Never eat at a place called Mom's

...or climb into bed with a woman with more problems than you. (Or almost as many as you.)
--Seldom Seen Smith

More on Blog Action Day

Well, first off, I love the title, as you might tell from the name of this blog.

And if I can do anything to leverage the "power" of this blog to advance environmental issues, I will. Not that I'm sure what gazillions of bloggers around the world will be able to do for a day. Nor am I sure what I'll post on that day. I'm just mulling over ideas, now, but we'll see.

I tend to vote green, and read writers who have a strong interest in the environment and nature. Right now, as regular visitors to this site know, I'm reading The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. Another favorite book of his is Desert Solitude. His take on the industrialized world and what it has done to the natural world, particularly that most beautiful part of the world I just visited, southern Utah, should be hot-wired into every young person today and rammed up the collective asses of every politician, developer, and banker.

Redmond O'Hanlon is another all-time favorite. He's the only person I know who can make the story of one of his best friends going slowly mad in the South American rain forest funny.

Christians: Not like us

Seldom smiled. "We'll all go in with you, Doc, the four of us together, and you can say, 'I need a houseboat for my friends here, one for the gal, too, that'll be sixty-footers, please.' The man at the desk he'll be kind of surprised but he'll oblige. Them people'll do anything for money. You'd be surprised. They ain't like us, Doc. They're Christians."
--The Monkey Wrench Gang

The Monkey Wrench Gang

The desert eased his vague anger. Near the dirt road which turned off the highway and led east for ten miles to the volcanic ramparts of Kofa Mountains, he stopped, well away from the traffic, and made himself a picnic lunch. He sat on a warm rock in the blazing spring sun, eating pickle and cheese and ham in onion roll, washing it down with beer, and opened himself through pore and nerve ends to the sweet stillness of the Arizona desert.

The river, the canyon, the desert world was always changing, from moment to moment, from miracle to miracle...

"The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life," the doctor said. "Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness." He sipped at his bourbon and ice. "Soon there will be no place to go. Then the madness becomes universal." Another thought. "And the universe goes mad."
--Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang