One Foot in Snowboarder Zen

I went snowboarding today (Saturday). Just casual cruising. I was actually glad the runs were groomed cause I'm tired of having jello legs. I reached my goal of seeing for miles around in Mineral Basin. It was windy though and they had to shut down the tram. It's disorienting to swoosh down the hill at 20 mph and have wind-blown snow-snakes crawling over your feet like the ground is moving. The resort is building a new chairlift to Mineral Basin. They say the Forest Service won't let them run another lift to the top of the ridge so instead they are tunneling through the mountian. I think they call it a "Magic Carpet." It will come in handy in the upcoming age of Nuclear Scaring. Fallout shelter.

I rode the lift with an 18 year old girl from Philadelphia. She said, "Do you live here? Are you just going to school?" and it made me laugh. I told her about my wife and kids. She said next year she would be attending "FIT" in New York. It's like "MIT" except the "F" stands for "Fashion." I told her all of my fashion peeves as outlined in my "Sissypants" blog. She agreed. Then I said, "We need to get back to our roots of stealing fashion ideas from poor black kids in the inner-city so they can be sold in "The Gap" to middle-class suburban kids." She didn't respond to that. She might have thought I was making fun of her career choice.

I rode with another guy who was visiting his brother here in Utah. He was american but says he lives in Manila, Philippines or Beijing, China. He said Manila is a concrete jungle with nothing left of an indigenous culture. He said it's a hodgepodge of all the people who have stopped by throughout time. He said he feels like he connects with China. He said he works for a bank (like Worldbank, he said) and he is supposed to help rural districts become developed in all aspects. He said the degree of separation between the rich and poor there is a real crisis. That "alarms are going off." The rice farmers live in third world conditions while the urban setting is driven by fraudulent trade.

But I said China is looked at as an up-and-coming economic powerhouse. I said China was an area of concern at my last job due to all of the counterfeit goods being sold. I said that when I looked up info on the situation I saw that, worse yet, fake Nikes, handbags, DVDs and jewelry are only the beginning. They make fake windshields. You don't want to find out the hard way that it's not actually safety glass. There is also a huge issue with counterfeit prescription drugs throughout Asia and Africa. So, "Not only do you have AIDS, sir, you were also duped on your medication."

The man on the lift said that they are even creating counterfeit eggs (the eggs people eat). He said they are having issues with fake baby formula, which is just a mixture of chalk dust and sugar. Most of the babies that don't die of malnutrition develop a "giant head" deformity. He said part of the problem with "Bird Flu" in China is that they've found that a lot of the vaccines they've used were also counterfeit. It's caused a lot of problems.

Do you want to know what is even cooler than that? America's skyrocketing national and federal debt is mostly owned by China. So Mr. Bush can "ask" for hundreds of billions of dollars for unnecessary wars and that other crap he does in addition to passing out tax refunds to millionaires and the rest of us can bask in the warming knowledge that our nation owes its soul to the communist knock-off kiosk which is China. Likely, they probably counterfeit our money but, if they wanted to, they could destroy the US dollar. Will $10.00 be the new $0.13 per hour? Do you think Mr. Bush knows the answer to that question? He should, but it's all too easy to picture him saying "nobody ever told me that was a problem." Because he says that all the time. Way to LEAD. How is that for National Security?

Let's reiterate on China: Communist. Poor people feed their babies chalk. Sick people pay for and ingest fake medicine. Contract for a fake vaccine is more valuable than containing a global homicidal illness. The economy is driven by fraud. But hey, Wall Street loves China and they pay for our wars...

Maybe life would be better if I just kept my mouth shut and lit up the green stuff on the chairlift like the other jobless moochers at the ski resort.