Ojai is sweltering the last few days with temps running from 90 to 100 down here in the valley and higher in town. What do you expect if you're a western desert town surrounded by mountains? I took my morning walk early before the heat descent. I don't mind the heat; it's good for my 70 year old bones. No air conditioning for me. I sit in my motor home which sits in the sun. Open windows all around is all I need. Someone was just complaining about my sauna home to which I replied that millions of people live in the heat not by choice.

I like associating with such poor folk. I live like them. If you're healthy you don't need air conditioning which presupposes you can live somewhere natural in nature even if it's only under a shade tree. In our crazy culture though you could be stuck in box somewhere twenty stories above the street; that's not natural and so you need artificial kool-aid. What a wasted expense for the earth. Why not build houses that can take the heat? Or for that matter, people who can take the heat?

I go out to an adobe and wood stump play house built by my 15 year old son. It sits under a sycamore in the middle of a garden. There's a built-in adobe bed. I lie down on that and it's pretty cool and natural. I don't know how it happens but ever since I joined the Love Government some pretty cool things happen for free or for very little cost. Let the spoiled Americanos have their artificial sealed up boxes called cars and offices. It's healthy to sweat; just drink plenty of water if you can get it, and I don't mean out of a plastic bottle.

That's another blessing that comes with the Love Government: water. I drink well water with no chlorine or other little bug killers. Eating a lot of zucchini, cucumbers and tomatoes now, along with the oranges growing year round. Sometimes I feel so bad I could cry but other times so good I could fly. An hour ago I was blue but now I'm blue too but happy blue like the sky lying over me.

Ojai is one of those towns that make you feel blue, sad and glad. I'm glad Ojai's a good girl some of the time but most of the time she's bad and doesn't even know it. She thinks she's good which is bad if she's not really good but bad. I love Ojai but sometimes I'd like to give her a good kick in the pants to wake her up. She's gone to all the best schools all right but her education has been sadly neglected.

I used to belong to the local athletic club where they had a sauna, pool, oodles of exercise machines but it was all too artificial for me. Like most of the people machines, about as phony as the tv's staring at the walking machines. Why wouldn't you want to walk on real feet or ride a real bike even if it was in 90-100 degree heat? I guess the answer to that is blowing in the wind and in the hot air steaming out of Ojai think-tanks.

-Dennis Joy Leary, a certified sad sack who surprisingly leaned to smile without going to school, an old fool who finds it hard to play by the rules of Club Ojai.

I just came back from my daily one hour walk along the river road and then into the Ojai savanna dry river bottom between the mountain ranges. With the hot sun climbing over the eastern hills, the cool green oaks, cloudless blue sky and warm brown earth with its earth tone vegetation it's a sort of natural paradise.

However along the way there are some nasty artificial irritants. I pass acres of horse prisons where ignorant humans force their pets to live awful lives in pens with artificial food so the humans can ride their pets when they take a fancy to it. Also I invariably see pets on leashes or in those mobile iron cages called vehicles burning oil to keep the empire from expiring. It's always a mix of good and bad; nothing's perfect unless everything is.

And then lo and behold the lead item on the Ojai horse Post is a video by a local pet psychic interviewing animals trainers who make their living by renting out animal actors. There were young wolves and a mountain lion in this video. The pet psychic talked to the animals and they talked back according to her. Apparently this is how she makes her living. Talk about ignorance and hubris. People making money off animals and destroying both animals and humans and they haven't got a clue about what they're up to. It was like a circus with the pets performing for treats. I hear pets telling a whole different story and I don't charge either; the pets say loud and clear that humans are criminal bastards and bitches but the ignorant humans don't want to hear that message.

The Ojai papers are filled with page after page of pet advice and pet services all busy creating an intermediary monstrosity that is neither human nor animal. In the meantime the earth and her people are suffering terribly and pethood is a primary cause. Pet lovers' brains have turned to mush so you're not going to get any kind of quality critical thinking from them. They are so loved starved that they holocaust an entire animal nation rather than face the ugly truth about themselves.

I also am mightily tempted to close my eyes to what is going on and avoid the whole subject because it's painful to look into evil. But denial is not love and love is what I want. I want true and tough love, not mushy sentimental gushings based on neurotic needs for control and power-over. No one that I know of around here thinks or feels like I do. I'm an outlaw in Petville. From the margins of society I can see more clearly than from the business district which I avoid most of the time.

-Dennis Leary, Ojai Outlaw, speaking unpopular truths from the margins.

The lead article on the Ojai Post now is a short video produced by one of Ojai's writers on "meaninglessness." It's a pretty good barometer of the mind of most of Ojai's leaders. They haven't got a clue about what is really meaningful and so they make a clever and entertaining virtue out of meaninglessness, and perhaps sell a few books and videos in the process.

Meaninglessness as a stance or a philosophy is self-contradictory because it is promoting the value of lack of meaning as meaningful. Of course to avoid this conclusion they may say it was all a joke anyway thus proving their point. Still, behind the gesture is some very serious meaning indeed as well as some very "mean" characters.

The first comment is a complaint about the doctor of someone's 91 year old mother who told the patient's daughter that her mother was wasting medical resources and money by trying to live. Apparently the 91 year old still enjoys life and participates in it although needing oxygen and a few emergency trips to the ER. The daughter sees a liberal Obama philosophy working to cull the "useless eaters" (in Kissinger's terminal jargon). My point is that here we have a very meaningful philosophy at work, the perpetrators using soft-headed teachings of meaninglessness, not that they believe in it themselves but that they use it for their evil purposes.

Life is deeply meaningful and it is no joke but let's face it, the patriarchal culture's ideology we live with makes no sense at all to a thinking, critical thinker. It's an evil farce based on power and money. And so naturally those who cannot penetrate its multiple smokescreens turn to the religion of meaninglessness with its hidden presumptions of nihilism. No wonder we get a religious fundamentalist backlash.

The meaning of life is love but love with practical consequences which most Ojaians are totally ignorant of because they are brainwashed by the cultic stew they are force fed daily such as constant meaningless distractions. I read just yesterday somewhere on the internet a quote from Obama that indicated just the philosphy of culling of useless wasters that the commenter complained about in the context of US national health insurance.

Despite some awful terrors underfoot under the rugs where we keep sweeping them, after a rather cool night where I live, the sun is up in a cloudless sky and we're in for another paradisal day here in Ojai, land of nature's beauty and man's meaningfulness, slight in stature as it is these days.

-Dennis La Lover, keeper of the flame at Hotel California on the outskirts of Ojai where the Lover's skirts kiss the ground where she walks.

The previous comment offers a brilliant syllogism:

Major: a love government cares for us.
Minor: we care for seals.
Ergo: therefore, members of a love government are seals.

I'd love to be a seal, you know the kind that saves people. The commenter is an Ol' Sea Daddy. I don't know if he was a Navy Seal but he has a kind and truthful heart as evidenced by his corollary to his conclusion when he says seals (animal and human?) need us to stop contaminating their environment. I may be an Ojai Outlaw but Ojai is only a dozen miles from the sea as a sea gull flies and I can tell a gull from golf ball.

Thanks for the comment. You're keeping me on my web-toes.

I see on the Ojai Post there's a town hall meeting coming up on Friday at the town hall about the national health care plan. I dare not go lest I be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail but I'll keep you posted here about loco developments. It must be important because the identical message was posted five times in a row.

-Dennis the Menace, an outlaw in love with Ojai inlaws aka Dennis James, the last of the James Gang who ended up in the little O.

The lead article with a beauty of a bright red picture in the liberal Ojai Post is about rescuing animals, in this case seal pups from the ocean, as if seals can't take care of their own in their own way. What idiots have we here? Must we scour the beaches of the world to save such pups when we haven't got a clue about how to save ourselves? Don't we know that we humans are making the oceans toxic which makes life tragic for seals? Of course we do but we can't do much about it because we are so God awful ignorant, or in the words of a Midsummer Night's Dream: what fools these mortals be.

I don't particularly enjoy being an Ojai nag but someone has to wake these fools up; if for no other reason than for the sake of seals. For more enlightening information along these lines, read previous posts here or at Love Government Blogstream or come to Ojai and see for yourself, a place blessed with incredible natural beauty and believe it or not, noncredible artificial stupidity.

-Dennis La Lover, an Ojai Outlaw writing from Hotel Ojai California on the border between sanity and insanity, finity and infinity where you can check in but never leave unless you have keycards of love to open the door out.