Salt City Sinner

As Utah plays the perennial Lucy to my Charlie Brown, proffering a balmy football helpfully labeled "SPRING" by the Great Editorial Cartoonist in the Sky, only to cruelly yank it away at the last moment, the season's new life *is* creeping into #Occupy. Not that #Occupy has been asleep at the switch - only yesterday, #OccupyOakland attracted enough attention from the police to earn the now-traditional " Greetings Citizen, We've Noticed You " gift basket of non-lethal gadgetry. No, sir, #Occupy have been busy little bees; it is I who have been remiss in reporting on domestic protest movements. It's an unforgivable lapse, really, but I've been busy traveling to L.A . and evangelizing about potatoes , while going to class part-time/online and tumbling head over heels down a rabbit hole of deepening interest in the occult. Anyhow. As always, #OccupySLC's hub page can be found   here  . Facebook discussion forum complete with 6,000% of your

I don't often (ever) write about it, but at times I have a pretty spectacular dream life. I like to think it's my subconscious' way of making up for drab, everyday life - except that about one in three dreams I have are so incredibly disturbing and vivid that they linger like diesel fumes or the stench of pesticide. Carl Jung wrote that "In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order." Some people dream of loved ones, some dream of monsters - I usually dream of places. I call them "limbic spaces," because they are defined by my memories of various atmospheres in which I have lived, worked, loved, etc. and because they are transitory - not quite Salt Lake City, a few pieces of Arkansas, a recurring dream-space that appears to be a vast, dank and endless public men's room that I call the lavatoryinth. Carl Jung Last night, for reasons I have long learned not to look into too closely, I had a particularly vivid and intense dream

I flew from Salt Lake City into LAX for a conference yesterday. I am currently ensconced in a hotel near enough to the airport that I can hear jets taking off and landing pretty much constantly. Like the monkey house at the zoo I found this offensive to my senses at first but have now adapted. The interesting thing about my flight yesterday was its timing. Due to Sundance , and the fact that it was a Monday morning flight from SLI to LAX, the plane was stuffed to the gills with (apparently) Hollywood types. Despite this, the closest I came to a brush with fame on the plane was to bumble past a person who I am 99% sure was Octavia Spencer , from the Help . Many seemed to be media industry cogs of one kind or another. It's worth noting that I have never been in a better-dressed coach section of a flight in my life. I cracked open Grant Morrison's Supergods to while away the brief flight (about 90 minutes). My aisle-mates were quiet and mellow - pretty much t

Since I was a child, Iran has been a regular (and rich) subject of discussion in my household. There's a simple reason for this - on my father's side of the family (the Bernards), the last two generations of Bernards have lived and worked in Iran pretty extensively. My grandfather was actually "knighted" by the last Shah before the Iranian Revolution for his contribution to oil and gas projects in the region. My father went to high school at the American School in Tehran, then later returned to work there as my grandfather had. My dad and my aunt still speak a little Farsi. This is kind of cool: I'm named after my paternal grandfather Charles G. Bernard, AKA Chuck Bernard, AKA whatever the hell this sign (which used to be his) says in Farsi: Due partially to the subject of Iran, I got into a lengthy dust-up in the Facebook discussion group for #OccupySLC , where the ideological demographics can be roughly divided up into one part anarchists/radicals (hello, f

Here in the United States of America, we like to "privatize" things. The short definition of this phenomenon is that services usually provided by the State - public roads, public schools, and, unfortunately, prisons - are increasingly being farmed out to for-profit corporations, who "can do the job more efficiently." Whether this is actually true is up for debate, but in at least some cases - perhaps most notably schools and prisons, those great institutional workhouses of ideology - "efficient" generally means "worse for human beings." Two companies in particular, the amusingly sinister-sounding (and genuinely terrifying)  Corrections Corporation of America  ... ...and the more placidly named GEO Group , are the heavy hitters in the incarceration game. The investors in these cutting edge experiments in human degradation and the commodification of suffering include Wells Fargo, Fidelity, General Electric, the usual gang. A siz

Note: much (but not all) of the source material for this was taken from Path to Freedom Urban Homestead  and Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen's invaluable The Urban Homestead .  Are you bored? Of course you are! Boredom is the bedbug infestation of our collective psyche, a will-sapping, seemingly insurmountable foe that gnaws and gnaws. Good news: if you're bored, I have a fun project for you! You might live with your parents. You might rent a house. Like me, you may live in a small box with no porch, window planters to speak of, or any other luxuries that would make growing an edible foodstuff easier. It doesn't matter. If you can find a corner of a lot (vacant or otherwise), a patch of Mom's backyard, whatever, you can grow some organic, kick-ass food. Let's start simple. Observe: Not pretty, is it? North America is awash in used tires . No, this doesn't mean that you can get some fresh radials for a steal down at Crazy Vinnie's - it means t

Sarah. She is a friend of my sister's, and a woman who wanted to learn how to shoot a Glock 27. That was enough for me. It's not an uncommon thing in this day and age (especially a sun-drenched, smog-soaked day and age in Salt Lake City Utah, Anno Domine 2012). My sister, subconscious yenta that she is, had told me before hand that this particular recent friend of hers was tall, blonde, crop-haired and masculine, the type of person that I find both intimidating and beautiful. Sure enough, she was "striking," which is straight male shorthand for "beautiful warrior woman." Sarah.  By a strange coincidence we ran into each other later. She didn't spare me a second look (and I don't blame her). Warrior woman, I would cook for you. I know how to keep the hearth warm and some good-god-damned meat slow roasting. Lost connections. Ships in the night. Sarah!

It's too early to call it, but I'd wager the 2012 election will be a "near-to-total loss" at this point. Then again, I'm not one of the optimistic experts at Standard and Poor's or Moody's rating agencies who gets a nice fat envelope in the mail a few times a year to keep blowing bubbles for amused toddlers (and also CNBC). I hate election years, and I hate news coverage of elections even more. Occasionally life tosses you a tender scrap of hickory-smoked hilarity, but if there's one thing I've learned lately it's this: if you're just whistling past the graveyard, change your route home. So. Ron Paul's has a depressing level of support*, even in groups of people from whom I never would have expected such a bizarre suspension of disbelief. Ron Paul supporters and their eccentricity have been documented extensively, but I still remember one spat very fondly . That spat is probably the reason I have such a soft spot for Paul and