I like telling the story of the time we went to Telluride with my brother David to catch the Bluegrass Festival there. Dave is a pretty dang famous fiddler, and this happened 13 or 14 years ago when his Freight Hoppers were riding a crest, having two then current Billboard Top 20 Americana list releases on Rounder, (Rounder is pretty much a ripoff, but that’s for another time). The Freight Hoppers were hot in Colorado, and their set would draw some 30, 000 festival-goers, with a respectable bevy of hairy Deadheads looking for an outlet following Jerry’s departure bouncing , flouncing and working their little Tai Chi dance up at the stage. Lots of really notable musicians liked them, too, and still do, actually.
Anyhow, we would meet up with Dave and the band at the festivals after winding through a long cattle-line setup, to get to the will-call desk and pick up our magic-rainbow all-access wristbands and hang out all weekend with all these niche-famous musicians, eating, drinking, being merry, smoking, and playing music together. That shit is great!
So one day we’re back stage chillin’ with Tony Furtado, (hi Tony—rock on!), and someone goes, “Is that Johnny Cash?” and sure enough, the Highwaymen had showed up to play an unscheduled set. We never made it away from whatever we were doing at the time to see them play, but not long later, as if they had come for no other purpose, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson show up looking for my brother to tell him how much they dig his music. How cool is that!? Well, we all got to jawin’, and knowing a little about Willie I pulled a little fairly decent weed out of my pocket and offered it, but Willie said, “Oh, no thanks, son, put that away,” and busted out some G13 mutant weed or something, and sparked the stoniest joint I’ve ever smoked in my life, to this very day. What a day!
Now, Willie has always been a hero of mine. His heroes have always been cowboys, he says; mine have always been outlaws, and I always figured Willie for a true outlaw, to the core. I mean the guy runs for president on a platform built of pot smoke, with Ani DiFranco as his running mate. Go Willie! That’s why some things he’s said lately trouble me. I’ll get to that in a minute but the first order of business here is to retell that story one more time, (not that I won’t tell it again—it’s a great staple of mine at parties and such), and to let you in on a secret: It’s all bullshit! It never happened!
***
I am a teller of tall tales, a spinner of yarns, a slinger of bool-shyte. That’s what I do. I’m gonna do some now, here; it’s my schtick, and folks who know me will instantly recognize some of the regular phraseology of my everyday standup, right here on the page. Hi Tim! Hi kids! Hi Willie! Some will recognize little inside tidbits and feel special. They’ll pick out my little eddies and anticipate how I circle back around myself. Hell, if you’re reading you might just as well go ahead and start feeling all conspiratorial and special right now. I mean, this is certainly not USA Today. You can pretty much count on being in an exclusive number by this count.
So if this is a bit of improv by a bullshit artist, how do you know this isn’t all bullshit right now? I’ll let you in on another secret: it is! That’s right—it’s the Lying Cretin. Everything I say is a lie. The Lie is truer than the Truth. Willie and I will be burning one in Austin when I make it down that way in a few months and we’ll laaaugh and laugh about this whole thing, because he gets it, you know. This statement does not belong in the set of all true statements.
Wrap your head around that a spell. It can’t be done. And no side-winding tap-dance involving imaginary words like”pseudo-statement” allowed, either. This is True Lies. It’s a breakdown in reason, a blind spot in our panoramic window to Reality like that thing with the dots you learned in elementary school. You can not manipulate the notions here to fit your mind, though you may, just maybe, be able to manipulate your mind to fit the notions. OK, so I’ll admit we can’t prove the magick here, and maybe someday some mathematician will build a technical ladder up and out of Gödel’s pit, but, we can’t prove a negative, right? But let’s see ya prove that. And now follow it back to the beginning of this paragraph, the beginning of this rant, the beginning of everything you’ve ever read, heard, saw, sensed felt.
And, lo and behold, you find yourself “poised on the wave of explicit Presence, the clockless Nowever.” But don’t forget what kinda bullshit you’re reading.
(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)
“American Fall” would be a pun, yes. A pan-Arabian-like Spring causing the US anti-democracy to tumble, being the objective. The English riots have put a dark spin on what might be Middle America’s reception to popular uprising, but mark the dates, because the brass ring nears whether you have the courage or not, and you won’t have the stomach for the alternative.
Donate, organize or help with the logistics. If you’ve the temerity, attend in person. At the very least, you’ll have your expenses reimbursed when the city settles your civil suit against them for false arrest. New York City already budgeted for the insurance policy that will pay the legal settlements for the probably now textbook law enforcement practice of kettling inconvenient protests. Or, thinking positively, you may just witness history. To make history you have to make it. Don’t leave it up to the Little Red Hen if you want a piece. 
Next up is 
A successful DC foothold will get real traction being closely followed by an international call for a worldwide uprising. #OCT15 is being spearheaded by Spain’s movement for GLOBAL DEMOCRACY. Will it dilute regional efforts to have actions running concurrently, or will synchronized demonstrations overwhelm our transnational overseers? We can wait and see, or we can give it our best shot.
Here are more graphics in support of the kickoff September 17. Borrowing from Tunisia and Egypt, and before that Chicago 1968, it’s US Days of Rage.
“It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before 
Remember 
This week’s cover of Time has to rank at their most scurrilous, a baldfaced attempt to evoke the iconic National Geographic cover, this time figuratively defaced. It’s Mona Lisa given a Howl; The Green Revolution’s “Neda” shot in the head, instead of the evocative-deficient not-in-your-face mortal wound elsewhere. If the Taliban cut off this young woman’s nose as a warning to others not to abandon their families, Time Magazine wants to broaden the extortion. Here’s “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.” But instead of 
What’s a lynch? I find it intriguing that Israel’s spin machine can drop an American pop culture reference like Love Boat, and simultaneously flub basic usage with “a lynch.” According to Israel, that describes what befell their crack-troop Mavi Marmara party-crashers. What does “a lynch” mean? Apparently someone feels at liberty to shorten Lynch Mob, or Lynching, to coin a new threat to Israel. But doesn’t it stretch credulity to imagine the IDF has never claimed to have been baited into an “ambush?”
“Light ’em all up. Come on, fire!” Watching the leaked combat footage of the helicopter gunships killing unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007, I’m troubled by my own desensitized response. When I saw earlier leaked videos of an 
The corporate media is hoping to let this story fade on the fringe. Does this mean that more pilots and gunners might become emboldened to leak other trophy reels? It doesn’t take Nelson Ratings for news outlets to see that viewers are already clamoring for more combat snuff films.
Is it right to confine wild animals within concrete walls and train them to serve man’s amusement? Making the argument that some beasts cannot be domesticated, to defend Sea World’s killer orca showing his untamed nature, is to sell mammal brains short. In the wild, Orcas seize and subdue their prey to eat it. They’re called killer whales, not dunk-the-irritating-human-until-she’s-dead-then-play-keepaway-with-the-body whales. In the wild, Orcas don’t have jailers who force them to labor.
I admit to feeling less supportive than I ought to for gays pushing for their right to wed — in the midst of every American’s crumbling civil rights — while our country decimates foreign human rights and lives. Couldn’t gay marriage activists at least share the spotlight with peace, out of consideration for the suffering of others, proportionately? How about: Make Love (Marital), Not War. Now gay rights are being made a wedge issue with the dubious right to aspire to be a soldier. Is now the time for us to urge the military to 
When it came to coverage of the Haiti earthquake disaster, the CS Indy left it to their 
Vic Chesnutt took his own life on Christmas Day. By coincidence, he’d just given an upbeat interview to NPR’s Fresh Air in spite of an ongoing battle with his health care providers. The segment seemed to pierce the celebrity veil we imagine insulates our talent castes from the worries of everyman. When he died, I reflected on the interview. I was reluctant to mar a eulogy with the villainy of the US medical system — but then NPR re-aired the piece, en memoriam, 
What does it mean that the stars we see in the sky represent light coming at us from millions of years before? The images we have of Earth, of ourselves from space, reflect a distant past too actually. Although we’re accustomed now to visualizing our planet from above, as a quilt of satellite photos wrapped around a globe, viewable from any distance on Google Earth, the actual vision they mimic is a single thoroughly ubiquitous NASA photo called “The Blue Marble.”
If this year’s 
Yes, it’s a live fish. The Youtube video 
Woman and man? The X and Y for creating life? Actually, symbols for copper and iron, designated by the alchemists; curiously, X/Y to the Bronze Age overtaken by Iron, the supremacy of technology.
Fishermen have always called it the Slimehead fish. It’s sorta-scientific name is Darwin’s Slimehead. But when bottom-of-the-barrel scraping began for the ocean’s remaining fisheries, fishmongers created a market for the never-thought-palatable deep bottom feeder by renaming it the Orange Roughy.