What can you do?  Distance yourself from the garbage; pretend that it doesn’t stink and cut off your air; pick some of it out to take in the house and make a meal of it; package it and offer it under a new name on the internet; if you’re white try the police; or report it on your piddlin’ blog?

Time for only two stinks today:   hint, today’s load comes from Texas via Daily Kos:

• Texas GOP legislators plan to replace certified counselors in schools with “chaplains”
• Texas agency threatens to fire anyone who does not dress “according to their biological gender”

Or you can just throw up.

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(I thought I had already posted this and wrote a follow-up post which happily I can meld into this one.)  It is titled

SELF THERAPY ATTEMPT

This is a continuation of the blog on dealing with all the current garbage being dumped on us.  It’s divided into the GARBAGE followed by a good memory from the past.  I haven’t tried this before:

THE GARBAGE: From Harper’s Magazine May 23: “The latest turn in automation is toward worker management–that is to say, intensifying the regime of surveillance and control in the workplace.  Bathroom breaks can be monitored. Paces walked, calls made, units completed–data  on all these things can be collected, so targets can be set. The idea, as old as the Taylorist factory system, is to increase productivity by squeezing more work out of each individual worker.” (Easy Chair, Hari Kunzru).

A GOOD MEMORY ATTEMPT TO OFFSET THE ABOVE:    Our old black babysitter laughing at Arthur Godfrey and all the little Godfreys on the radio when they sang I’m a lonely little petunia in an onion patch…back in the late forties….And oh yeah, the Briarhoppers on WBT radio singing Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie, in the early forties….And the soothing sound of one airplane droning  away in the sky during an afternoon nap in the attic.

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THE GARBAGE:  Drake Chamberlin refers  us to The Chris Hedges Report on American Universities  having become appendages of the corporate state. For example, educators are increasingly poorly paid, denied benefits and job security while senior administrators pay themselves obscene salaries. “Rutgers, like most American universities, operates as a corporation…This inversion of values is destroying the nation’s educational system.”

A GOOD MEMORY ATTEMPT TO OFFSET THE ABOVE:  …Wait a moment, I’m wracking my brain…Oh yeah, attending the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, north Tennessee with friends back in 1988 and getting a photo of me with Pete Seeger.  (Due probably to  planned obsolescence my printer quit working; otherwise I would add that photo.)  Now that didn’t turn out to be very therapeutic, but another good memory is getting two A-plusses from Miss Arveson in the ninth grade in Bethesda, Maryland, on one history essay.  And of course finding that wonderful Indian arrowhead just lying under a big tree after a rain in Charlotte, North Carolina.  It seemed like it might have just been dropped, and seemed to connect the ages.

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Well, I do feel a little better now, but I do know that the garbage is still out there and just running away from it doesn’t help the situation, just me, briefly.