Anti-War Voices

It was cold and rainy and windy here in the PNW. As we huddled together under umbrellas and rain hats and posters turned sideways to keep the rain off, many of us felt that underneath the familiar images of an anti-war protest something else was going on. It felt important and those of us who were there understood something was beginning again in this country--the stirrings of a more persistent voice for Peace. It was different than the ones previous. Those felt calm, subdued, well-behaved. This time there was an underlying anger, an energy to do more than play nice.

But we ARE nice people, nice non-violent people. Our whole reason for being there was to demonstrate against the kind of anger and rage and despair that leads to violence. No one I talked to wanted to put into words what that uncomfortable feeling inside us was. But we saw it in each other's eyes. We felt it in each other's voices, in the fed up tone of enough is enough that seeped through the crowd. We were part of a difference, a very important difference. A difference that grows as a feeling in the eyes that comes from the heart, from the depths of the heart where anger grows a shell around love to protect it from evil.

We were there because we understood The Bush War Machine is the worst of evils right now. It has an insatiable hunger not only to keep enriching itself on wars fought solely for profit, but also a hunger to protect itself from the crimes it has committed and continues to commit in that drive for profit and power. Firing prosecuters. Defaming anyone who disagrees with their addiction to wealth vast enough to buy the silence of every objector, torturing confessions out of everyone they can get their hands on until it sounds like some demented Jerry Springer show: Yes, I slept with Osama Bin Laden! I am the father of Anna Nicole's baby! I blew up the towers! I killed Kennedy!

The vast majority of the country is too disgusted with the lies continually spun by the Bushco War Machine to even laugh at the absurd desperation these sudden confessions reveal about an increasingly trapped administration facing an angry populace that is slowly starting to wake up. It's the rainbow hued terror alerts all over again. It's Karl Rove throwing tainted meat to the ignorant starving masses. Once they gobbled it up in the form of free hotdogs and Coca-Cola and support the troop rallies that were really rallies to stir up blood lust. Once they fed at the pulpit of hate as stereotypes and fear took the place of what used to be sermons and became right-wing propaganda spun doctrine. Once it worked so well and so easily. People fell asleep and became sheeple drugged subservient by the latest feel good mood pill brought to you by a subsidiary of Halliburton-Frist-Rumsfeld Incorporated.

But the stakes are higher now. And so is their desperation. It makes the Bushco War Machine very dangerous. It's a threatened beast spinning around in an ever smaller cage. The room holding it back has grown smaller and more constrained. The indictments are coming. The stench of fear is rising from the White House. From The Vice-President's Office. From those committees within committees within Pentagon death chambers. From the mockery of Justice Department. All inside these halls are desperate caged beasts hungry for a distraction, and that distraction is Iran, or Syria, North Korea or some other poor sap country that will allow itself to be drawn into the Bushco lie machine.

That is why this is the time when people must take to the streets. This is the time when it must be made very clear that the sheeple are done walking subserviently on all fours. This is the time when we must make it very clear that a diet of lies and crap isn't going to pacify the anger so easily anymore. We, who live our lives trying to convince others of the value of playing nice, have to develop a less nice backbone. We have to get louder. We have to get out in the streets every weekend instead of on approved anniversaries. We have to make it clear that we are listening every day, we are paying attention to everything, and we will express our opinion on every damn thing they throw at us.

That is what has been missing and has allowed Bushco to destroy the foundations of this country. Every time the constitution was trashed a little more, we were too busy, too dismayed, too pre-occupied. Every time more money was taken from schools, from communties, from VA hospitals, we looked away because our power was too little, too futile, too subject to being called traitor, troop hater, wimp, weak, and any number of insults those who want to continue to do evil throw around so easily. It's time to remember these are the same people who made the word Peace an obscenity and free speech an impediment.

It's time to take it all back. It's time to take to the streets seriously, not just once a week. Not just when others say so. Not when it's convenient. If you don't, the price is high, so high you may not survive. That price is war and if you think just recyling the same troops over and over again is going to satisfy the War Machine's desperate hunger, then you need to look up the meaning of the word "draft" because that's not a cold breeze closing in on you. It's your indifference, your mistaken and foolish belief that it has nothing to do with you.

---

Peace Skull design available on t-shirts and other items from Ursine Logic. Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

Anti-War Voices

The Gift Of Hate

I was taught early in life how to hate. My grandmother would never believe that is what she was teaching me. In her mind she was warning me about bad people who hurt her and her family. The pain in her voice was real as she described the beautiful house with the flower gardens, the many precious herbs tended for decades that both healed and brought in necessary income in times of need. And the team of white horses that identified the family carriage to anyone who saw it.

It was the horses I always remembered because when she spoke of them a shine came into her eyes, the kind of shine one gets when looking upon something so magnificent it literally brings tears to your eyes. And it was the horses, in all their majestic beauty, that was my first lesson in hate.

"So many in town hated my family for those horses," she would whisper to me as if it were such a deep and horrible secret that she didn't dare speak it aloud. And of course I felt the first stirrings of hate in my own belly as she described the injustice of having such creatures and not being able to openly enjoy them without drawing forth envy from those who resented "us" for our good fortune.

I learned these same people, one family in particular, lead the hate. "It was over politics," she would whisper as the sheer filth of that word fell from her lips. Politics. The ultimate bad guy in all her stories. It went hand in hand with hate because you couldn't have politics without hate. "They hated us for not believing what they believed, but our family was unshakable. We believed what we believed and that was it." I felt the passion of that injustice in my stomach and swore always to believe what I believed and I felt angry at these mean people who would deny me and my family that right.

Next came the real killer: religion. I come from a long line of Atheists mixed with a few religious fanatics. My family has straddled the religion fence decade after decade with a sort of blind faith that they will end up on the side that isn't lined up against the wall and shot, so it didn't surprise me that some hated them for their faith or lack of it. Why should the inner workings of my family be any different than the outer workings?

"The bastard hated us because we didn't believe in his Jesus." I felt her anger, her despair and I became ferociously Atheistic. I hated the family who judged us, the father and his son who stopped my family on the street and spit at my family and called them heathens. I could see him whenever she told this story: his hair black as his soul, his cold eyes, his crude language that no gentleman would be caught speaking. By the time I was in my teens I hated him with a passion so deep that I was certain if he was in the room with me, I could easily hurt him and feel no remorse. That is the power of hate, that is what it can convince you to to do: hurt a stranger because he did something to someone else you also never met.

But the worst part of this story was the horrible ending. "They came in the night," she told me with tears in her eyes. "First they poisoned the horses..." We always stopped to cry together at this part of the story. I loved horses as a young girl and this was a crime too horrible to ever forgive. I could see their eyes close in death as they suffered from the poison. I hated this horrible horrible man and his family and all his relatives and all the children he would bring into the world.

And then they came back and burned down the house and tore up the flower gardens and destroyed a decades old garden of medicinal herbs the town depended upon for healing. "We left and never returned," she said with that perfect note of despair that has left me feeling my entire life as if I were a homeless refugee, a displaced Atheist waiting for the first hail of bullets to strike me down for my terrible crimes of not believing in Jesus, of having politics that differed from the most powerful man in town and his evil son, and just being hated for no reason other than for who I was. The injustice of it was so strong, so much a part of how I grew up and why I became the adult I am.

My grandmother is long dead and it wasn't until I was in my twenties that I found out the truth about this family, this horrible man and his even worse son. Yes, they did all that. Yes, they were bad people. Yes, they caused my family endless and unjust suffering. I also found out they died at least a hundred years if not more before my grandmother was born. None of the bad things they did was done to her or to me or to anyone who was alive. They were long dead, but yet they lived on in this perverse way.

My grandmother was only repeating what was told to her. She gave me the only legacy she had left, the memory of an injustice committed on our family long before any of us were born. She gave me hate instead of love. It is a gift that I decided needed to die with me. I do not want to know more about this man and his son. I do not want revenge as a dish best served cold. I want him to die with the all the stories, all the unforgiven wrongs, all the hate he spread far into the future.

It ends with me. And what begins with me is a sense of peace, a feeling of moving forward in time instead of backwards, a reworking of hatred so it becomes love, a reworking of intolerance so it becomes acceptance, and a reworking of eternal and perpetual war so it finally, at last, becomes peace. It begins with me.

---

---

Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

The Gift Of Hate

Save The Planet, Save Ourselves

Whenever I need a break from the stresses of day to day life, I go for a walk. It helps that I live in a magnificent part of the world. Within a half hour of my home I can walk by a river, a couple lakes, a saltwater bay, and numerous parks with tall trees and creeks and ponds. By most people's standards, especially those who live in urban environments, I live in a wondrous nature paradise. I show it off to visitors. I live in awe of its stunning beauty even now, a quarter century since I first moved here. It never pales for me. It never loses its magic.

But I can also see the changes. The mountains and hills that surround much of this area have bald patches from the obscenity of being one of the few places in the world that still clear cuts entire mountainsides without any thought to future or even present generations. In the rainy season, which is a good deal of the year here, the clear cut patches become conduits for mud and debris filled flood waters that destroy homes and farmlands at their foothills.

In the out of control greed of slash and burn GOP rule these last few years, the families in those homes and farms become insignificant. It doesn't matter how long they've lived there or if their family homes and farms get washed away in the debris. Only one thing matters and that is how much the corporate clear cutters can get for the mountain's "lumber." There is no thought to the safety and well-being of the people below. The spindly replacements are reforested into the ground using desperate, transient and undocumented laborers willing to work for little money. And then everyone moves on and what the deer don't eat, the winter rains wash away, leaving a few tiny twigs to replace the thick forests that were clear cut away.

The mountains and hills stripped bare by cut and run profit taking are forgotten. They become as insignificant as the human beings whose lives were permanently devastated by the profit grabbing from above. Sadly, in some of the cases, those who were destroyed and will be destroyed are the same loggers and their families hired by the corporations to put their own property in danger. The Corporate Pigs know people don't dare complain or worry out loud when they're desperate for work. They shut up and pray. And they collect their paychecks until the Pigs move on to somewhere else. And then the loggers pray the unemployment checks don't run out before they find more work, and their homes won't wash away, and that mudslides won't turn into raging avalanches of boulders, uprooted stumps, and small trees left to rot because they weren't big enough to put on the truck or small enough to plant back into the ground. In the meantime, the rains come and the hill turns to mud and prayers don't seem quite enough anymore.

I also see this same lack of foresight when I look to the bay. Salmon comes from out of town now. Some of my once favorite fish aren't safe to eat in large quantities anymore. I can't find any fresh mussels in the store and the shrimp and clams come from China instead of from the fishing boats these days. The waterfront is changing from industrial to overpriced condominiums for urban refugees and wealthy retirees. But the train still runs below these condos and parts of the bay are preceded by the words: Superfund cleanup...

It's also impossible to walk from one end of town to the other anymore without crossing a major highway or intersection. The interurban trail system crosses more and more through urban areas and instead of forests, they are part of people's backyards. The traffic is horrendous and the roads are falling apart. There's no money to fix anything and yet new housing developments take over more homeland, and more poor and working poor are evicted from apartments that are converting to condos. The air smells like fuel, gasoline, diesel and continual traffic in many parts of town now. It is noisy and crime-infested in more and more of it. It is a dying paradise.

But the saddest part of all this is what is happening to the wildlife. Unchecked growth has displaced so many of the creatures who live around here. During a cold stretch a few weeks ago when the snow froze on the ground and didn't melt for days, I ended up with squirrels, raccoons, possums, and so many birds they would empty the feeder in less than an hour. I put out pans of hot water that they drank thirstily and quickly before it froze.

And the deer came. Skinny, hungry, thirsty deer who were so desperate they put aside all their fear of human beings. I fed them apples and gave them water and felt both a sense of awe that they were eating from my hands and also a deep sadness that in a place so lush, so beautiful, so filled with plenty, these beautiful creatures were starving because their homes were gone. Their grazing meadows were now condo villages. Their creeks were now in the middle of housing developments. They had to dodge traffic to go from block to block to try and find something to eat that wasn't frozen solid under the snow.

I took a picture of one of them after he hungrily ate three apples in a row and drank a bowl of water. He's tiny with ribs showing through his fur. But he's so beautiful and such a symbol of what greed and a total disregard for nature leaves behind. Look at him good. Look in those eyes. And then get out and do something to reverse the damage being done to our planet because no human should be able to get so close to a wild creature. It's just not natural. And it's our fault.

---

---

Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

Save The Planet, Save Ourselves

Why Al Gore has to be our next President

I watched the Oscars for probably the second or third time in my entire life for one reason: Al Gore. I had a bottle of champagne cooling "just in case." And when the evening ended without the rumored announcement, I didn't open the bottle. I don't even like champagne. But it would have been worth it if Al Gore said the magic words.

Some of you may wonder why this is so important to me. I make no secret of the fact that I am a strong Obama supporter and have been ever since I heard him speak at the Democratic convention. Obama would make a good President. He has compassion, intelligence, and the ability to see what the people want and find a way to give it to them, as any good leader does. I don't doubt for a minute that America would thrive with Obama as our leader. But I think America NEEDS Al Gore to be our next President.

My number one reason is for the sake of the planet. He is the only one who truly gets it. He is the only one who has been trying to educate people for the last few decades about the dangers that Climate Change can cause. Through his passion and unwillingness to give in to the status quo, he has made the words "Global Warming" familiar enough so that just about everyone knows what they mean. It doesn't matter if people agree or disagree with him. He got the message out and that is what matters. Those of us who understand are perfectly willing to help him educate those who disagree or fail to understand that our planet is in danger of dying from our neglect and abuse.

I remember the excitement I felt when I read "Earth In The Balance." I remember thinking this was a man who understood not only Science, but the Metaphysical dialogues that give birth to such hard truths. Halfway through the book I found myself falling in love all over again with the processes of critical thought, with the ability to take a concept and thread it through a needle with skill and precision.

It has never been enough for me that a leader be intelligent as there are lots of intelligent people in the world who do nothing for anyone but themselves. A leader also needs to be able to think, to conceptualize, to see outside the lines drawn by advisers and self-interests groups. A leader needs to lead from compassion, from vision, from an inner reality that translates to an outer truth. This is the kind of person who holds a diverse population together because he gives equal, intellectual weight to all sides. This is the kind of person who could lead America into another golden age.

My other reason is that he should have been our President. And no, I will never get over this. The election was stolen. He won it fair and square and the Supreme court members who voted to install George Bush as Puppet-In-Chief will go to their graves with the blood of American soldiers staining their robes. Even though I'm an Atheist, I hope they believe in a fierce and damning hell because they know they did wrong and I want them to be very afraid of dying. I want them to suffer for the evil they inflicted upon America by selecting Bubble Boy to be the President against the votes and wishes of the American people. Their grandchildren will have to live with the shame of their legacy. History will remember them as traitors to the Democratic process called America. When measured against that truth, fear of hell is nothing. They are still young enough to suffer the humiliation of having their grandchildren come home from school one day and ask them to defend their unconscionable act. There is no answer they will be able to give that will take away the shame in their grandchildren's eyes. That will be their true punishment.

I will never get over being angry at them because this body of judicial whores stole the integrity of our country. They made our voting process a mockery and sullied our democracy. The only way this can ever be fixed is if Gore becomes the President we voted for in 2000. It is the only thing that will heal this country because it will correct the wrong that has been inflicted on it. It will make things right, and if this country needs anything desperately right now it is to have things made right.

So please, Mr. Gore. Run. It's not about you, just as Global Warming and Climate Change is not about you. It is about all of us, about the planet, about healing the deep wounds Bushco has inflicted on everyone. We need you. America needs you. But most of all, the planet needs you..

---

---

Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

Why Al Gore has to be our next President

That Ethnic Thing

This Ethnic Thing

In the last few weeks I've been working on St. Patrick's Day designs for my shop. It's been an interesting experience because there isn't a drop of Irish anywhere in my genetic make-up...at least that I know about. However, I did get assimilated into a big old crazy Irish family and whenever I'm with most of them, there's something that starts to simmer inside me. They seem so easy with being Irish, with having a solid identity that withstands both moves all over the world and the urge to culturally merge that is so much a part of being American.

It's that culturally merge bit that always gets me personally. I wasn't physically born in this country and half my family spoke with strange and bewildering accents to most American ears. The best way to strike panic in most of us kids, even after all these years, is to make some reference to "accents," such as: you pronounced that wrong! Or remarking that a few weeks spent visiting the old country has left its mark on your pronunciation. Hey, you came back with a slight accent. No! Yes. Did not. Did. Aieeeee.

As children, we did all the talking to strangers because our family's English skills weren't fully developed enough to answer the door, the phone, or to ask directions and understand them and have them understood. Once we were teenagers and our parents could speak proper English, often grammatically better than the average American, we still did all the talking because we were mortified and embarrassed that our parents spoke "funny." It was horrible going through all the angst of teen-ness, and have to also deal with family members who weren't cool enough to speak without an accent.

There was a blissful period of time in this country before Bushco when it was actually cool to have an accent, when being "Ethnic" was something interesting and unique. People wanted to know about your accent, where it came from, who you were culturally, how you differed from them, and what we could learn from each other.

Bushco changed that. They made foreign a bad word. They made accents suspect. They made enculturation mandatory and immediate. They once again made it bad to be from somewhere else because if you were, you were either a terrorist or wanted to steal shit jobs. They made ignorance of other cultures a reason to hate and suspect and punish them for being from somewhere else, for believing different things, for gasp! Not being white, Anglo-Saxon Christian Republicans.

I would not want to be a child immigrating to America in these times. It was difficult enough as I was growing up, but foreign-ness still had a certain charm and allure then. It made you interesting. Women with thick dark accents were considered exotic, especially if they also smoked cigarettes to give them that lower sexy tone of voice that would eventually kill them from lung cancer. I both used to smoke and exaggerate my long lost accent as a young woman because it was an advantage over prettier, blond American girls. I was short, dark, and an Atheist. I needed all the advantages I could get.

Then we became the great melting pot where everyone was expected to jump in and become part of the same bland stew. Immigrants weren't allowed to spice it up. They were boiled until all the ethnicity was gone and only then could they jump in. Only then could they be bland enough to be part of the American dream.

With the civil rights movement in this country also came the right to be foreign. It was a magical time. People asked me how to say their names in my native language. They asked me for recipes they could serve their guests as something unique and different. Children began to learn foreign languages in the schools that included cultural components instead of just plain vanilla grammar. America began to truly be the land of immigrants.

Then Bushco came into power and all that started to decay. They introduced hatred and suspicion and served "freedom fries" with their ignorance burgers. White Christian cowboys skyrocketed in the music charts with hateful anthems bringing shame upon everything this country once stood for. Education became something for the elite and it became cool to be dumb, inbred, and spewing hatred from the car stereo as the pickup truck dug deep craters into the earth. Television shows were bland and made fun of anything that wasn't dumb and ignorant and poorly educated like the President. America began a backward slide into the kind of ignorance that once kept slaves and denied women the right to vote. It became a banana republic where English, bad uneducated, grammatically incorrect English was proposed as the official language. Hee-Haw.

There were a couple things that saved this country from itself and continues to do so. One was shows like the Sopranos where even though it feeds on stereotypes and makes one ethnic group seem like idiots and cold-blooded killers, it did break the mold of white people TV. These were not characters who played at being the Sopranos but spoke with white people accents and ate pot roast for dinner. No, these were out there Sopranos were were as different as they could be from the standard American prototype.

Another was the fall of the wall. It allowed communication and intermarriage between cultures that were once kept separated by government induced fear of each other. We became each other's forbidden pleasures and once again those who were from these previously hidden cultures, became desirably exotic.

But most important in all this are the Irish. What other culture has such a day that is celebrated year after year in such large numbers? There's no St. Italian Day or Russian Day or any other Ethnic holiday that draws in all the other cultures and makes them so much part of them on that one day a year. There's no other holiday that brings in the camaraderie and fun and acceptance of both being Irish and being honorary Irish on one special holiday.

So these designs are both my thanks to the Irish for being who they are and most importantly, for accepting me with such open, festive and loving arms. America still has much to learn and it wouldn't hurt to learn some it from the Irish.

---

---

Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

That Ethnic Thing

The Seeds of Self

Today is the anniversary of when my life changed. I mark it each
year as if it were a grave tended by my careful hands. I remove the
weeds lovingly, one small blade of grass at a time and relive a
quiet moment in a time I thought I'd never leave behind.

But leave it behind I did. I call that period of my life "The Cruel
Time." Everything about it was a stripping of my soul in order to
bind new wounds that grew daily from loving a real bastard. He
almost destroyed me. He almost took away everything that made me who
I am. He almost made me scratch my own eyes out so I would never
have to look at him again. He almost made me throw myself from the
highest building I could find so I could die screaming his name on
the way to my death with only the wind to hear. He almost made me
leave everyone and everything just to escape ever hearing his name
again. He almost destroyed my belief in the power of love, in the
eternity of friendship, in the unbreakable bond of my word. Almost,
but not quite, because in the end I was simply the stronger force.

The reason for this is simple. I value people and he never did. He
would be surprised and even insulted to know this about himself and
appalled that I would think of him in such a way. It was the worst
curse you could place on him, on me, on others like ourselves who
grew up believing everyone was bad and the only people you could
trust were the ones in your small circle of confidants. Everyone
else was dangerous.

He was dangerous. It's what drew me to him. He had that dark soul of
a man who'd destroyed so many lives that he no longer wore the guilt
of that destruction anywhere on him. He would swear he never
intended to hurt people, he never intended to lie to people, he
never intended to cheat people. He was just incapable of living any
other way. His way was the only way he knew.

I'm a stubborn woman and I also have this questionable ability of
being able to see past the outer crap and cut straight to the inner
meat. This has caused more trouble for me in my life than any other
thing because as I've learned, that outer crap is supposed to keep
people like me out. It both disturbed him and intrigued him that I
found a way in.

I saw in him what I see in everyone who becomes my friend: deep
wounds, excuses, rationalizations, fear, and a restlessness that
remains a lifelong unfulfilled hunger. Where he differed was his
inability to see human beings as anything other than objects to fill
whatever needs were the most predominant. He didn't discriminate. No
need was better or worse than any other. They were just needs.

It gave him an aura of being a free spirit who was tied to no one
and no thing. We spent a lot of time outdoors among the trees and
rivers and mountains because it was his natural element, the one
place where his animal nature found a comfortable home. This was the
man I came to love and cherish and need with all the depths of my
soul. But the moment the stink of city assaulted our lungs he became
a sort of urban werewolf, a blood-sucking creature who drained
everyone until they shriveled up and disappeared.

I didn't disappear. I have an overdeveloped loyalty gene. Once I
give my friendship, it is for life because whomever wins it fought
for it with honor and sincerity. And once I love, nothing the person
does can kill that love in me. Once given is forever beholden.

But he didn't deserve this kind of devotion. He treated me badly. He
treated the women he dated and married badly. I befriended them,
picked up the broken pieces and he hated me for this. He hated that
I took home and healed that which he discarded. He told me once it
was embarrassing, almost as if he caught me rummaging through his
trash for bread scraps.

And he loved me. He loved me with a passion and sincerity and depth
that surprised both of us. It was the secret I carried with me, that
he was capable of deep and overwhelming emotion, that he felt to the
point of madness, that his skin was sometimes a barrier that he
wanted to rip away so he could feel more.

But it wasn't enough to have this with me. It wasn't enough to heal
him, to show him a better way of being. He saw it as an anomaly, an
aberration that he grew to hate me for bringing out in him.He began
to try and prove it to me that he really was the bastard everyone
thought he was. He insulted me. He challenged my ethics, my honor.
And he questioned my love, my friendship, my devotion.

That is when I left him to fester in his own world. I learned that
moment that I had limits, that I had self-respect, that I had honor,
and integrity, and a healthy sense of self that I refused to turn
over to someone who didn't deserve it. I walked away.

Five years went by before we saw each other again. He was dying. He
had stomach cancer. All those cigarettes, all that vodka, all that
rage, and anger, and hostility, and most importantly lack of love
for himself and others, was killing him. Cancer was just the
convenient name for it.

I still loved him and told him. He was astonished. He was
incredulous. And finally, he believed me. In that moment he learned
what it meant to love.

He died six months later. It's been seven years now and I still
grieve for him, for the life he could have lived but didn't. I
grieve for the person I knew that no one else could see. I grieve
for him as as anyone would grieve for a precious friendship.

But I also mark this day as the day I learned that you can still
love someone and not let them abuse you. You can still love someone
and walk away and not look back because my love and anyone who knows
what it means to truly love, understands it lives on its own. Love
is its own entity. If it depended on a person, if it depended on
being valued, if it depended on being received, then it would be
called something else.

---

---

Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit
Ursine Logic for
more designs.

The Seeds of Self

Love, Anti-Valentines, and Friends For Life

I couldn't let my least favorite holiday go by without some comment, so on Valentine's Eve, here are some thoughts on this "holiday." Many of you are probably surprised that I don't like Valentine's Day. After all, I've said many times that only love will heal this planet and that the healing must begin inside us first.


I still say that. And I also say I don't believe Valentine's is a day of love. It is a day to get stressed out over love, to give it a financial value, to make one person happy and another one sad when you choose who gets the best valentine. Remember when we gave Valentines at school? There was always one or two of the really cute girls and guys who got the fancy, elaborate valentines. Their bags overflowed with unrequited love.


Meanwhile, the rest of us looked at our mass-produced bits of paper and said screw this, I'm going to hang out with my friends and practice unconditional love to fight against this injustice. And we did. And we grew up hating Valentine's Day, no matter how many cool, elaborate valentines we got from admirers, lovers, partners, husbands, wives, and all the mixture of love, sex and paying for it dearly clubs we belonged to.


I fell in with a bad crowd in high school. We protested against war. We became vegetarians. We listened to music that stirred our blood and bodies to create a sexual revolution that changed forever the roles between men and women in this country. We began to talk about and write about and sing about things that mattered to us like overpopulation, pollution,the strip-malling of our hometowns. And we redefined love to mean something that was genuine and not bought, felt and not enforced, and celebrated instead of feared.


During that time one of us created the first anti-valentine, a work of art on bits of paper and cardboard and even tin foil. We exchanged these little gifts of love with each other on Valentine's Day, no matter what the relationship or gender. We gave each other these gifts as a way to express that we loved each other, we appreciated each other, and that we understand a very basic concept: lovers come and go, but friendship is forever.


Each year since then many of us have continued to exchange these anti-valentines. And truth be told, one of the major reasons I became a Cafepress shopkeeper was because I fell in love with their anti-valentine designs. It was the one place I could go to see how others were reacting to the enforced day of love. I saw at once that not only was my little group far from unique, we also had many friends in the world who thought the same way we did.


This year I made this design. I bought it for myself and wear it a lot. It's a sentiment that always brings a smile to my face and it also pokes fun at the whole idea of dating, valentines, and the ridiculous idea that we should only express our love for each other one day of the year. Enjoy!

---

---

Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

Love, Anti-Valentines, and Friends For Life

Anna Nicole and The Bubble Boy

There's something deeply obscene and sad about the way the world came to a sudden stop the other day over Anna Nicole Smith. People who had shut out most of the Iraq war horrors, and the reality of a leadership that sees its own citizens as impediments on its path to perpetual war, and the juvenile and vengeful reactions of the Libby-Cheney cabal over someone who dared to insert some truth into their bullshit--they all stopped to pay a weird sort of homage to this pathetic caricature of a woman.


After I got over my outrage and stopped my stream of insults directed at the simple mindedness and short attention span of my fellow citizens, (her death replaced a crazed astronut in diapers, for dawg's sake!) I began to understand exactly what Anna Nicole represented and why she had such a pull on people. She was the America we've come to know in the last few years of the Bush Junta.


She was the garishness of an ideology that was fed by greed, an unfathomable lust for power, bling instead of substance, and the indifferent coupling required to move forward one notch on the political belt. With her inflated, unreal breasts, exaggerated red lips, and hair so stripped of color it was an anti-color, she paralleled the inflated expectations of world domination based on unreal mountains of evidence, an exaggeration of all fears and ethnic groups to more clearly create a red and blue divided country, and propaganda so stripped of truth that it became its own doublespeak crapped out daily by the White House press secretary of the quarter.


She was crude as Bushco is crude. She was uneducated as Bushco is uneducated. She was a package put together to appeal to the lowest common denominator just as the Buscho political agenda was put together to appeal to the dumbest of the dumb, the weakest and most gullible of the flock. She was portrayed as both the used and the user, just as Bush is portrayed as both puppet and inflexible ideologue. Everyone wanted to be her daddy but no one wanted to step up and take responsibility while she was alive, just as everyone can see the daddy issues between Bush the bubble boy and the daddy who loves Jeb best, but no one can step up and say get some therapy you assholes before you kill all of us.


And now the vultures that always follow train wrecks so they can pick the bones clean are circling Anna Nicole's preserved by court order body to lay claim to money she might be granted sometime in the mythical future. They are claiming paternity of her baby now that it is a child of future wealth and privilege instead of the product of their white trash coupling. They are saying oh how awful that she was so exploited as they stare transfixed at those enormous breasts, those red lips and hear that breathless little girl voice coming through the television screens once more.


And while they are so transfixed, Bush the Bubble boy is pulling wings off the fly that is Iran while shiny, ideological toys are waved in front of him by the neo-con vultures getting ready to wind up the idiot for one more spin around the room of smoke, mirrors and lies. If we fail to stop this next war in Iran, it is only fitting that Anna Nicole Smith becomes the historical symbol of our generation. We'll have earned her.

---

---

Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

Anna Nicole and The Bubble Boy

Some Enraged Thoughts On Global Warming

After watching "An Inconvenient Truth," I was left with a wide range of emotions that mixed with the ones I had over the stolen election of 2000 and the subsequent disaster the Bushco thieves have wrought upon the planet. I rarely get angry. I believe anger is something that feeds on you and turns you into a hate zombie consumed by things beyond your control. But I've been angry for a long time now and today when everything the Bushco bastards tried to suppress about Global Warming and Climate Change was finally allowed to see a glimmer of daylight, I became furious.

From day one this administration has threatened, blackmailed, intimidated and bought off Scientists, Doctors, Teachers, Scholars, and just about everyone who believed something that threatened Bushco bank accounts. They inflicted their junk science creationism voodoo on a generation of school children who couldn't fight back and demand a real education. They turned stem cells into a political tool instead of using their influence to help those who have long ago given up on hope. They cheated human beings out of real research that could have found the cure for cancer in favor of enriching pharmaceutical donors with millions of dollars of happy pills sales, that also had the added benefit of keeping people drugged and indifferent. They lied and sat on proof of Global Warming so oil companies could make billions of dollars in profits without having to even clean up their messes--like Exxon and the still unpaid costs of the Valdez environmental catastrophe. They let an American city die and have done shit to make it live again.

Everywhere they could cut a corner for security, safety and the common good in favor of lining their own pockets, they did. I long ago realized that Bushco cares only about money and the power it brings. All the rest of it, the religious crap, the fetus worship, the Middle East plan to slaughter everyone into democracy has nothing to do with ideology. They will pretend to believe whatever pays the best. And they will find a way to silence anyone who threatens their obscene and money-hungry pursuit of power. If the Republican Christo-Fascists ever cut off the money supply they use to buy legislation that puts us square into another dark age of religious persecution of the non-believers and the turning of women into chattel, they would turn on them as well. If the oil in the Middle East disappeared overnight, the very next day the troops would be coming home and there would be no interest in bringing "democracy" to places like Iran anymore.

But the worst damage they did was to the planet, a place that belongs to everyone and not just Bushco, a place that belongs to future generations and not just the greedy bastards that have staked their oily, greasy claim all over it. They tried to hide the damage their policies were doing. They lied about the effect of those policies. They cheated their grandchildren out of the only real legacy they had any right to pass on: a clean and healthy planet. For this reason alone, they should hang for their crime of murder, because it's a murder that doesn't end with this generation. It will continue to kill and destroy for generations to come and that is what makes them truly evil. Future generations will curse the names of these bastard ancestors that make up Buscho and if there is such a thing as an afterlife, may they hear their voices loud and clear for eternity.

---

---

Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

Some Enraged Thoughts On Global Warming

Meat Puppet In Chief

There are days when I just can't believe this is what we have for a President. He reduces me to childish retorts, sneering insults, and frat boy jokes. More and more it is clear that the only reason he became President was the same reason idiot Kings were put in charge of countries--they are the meat puppets who stand in front of the curtain while the real bastards pull the strings.

Meat Puppet In Chief

Crazy Men in their 40's...

I'm very selective about the people I let into my life. I know what kind of friend I am, how seriously I take the word and the obligation of friendship. I also know this is what attracts people to me who want only to feed off that which I am. I know the world is full of people who have issues, who have dramas, who are on paths that will eventually grow them into actualized human beings. I also know that I've put in my time helping some of those people walk that path at the expense of my own sanity at times, and that I will continue to do so.


But the years have also taught me to be selective as I told a new acquaintance. We were sharing a cup of tea on a cold rainy day. The conversation was wonderful with just that touch of danger an underlying attraction can take on. We agreed politically, mentally, about love and friendship and all the cornerstones that form a solid connection. When he left to go home I experienced a momentary sense of sadness that so much potential wouldn't be developed further.


He left angry. I won't see him again. It's a conscious choice I made the minute he started to talk about his marriage, his kids, his frustration with his job, the gray that was taking over his hair, his fantasy of just bagging it all and buying a motorcycle and traveling the world before it was too late.


In other words, he just told me that he was offering me the typical friendship a woman has with a man in his mid to late 40's...months of dependence on me every time something went bad at home or work, gratitude for listening without ever saying much in return, an intertwining of his life with mine so complete that all that was missing from a total bonding was the sex that would never be. (The reason for that is simple. I don't mess with married men. It's disrespectful to the women and there's always complications.)


Nothing is simple with a man, especially friendship. They are either actively hunting a mate, in the throes of raising children and therefore not available unless it involves "the children." Or they are about to go bat shit crazy starting in their early to mid-40's when the children become teenagers and their marriages start to tighten around their necks.


In the last few years I've let myself get caught, for the sake and honor of friendship, in the whirlpool that was created by these men experiencing all the typical symptoms of a full-blown mid-life crisis. It always starts the same way. The woman they've been with for a decade and more is suddenly dragging him down, making too many demands, stopped loving him, is gaining weight, and becoming boring. If it wasn't for her, there's so much he could do, but now it's too late and it's all her fault because SHE makes him unhappy. And the children hate him, want him only for money and expensive presents, and as a chauffeur if they aren't old enough to drive themselves.


Think I just know some strange people? Well, I do. But I'm not the only one. Many women have been stunned to hear out of nowhere that their husband of many years suddenly wants a divorce.


I've been on the other end of hysterical phone calls at least twice a year now for the last few years as I tried to explain to my distraught women friends that it wasn't all their fault, that maybe it wasn't even the man's fault, that they were just caught up in a psychological whirlpool so intense they couldn't fight their way out and survive.


Sadly, it usually does end in divorce and even though the men always swear the girlfriend came later, she was usually in the picture when things started to go crazy. She became a symbol of all that was wrong in their lives. She became the unattainable Goddess they could have if only if only if only. And worst of all, these men often do end up with the Goddess who ends up becoming their new wife. It takes about 18 months for love and lust to become ordinary. This is after maybe another child has been conceived or since she is always younger than him, she often brings young children into the new relationship.


And the man finds himself in the exact same situation he escaped from. But instead of the bliss, he often has less money because now he is supporting two families on the income that was barely enough for one family. He often goes from having teenagers to having infants and young children in the home. Instead of more freedom he suddenly has less. Most of these new relationships end within two years and the man is left with nothing. Two of my friends became suicidal. One ended up killing himself for, as he put it in his suicide note, "Throwing away a beautiful family and a wife who loved me."


So what has this to do with me and friendship with a man in his 40's? Actually, quite a bit. You see, as the Patron Saint of difficult people, I draw these fools to me like bear to honey. I start out with friends who are couples and end up with two friends who won't be in the same room with each other and who spend most of their time trying to make me take sides. If the friendship is solid enough, I'll risk it.


Why risk? Because in the end, I'll still have the woman as a friend. We'll still stay in touch frequently. We'll call each other all the time and share emails. At first I have this with the men too...until one day the calls stop coming, the emails go unanswered, the voicemail doesn't get returned. Then I know he has begun the next relationship and I cease to exist. I become insignificant, an annoyance, that friend who becomes an obligation whose call he must answer as he and his new love giggle privately as he rolls his eyes to take my call. I become part of his past, the friend of his ex, the one who knows how low he went and the throes of his despair. I know too much about him. It doesn't matter squat that I gave him the depths of my friendship, that I cancelled appointments because he needed to talk, that I listened to him for hours on end go on and on about stuff that was essentially boring and tedious and annoying because I'd heard it so often from men before him. My friendship didn't matter anymore than it matters to him that his wife gave him her life, her youth, love and support for all those years.


And that is why I am acquaintances with men in their 40's and save my deep heart connections for men who are at least in their 50's and have already gone through all that nonsense. I'm a good friend. I have a lot to give. And I don't believe in wasting anything, especially my time, my love, and especially my friendship.


So, he left mad. He'll probably call me in a few years and say, hey you know what? You were right. Let's meet for tea, and I'll happily agree. Maybe I'll even invite his ex to join us.

---

Design from Ursinelogic. Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

Crazy Men in their 40's...

What do you mean is Obama BLACK enough???

Ever since Hillary and Obama announced their presidential runs, watching the news "actors" delivering their commentary is giving me bad flashbacks to the 1950's. That's the last time I heard such bullshit about whether a WOMAN can do anything as opposed to a man. Are we hearing anything about John Edward's gender? Do we hear about oh gawd, not another southern white man! Has anyone asked Elizabeth Dole lately if she would have risen so far in politics if she hadn't been married to Bob? And yet some meathead actually asked Hillary that today. He asked her if she would be running for president, if she would be in such a position of power if it hadn't been for Bill--which completely shit on the fact that she's been a successful senator who won re-election all by herself without Bill.

The pathetic excuse for commentators are falling all over themselves to see who can get the dumbest remark in that focuses just on her gender and not her qualifications. Next people will be saying she is too "pushy" to be president, too much of a bitch, too hormonal, too emotional, too castrating...the list goes on and on for those who want it to go on. The rest of us think of castration as something that's going to happen to welfare for the rich and corporate and not something she's going to do to Bill or anyone else with a butcher knife as they sleep.

But all that pales, literally PALES as in stupid white people pales, when compared with the idiocy coming out of people's mouths over Obama. All the closet racists are coming on down to get their two cents of marginalized intellect into the dumbshit stew. They are asking us, we the people who know better, we who haven't thought this way for years if at all, if AMERICA will vote for a black president? WTF!!!?????

In my never humble opinion, the best response for that came from a woman who runs a discussion list I've been on for her over a decade. I made the following design to capture as best as I can remember, her perfectly reasonable solution to those who ask if Obama is BLACK enough to run for president. It's the one at the top of the page that says: "Will slap next person who says Barack Obama isn't black enough."

---

Design from Ursine Logic. Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs. And a great big thank you to Kamal from 3blackchicks.com for suggesting this design and others. If you're into movies, this is the site to visit. Tell her I said Hi!

What do you mean is Obama BLACK enough???

President Hillary Clinton?

It's really hard for me to figure out how I feel about Hillary running for president. She lost my heart when she didn't come out and say the Iraq war is wrong, based on lies, and let's get the hell out. It's why candidates like Obama and Edwards have my heart.

Obama says yes when asked if he did things like get high. He doesn't hide it like Bush does or stretch the truth ridiculously far like Bill who didn't inhale. He says what I want to hear about Iraq. I like Edwards for saying what I want to hear about Iraq. I like him even better because he acted like a real husband who cares about his wife when she had breast cancer, unlike Newt who ran into the arms of his intern mistress--and then condemned Bill for a blow job, when HIS wife got cancer.

But more than anything it comes down to Iraq for me. From the beginning, right after 9/11 when the bullshit began, I read what I could easily find online and immediately came to the conclusion that the reasons for the war were a crock and a case was being made that was based on flimsy heresy. Experts were ignored and discredited. "Suicides" of those who could verify this suddenly increased. It didn't take much for me to figure out Bush and Cheney were lying the country into war.

My anger at Congress is based a lot on this. If I knew, if a few days a couple hours at a time let me know the excuses for war were flimsy and stretched beyond belief, why didn't Congress who were much closer to the situation than I ever would be? Are they that stupid? Or were they that bought.

That is my problem with Hillary right now. Who owns her? She rides the centrist train as if it were the only ride in town with a promise of getting to the destination. I don't want centrist, Republican-lites. I want someone with the courage to go against the war machine. If Hillary can't even speak against it, is she strong enough for the job? And if she isn't, why should I vote for her instead of Obama or Edwards who at least make a pretense of being strong enough?

I don't want to vote for Hillary just because she is a woman, although as a woman in my 50's the time is getting shorter to see a woman president in my lifetime. I cried when Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House. Only someone who grew up when I did and remembered what it was like to be a subservient secretary to an incompetent boss, or have all our accomplishements prefaced with female poet, woman writer, girl geek, or have school counselors tell us we could be Nurses and Teachers and Wives while the boys were told they could be anything they wanted, can ever possibily understand how important seeing a woman become President is to me and why I cried at the words: Madame Speaker.

But I didn't come all this way to compromise my principles just to see a woman become president. I am a Pacifist first and foremost. That is my soul and that is how I will vote.

---

---

Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

President Hillary Clinton?

Why I Don't Have Children

People sometimes ask me why I don't have children and I usually give them some smart-ass answer such as "because I can't have kittens," or something equally evasive. Why I do this is because we live in a world where I've received more hate mail over a section of my shop that is devoted to childfree people than I have over designs such as "Fuck You Mr. President." People are threatened in a weird way by those of us who choose not to breed.

And yes, it is a choice, one I made when half my graduating class was missing because they signed up for the military at 17, got sent to Vietnam, and were dead by graduation day 1969. We read their names in tribute and handed their empty diploma cases to their grieving families. At that time the military was mostly male and we young women looked around that room empty of most of the boys we grew up with and left the room as Pacifists. I swore right then, with many of my friends, that I would never provide children to be used as cannon fodder.

My other reason was over-population. I saw a world filling up too fast with too limited resources. It is far worse now. If we keep reproducing at the rate we are now, our future and those of children born in the next few years, will be a future of wars fought for limited resources such as water, food, and unpolluted land. We are already dying for oil. That should be a clue and wake-up call for those who still don't get it.

Later in life I was told a third reason to never have children: I carry the gene for Hemophilia. Any male child would have more than likely been born with this disease. And while I've heard all the arguments why someone who has this can live a long and happy life, I didn't feel I should inflict it on a child if I had the choice not to. I chose not to.

At the same time, I realize there are amazing people in the world who need to have children. They need to raise the next generation to be the amazing and enlightened beings they themselves are. The answer to this is very simple. Adopt. There are so many children all over the world who would be grateful for a safe and permanent place to sleep with parents who loved them. There are children in this country, in our own neighborhoods who have grown up in foster homes because they are not cute enough, white enough, perfect enough to be adopted. This is so wrong.

One of the worst arguments I've had with someone on myspace was with a couple people who tried to convince me there was a shortage of babies to adopt and that's why abortion was wrong. There is NO shortage of babies to adopt if you aren't looking just for cabbage patch dolls. If you really care about humanity and the planet and saving lives, then adopt a special needs child. Adopt a child who is not a baby. Adopt a foster child who longs for a real home they won't have to eventually leave. Then tell me there are no children to adopt. Before then, you are not being compassionate and caring about human life. You are being a fucking racist who only wants a dolly with blond hair and blue eyes.

After the latest round of hate mail I decided to expand the section of my child-free shop and will be adding more designs to it just because I don't like racists, I don't like people who think it's alright to tell me what to do with MY body, and who judge others for choices they make that are different. If I was like them I wouldn't have any friends with children. I wouldn't be around children. I would just live in my biased reality and call it good.

But I'm not them and I have both child-filled and child-free friends. I have friends who adopted children from other countries. I have friends who adopted crack babies. I have friends who foster children no one wants. To me these are the true heroes of the world, those who give a home to the less than perfect. That makes them perfect humans in my book.

---

Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

Why I Don't Have Children

What is Bushco really up to with this Escalation crap?

Bush is either completely delusional or this is a big fat distraction to keep our eyes off his hand...which is busy trying to start shit with Iran and Syria. The scary thing is that it is probably both...he is delusional AND he wants to start shit. If you haven't called your congressional representative, now is the time to make those phone calls and demand they make Bush come to Congress before taking military action in Iran or Syria. If we've learned anything in the last few years it is that our freedoms and rights do not disappear overnight. They leak away in hidden bills, legislation passed when no one is watching, and those insidious signing statements.

The War on Terror is just another excuse to make us subservient and cowering victims of Bushco. It is a badly refurbished version of the War on Drugs, and we all now how successful that was. All it did was make criminals of recreational users. The big drug lords are richer, more powerful, and have tons and tons of merchandise now more than ever. I would not be the least bit surprised if cocaine and heroin were once again raising money for illegal wars. After all, most of the people from Iran-Contra are now in privileged Bushco positions, and we all know how that funded that one.

As much as Bush disgusts me, what absolutely terrifies me is the idea that someone like Cheney could become President if Dubya is suddenly incapacitated, or worse, if Cheney resigns and Bush appoints someone like McCain as his replacement.

You have to look at these bastards for what they truly are: obsessed with power. Do you really think if Cheney or Bush starts to go down that they don't have an odious backup in place? Now is the time to find out exactly who those backups are, and it is also time to let Congress know you are paying attention. Make those calls now and demand that Bush must go before Congress BEFORE he can "bring democracy" to any other country. After all, 2008 is not that far away. You voted them in and you can vote their asses out the same way.

---

Design from Ursine Logic. Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

What is Bushco really up to with this Escalation crap?

About those Freeloaders...

One of the many things I enjoy about being a Cafepress Shopkeeper is the community that congregates on the forum boards. We talk about how good or bad our days and sales are going. We encourage and support each other. We share our births, illnesses, dysfunctional families and relationships. In the year I've been there I've learned so much and made some wonderful
friends from all over the world.

There's a section of the forum where we can chit chat about anything.During one of these conversations one of the shopkeepers described how she packed up her cheating man's stuff in black garbage bags and set them outside. Of course we had to run with this. Thus was born the Freeloader thread and the following designs.

Do check out the various shops and bookmark them for future birthdays, anniversaries and holidays. I can vouch that your money goes to support some really nice people who are raising families, growing themselves as individuals with new confidence and skills, and creating original art that you will not find anywhere else.

---

Freeloader Plastic Garbage Bag Luggage

Ornament --11.99

This design is from Ursine Logic

This is what the designer has to say:

Has that unwanted house guest started to stink yet? Have they ignored all your invitations to move on? Instead of using a regular garbage bag to throw their stuff to the curb, get designer on them! Text says: For those whose welcome ends up bagged and tossed to the curb.

---

The Freeloader insult shirt Ash Grey T-Shirt

This design is from The Eclectically Incorrect Shop

This is what the designer has to say: Can't get rid of that bum? Give 'em a gift and shame them out the door. Or, just quit cooking with cheese.

---

FREELOADER Value T-shirt

16.99

This design is from Scott Designs

This is what the designer has to say: Heal thyself...kick the freeloader to the curb!

---

Freeloader White T-Shirt

21.99

This design is from Evil Genius Comics, T-shirts and Gifts

This is what the designer has to say: Broken heart and garbage bags full of his things with caption: My valentine's day gift to my freeloading boyfriend: his stuff by the curb and the locks changed!

---

Freeloader Spider Baseball Jersey


22.99

This design is from Circus Valley - Funny T-shirts

This is what the designer has to say: Spiders do help us get rid of pesty insects. Why not give your freeloading friend or relative this not so friendly hint. Text: FREELOADER at the back of shirts.

---

Ash Grey T-Shirt

22.99

This design is from missingnebraska

This is what the designer has to say: From Western Nebraska, I'm having a ball at cafepress. I've learned a lot, made a little money and a bunch of great friends. Humor is my main venue, as I think we all need to laugh more

---

Funny Freeloader Design Dark T-Shirt

28.99

This design is from The Hot Tees

This is what the designer has to say: Are you living with a freeloader? Have all of your hints fallen on deaf ears? Tired of finding an empty refrigerator.... a messy house.... cigarette butts ground into the carpet... a lazy freeloader lying on the couch watching "Dr. Phil"... It's time to take a stand!


Wear this tee and let them know the party's over.... Garbage can in the middle of this design with text that says, "Get The Hell Out Or I'm Packing The Freeloader Suitcases!"

---

And do check out the comments because I've invited the other shopkeepers who made "Freeloader" designs to post them in the comments section if they missed out getting them in the actual post.

About those Freeloaders...

The Value Of Friendship

In the last couple weeks filled with holidays that focused on family gatherings, there's always this small bit of sorrow in me that I didn't have those joyful memories. I come from the original dysfunctional family. It was dysfunctional in so many ways that I can't even begin to describe it here. I tried to write a book about it once. I even finished it. It's in a drawer along with other memories that are worth hanging on to for the educational value: love letters from old and dead relationships, long expired student identifications and driver's licenses and other bits and pieces of officialdom that have been replaced by the digital age, photographs of a youthful me that I'm always surprised looked kind of cute. I always saw myself as painfully ugly then. How perception changes!

What isn't there are many family pictures. We never took many. Most of the time we were too poor to afford a camera for more than a few weeks at a time. It lived mostly in the local pawn shops of whatever town we were in at the time. And film cost money to buy and develop. And who wants a record of domestic violence, alcoholism and poverty as mementos anyway?

Yes, my childhood sucked and I've had to spend a lifetime climbing out of it. But then as now there was something that kept me from taking one of my father's weapons and blowing my head off with it or one of my mom's happy pills that would let me sleep forever without waking up to them screaming at each other, and that was my friends.

There is an old saying that you can't buy friendship. This is probably because you can't put a price on it. Friendship is truly priceless. When I think of my childhood, it is filled with memories of friends who sheltered me, helped me talk through my anger, fear, and tears, who held me instead of hit me, who accepted me no matter how bad a person I thought I was and who saw me as beautiful no matter how ugly I thought I was. They kept me alive.

As I grew older I moved a lot and finally found a place to stop. I chose the place because of the people who came into my life in this place. They were the people of my childhood, the open and accepting arms, hearts, and minds. From the beginning they sheltered me from the other elements in the community who saw my vulnerable neediness and looked for ways to exploit it.

Some did and they live in the memory drawer with my family pictures. But the ones who are outside that drawer taught me that love is stronger than hate, tolerance is more powerful than bigotry, and love means being there when you are needed. That is why for this holiday like many of the others, I spent it with my friends. It's going on a couple decades now and it's because of them that the wounds are finally starting to heal.

---

Design and many others available at: Ursine Logic

---

Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Limited coupon offer! DES140 will get you 10.00 off your purchase. (If it expires before you get a chance to use it, you can grab the current coupon code for 5.00 off at the top of my store entrance. There's a link that will take you to the coupon code site.)

The Value Of Friendship

George Bush, Unfit To Serve

For anyone who is still deluded enough to believe that George Bush will listen to anyone but the seriously disturbed voices in his head, here is a definition of "Antisocial Personality Disorder" (formerly known as: Sociopath) from Medicine Net

---

"Antisocial personality disorder:

A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others and inability or unwillingness to conform to what are considered to be the norms of society.

The disorder involves a history of chronic antisocial behavior that begins before the age of 15 and continues into adulthood. The disorder is manifested by a pattern of irresponsible and antisocial behavior as indicated by academic failure, poor job performance, illegal activities, recklessness, and impulsive behavior. Symptoms may include dysphoria, an inability to tolerate boredom, feeling victimized, and a diminished capacity for intimacy.

Antisocial personality disorder, also known as psychopathic personality or sociopathic personality often brings a person into conflict with society as a consequence of a pattern of behavior that is amoral and unethical. Complications that might arise from having this disorder include: frequent imprisonment for unlawful behavior, alcoholism and drug abuse. "

Bush will NOT listen to reason when it comes to Iraq or anything else. Like most seriously disturbed people, reality is not something that has a snowball's chance of getting anywhere near his thought processes. To make it even worse, he is surrounded by those who are equally psychotic or who are manipulating his psychosis to further their own means. It is time, way past time, to seriously considering impeaching him. George Bush is unfit to serve as the leader of the United States.

---

Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

George Bush, Unfit To Serve

How Many More Will Bush Let Die?

If anyone doubts the benefits of an education that includes a good dose of the Literary classics, History that isn't underwritten by corporate grants, and an emphasis on critical thinking rather than boot-licking loyalty to an ideology, all they have to do is look at the current dynamics between Bush, his father, Iraq, an enabling, vindictative mother, and the paid minions who spout ideology instead of facts because of favors bought and promised.

Shakespeare covered the whole ugly story of the Bush family many times over: the resentful and spoiled son who can never be better than dad, the manipulative mother who turned away at the affairs, the ugly political scenes, the dehumanization required in order to head something as vile and immoral as the CIA. You will find the corrupt "royal" family whose roots are sown deep in the secrets that made them rich, the passive-aggressive mother who uses the son as a weapon against the father, the ambitious social-climber who knows her family's lack of breeding will allow them only to be used by those who are more "legitimate," and the bumbling ideologue trapped in a position beyond his ability to understand, much less control.

If that isn't enough, there's always the Greeks and their classic father-son dynamics that brought down empires, the overbearing mother who lusts after her own offspring so completely that she can see no wrong, no defect in him. This is paralleled by the son who sees mom as a sort of Hellenic Goddess with the power to destroy those who cross her or who fail to acknowledge the perfection of her fruit of the loins.

Or you can move forward to Freud and other analysts who drew on the Greeks to describe the incestuous relationship (physical and/or mental) between mother and son, the battles between fathers who cannot relinquish control and sons who will do anything to take it over. You can read how these dynamics destroyed not only families, but businesses, villages, and countries.

You can really study History and learn how the Bush family has its dirty little fingers in every stinking pie for decades. Want a nice shock? Type these three words in google without the quotes: Houston Barbara Zapata. You will read about Bush the Elder's connection to the CIA and the Bay of Pigs, Iran-Contra, the assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy, and others. A picture will emerge of a dirty dirty corrupt and immoral family who have no concept of humanity, compassion, love, or a world outside their own greed and need for power.

And the blame for this can be put squarely on those who thought Shakespeare, Greek Literature, and Psychology were too complicated and boring to study on more than a superficial level. It is because of this mindset that we have a President who will not admit he is wrong about Iraq and who listens to the greedy minions with war profits to be made, instead of listening to the advisors forced on him by a father who long ago lost control of his son. And alongside them, you will find the cruel and trashy Barbara who will keep enabling all of them because if she stops then she has to look at herself--and that is NOT a pretty picture.

---

Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for more designs.

How Many More Will Bush Let Die?

Global Orgasm for World Peace Day

My main holiday of the year is the Winter Solstice. For the last couple decades I've celebrated it with an ever-growing and changing group of people. We are a mix of many communities: Pagans, Wiccans, Atheists, New Age Christians, Scientists, Teachers, Geeks, Artists, Musicians...you just can't fit us, the collective we, into a nice neat box. We are who we are and that is what has made this yearly ritual so powerful for all of us.

Sure, there are things we do, movements, chants, songs and we meet in one place once a year to herald the return of the sun. And also to acknowledge our ancient blood that understands we are Nature and we are the Sun and together we create ritual to give meaning and momentum to the change of the seasons.

I begin anew each Winter Solstice. I grow myself from the ritual seeds we plant that are wishes, dreams, hopes, aspirations, needs, desires, and our version of what we hope to find under Santa's tree. Each year the ritual evolves and changes. In that way, it mirrors the patterns of Nature who grows, evolves, changes, and becomes.

That is just part of why I am passing this information on to you about the Global Orgasm day for World Peace. I've heard about it for weeks now and the momentum seems to be picking up as I received several email letters, saw some artwork, heard some songs, and created a design in the last few days.

Since I dismiss nothing as a potential seed for world peace, I pass this on to you because it makes such sense to me who lives by the teachings of Mother Nature. I have always believed we live in a world we create each day by our actions, our dreams, our collective visions. I would not spend a moment of my life working for peace if I didn't believe my work is like a snowball that grows and grows and picks up people and their dreams and visions as it rolls along and gains momentum. This is not hard Science or Religion or Woo-Woo Spirituality. It is common sense. If we put our energy towards making something happen, it generally does as long as we do not give up.

The information describing the idea behind Global Orgasm day can be found at

Global Orgasm Day

Here is some information directly from the website:

"Donna Sheehan and Paul Reffell co-founded the anti-war
organization www.baringwitness.org">Baring Witness, a worldwide collective of peace activists who are alarmed enough to spell peace publicly with their naked bodies. The Global Orgasm is a way for even more men and women to be involved in changing the way human affairs are conducted in the world."

WHEN?

Winter Solstice Day - Friday, December 22nd


"At the time of your choosing, in the place of your choosing and with as much privacy as you choose."

---

---

Design from Ursine Logic. Changing minds one t-shirt at a time. Visit Ursine Logic for this and more designs.

Global Orgasm for World Peace Day