Okay, so early on, I mean way early like pre-bible times before any of the big celebrities like Marduk or Hammurabi came along. Not quite quote "In the Beginning" but then not too long after that either. Back then everybody pretty much had the same deal going. You know, just a few options on how you could make ends meet. You could be a farmer, raise livestock, be a hunter ... If you were really good at it and you lived near the right people, maybe you could make clothes or tents or stuff like that, but there were no office workers or store clerks or pizza makers.

So most people worked on the basic stuff and traded for the other stuff they wanted. The camel farmers would trade camel hides and milk and cheese and camel jerky to the sheep farmers who had wool and mutton and spicy cylinders of lamp that they used to make gyros. The guys who had vineyards were popular with everyone because wine goes with both gyros and camel jerky, I hear. Also grapes and raisins were popular with everyone, except for fig and date farmers.

Any road, it was hard to make change for a camel unless you happen to have the right size sheep, and if you didn't things got pretty bad for the sheep. So one day this exotic caravan rolls through town and they have all this interesting stuff, like spices and babbles and trinkets, and things like that. So Mrs. Tentmaker decides she can sew some bling onto her tents to make them more expensive for the holidays. She can also market the new goat resistant model of tent for the season.

So they barter and haggle and afterwards Mr. And Mrs. Tentmaker have much smaller tent piles, fewer goats and now they have a basket full of shiny stuff. And that shiny stuff, they say, doesn’t need to be fed like the goats and is not nearly as hard to carry in your sleeve pocket as a tent. Say Mrs. Tentmaker, why don't you hang some of these shiny things on your collar so Mrs. Enkidu can see them. And so instantly, jewelry and currency were invented by the Tentmakers.

Now the Enkidus were always self conscious about their struggling and isolated fig and date plantations when they compared themselves to the relative wealth of the Tentmakers. So they started decorating their tents unnecessarily and this led to the great Goat and Babble War of 1754 BC. So by the time of the bible celebrities, those trinkets and babbles had eventually turned into gold and silver currency. Bartering was still done with sheep and goats and camels, as well as wine and grapes. Figs and dates did well too, but not like gold and silver. Also, people had learned how to build things like walls and cities and ziggurats. So goats were not eating tents like the old days, except as snacks.

As time passed, pants were invented followed by pockets, which proved good for carrying currency, though not so good for carrying dates, goats or tents.

The enterprising explorers of The Americas filled their pockets with bling and went stomping through the underbrush trying to make deals, at gunpoint if necessary, but finding that the residents only had groceries to trade they opted to take New York instead. This made a lot of people on both sides very upset and resulted in a lot of violence and impoliteness. So to keep things civil, everyone agreed that money should be made of paper. The man who kept all the gold and issued all the paper was a guy named Midas. He starved to death under mysterious circumstances and the investigation continues. We still use that paper today, but we paint it different colors just to keep the middle-aged folks nervous about the economy.

Then about sixty years ago a teenager named Johnny Visa took his girlfriend out for a burger and fries kind of date realizing all too late that he left his wampum in his other dungarees. They used words like wampum and dungarees back then. Any road, since he knew the burger shop owner he offered his driver's license as collateral until he could come back discretely with a goat. I mean some paper money.

That's when he got the idea to start using a card for credit to cut down on how much paper he needed to carry in his pants pockets. Filthy rich from the idea, he later married that girl, Suzie Mastercard, but they slit up a few years later over charge disputes. Then in 2001 we entered the future. A computer named Hal took over all the financial credit card systems starting with Y2K. Now we just trade digital credits back and forth and the machines tell us that our credits are worth less than our paper, which was never a good substitute for wampum or gold or figs or goats.

The Apocalypse Age is upon us. Robots run amok, killing humans and acquiring their credits. One became the governor of California. Most human survivors exist in a prison known as the Middle Class, working strenuously to pay artificial credits to robots for possessions they need to impress other fellow prisoners. And that, my friends, is the history of money.

Everyone knows Gargamel - or they should. This plucky fellow was the bane to all Smurfs. His only desire was the capture the Smurfs in his nefarious plot of the week. But has anyone really thought about Gargamel, the Man? Has anyone considered Gargamel's past, his possible motives, or the evidence of his deep emotional disturbance?

Gargamel spent every waking moment of his life pursuing the Smurfs. Ordinarily, if a man chased little blue men all week long, he'd be locked away. Luckily, as we can tell by the architecture of his home, Gargamel lived in the dark ages, when chasing woodland creatures for nefarious purposes was a time-honored tradition, along with bathing in urine, locking up women during menstruation, worshipping graven images, and beating up old people with long wooden poles. No one questioned a bald guy in a black nightgown who chased little men all the live-long day.

More importantly, Gargamel represents the inner pain and struggle in all of us against the relentless forces that cause us to suffer. When Gargamel has the Smurfs in his clutches, only to have them escape, embarrassing him in the process, we all see our own dreams escaping from us. But we don't bang our heads off of trees as often as Gargamel does. And, again, our dreams don't employ woodland friends, like rabbits and deer, to thwart us.

No one need question Gargamel's motives. Obviously poverty-stricken (notice the patches on his clothes), and perhaps a war veteran (he did know how to make explosives out of common household items), Gargamel's poor appearance and male-pattern baldness created a romantic rift in his life. Sexually frustrated and living alone in a shack (much like the Unabomber), Gargamel was striking out at his own personal demons - little blue creatures, two apples tall, who enjoyed singing and wore only pants and hats. We all have to fight our own demons. We hope that they don't live in mushroom houses, but occasionally, they do.

Gargamel seemed extremely intelligent on the surface - a complex vocabulary, a knowledge of alchemy, and a seemingly infinite knowledge of the arcane. However, there are slight flaws that show us he lacked in the common sense department. For instance, why did he always wear that dress if he knew he was going to be chasing Smurfs all the time? It doesn't look like that outfit gave his legs a lot of room to run.

Furthermore, Gargamel should have realized that targeting Smurfette was the key to getting the Smurfs. If Smurfette were re-captured (recall that Gargamel created Smurfette to trick the sexually-deprived Smurfs), every Smurf in the village would go searching for her - or as they say in Smurf, "Go lookin' fo' dey ho". If Gargamel could capture Smurfette, then he would control the means of production - he could (theoretically) breed Smurfs.

(Of course, the breeding habits of Smurfs remain a mystery. We are never told where Smurfs come from or, more importantly, why they all call the guy in red "Papa".)

With the power of Smurf breeding (which I honestly hope will be a technological development in the next verion of Civilization), Gargamel could make a commercial empire based on the Smurfs - just like Hanna-Barbera did in the 1980's. Unfortunately, Gargamel lacked the chutzpah and motivation that was so necessary to succeed in the harsh business climate of the 11th century.

There is an important lesson to learn from Gargamel - keep your mind on your goal. Gargamel could never seem to decide if he wanted to eat the Smurfs, turn them into gold, use them in some bizarre arcane ritual, or pose them playing pool and laquer them. Because Gargamel never stuck to his goals, he was doomed to failure. So remember, kids, put your goals down in ink, and don't stray from the path.

And if you see little blue men, for God's sakes, just leave them alone.

I was
a daughter, a sister,
a lover, a friend,
a wife, a mother
while learning to be myself.
Now, I’m just a disillusioned bitch.

I am
on an endless quest.
What does she mean
you might wonder, or not.
Nothing much.
Aw, that’s not true.
It just not what you think.

I will
cloud your thoughts,
mess with your head,
blow smoke in your eyes,
dance as a Tasmanian dervish.
Can you still see me?

There's a full moon out tonight
I went into my garden
and there it was
a beautiful gem in the sky,
creating shadows
among the bushes and trees
I'm sure I saw a fairy whiz by
perhaps it was just a firefly

As a non sequitur

Grief is like this foreign place you are forced to move to, you just have to fit in somehow. I'm still discovering how it feels to be in this foreign place. Strangers make me feel more at home than family or friends. Some old friends have disappeared. Pulled away. The feedback comes in the form of comments like this: "I can't talk to her. It's too sad." Yeah? Well, F*** ‘em. I don't care about those people anymore. If they can't get beyond their own feelings and be a friend then I don't need them.

These old friends were never friends. Sunshine friends. Fair weather friends. I’m moving on, but it hurts sometimes. People can be so cold. One girl, before this happened I would have referred to her as "girlfriend." I knew her for years. We took vacations together. We hung out when our kids were little. You know, Thanksgiving, July 4th weekends ~ our families spent tons of time together over the years. She used to send those Xmas calendars every year to my daughter. You know the kind, the ones with chocolate candy behind the days of the month? Advent Calendars! She sent one every year for 16 years to my daughter. I have not heard one word from her since my daughter's death. Not a phone call, a letter, no third-hand message, NOTHING! What is wrong with this person? Surely last Xmas she must have had to scratch Gina's name of the list? I guess, it's that easy for some people. I asked my sister who saw her last summer, "Did Jeannie say anything about me?" Jeannie's the one who said, "I can't talk to her, it's too sad."

Yeah, sure. I get it. Everyone needs their comfort zone to make it through the day. God forbid that some element of sadness enters into their life causing some ripple in their energy field. Where's compassion for your fellow man? Does she walk by the homeless lady on the corner and avert her eyes? I sure hope so, cuz then I’m no less than that. A total stranger in a foreign place where friends don’t exist and nothing you have ever known is the same.

Ok, I'm done venting for now.

There is a moment of sweet tension as I hold the glass in my hand. The peat-rich fumes rise to my nose. The color is amber promise. I raise the glass to my lips. Molten honey in the gut. The switch flips. Sweet warmth begins to flow from my belly to my fingertips. The mind becomes soft and fluid. Images appear. I drink more. I'm feeling deeply now, deeper than I do without the booze. I'm seeing the truth of things. The landscape of the page becomes languid and it seems possible to get what appears in my head down onto the page accurately, precisely, and completely. I drink more and begin to write--frantically, feverishly, propelled by the urgent volume of all the perfect sentences pressing up against my brain. I drink more, not wanting to slip even a millimeter from the peerless pinnacle. Purity. Prismatic perfection. Write. Sip. Write. Sip. And so on, until things become bleary, unclear, swirling concrete weights, black shadowed water ...