Wednesday, January 09, 2013
I often find myself lamenting the fact that I didn't move to Milwaukee sooner because there's always cool shit going on. But, the other night, I realized that I'm probably better off having not been here when I was younger. I went to an event they call "night school" at my bar. It's a weekly thing they have where a presenter will come in to speak about an issue potentially affecting us. This week's was some hippy man talking about the XL pipeline, connecting Canada's tar sands to the American south so they can ship oil to other countries, which apparently has the potential to pollute the water table were the pipeline to burst, which it already has done twelve times over its twelve months of operation.The hippy man started out by talking about how, post graduation, he didn't know what to do so he played Jack Kerouac for a while. While he was in Death Valley, his other hippy friend decided to drop out of school and bike to Texas from Milwaukee to join this crew of hippies attempting to block the pipeline from being built. Both of these hippies were about as articulate as my best friend Brent. Brent did copious amounts of drugs and alcohol and occasionally has problems piecing together coherent thoughts. He's gotten much better now that he's been clean for about seven years, but he'll occasionally do something completely nuts like move to Alaska or buy a houseboat to live in in Alaska.
While I agreed with the hippy men that this particular pipeline was likely a Bad Thing, they didn't sell their organization all that well. Living thirty feet in the air on a crude wall or in trees constructed not by engineers but by other college dropout hippies, pissing and shitting into buckets and not getting food but once a day isn't something I want to do right now. Younger Tom, maybe would have, but old, one handed, jaded Tom isn't joining that cause.
And that's why it's good that I didn't move here earlier. A younger, more capable Tom who actually believed that change could be affected by common people doing such actions might have joined one of these cults. I'll affect change on my own in my neighborhood, rather than attempting to smash the state by joining a group that'll get me on a government watch list so they'll dig in my ass when I try to fly to Fest.
said Tommy T. at 9:19 AM - #
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said Tommy T. at 9:19 AM - #
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