Where is John Gault?

On a brighter quality of living note, I used to wake up in my room in the Simi town home that I owned in the Spring and feel like I was waking up in an aviary. It is like that here, except it is still too cold here to open the double paned windows, but I hear all the birds chirping away every morning when I sit outside with the cats on their morning stroll.

This is my neighbor's backyard tree, which is in full bloom,


I do not know what kind of tree this is. I don't think it gets fruit, but last night it smelled awesome. Here is my neighbor's other cat, Cookster, terrorizing Cruiser and Spit from the safe distance of my car,


Friday it got really cold again and Friday morning I woke up to a small patch of snow in my backyard. The Boise River is roaring and people I talk to say they have never seen it so high. It is running fast and the bottom foot of the trees along the bank is under water.

Wow, applying for jobs is super boring and no fun to write about. I took the day off on Friday and went to the movies. My brother Dave reminded me recently that in high school I could have won the Ayn Rand most likely to achieve award, so I went to see Atlas Shrugged in an actual movie theater. A business man financed the film, since none of the studios would touch the subject, and it has a made-for-TV look with some mediocre writing and acting, but I still walked out of the film feeling pretty fired up. I read the book years ago and felt like it predicted a future that was coming true, but after watching the film I realized Rand's future is here.

When I read the book, I wondered about the main female character and the lack of spirituality. The main female character is a man in a woman's clothing and there is no feminine role model in the book. Ayn Rand's writing about sex is pretty warped, too. Makes me wonder about her. Her writing about individualism is ego-centered, and I would not agree with that concept today, but I did wonder if Rand's ideas could easily apply if they were spiritually-centered, which is why I went to see the movie. The movie is only the first third of the book, so after getting fired up seeing the movie, I had to go buy the book so I can read it again.

In the book, all the creators leave. (They are invited to a secret place by John Gault, who is the first to leave.) They are tired of having the life sucked out of them by government regulation and having the fruits of their labors taken away and given to all the non-creators. As an artist, should I create so that all of my work be given away for the greater good or to benefit the less fortunate? Am I not to be trusted to do some of that myself by choice? If I want to sell it so I can afford to live or to feel rewarded for my creation, is that bad and wrong? Does that make me a money grubbing Capitalist? When I remembered that in Atlas Shrugged all the creators leave, it made me think of me leaving for Idaho.

The Feds completed a yearlong sting operation on an Amish farm in Pennsylvania, and announced this week that it has gone to court to stop Rainbow Acres Farm from selling its "contraband" to willing customers in the Washington area. The contraband is unpasteurized milk! Those money grubbing Amish Capitalists! Endangering others in their never-ending quest to make money! The public paid for a year long sting on the Amish over raw milk?! When government pretends that they need to protect the public from the Amish and raw milk, when producing and selling your raw milk to willing consumers is against the law, and when government starts protecting the interests of large corporations (pasteurized milk producers) from small competition, that is Rand's future and we are here.

Where is John Gault?