SEQUESTRATION: To Whom It May Concern

    (NOTE: The slight pain the sequester will create in my sphere is so very slight it's hardly worth a mention. Real people are going to be hurt and life-and-death situations will inevitably occur. I bring you my experience as a way to highlight a very simple and very real fact: If someone who will survive this, though not unscathed can be responsible for these ripples on my end of the pond, how high will the community tsunami rise when our less fortunate, when our dispossessed and undervalued are put upon in ways beyond their contemplation? We ought to be a nation of life rafts and tow lines, not one where a drowning man is handed a "How to Swim" pamphlet and prayed over.)

    If you've been out in the "free market" over the past decade you've no doubt been asked by someone paid very little money by someone earning way too much off their backs your opinion on how they might improve your customer experience. The checker at the grocery store will draw your attention to a survey on your receipt offering you a chance to win $100,000 if you'll only rate your shopping trip, the online purveyor will email you, asking you to fill in a virtual suggestion box, and the hold message of your insurer/doctor's office/bank will remind you that your call might be recorded for quality control.

     If they are really so keen on garnering our thoughts on how they might be able to strip more money from our accounts, I say let's give it to them...sequestration-style. As a means of example, I offer you the following:

          Dear Local Grocery Store:
               With the looming sequestration, I will not be able to make my usual purchases at your fine establishment this year. Please do not order too much stock and feel free to let a few stockers go as a result. You may be able to multipurpose other employees thus making them more tired and more sick. Accidents may increase, but that will result in good hard work for the lucky soul who gets to change the "104 Days Without An Accident" sign on the dry erase board at the front of your establishment. Of course the local economy will suffer a loss of revenue and the schools, already due to be cutback will lose whatever pittance you might offer them in "public service writeoffs", but just think of the cheap, benefit-free labor to be had in the coming generations. Those non-profits you assist you may have to shutter their operations, but tight belts and bootstraps are due for a stylish comeback.
               If you find you are concerned about losing some of my business and want to know what you can do to remedy our relationship I have only one suggestion: Contact your other employees, your members of Congress.
                                                                                 Sincerely,
                                                                                 The Families of Federal Employees



          Dear State Park Marina:
                While your services are certainly not vital, I'm sure you'll have no problem with my decision not to dock my boat with you this year. The folks in our nation's capital have decided that I need twenty percent less to live on this year so you will have to forgive the shared sacrifice. As I will not be boating at your facility I see no point in renewing my State Park Pass for 2013. Likely the sequester will mean cuts to our parks and recreation department already so what's another little source of income. Pine beetles will find harbor where I will not, possibly fueling nice big summer wildfires, but it's not like we have a big problem with those here in Colorado.
               If you are able to stay open at all this year, I'm sure you'll do just fine without worrying whether you can patrol campfires adequately, keep bathrooms open for feces deposit, or tamp down invasive species of "water fowlers" at the climate-strangled reservoir you husband. After all you'll still get all that lottery money we'll all have lying around to spend on our short odds. In the meanwhile in lieu of contacting me, please feel free to float your ideas to your members of Congress.
                                                                                  Sincerely,
                                                                                  Backyard Campers of the USA



          Dear Everyone Else:
               This is to inform you that in order to compensate for the thousands of dollars I must try to make up in the next few months, I will no longer be able to assist you as I have so enjoyed doing in the past. Please look elsewhere for contributions of food for the hungry and clothing for the cold. Please find someone else to do all the baking required to prop up the school and community events of the spring and summer and please do not ask me to host any social events. Please do not send me any mailings so that the wildlife can survive, the planet can halt its destruction, and the "Native Americans" (indigenous peoples) can educate their children. Please do not stand at stoplights or farmers markets with your fireman's boot or your Search and Rescue helmets as I have to perform a rescue of my own. And please refrain from keeping tip jars and memorial fund boxes in your stores from now on. 
          No, Brother, I do not have a dime. I wish that I could help you, but I must pay the house payments whether I have 100 percent or 80 percent of a salary with which to budget. No, children, the balance in your college savings accounts will not change for the rest of this year as we cannot afford to have it withheld at this time. Please check back later. No, friends and family, we will not be able to visit this summer so please accept our free minutes in phone calls instead.
          I'm sure in the absence of our largess someone will step into the void to assist you all. Perhaps give a call to the bankers on Wall Street, the gas and oil companies, and all the other beneficiaries of corporate welfare. Members of Congress could no doubt pitch in as well, and as they only work three days a week for part of the year, I'm sure they'd be willing to roll up their sleeves and feed sick babies and starving dogs, help your elderly parents get to the bathroom when you have to work a second job and can no longer be there, or climb hillsides to perform some fire abatement. They do work for you so why not give them some direction?
          
                                                                                    Sincerely,
                                                                                   The Nation's Silent Heroes

     Those are just a few examples of the messages the WE need to impart to the THEM. It's funny, but not "funny ha ha" that this whole nonsense began because our leaders could not commit to paying the bills our nation has already accrued, bringing us to this precipice to arrive at this "solution": Hundreds of thousands are now expected to pay their bills with a partial salary? Excuse me if I'm too slow-witted to follow the logic here, it must be me who doesn't get the message. Maybe the "reality check" is in the mail. And if it's to come by way of the USPS, I won't expect an answer to come on a Saturday.
                                     
                                     

Last Night an ex-Veejay Saved My Life

     Well actually, it was yesterday afternoon. A series of asinine events had decided to converge upon me no doubt answering some subconscious call for internal anarchy that I had issued against myself. The exercise bike refused to cooperate, a batch of brownies burned, and it was the one week anniversary of the death of one of our herd, our first loss in over eleven years.
     I was doing fine until I wasn't. For the next several moments, I made myself motion sick from climbing and just as rapidly descending all of the Twelve Steps of Whatever it is You Wished You Weren't Dealing With. I cried to the remaining dogs, I screamed at no one in particular, and then in a split second of blessed pathos, I remembered something. That something saved me.
     I owe it all to John Fugelsang. I will explain, but first let me offer him a gift in return. I pass along this little nugget of wisdom to all the baby-laden folks I know, even those with abnormally large babies. Post the following over your changing table, or whatever other location you find yourself returning to in your version of the Childrearing Passion Play:
   
          1. Is baby hungry?
          2. Is any article of clothing pinching baby?
          3. Does baby need a diaper change?

     I was in constant amazement at how easy it is for these obvious answers to fail to come to one when a small person is screaming the question. It was just as obvious that yesterday I needed an answer for my melancholy. I needed music, but not just any music. I needed to visit the Prophesy of Fugelsang in the Book of Mash-ups.
     If you know the genre, you will understand when I say that mash-ups are the perfect way to hear twenty songs in about six minutes, a good way to force your mind out of its comfort zone (get off your ass, hippocampus), and the only way in my humble opinion to hear today's equivalent of the great classical composers. For when my just-barely-teens were small, I would explain to them how classical pieces were full of movements and that those movements constituted the same elements as the paragraphs of a three- or a five-paragraph paper, or of the sermon of a Southern Baptist preacher. You start HERE, you travel around the edges to gather up the disparate pieces of cloth, then you sew it all up into a package. You bring it all home, as it were. I'm sure there are those who enjoy mash-ups about as much as I used to enjoy those sermons, but they refine the cloth for me, they stitch together colors and fabrics I had yet to consider.
     Since the news that Uncle Al had sold our beloved Current TV to Al-Jazeera, I had begun the task of preparing myself for survival, Steph-head style. I downloaded the TuneIn Radio app to my phone in preparation of going from TVland to Podcast Alley. In my distraught state, I had forgotten that particular arrow in my liberal quiver. I had TuneIn; I could go on a mission of discovery.
     John had introduced those of us in the listening/viewing audience to many of his favorite mash-ups some months ago when he was filling in for Stephanie Miller, and like a sinner running to salvation I found the Got Radio Mash-ups station. Boston's "More than a Feeling" and the Black-Eyed Peas' "I've Got a Feeling" wove new directions in my tapestry, followed by Lady Gaga meets the Human League, Soft Cell and the Dandy Warhols, The Doors and Blondie. After all, you gotta love your man, even if he is from Mars. Ninety minutes later I was feeling much more bohemian than tainted, my crying dissolving into dancing.
     Who knew that you could combine Loius Xiv, Fatboy Slim, Devo, and The Knack into "Finding Out Sharona Was Blind"? And who knew that the man with the most pompously wonderful TV hair since Andy Travis of WKRP in Cinncinnati could mend a broken heart, or save your soul, or hey, what about the BeeGees meet Jewel?
     So I wanna send a shout out of thanks to Mr. Fugelsang for helping me through my momentary lapse of reason yesterday. Like John Barleycorn, our Roxy (who had the big C) did have to die, but I know that when I get to that dark place again I can extricate myself: Never from the strands of white fur on purple couches nor the deep pawprints left on my heart, but certainly from the abyss and back to a place where I can recognize myself, same as I ever was.