Occupy This! Wall Street & Reality TV

Tis the season for occupation. And why not? I’m occupying my chair as I type. From Wall Street to Walmart, I say it’s time for hardworking and hard-complaining American citizens to get to occupying.

The only problem I keep running into is that I don’t know how to occupy an ideal or a concept. I’d love to occupy greed or corruption in order to break it’s will, bust it down to mere covetousness, slap it around a little and toss it to the curb. But it’s not exactly like occupying a Honey Bucket. There’s no latch on the door that switches from ‘vacant’ to ‘occupied’ (as far as I can tell).

But then again, it’s not like Wall Street or corporate greed or whatever entity we’re invading was actually vacant to begin with. So I guess what we’re talking about here is a relocation program of some sort–removing half of the venture capitalists and day traders to replace them with what? Dissidents? Hippies? That hardly seems any better. We can’t have the trading floor resounding with “Sell! Sell! Kill! Kill! while the rest of the group gets the munchies, now can we?

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Reeferpunk 2.0

In celebration of the reemergence of ticked-off Americans via the Occupy Wall Street movement I’ve decided to totally revamp Reeferpunk.com. (Actually my decision had nothing to do with OWS, but I wanted to sound like I’m on top of current events. Besides, the characters of Reeferpunk where sticking it to the man back when the … Read more Reeferpunk 2.0

The Need for Irregular “Regulars”

Cheers Where Everybody knows your nameSuch a funny word, regular, stemming from the Latin root, regula or ‘rule.’

regular |ˈregyələr; ˈreg(ə)lər|adjective (of a person): doing the same thing or going to the same place with the same time between individual instances.

All I know is that my trip to the donut shop this past Sunday morning (to celebrate donut month) became a significantly richer experience because of two “colorful characters” bantering with the the lady behind the counter as well as my son and I. While the experience emphasized my own lack of ‘regularness’ (being newly transplanted to Nampa, Idaho), it also illustrated the critical need American society has for such irregular regulars.

Stemming from my high school addiction to late-night reruns of Cheers (“Where everybody knows your name”), I’ve always longed for regular status (even while I ‘raged against the machine’). Not necessarily a Cliff or Norm, but someone who could simply nod to the establishment for a quick cup or bowl of ‘the regular.’ Who hasn’t craved such status? (only asocial loners, I assure you.)

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