QUESTION:  What do 2 strong women and 2 alpha female dogs make in the kitchen? 

ANSWER:  Alpha bitch soup

In early winter, I drove through southern Idaho's agricultural lands. After awhile the Tetons played peekaboo with me.  I was sad to see the smog. Badlands and sage brush and the Agricultural Industrial Complex. I am pretty sure it was cow-fart smog. I wondered:

What if the Yellowstone caldera explodes at the same time that the jet stream piles up the cow-fart smog. Would the two cancel each other out?

Mmmm, more likely:  No one gets out alive.....Well, except the mushrooms, bacteria and viruses. Just like the good old days.

My refrain these days is:

I'M A LATE BLOOMER, BUT I am having a mid-life crisis on time......

Shout out to Stephen Colbert:

I loved your interview of two local media casters in Monroe County, Michigan. But I think you should dump the Late Show, man. You will be perfect hosting my new show:

Political Pundits, with Mr. Rogers.

Can't you see it? Retro pastel slacks and argyle sweater vests?

Your banter and jabs with authors, leaders and CEO's -- asking questions -- couple with razor sharp assimilation. We rely on your contribution of real information to the masses that the mainstream news avoids?

All wrapped up with your PG 13-sardonic smile, and a mocking twinkle in your eye.

The 40-somethings want their icon of the 70's back in the spot light, and we want him now.

Oh, I can see it......I mean Political Pundits, with Mr. Rogers is really just one bacterial daughter generation from the Colbert Report. But I guarantee not a single fan of yours wants your character to ever die. We can reinvent.

Join me!

• I have always tried to live light on our blue planet. In 2006 I started using a diva cup www.divacup.com. I figure I've kept just under 1,300 tampons from piling up in the dump. Now, I am buying a house that really couldn't be more suburban. It lies north of the mall. I am downtown girl. I ride my bike most places. I wonder if the balance works out if I exchange my 1,300 tampon credit for a suburban house?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
• I am in sync with my IPod. It knows what music to play for me depending on my head space. This morning as I drove into the farm lands, the spring air pungent with last fall's leaves and dried grass, Psychedelic Woman came on.                     

 I am on my own for the weekend, and I am doing something new. I feel frisky and open. My familiar, old town is shedding a layer and feels new and strange. (I did read Kurt Vonnegut upon waking.)  I know the IPod relies on math (algorithms), a 14 year-old explained it to me. But the IPod must also have a gut. And in that gut, there must be neurons that sense me and my gut. It's the only explanation.

• A bad idea?

A heat lamp in a port-o-potty. It is nonsensical. One thing I do know: whoever installed the heat lamp, surely doesn't shit there.

• Timothy Treadwell, and his girlfriend, pulled off an historic shamanic event in 2005.

Do you remember Treadwell? He lived with Alaskan brown bears in Katmai National Park. Grizzly Man, the documentary of Treadwell's life was made in 2005, by Werner Herzog. Dangerous carnivorous beasts, he believed the grizzlies were his friends and spent 13 summers watching them, talking to them, photographing them, etc.

After so much time with the bears, I think he considered his options in leaving humanity, and joining them.  He attempted to become a bear.  Was he aware of what he was doing? 

Treadwell simply wanted to merge with bear culture.  His only path was to be eaten. The bodies of Treadwell and Amie Huguenard, fed one or more bears. Their human experience morphed and in doing so, is the most-publicized shamanic event in recent times.

• What is truly radical in 2014?  Refusing to pay income tax? Protesting nuclear war?

Actually, it's riding a bike, or walking. 

Many people have cars in Montana.  But to move your feet, pump blood throughout your body, and at the same time admire your neighbor's garden -- are all part of one modern radical act:

self-propulsion.

• When I was in the Escalante desert this spring I took along Straw Dogs, by John Gray.  "Anyone who truly wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places.  Instead of fleeing to the desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will do better to seek the company of other animals.  A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery."                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
• I love William Least Heat Moon's book Blue Highways.  The curious beauty of traveling the country and meeting ordinary people.  One of his experiences in any of the towns he visited, the residents always give bad directions.  I think they just know it too intimately.  Its like they have to transcribe seven layers down to one.  Their town is too familiar to break down into the chunks a stranger is looking for.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
• Gallatin County Sheriff's Office Report Saturday July 26, 2014: 

A caller wanted to speak with animal control because the caller believed someone may have poisoned ravens because they "quit coming around."

• It turns out newsprint is an excellent choice to clean your glass surfaces.  A friend told me this years ago and I just tried it last week.  I imagined the ink smearing into the dried toothpaste stains, creating a bigger mess than when I started.  This polarity of ink pressed paper unsmudging my mirror pleases me.  A small miracle?