When You Are Living Dead Above Marilyn Monroe

marilyn-monroe

Westwood Village Memorial Park is arguably the nicest cemetery in Los Angeles.   It is a small park, just south of Wilshire Boulevard.   A movie multiplex sits in front of it as well as a high rise office building.  In fact, you would never know it is there, unless you…know its there.  Or discover it by accident.

Bodies have been entombed, buried, and cremated.  Ashes have been stored in urns in a special room that looks like a dusty old apothecary, and in designated vaults.   There are cylindrical graves, a couple inches wide, set into posts that also hold ashes.   There are fountains, rock formations, and benches marking burial sites.   The graves in the cemetery are both simple and elaborate.   Yet you will never find a garish grave.   This is Hollywood, and spending eternity in a tacky setting is the ultimate in bad taste.

While small and obscure, this quiet graveyard  is hardly a secret.   Although Forrest Lawn may get the attention,  Westwood Village Memorial Park is the final resting place to many show business luminaries.   It is an A-List repertory company.   The legendary Fanny Brice is buried there, along with film pals Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.  Natalie Wood, Kirk Douglas, Roy Orbison, and Frank Zappa have been all laid to rest in this exclusive little cemetery.  Singers Mel Torme and Beach Boy, Carl Wilson are here.   You can find the graves of Dean Martin and Burt Lancaster, if you are so disposed.     George C. Scott and Billy Wilder.  Peggy Lee and Carroll O’ Connor.  The list goes on and on.

But perhaps no resident is more famous, or controversial, that Marilyn Monroe.   She lived as a legend and died in mystery.   Even today, we see her like she was in “Some Like It Hot,” or even, toward the end, in “The Misfits.”   It is hard to imagine her, if she remained alive, visiting talk shows at 83 years of age.   That is what she would be today.  Eight three.  Hard to believe.

Male users certainly seem to profess gratefulness to the erectile dysfunction drug, for its effects on their sexual viagra online pharmacies stamina and erection during intercourse with their partner. canadian viagra 100mg mouthsofthesouth.com Ask them how they are doing, ask them what techniques they are using to advertise and network. I have followed his plan faithfully and Iwent from $90,000 in debt with no direction, to where I am now having a normal love life with my partner and he or she is extremely best prices on levitra proud of Pine Tree State. you cannot even guess that I had this problem from birth. online levitra mouthsofthesouth.com Once you forward the message, the spammer actually has a program that can copy the list of addresses that the message has been forwarded to and send that list back to the person who originally sent you the email. Marily is entombed and not buried.  Her casket is set above ground and covered in marble.   There are myriad lipstick impressions all over the marble made from people who have come and kissed her grave.   There are flowers, courtesy of former husband and Baseball Hall of Famer, Joe Dimaggio.   At least the flowers were still being delivered each day, as Joe had ordered, even after his passing.   He loved her, after all.

But no enough to spend eternity alongside her.   That was the plan, but then the plan went awry for reasons that have embellished both their legends.   Instead Joltin’ Joe sold that crypt, just above Marilyn’s, to Richard Poncher.  Poncher has been occupying that crypt for the past 21 years.   It is fitting in a way, as Poncher was an inventor but a rounder who had befriended gangsters, movie stars, and assorted notables.   He ate at the good restaurants, traveled, and was the bon vivant.   Poncher lived well and died at 81.

At Richard’s insistence, his wife, Elise, had the funeral director turn Poncher’s casket upset down so that he was facing Marilyn.   A little unorthodox, perhaps, but far from the oddest dying request.    It is Marlyn Monroe we are talking about here.   Elise contends that if she didn’t abide by his wishes, Richard would haunt her for the rest of his life.

But now Elise wants to sell Richard’s place and move him.   She is selling his crypt and moving him to the one that had been reserved for her.   She will be cremated.   Opening bids on EBay will start at $500, 000.   Half-Million bucks, and up from there.    Elise is not selling the crypt out of whimsy.   There is nobility involved.   She wants to leave here Beverly Hills house to her children, mortgage free.

I wish Elise luck.  I hope she gets plenty of cash.  I am sure she will.   After all, who wouldn’t want the berth above Marilyn Monroe?   And right next door to her, reserved for the time he draws his final breath, will be Hugh Hefner.   Fitting enough for the Founder of Playboy to be Marilyn’s next door neighbor.    And if nothing else, it’s a very exclusive neighborhood.  No rowdy neighbors.  Very quiet.   And the shows they put on are not to be believed.

The Women’s Movement, Advance Back to the 1950’s

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There are many ways to move backwards.   One of the more popular ways is to embrace what we perceive as tradition.  We view a seemingly idealistic pattern of behavior that has been rejected perhaps by previous generations and see it with fresh eyes and renewed vigor.   We see the upside, forgetting or ignoring that a downside ever existed.

It is perhaps even natural to want to return to the past.   The present is unsettling, and the future is obscure and insecure.   In the past it seems like values and virtues were firmly set.   People were honest artisans who farmed organically and used beasts of burden and not dreadful gasoline guzzling, sheet metal monsters to travel about.   Men were genteel and women were kind and gracious, capable of walking on air.   People has a special sense, a sixth sense, if you will, to perceive things that escape us today.

Of course, no one wishes to dwell on the realities.   The health issues, the dangerous horse doody and the  piles of garbage in the streets.    We forget the levels of ignorance, illiteracy,  and genetic maladies that left us with goiters, wall eyed, hairlipped, or with an extra leg hanging out of our chests.    We ignore the millions who starved because organic farming wasn’t quite getting it done.    We admire the honest craftsman but ignore the fact that until here was mass production most went without most things.   Many went without even shoes.    Most people had two outfits.  Every day and Sunday.  There were no color choices or the need for shoe racks or designer hangers.

And then we have the Women’s Movement.    First off, there is no denying that there are great many skilled, highly intelligent and competent women practicing in any number of professions.   These are great women who have changed the course of history and made tremendous contributions to their industries and disciplines, and to society as a whole.

More women than men are graduating from medical school and law school.   Women, overall, earn more money than they ever did.   On the less grand scale, there are more working women, showing up at the office or working diligently from remote locations, mainly because they have to contribute to the household income.   They work because they have to, they want to, to the point perhaps where they never give it a thought.

But then there are increasingly more younger women who lack the desires of the women who pioneered the Women’s Movement.  Maybe it is a generational thing.   Perhaps it is even rebelliousness or a backlash of sorts.   Or maybe some have arrived at the harsh reality that sitting at home is a lot better than showing up at an office where you are forced to deal with politics, harassment, and the duties inherent with your profession or job.

Some may argue that this is not the case.   And some may argue that these women have the freedom to do whatever they choose.  It’s about choice.  Yes.  Certainly it is.   But when you are taking up space in an elite law or medical school so you can be a better marriage prospect, rather than a contribution to that community, something may be wrong with this picture.

As Marilyn McGrath Lewis,  director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, was quoted in an article in the New York Times, “It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?”

In the same article Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, ” What does concern me is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn’t constructed along traditional gender roles.”

Simply put, a lot of precious space is allocated in schools that produce influential inhabitants in their disciplines, people who move forward to assume places at the highest levels of their professions.  People who become inventors and innovators, judges, developers of vaccines, leaders in their communities and their nation.   This is not necessarily the place where  someone takes up one of the few seats to practice for a couple of years and then move on to stay-at-home motherhood.

And with this type of behavior, we are referring to the achievers.    We are referring to the elite.   Beneath the elite we have those who quite simply just want to marry the richest guy with the most stuff on the best career track who can let them stay at home.   Where professional challenges were once the major concern for young women in college, it seems now the big ticket it merely to find the guy.   Find the guy.  Marry well.  Marry rich.  As for love…maybe?

That way you can stay home, have lunch with your girlfriends and wax for hours on the celebrity hit list and other people they don’t know.   This new attitude, as noted before, may be an act of rebellion.  It may be a reflection of the economy.  It is tough economic times and life is tough out there.   Find someone who will take care of you.  Not someone you can be with and share the joys and misery.  Someone who will take care of you.

If you are purchasing a tablet to help you win your game! Erectile dysfunction and impotence are problems that affect a large number of people each year. sildenafil rx ED is to be well understood and taken care of creating this technique an successful and efficient recommended for you generic sildenafil tablets therapy. There are several acupuncture4health.ca viagra discount prices treatments available in the market only as the one branded product. Evidence of anxiety masked by physical symptoms Stress is closely linked see content order generic levitra to a biological mechanism called “flight-or-fight” instinct. I know some will deny this.  Some will complain.   But we are a nation that if nothing else works extra hard to conceal the obvious.  In this case the obvious is registered on Facebook and the social networks.   It is apparent on my elevator as the gaggle of students converse among themselves or, as is more the case, endlessly on the telephone.   If an original thought ever erupted from a lipsticked mouth, brains would suffer a meltdown and the elevator would plummet to the basement level or purgatory  where leftovers, closeouts and sale merchandise are to be eternally begotten.

There is no blame, really.   And this is hardly a rant.  It’s an examination of the overall policies, social and financial, that have left this nation, hurting, wanting, and very insecure.   As a market driven society where consumerism made up two thirds of the economy, going cold turkey on the shopping impulse is like being a junkie at a revival meeting.   You don’t know what to do with yourself or when the pain will start to fade.

In a society where air brushing as created the perfect form of beauty that no living being could ever recreate, it is bound to drive women crazy.   To think that our celebrities and movies stars, who appear to us after sixteen hours having designers, makeup artists, etc.,  preening, fussing, and dressing them, can be copied in real life is bizarre.  Truly bizarre.    Yet that belief is the standard.  It is an accepted reality, in spite of the facts.  In spite of the facts that the celebrities and  models can’t duplicate in real life the perfect image of themselves.

Yet here we are with women believing that with a few good beauty tips and some high priced cosmetics they can actually look as good as their aspirations.    So women, smart women, exchange beauty and dressing tips, talk about their favorite celebrities and seem never wonder how they allowed themselves, no voluntarily, jumped into this box in the first place.

Men don’t escape responsibility.   When it comes to romance and related social issues.  Most men are idiots.    Inarticulate idiots, at that.   “Dude.  Dude?”    The idolize the marketing  version of the sex symbol that is both unwieldy and unachievable.   It makes them feel awkward to think they have settled for less than the stay at home beauty queen.

It is understandable.  Most men really don’t have much to work with.   They have their jobs and the things they buy and they things they believe they possess.  Like their women.  Most men have been programmed that anything remotely resembling taste, outside of cars and lawn care, is effeminate or gay.  They are taught to believe their wives know better about everything except the job and the industry they compete in nearly every day of their lives.

More importantly, many men are threatened by thinking and successful women.   They want their women to stay at home.   They don’t want them competing.  It is tough to have a bigger penis contest with someone who has you out outmaneuvered because they aren’t wearing one.   It is tough to go up against the traditional social pressures that have evolved since Mom and Pop partnered as equals in the Mom and Pop shops.

After all, your mother and father probably set up the family that way.  Others around you have condemned you as less of a man if you can’t carry the weight of a stay at home wife and three kids in the self-indulgence  program on the weight of your designer shoulders.   This is your job.  Nay.   This is your duty.   Sit there and be mute, forgetting the lessons of the past.

What past?  When the little woman sat home and allowed her brain to atrophy on nonsense and more nonsense.   When the high point of the day was doing battled with that dreaded ring around the collar.  When the woman was viewed as chattel, because as such they had no real ownership other than what was allowed by law.   When soap operas and smores took priority over the Cuban Missile Crisis and the advent of social change.

Part of that change was Women’s Liberation.  More succinctly, Women’s Rights.   I remember when a good job for a woman was being a teacher.  “You could always teach,” or so it went.   “Or teach for a couple, few years until your husband gets his career off the ground.  And then you can stay home and go out of your mind with the children.”

Okay, it’s different now.  With the advent of illegal immigration and cheap labor, many women have a helper.  They have a nanny and a housekeeper.   They don’t clean, they don’t have to clean, cook, or do the laundry themselves.   The maid does it.   If you explain it correctly in broken Spanish, then she may even hang the delicate fabricates and not cram them into the dryer.

It is different.  Women’s careers.  Been there done that.   Women are free to go to the top schools in the country and then be the stay at home mother.    They can  nosh with friends  on salad and sushi.    They can discuss the merits of  Young Einstein.  Rather than try to be one themselves.

As for the women that still march on,  working to achieve at the highest levels of profession and society.   Bless you for keeping the bar at some civilized level of progress.   I realize it is tough sledding in the face of those who criticize you and wonder if you have a screw loose for not seeking out the perfect fellow and settling down.  At home.   But you are the ones who the next generation may use as role models.   You may yet inspire the next generation of women, not to stay at home but to take advantage of their talents, their brains and, yes, their sexuality.   Take advantage so that society can benefit from your unique and special skills.

Miss California Makes Hay on the Gay Marraige Issue

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Carrie Prejean made her television commentator debut recently on Fox News.   Prejean, otherwise known as Miss California,  graced the airwaves as a host on the Fox News Show, Fox and Friends.    Her two male co-hosts were apparently smitten with her as they heaped so much praise on her as a visionary and in possession of the hearts and minds of the people.   I thought I was witnessing a pick up scene in some  Upper East Side Watering Hole where the two stiff suits were trying to woo the hot babe from the eighteenth floor.

Carrie Prejean, as we all know thanks to the media overload, stirred up some controversy when she  while running for Miss USA that she opposed gay marriage.    She talked about family values and the way she was raised.   She talked about morality and virtue.   She didn’t discuss the racy photos taken earlier in her young life that later appeared all over the Internet.  But so what?   We are in the age of digital cameras.    And blind ambition.   What’s going topless in quest of fame?

But being against gay marriage and showing off your much smaller, non-implanted boobs was too much red meat for either side of the issue.  The liberal left reflexively hated her guts.   The conservative right adopted her as a love child and couldn’t support her enough.   Even Sarah Palin stepped forward in support of her fellow Beauty Queen.    Talk show pundits rambled on as they are wont to do, getting paid for their scintillating insight into such matters.

As for me, I can’t get all excited, either way.   I realize the media is a circus and unlike  spectacles like wrestling that openly wink at its play acting and entertainment value, the news  media still pretends there are shreds of authenticity left in its tabloid soul.   I realize that while I may disagree with Carrie Prejean’s opinion, vehemently, in fact, I will defer to Voltaire in defending to the death her right to it.   Well, maybe not to the death, but you get the point.

Besides, what brand of idiots would resort to a contestants in a  beauty pageant for insights into the complexities of social and political issues?    I mean, to take seriously the geopolitical perceptions of a beauty queen is in and of itself an oxymoron.   Other than their traditional desire for world peace, there is little to offer other than a sneak peak at their silicon boob jobs and a few minutes of mediocre talent.    I swear if Carrie Prejean or any other aspiring beauty queen came out in favor of inter-bestial sexual relations, I wouldn’t feel anymore upset than her view of love being long walks in the moonlight.

What does interest me is how Carrie Prejean can parlay her controversial position into one of a bonafide celebrity.   While she may have done it from the platform of the Miss USA contest, it is still remarkable how she joined the growing list of limited people making the celebrated move from there to here.  This in itself, if not an art form, at least qualifies as something worth noting.

I am not claiming that Carrie Prejean is particularly talented or that a brain trust lives in concealment under that lovely blond hair.   In fact, it is safe to say  she is no rocket scientist and that no missiles will be launched from that brain.   But then her  two fellow hosts on the show are far from what you would deem an Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite.    And yet there they are…commentating.   Or whatever.

Besides, Prejean has the Big Mo going in her favor.    Her momentum based on the fact that somewhere around half the nation supports her.   Americans love a pretty face and a girl that’s both traditional yet spunky.  It’s the natural combination for big time appeal.   This is, after all, nothing if not a country that for some strange reason usually prefers its leaders be mediocre.  Perhaps that way they are less intimidating and more accessible.   There are a number of reasons, but that is the subject of a different feature.

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Ironically, or maybe not, it seems to be the conservatives who best repurpose adversity.   You can name a few.  There was Oliver North who was convicted of violating the Congress and the laws of this land by allegedly engineering the elements of what would be the Iran-Contra Scandal.  He became a talk show host who was revered by his followers.  Same goes for G. Gordon Liddy who was convicted for his participation in the Watergate Scandal and went on to be a talk show host.

Jessica Hahn, church administrator, was spotlighted for being sexually abused by Televangelist Jim Bakker.   She had a radio show, however briefly, made dozens of guest appearances, and posed in Playboy Magazine.   Not bad for a conservative girl who was supposedly a virgin at the time of her abuse.

Rush Limbaugh, famous already, after telling his adoring listeners what harsh treatment was levied on drug users was in fact a major drug user who violated the law.   His punishment was higher numbers and, arguably, the title of the Republican spokesperson for this era.  He was famous already, but after the drug scandal, he was promoted within.

Then there is Dick Morris.  Morris worked as a political adviser to President Bill Clinton, but who resigned  after it was discovered he sought out prostitutes for mutual toe sucking festivities.     He is now a Republican Pundit, appears on countless shows and waxes critically on the behavior of others. It is fair to say Morris is more famous after the hooker told all about the toe sucking than he was as merely a political adviser.

The Democrats have very few who knew how to turn adversity in their favor.   There is of course Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky Scandal.   But he was already the President and therefore famous.   In Clinton’s case, adversity cost him.   Influential people distanced themselves.   He faced public embarrassment, including a vote to impeach him.

Gary Hart, leading presidential hopeful, got caught doodling Donna Rice, and he had to drop out of a race that surely was his to lose.  He lost it.   He dwells now in Media Limbo, making appearances here and there but living overall in relative obscurity.

So at the end of the day, it’s fair to say the Republicans do it better.   They can sin and ask G-d for forgiveness, and remarkably he seems to do it every time.   He even gives them a talk show.   So in the end, contrary to the common opinion that that Republicans are dead or dying as a party, I would say they are far from it.     They are only on hiatus.

As for Carrie Prejean, should she lose her conservative backing, there is always the Weather Channel.

Boomers’ New Commune for Retirement Post-Recession

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Increasingly, I have listened to my Boomer friends tell me that  the economic meltdown has caused a serious decline in their pensions funds and portfolios.   The standard refrain is, “I’ll never be able to retire.”   Some are joking, or trying to put a good face on a rotten time for a Recession, and some are hardly joking at all.

Couple the loss of savings with the potential loss of your job, and Boomers are wondering how they are even going to make it to retirement.   It is no secret that the Boomers are generally higher paid and not as willing at this point in life to work the slave hours as their younger counterpart.   Then there are the others, who can’t find work and have given up trying.  They are taking earlier retirement.   Maybe they are getting less income from their Social Security and Retirement funds.   But at least they are getting  some money.   And some money is better than no money at all.  I guess.

It is a lousy economy for everybody but especially for a generation that thought it would never grow old, and now it has.   It’s a harsh reality, for sure, especially when you feel the first ailments, the aches and pains,  that make it harder to get up and harder to get it up.   Friends are starting to die around you.  It seems too early, but nevertheless life has its way of telling you the time of the season.   As Bob Dylan sang in one of his songs, “It ain’t dark yet, but it’s getting  there.”

All right, not to be morbid.   The fact is for most Boomers there is still a long way to go.   We are overall in better shape than any other generation.   We are better educated and more or us exercise and eat right.   We try to stay vital and relevant, even when looking vital and relevant is a full time job.  We have sex on a regular basis.   Or at least some of us do.   We accept the new realities that our friends and associates in trying to find themselves found sometimes that the boys liked boys and the girls liked girls.   Hey considering that our parents at our age looked like Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, this ain’t too bad.

We look for second careers and go into business for ourselves.   We wear funny tee shirts and buy CD’s of our favorite bands.   We try to understand our children and maybe we do a better job of it than our parents did with us.   Or maybe we have no more of a clue about how and why the younger generation behaves than the old fogies who tried to ruin our youth.

So now hear we are, at least eyeballing retirement.   But in this economy we are increasingly aware, despite the assurances to the contrary, we may be faced with some serious downsizing.   Social services and entitlement may not be there like we thought.  We sure can’t take it for granted.   Instead of the government and our nest eggs providing us with economic and psychological sanctuary, we may be left to our own devices.   There are cracks in the system, the same system we once deplored and then finally embraced.   We were victimized by stupid wars, again,  and watched a bunch of white collar thieves run off with our money.   Some of us are those white collar thieves, but I digress.

We have handled it well.  So far.  Rather than man the barricades and storm the government institutions, we just grouse about it.   Maybe.  Or we take mood elevators and try not to notice.    Perhaps the storming part is best left to younger people as all that climbing and running would causes pains in the places we would rather ignore.   Who wants tear gas all over our brand new designer jeans?

As for the younger people, they accept their fates with a mix of apathy and lethargy.   It’s that or they are remarkable stoic.   The thing is if they are this apathetic about their own fates, then for sure as hell they are not about to care too much about us.   Even if we are their parents.

So I started thinking of solutions to our possible future challenges.   I realized we are liable to end up living on communes.  Talk about karma with a capital “K.”   We are going to chip in or in some other way cluster into workable communities where we can put food on the table and take care of each other.   Maybe it’s nuts to think this way, but it is no crazier than believing all those years of working fourteen hours a day would guarantee our economic security.   That is starting to look like it was really insane, wasting our lives, most of us, in jobs we hated.  For trinkets and beads.
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I write this never being a big fan of the communes of old.    I had visited a few in those times and it always seemed oddly humorous that the  commune dwellers in search of democracy voted on just about everything from cooking the ubiquitous brown rice to sexual sleeping arrangements.  all that deliberation was just too overwhelming.   I realized there need to be certain arrangements in order for these communes to survive, but some of the rules were more draconian than the rules of straight society.     In straight society you just needed money, and people would tend to leave you alone, if you wanted.  Not at the communes.  It seemed everyone was into everybody else’s business.

I remember living in Santa Fe, New Mexico and sitting in my favorite restaurant as a gaggle of hippies and their gaggle of kids partook in their weekly restaurant experience.   they may have been rich kids looking poor for all I knew.   The men and women were often dressed in muslin.  Dirty muslin.  Dresses, skirts, mens’ shirts.   Their kids, too, were adorned in muslin.  Set off, as they say in the fashion world, by dirty faces.

I forget the name of that particular commune where this group made their home.  It was up in the mountains and over the years was transformed by new owners into Ten Thousand Waves, the Japanese health spa.   Talk about changes and things.   The commune did enjoy the rare distinction of surviving longer than most.

So now here we are, perhaps about to reexamine the commune experience of our youth.  While most Boomers never set foot inside a commune, maybe a good thing, now it may loom as one of the principle means of our survival.   Of course the new communes would hardly resemble the old communes.   For one thing the sex acts would be far more limited.    Even with Viagra.

The good news would be that the residents would be far more accomplished than those who lived  in the communes of  our youth.    Despite all assertions to the contrary, we we largely young and inexperienced, lacking skill sets we have developed over time.   We may actually have a clue and know what we are doing, which back then was often not the case.

Things have changed.  We live in a digital world with the Internet.  Survival and setting up a business or series of business that may bring in income is a lot more realistic than the axiom of merely growing one’s own food and inseminating the barnyard animals.    Power lines reach into even the more rural areas, so running computer and appliances is not that much an issue.   Besides, some of these communes may be in urban areas, even blighted urban areas that can be reclaimed on the cheap.   Or perhaps they will exist in suburbia, in communities that have fallen apart.   Old factories.  Who knows.

Needs will be different from those in our youth.  Once upon a time it seemed like every third hippie woman took up midwifery.  Noble enough but hardly necessary with a group facing its own mortality.   People will need nursing and hospice skills instead.      Some people will need retraining. People will need entertainment.   Some will come over the Internet and through satellite and cable, but if there is leisure time it cannot all be spent in the pursuit of metaphysical enlightenment or listening to a poorly played guitar.

Then there is a matter of benefiting the surrounding communities.   When you have this many skilled Boomers clustered into one area then it is only fitting devote some time to going out into the community.  It wouldn’t hurt to teach the kids to read and write.   Teach classes on real issues, things that we have learned along the way.   Be the mentors we as kids thought others should be.   Maybe put a little something back in the world, even if our experience in it was less than satisfactory.

It can’t hurt.   And after all, it beats working.

Revolution and the Loss of Soft Toilet Paper

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Some years ago I used to joke that America would only launch a revolution should we encounter such catastrophes as the loss of our favorite toilet paper.   Forget the Tax Day Tea Parties and the grousing over bankers’ bonuses.   Those are but minor episodes when compared to the prospect of harsh toilet tissue.  Now it seem there is some truth to that remark, according to an article in the U.K.’s Guardian.

The article maintains that Americans have a love affair with soft toilet paper is made from virgin wood.  Not remnants, nor any recycled material, but pure tree.  In other countries, toilet paper is made from as much as 40% recycled material, but not here.  Here in order to swipe our buttocks in the comfort to which we are accustomed, we need pure, virgin wood for that extra quilted ultra-soft, muti-layered roll of bathroom tissue we reach for with little concern.

Sure, we may make noise about saving the environment, and we go on about saving the trees and developing non-fossil energy forms, but in the end we waste a precious resource each time we wipe our end.    To support this issues, a study reports that there was a 40% increase in the costlier brand of toilet paper in 2008.   The premium brands are often infused with hand lotion or aloe vera.   Seems everything contains aloe vera, these days, but I digress.
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As American we already consume more paper than any other country.   It is one thing to use the precious resource for developing majestic theories of life on earth, but quite another to waste itour  on our bodily waste.   With companies spending millions of dollars every year telling us their premium brands  are far superior to the recycled stuff, it is small wonder softer toilet paper is more precious to us than say our Hummers.

I once had an assistant whose very demanding metrosexual boyfriend insisted she run around the city picking up the household products he most desired.   His favorite bathroom tissues was sold, it seemed, at bulk rates at only one big box store.   This tissue was infused with the notorious aloe verga gel.   So to keep him happy, a tough task on a good day, my assistant had to use up what little spare time she had running across town to buy him toilet paper.  Not only was she wrecking trees, but burning gasoline in these senseless journies.

Perhaps this recession is the time when we get our heads on street or at least take our head out of our you know where.  Maybe we will see the light and find we really don’t need to be using virgin wood to accommodate our daily needs.   We can remove our heads from our pampered derrieres and replace them with paper made from recyled products.