All my respect, Dr. King.
fromthearchives.blogspot.com

I spent a summer setting traffic counters in dirt roads for an air quality study. We placed counters all over California. It was a lot of driving; I learned early to listen to books on tape. One day I left Sacramento before 4 a.m. I had to collect a counter in the lower Sierra, cross at Kennedy Meadows, drive up the (Highway) 395, plant a counter west of Mono Lake and cross back on (Interstate) 80. I got home at 10 p.m., wrung out, shaking and crying.

That day, I'd chosen to listen to a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. It was as beautiful as you'd expect, with long excerpts from his speeches. It was 14 hours, moving toward his assassination. I'd read pieces of his most famous speeches, of course; I knew I'd be moved by those. I hadn't known how prescient he was. In the last years of his life he was turning his attention toward urban poverty in the north; we lost so damn much when he was killed early.

I'd never driven Kennedy Meadows, which were green and open and gorgeous in July. But much more than that, the 395 tore me open. High deserts are the landscapes that own me. With the high, stark Sierra on my left, I stopped at Manzanar, because I had never been and I wanted to see our shame. I left feeling even guiltier, because for all that I knew the Japanese suffered during their internment, I thought it might be one of the most painfully beautiful places I'd ever seen. It would be a mixed sentence to confine me to Manzanar for years. I stopped at a fish hatchery, to see the WPA stone buildings and ponds, and wonder why we don't spend the labor to make our useful things unreasonably balanced and graceful anymore. I saw the Owens Valley, an even more personal responsibility for a water girl from L.A., emptied, dusty and poisonous. I saw Mono Lake, whose heavy water does reflect the mountains and the sunset in deeper colors than other lakes. Mono Lake is proof that hope and work based in well-documented science will make bureaucracies change course. I set my counter in the last of the light, on a dirt road I couldn't find now, near cattle grazing in the type of meadow valley that would trap the people living there. That much beauty must be addictive, but ranching is a hard, hard way to pay for it. A black bear crossed in front of my car.

Any of those things would have been the emotional event of a week, but they happened on one day, as Dr. King spoke bravely and truly for hours, until they killed him for it. I was a wreck. It took me several days to recover. I did though, got back to my usual cheerful self. One thing changed though. After that day, I was always deeply and fiercely proud that I went to a law school named King Hall. I never thought that was hokey again.

Doomsday!
troutunderground.com

Are you desperately searching for a reason to go fishing? Well, our friends at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists may have given you one of the all-time best ...

"The Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' ticking nudge to the world's conscience, moved two minutes closer to nuclear midnight (Wednesday), the closest to doomsday it has been since the Cold War."

There you have it. ... Clearly, these are a bunch of "glass half-empty" types. What's the "glass half-full" view from the Underground? We've got two more reasons to go fishing - right away.

If the threat of nuclear annihilation isn't excuse enough to hit the local carp pond (or road trip to the mountains), then what is?

("Honey, odds are we're all going to be vaporized in a great big mushroom cloud, I'm going fishing).

Clearly, while some might view the end of the world as a bad thing, here at the Underground we prefer to provide a more useful, relevant perspective.

Go fishing. Before it's too late.

Click Click Click Click
rockass.net

How many times a day do I check my e-mail?

Eventually, I'll have that message in my in-box.

The one that says, "Keith Lowell Jensen, quit your job. We see that you are truly too special for menial labor. Here's a million dollars. Go make the world a prettier place."

Actually, I've received that e-mail several times already. Eventually it will be the real deal and not Spam from the former Treasurer of some African Nation.

I think that is what scares me most about an after-life. I'll get up there, and the old dude with the white beard will say something like, "Sorry, you had it so rough kid. I kept sending you e-mails worth millions, but you always hit that Spam button. What the heck?"