Its story time:

My dad had 5 heart attacks before he ultimately died. He was a smoker and he drank alot and didn’t eat the best food and he used drugs. As you can see quite the formula for a healthy life. In the beginning Heart Attack 1 seemed like a wake up call. Most of the time shit like that is a wake up call. You get the fear of God put in you and you see that “hey, maybe I should change some shit up.” So he did, then he stopped. Enter stage left Heart attack #2. After this one he needed a bit of a reminder that his heart and him were still working some shit out and needed to maybe reconsider the state of their relationship for the both of them. OK so rinse and repeat, everything gets back under way and then as you can guess the story goes…stops. Enter stage right Heart attack #3. Ok so you have 3 heart attacks its evident that you need help with this whole “Staying alive thing”. After this I’m not sure what happend as I wasn’t really in contact with him but suffice to say, he had a 4th heart attack. At this point he proved that he was not physically able to make decissions about his life and in my personal opinion needed to be taken into some kind of care facility. This as you no doubt can guess, did not happen and the end result was his death after heart attack 5.

I feel like where we are at economically is at heart attack 4. And the bail out feels like more beer, smokes, and burgers for the financial groups. Look, I will be the first to admit that I’m still working on understanding all of this. I’m trying to keep a level head about it and not freaking out and wanting to pack up and move to somewhere that I believe is going to some how fix my problem by not staying here. In talking with people about the Great Depression it seems that it didn’t really kick in to full “We’re totally Fucked mode” until about 2 or 3 years after the crash. So think about it this way. You live in New Orleans, only its 2 years before Katrina, and you know what you know now. What would you do? No doubt move right? Ok so for the majority of the people reading this I doubt you’re going to move. Hell you might move out of the states, but with how the financial institutions are all situated, this is going to effect the whole world. We’re all linked, that was one of the primary goals after WWII. If all of our financial institutions and companies and whatnot were in other countries they’d be hard pressed to attack one another, as they wouldn’t want to destroy their own economy. So…What would you do? Lets say that you and your friends and family and all your stuff dosn’t get destroyed at all and no one dies. Everything around you is fine but what would you do to plan for it? That’s kind of the mindset I’m in right now. I’d rather plan for the worst than to not have planned at all. It feels like to me that it dosn’t really seem real for anyone yet. I mean its all happened so fast that its difficult to process all the ramifications of what actually happened. If you’re unsure and if you’d like to know. My friend Julie (Whose going to MIT for her MBA) wrote this paper. Its 8 pages but it will help you to understand it all if you don’t already know. My suggestion is that if you hate reading things that are longer than a head line that you get over it and read it. I suggest you read quite a bit of things on this issue as its going to directly effect your life. Up to this point things like the Original Great Depression and other financial collapse seem to be some shit that happened to other people and they have all these great stories about how they survied and how they had to walk up hill in the snow both ways to get to school 10 miles away and all, but from the looks of it, we have a very good chance of walking both ways in the snow here pretty soon.

I’ll say this, right now I see no need to freak out and I hope this post hasn’t come off that way. Katrina is still 2 years away, we can plan, we can save and prepare for it. I’d also like you guys to think about the communities around you. If you’re in a church or some other group, you’re going to be a really great resource for those in your community who aren’t in said group. Who don’t have the resources you might have. Look, I’m saying, get together with your church or whatever and start talking about this. People are going to need help, walk a mile in their shoes, hell you might have to, wouldn’t you want to have some help? Are there blankets, or baby formula, or clothes, or medical supplies that could be gathered? Are there projects that could be planned that could bring more money into your community? The dollar hasn’t gone to shit yet, so as such we should look at this as a time of plenty and store up what we have to make tomorrow better. I have a feeling we’re fast coming up to the “7 years of famine (as it were). “We the People” are the ones who are going to have to bind together to get through this. If and I stress, IF this is as bad as everyone is saying, if they hype isn’t just there to push news papers but what everyone is saying is true, we’re going to need to bind together and work on making a better future for us all. This could really suck, I mean REALLY SUCK, and all the while we could point fingers at those in the past that made it happen, or we could work towards helping your next door neighbor. There are going to be lots of hands out to the government asking for help (and everywhere else) And this is our chance to step up to the plate. So the burden falls on our shoulders to do what we can.

Most Importantly…Pray. A few years back I was up snowboarding with my buddy “Stick” (His nickname…not a stick that is my friend) and I was hit by a skiier. I had a concussion and a broken collar bone ). I was talking to my Grand Mother about the situation a while after and she said “when God wants you to pray he puts you on your knees.” No doubt. I’m pretty sure right now this is God putting the whole world on their knees and its time to pray. Pray for those that are going to be affected by this, for those in power making the big decissions, pray for wisdom. Pray that if you don’t have a community (read: good church) that God provide one for you. Don’t worry about how to pray, just talk to God. Hell, Ask him to help you how to know how to pray and what to pray for.

Keep your head, Educate yourself, be smart and don’t flip the fuck out about this. I’d also suggest when you talk about this with people that you (after the angryness dies down a bit) talk to them about what they think they can do to help. Get ideas and get them on board.

Word

PAX came and went and honestly its all a blur for me now. I just remember it was super busy and i’m pretty sure I had a good time. Really I didn’t get to see much of the show as I was spending too much time focusing on recording footage for the DVD. Well, I wasn’t personally recording anything but we had a pretty tight crew doing that work. Roband I had been working on all the pre-pax recording stuff for I think about 4 months. When the day of (or rather the day before as we started recording on Thursday…PAX started on Friday for those of you playing from home) it was surreal that we were actually there and it was “Go time” Now all the theory all the "what ifs" and such we’d mulled over for months were now either going to happen and become reality or it was just us over thinking things. Well, all in all the project went pretty well. We had a professional recording company covering the main theater and they had a roaming crew that got a lot of the “B-roll” footage I wanted for the DVD. In addition to that we had another “wild card” camera man by the name of Hicks. I’m not gonna lie, dude is a freakin pimp. With all that I think we have a billion hours of footage to go through. This is fine by me as I’m really focused on making sure the DVD for PAX this year rocks the fucking house! Its weird, for all those months we were going over the planning for the actual day of recording, but now the real work begins putting the puzzle together with the footage. I’ll write more about PAX here in a bit, I just wanted to say some stuff like I just did. Oh and here…watch this. So this is a taste of what I want the final dvd to be like. This is the montage that was played before the final round of the Omegathon. CLICK We got licensing for the song…our editor on that kicked ass and in the end I think it turned out way good