Another weekend gone by

The weekends come and go

Ahhh the sweeetening effects of the weekend has worn off as, once again, it was quite busy with shows and driving.  First of all my brother was driving here to bozeman in order to stay for a while and then head to Eugene, Oregon for graduate school, and on the way his car malfunctioned in Columbus and had to get it towed and fixed.  It ended up being a transmission problem so I had to hop in the car with Nakai and head down to pick him on up!  This was, mind you, after only getting 4 hours of sleep…  The night before we played at the Cat’s Paw and did not get to sleep late, Jesse (brother) had to miss our first evening but he caught our second one there on Saturday night! Twas a blast : )

The Cat’s paw is an interesting place, during our reading about visual literacy, it really struck me how many televisions were in that place!  I mean on the stage alone behind us there were 18 big screen televisions all side to side and stacked upon one another.  From what I’ve heard, the cat’s paw used to have bands play six nights a week! Now it seems like televisions matter more, along with the rows and rows of electronic gambling machines.  IT was pretty cool watching football, soccer and tennis all in the same 5 foot radius. But none the less human interaction and attention spans take a hit when there are that many tv’s. It is hard to come by a bar nowadays without a single television inside.  Heck it is hard to go anywhere without getting bombarded by music, television, or some sort of advertisement attempting to coax you into “needing” their product.

My motto usually is if you see it on T.V. it is highly processed and generally not good for you.  These include the corporations with the most money to throw their commercials at you and I, attempting to brainwash consumers: mcdonalds, coca cola, walmart (chinese slave labor), burger king, etc.  I do my best to stay away from these places (walmart is the most difficult for me).  I definitely enjoy whole foods from local places, supporting the community rather than some world wide corporation who is feeding you crap basically.  Do any of you have a problem going to walmart?  I mean the CEO took in 27 billion last year, while their line employees make maybe 10 dollars an hour if they are lucky.  Costco gives their employees 16 dollars and hour and pays for 92% of their employees health care.  In our society where virtually all of our products are imported, Tvs, cell phones, computers, anything with a screen, from china, india, indonesia, or where-ever else, do you ever stop to think of who helped assemble your product and maybe what kind of living conditions they have?  I think wage-slavery is a terrible thing, yet very difficult to raise awareness about b/c most people frankly don’t care and would rather get their products as cheap as possible w/o knowing where they came from.
I wish people could comment on my blog, I am starting to feel like I am on an island… maybe I will switch to blogger this week…