STARRING: HERSELF

Pilar had wanted to be in the movies ever since padre Ignacio had set up the projector in the community lodge. She was one of the few among her tribe who realized the story unreeling before them on the big white blanket was more wondrous than telling it with pictures that could move, stranger than the cloth covering all but the faces and hands of the people, odder than the sounds they made, or where they were, or what was going on. It wasn’t happening anywhere in time or space. Not on the wall. Not in anyone’s memory. It didn’t happen, it was done.

She remembered several years earlier when the huge boat without sails or oars came up the river with those wet crystals that shocked her fingers when she touched them and turned to water when she watched them. That happened; the only thing that happened at the movie was watching the movie that was done.

It was ninety-three years later, rolling tortillas in her booth at the reopened zocalo one morning, when she realized her dream had come true. The process of becoming one of those people who did their life was a long process of absorbing the changes that began with that movie about a world that didn’t happen, but was done with planning for a purpose.

When people dressed as those in the movie began to come up the river to clear the bank of the river where they landed to build huge buildings with the great trees they felled, she watched her people fall for the ice machine over and over again — or disappear into the disappearing forest. When her clan ceased relocating, it became surrounded by other uprooted clans in an area dense enough to make the big buildings go around it.

Last year the people in the big buildings decided to celebrate the wonderful life they carved out of the wilderness by thanking her people with an urban renewal project that turned their east side village square and its neighborhood for several blocks into a stylized reproduction of the native village when she was thirty — a sort of ethnic cleansing. Many homes were purchased and converted into shops selling mass produced copies of clan items. She was paid a commission to sit in a booth in the zocalo rolling tortillas in addition to whatever she made selling them.

And there was the Director of Photography now. In his flip-flops, black socks and garters, Banana Republic shorts, Hawaiian shirt, gimme cap and shades-on-a-rope he was directing the rest of the cast into position around her. When Pilar stopped to watch as his children and wife gathered behind her and leaned their chins on her shoulders with big smiles on their faces, the DP said, “No, no. Keep on doing whatever was happening when we showed up. I want this to be a real documentary. Okay, everyone. Action.”

DETECTING THE INEVITABLE

If there were ever an oxymoron that an entire civilization hasn’t caught on to yet, it is the idea of detecting the inevitable. I’m about to whup a whole sake cup o’zen on your ass here, so be warned. Detection is becoming aware of and possibly pointing out previously unnoticed things. The inevitable, the Tao, the way of all nature is not a thing. It is not a law of physics or biology; it not a beginning, middle or end; it is not a creator any more than the Earth’s oceans intentionally created biological life. I am given to understand that in the Hindu vocabulary, the closest word to mean thing is “event”, in keeping with this idea of a living universe.

The myriad variety of things to be detected and pointed at arise from the infinite process that indicates the universe is alive, and if so, conscious. As each being is conscious of the sensations of its constituent cells’ reaction to the environment in its location so is the universe aware of itself with the same curiosity with which we constituent beings quest, or not.

Becoming aware of the natural, inevitable source of the distractions, of which most are exclusively, distractedly aware, is not a process of detecting but rather a cessation of detecting, dissecting, naming, and explaining. No explanation can make someone see the depth of the flat autostreogram pattern and my humble attempts to elucidate the inevitable are infinitely more inadequate to save anyone the actual, personal experience of realizing with all one’s senses, life as it is beyond description.

Such awareness has shown me that each entity has a characteristic nature which, should they align it with the nature of the universe, the fears and regrets inevitable with attachment to particulars in the evanescent variety as it passes gives way to sharing the ride with all the things down the inevitable river or the stroll down the way of everything that runs along its banks. Western civilization is a mistaken attempt to build a damn out of attachment to the water.

PATENTLY COPYWRONG

I just left a site with a giant copyright symbol and statement at the top of his side bar to return here with a clear explanation of why I see assuming the authority to control the interpretation of a voluntarily overt act second only to the usury such assumptions enable that riddles western civilization with the constant sense of oppression it exudes. Competition is beneficial only when it encourages everyone to expand their perspective and skills beyond the current edge with no energy devoted to retarding fellow vier’s possibilies; otherwise, such events are competitions in the most spiteful vanity.

When I first decided to sacrifice my graphic skills on the fires of the open market, I matted up the pages from several pads of watercolors, pastels and pen and sat on a blanket on the sidewalk along the “drag” with other art and craft vendors. Among the many things I learned by watching the faces of the people leafing through my work was how fraught with attachment to their reactions I was — to the point that the whenever I sat with pen, brush, chalk in hand after that venture, my mind leaped beyond any inspiration to faces in reaction to whatever it might have been. For me it was severe artist block. It was a full ten years before I was able to live by mypenchant and passion for art.

The one thing that has changed in the thirty odd years since that experience is my attitude toward the future of anything I might create once I offer it for public access. While it remains an inspiration or its incarnation in a drawing pad, note pad, voice recorder or computer program the work is mine; how could it be otherwise? But when I receive my commission from a client, sell my art to a customer or publish rants and ponders here, they are out of my hands and are free to be used for anything. To litigiously trace works into their future to ensure my desired interpretation is not only frustratingly futile, for an artist or author it is self-defeating.

My friend, Amber, began her own stained glass business making hanging creations she called Suncatchers. They are so beautiful that within a couple of years she began seeing “suncatchers” at trade shows underselling items so brazenly copied as to have the same names for the pieces. After much contemplation on the situation she realized the negativity and expense associated with legal action was much greater than any loss she might recover.

More importantly, she realized the value of any of her creations was in the quality she devoted to her own inspirations, a field in which she relished creating new pieces yet to be imitated by flatterers who not only demonstrated her ideas, but exposed the superior quality of her work as surely as an ad campaign.

In the case of the blogger who warns away plagiarists with a stay puff sized ©, I must assume he either wants to keep his ownership, income or integrity in tact although others’ misuse of his work can have no effect on the value of his intended meaning, while gratuitously drawing attention to the expressions he wanted out there in the first place.

Methinks © protests too much.

THE “BANE” OF SELF-RELIANCE?

A post over at Thoughtstreaming was in its usual process of describing what I must assume is the “opposition”, which any blog espousing a political ideology authored by names like Troutsky and Che Bob must, of necessity, have, when along comes this sentence, “Individual as opposed to collective rights and a fetishized discourse on the Founding Fathers and Christianity and self-reliance.” Something clicked into place in an ever present puzzle presented to me early on in my naïve delve into the political blog scene with a comment to this same blog and receiving a most hostile reception for suggesting that I got any value for my life from reading Ayn Rand, obviously one of their code words loaded with ammunition of instant opinions for the combat life seems to be for them.

For me the entirety of Ayn Rand’s works were another version of the theme that inspired Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, singing the beauty of the of human potential and railing against the enslavement of it. That she made super heroes of those who realized their potential by becoming the most ethical architect in all of literature in Fountainhead and were the rare few honest captains of industry in Atlas Shrugged, got her branded by socialists of Trout/Che’s brand as a champion of the real, living, union busting, greedy, Gordon Gecko CEOs who milk their country dry. That she learned her fierce self-reliance in escaping from the collective nightmare of her life in the worst incarnation of socialism to date that was the Soviet Union, only emphasized their reasons to oppose her. That Howard Roark and John Gault had stirling ethics with no room for usury, the bane of civilization against which they and all men rail, just doesn’t seem to matter. It’s a brand easy to singe into the hide of anyone who would rather make it on their own. Methinks they throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

In western society, human potential exists in various kinds and quantities, less by genetic inheritance than by early wiring by the highly variable environment into which an individual is born. The belief system of the parents is either the first oppression or the first inspiration a growing curiosity deals with. Socializing outside the family is the first challenge to the inspiration or light on the oppression in a life full of contradictions to every assumption we make. It is at this stage that all the advice points to making irretrievable conclusions about what is right as a keel to remain steady through whatever experience the future may hold. Some, myself included, were never so sure of the concept of righteousness as to adopt it in any form other than than their own autonomy. I remember instances of great passion in love and war in my life, but none were my attempts to convert another to my ideas as a matter of faith in their intrinsic righteousness – merely food for thought in varying potencies from out side the box.

Although I have mentioned it several times previously, the Hindu concept of Minahana and Mahayana is particularly relevant to this socialist/capitalist argument in that Minahana is the individual, “little boat”, which must be mastered before one is capable of taking an oar in the “big boat”, Mahayana. This has always meant to me the same sort of self-understsanding that must precede indoctrination into the requirements of any culture, whether it is the solitary vision quest of native American adolescents or the walkabout of Aborigine lads, without which their communities held them lacking the virtue of responsibility and unworthy of assuming a role of tribal responsibility. Had either culture met a Marx or a Trotsky they would have laughed at the folly of their rejection of self-reliance in favor of group righteousness.

One person’s passionate belief in their responsibility for the care, feeding and behavior of themselves is another person’s fetishized self-reliance. It seems to me that the socialist abhorrence of self reliance is its lack of needing the group they cannot imagine living without. There are no self-reliant mobs out to take over the government that they want control of, there are no anarchist clubs anywhere. The gun toting, John Birchers against whom they rail are not self-reliant — they want to control the same government the socialists do — smaller government just means they want the orders to come from their own living room.

Well, this is as clearly as I can state my thoughts regarding the methods of painting the opposition with such a broad brush it leaves no room for anyone to qualify as an ally.

…AND THERE'S ALL THE PEOPLE

This is the church

And this is the steeple

Open the doors

And there’s all the people …

… who keep making more people for the church down the road, and the one further down the road of years until that road runs into the road of inevitability coming the other way like the meeting of the Union and Central Pacific completing the first transcontinental railroad, except in this case all the people keep on growing like a pileup of cars in this train wreck of a world plan to just keep on feeding the result of careless breeding with the pope on the sidelines cheer leading, his “abstinence only” yells they aren’t heeding as minorities feel needing to catch up by speeding the irresistible seeding.

We have a Pope-ulation problem!

Overpopulation - John Pitre

GRADUATION DAY

Yesterday afternoon found me with unusual optimism for the future of my class of '09 debutantes when I opened the coop door and tore down the mesh barrier to their just walking out. It took no time at all for them to escape their seven month home schooling and test their training on the real world. I am quite gratified that, with only one warnining, Priest was satisfied to observe them rather than attempt to eat the chicks he watched grow more constantly than I.

They have yet to encounter the dags, which were in Donna's house for the three hours they were out before returning to roost at their usual shade of evening, but seeing them keeping to the the 12' x 8' area of proximity to one another within which they spent their previous life even while they roamed all over the garden area, I imagine they will hold their own en masse.

The setting sun catches their exotic feather colors and patterns to perfection, if only my camera did.

•

I swear, I must be psychic. Watching this a couple of times after I slapped it together by equating giving the chicks the right to roam the same ground I do with Democracy, loving Leonard Chohen's song by that name and quickly publishing it I noticed the music sounds just like a bunch of chickens to me. Then again, maybe I'm not psychic at all, merely psychotic.

RIP VAN YODOOD

Xiao Mao & Priest
By Babyldorkgalactinerd

I woke up this morning to the long hairs on Priest’s twitching ears brushing my nose as they searched for the source of a sound outside. Snuggled together in the chilly morning air, I’d been dreaming of the dissolution of the sharp edged contrast of one color dye or paint being swirled into a container of another color until only the third is purely evident. I never know what he is dreaming.

The stirring without began stirring within and we both headed outdoors to relieve ourselves and join the beginning of false dawn a good hour and a half before direct sunlight. The bang of the screen door set the hens to crying out their excited anticipation of fresh food. Along the path by the pond the sound of a hundred frantic little suppings came from the fish for the same reason. It is good to be king when your subjects are happy.

The three free ranging matron hens are in the shed picking up spillage from the feed bin as I dip out the daily portion for my younger coop bound girls. Soon I will let them free range too and the feed bin will empty much more slowly. I know they can’t possibly be hungry when they go into their greeting ritual of fluttering up to get the feed out of the can before I spread it for them because the older hens eat out of the areas last occupied by the rolling coop for weeks after I’ve moved it. Then comes a beautiful lawn of grass from the mix of rain with scratched in poop and seeds even they didn’t eat. It’s all good, nothing wasted. No eggs this early. They wait for the sun to get in the mood.

Although they cannot make sucking noises in pond water or cackle from their coop I am no less aware that my sprouting winter garden needs water despite the recent rains. Drought conditions aren’t relieved by sudden floods near so well as by steady drizzles delivering the same amount of moisture. How ‘bout that — my first farming aphorism. The remaining survivors from summer, three Serrano peppers and three okra, two artichokes and an asparagus bed are making up for lost time as I soak their roots with the hose on full shower into the hay around their feet. A mist setting is gentle enough to feed the sprouting cilantro, arugula, lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower without beating them down into the well-composted soil.

After turning the compost pile vigorously enough to shed my hoody, Priest and I settle in our sieto to greet the great golden bringer of life from our merry go round seat in the shed. Refractions and reflections of the solar radiance spark on and off with the breeze on shuddering leaves’ fresh droplets and the inexorable change in the attitude of the light itself. Thousands of birds leave their roosts; criss-crossing overhead to inspect fields from on high where dwell billions of bugs and seeds that threaten to overgrow all the rest of us ground bound critters, swoop down upon the juiciest terrain and eat as many as they can. Good birds.

When the brilliance of the day enters the shed at a particular angle, like a preprogrammed robot I stir from my cerebrations, meditations and mid-morning snoozes to return to the shade of the porch and my electronically bewebbed portal to the wide world of western civilization. I consider it the ultimate reality show based on the outlandish question, “How do humans behave when born within a culture saturated in the certainty of human superiority entitled to ownership of the rest of the world; and each other if the price is right?”

In my most anthropomorphically cynical moods my browser news sites serve as an early warning system hot wired to the political scene for hints of when the baling wire that holds together this country’s faith in liars snaps in time to man the compound gun towers against the suddenly starving hoards pouring out of suddenly empty cities roaming the countryside in search of food. On the other stroke of the pendulum, during my most sanguine moods “Ted’s Tubes” allow me to sample individual’s various freely offered reality tunnels and to leave examples of my own observations, ideas and experiences as a measure of connecting, spreading and evolving like mycelium in preparation for the next time the conditions are right for the dirty hippies who groked flower power to come back out of the woodwork and rise to the fore once more to lead humanity back to the garden before the oil runs out.

So I click on Democracy Now! and there’s Amy and Juan at their table on their normal set, but they’re both clad in shades of violet. The first picture of the current events is of peasants in Venezuela wearing either traditional clothing or red tee shirts for Hugo Chavez; seemed pretty normal. Then came a scene from the US congress. It hit me with something as hard to get my head around as seeing a UFO.

Everyone was wearing either red or blue, though it was often hard to tell from all the logo patches covering every inch of their clothing … and the hats most seem to be wearing. There was nothing extraordinary going on; which only compounded my astonishment. I might have accepted a special occasion our elected servants may have drummed up, but there they were carrying on business as usual. WTF!

The area of their left breasts seemed reserved for rows of what resembled battle ribbons. Except for the hints of the background color of their clothing being limited to red or blue, there were no signs of uniforms or rank; there hadn’t been a military coup. Then a close up of a representative sleeping during the argument against a bill he introduced outlawing the use of poor people for fuel showed his colorful shoulder and sleeves festooned by the logos of Shell, Exxon, BP, et al, wrapped around him by his crossed arms.

The speaker, wearing blue covered in logos from the green revolution industry, was not opposing the bill because he wanted to legalize the recent popularity of spontaneous human combustion engines since that high speed camera learned the secret on film. No, he was opposed to the oil industry’s constant attempt to eliminate competition through legal channels behind the cloak of humanitarian concern for the lack of concern for the poor, rather than spend the money to buy them on the open market like everyone else, the free enterprise way. Ah, yes, it was a marathon competition of whose ethics could get under the Limbaugh stick. I checked the URL to see of I’d gotten the Onion site by mistake.

No, still Amy and Juan, in violet. I started frantically clicking around the news sites to finally realize that everyone out there was wearing either red or blue, with or without logos attached, or what I would call “civilian” clothes as seen on everyone last time I ventured into town. People in violet voluntarily wore fabric whose red and blue components came from the color of each thread woven, or dyed in various sized checks, polka-dots and mezzotint, but no logos patches. They seemed to be obeying an ethic lost on the reds and the blues.

I was well aware that someone out in Delaware could be doing something I never heard of and it had been a long time since I’d been to town; in fact, I relish signs of my being out of the loop of societal gossip, but this was stupefying. What could be happening? The habit my curiosity has acquired along with this portal is the Wikipedia button on it. I typed in red and blue clothing, and eventually ran down the history which had been going on so long that it was unremarkable on the street while I began doubting my sanity over what I was experiencing.

It seems Steven Colbert logged an entry into Wikipedia facetiously explaining the non existent Law of Transparency requiring anyone publically espousing their ideology as being good for anyone else to don red if it fell into the category of, “every man for himself in the human race to the top of the free-for-all enterprise heap” and blue if it was, “an even playing field, even if holes must be dug for the tall people to stand in so we all see eye to eye.” And that such espousers declare the sources of their income in logos of the companies who write the checks attached to the exterior of their clothing like thousands of other sponsored event participants.

Apparently a junior congressman from Delusiana, came across the entry and, recognizing Steven’s name from his far right wing TV show knew his fellow ideologue couldn’t be wrong, went out and bought a red suit and plastered logos of every backer from AIG to Tom’s Hardware on it, and wore to his first session of congress. As they say, the rest is history.

Like the Austin hippies turned the song, Oakie from Muskogee, around on the redneck mentality that liked “kickin’ hippies’ asses and raisin’ hell” and made it their back-in-your-face anthem, the fun being made of such a naïve clown on the floor got spun into the idea that the expiation of the guilt laid on them by government ethics watchdogs for gorging at the lobbyist's bribe banquets was at hand, if they could just bite the bullet, man up, own up and brag about their sleazy betrayal of the public trust — and dare their constituents to name a better price if they didn't like it. The violet was a voluntary choice made by the extremely interested but strictly nonpartisan investigative news programs which was only right in such a transparent, arrogantly honest society …

I woke up this morning to the long hairs on Priest’s twitching ears brushing my nose as they searched for the source of a sound outside. Snuggled together in the chilly morning air, I’d been dreaming of the dissolution of the sharp edged contrast of one color dye or paint being swirled into a container of another color until only the third is purely evident. I never know what he is dreaming.

HEALTH: Mental Concrete part 3

Beginning with the dictionary definition as a starting point…

Health: n, the state of being free from illness or injury.

… which apparently the medical/insurance industry’s indebted toadies, squirming under the contradictory desires to serve their masters while milking the fools who naively vote their servants into the public trough, would rather see as a point of departure, busier than all the all the airfields, harbors, train and bus stations in the world combined, the way all sides obfuscate the very simple humanitarian question of, “who is responsible for health in the land of the free.”

I’ve been pretty good about keeping the actual machinations of politics out of my rants about the deeper problem of how individuals can be so eager to be served and so loath to actually be of service that we leave the care and maintenance of our most personal responsibilities and mutually beneficial welfare of our neighbors to mercenaries from afar and bitch about paying them. Oh, Yodood, you’re so extreme! Okay, I admit it. We aren’t that irresponsibly dependent or stingily selfish by our nature, but we certainly let the government convince us it’s the right way to live.

Dropping out of the grasp of western culture’s mythology has been more than a physical shedding of its stuff and the 24/7 pursuit thereof, more than discovering a more timeless, naturally spontaneous lifestyle, more than learning that what I have always called my “will” has been obeying the prime directives of my cell’s collective consciousness as they manipulate a natural path through the artificial hoops and cul de sacs of civilization. For me it has also been a growing extension of the realization that, at the age of thirty-four, I had never fed my body or considered its nutrition to be more than satisfying my taste buds.

I’ve gotten to know my body pretty well over the years since feeding myself became my most primal responsibility as a being who desires to remain alive and able to follow the interests of my curiosity. A large part of the nature I am learning to observe, if not all, is the machinations of perception flavoring every experience with memories of other instances in an ongoing internal dialogue ready to report who, where and when I am; a practice so well instilled by public education and four years of marines. Beneath that dialogue are the the tangs of taste buds and the pangs of pained cells signaling more than need of habitual soothing; they’re hints at a remedy to be applied. All metabolisms are different, there are no panaceas to replace familiarity with the territory to which we all have as intimate an access as we wish. All too many leave such care and feeding to people in white aprons behind masks and fast serve counters of pharmacists and fry cooks.

When my wife, a hypochondriac registered nurse, took her sanitized world elsewhere, I was faced with an empty plate and no thermometer. Over the past thirty-six years I have learned to feed myself the foods my body tells me it needs to remain healthy without the crutch of the “health care industry.” Mid-2004, I went beyond feeding myself to growing the food to complete the life cycle of symbiotic responsibility as my waste feeds my food through composting.

My interest in Buddhism led me to the eastern philosophy of health and its profound sanity in considering prevention of disease far more fundamental than the forensic pathology of the west, that sends you home until you’re are sick enough to treat or afraid enough to gouge. The chi or kundalini system of the body, through which an immaterial regulatory energy flows, maintains its healthy balance just as the more material nervous system maintains its communications. Until the East met the West it did not know the intrusion of surgery. Acupuncture, Tai Chi and massage all treat the chakras and their networking as indispensible to health but are in turn treated by the AMA as fundamentalist Christians do other gods; as pseudoscience. In eastern health traditions doctors were forbade charging fees for their gift of compassionate understanding of the health of the body, but their willingness to share it made them the most revered and wealthy in their communities from the donations by the grateful.

I am not saying that because I haven’t seen a doctor in almost four decades I think everyone should boycott them. I just think it is worth considering retaking personal responsibility for our health far beyond taking antacid tabs while waiting in an exhaust choked waiting line at one of the millions of fast-food industry anuses that keep this great fat country going — coughing to hell. It is the same responsibility one must assume for daily behavior should one forego the ritualized accident, home, theft, health insurance guaranteeing that: no matter how irresponsibly we behave in the present (the only place we ever are), if we pay someone enough money in the past, our future recovery or death will make someone undeservedly rich off our carelessness — and perhaps our health will be covered — just like Zantacs at Jack in the Box. Taking drugs to ward off the results of ignorance is not the kind of prevention I’m talking about. Focus in the present needs or can benefit from no other insurance.

I realize there are wide variations in individual beings' ability to survive life on earth to the extent that, save the compassion of loved ones and/or the Hippocratic oath, they would live a life of pain or die. The whole while mankind has been building and clunking into the walls of western civilization, it has evolved a sense of empathy for fellow, clueless victims of the unfathomably ridiculous myth that nature is to be conquered, driven from the wilderness and sold on the block. It is what civilized people do to themselves, as they train their offspring out of their natural curiosity into a life of labor maintaining the walls, and force on others, as they replace natives’ jungle encampments with malls and move them to the brand new slums at the fringes of the brand new city. We are sicker from the system’s poisons and machines to isolate us from it than nature has ever made us.

As my body ages and my daily routine becomes more meditative than spontaneous I feel the feebles creep into my balance, strength, hearing and sight and I think to perhaps not throw away the mailer from Medicare next time. I pay for it. Or so it says on my annual statements from Social Security. They tell me I could opt out; and I would but for the idea that my unused portion goes to benefit the common medical access; the kindest gesture I’ve found in government anywhere. That we limit such efficient altruistic concerns to the aged while the general population pumps enough money into private industry’s pre-existing bean counters to pay for free, unqualified health care for everyone within our borders several times over is hand in glove with legislation protecting the polluting industries that cause ill health to begin with.

But the western health industry isn’t too much into prevention when the wreck, the war, the expedience is so much more profitable.

MOON … OON … ON … N

The full Moon dawns on the break of night

Solar reflection, Brian’s selection

The theme for All Hallows Eve.

Her full moon dawns on my line of sight

Solar reflection’s reflection’s detection

From my pond she doth retrieve.

I see it in the water of my eyes

In the mirror on the wall

Out the window to it all

In her rippled rings of water

In the pond

On her moon

On the Moon

In rings of water drops

In the sky

Sol still

Reverberating

His gong

Long gone

Not yet.

•

This is my submission to this installment of 10^th Daughter of Memory, though the post just before this is the result of getting so reflective about the Moon’s dawning I followed curiosity way off the theme. Boy oh boy, without reflection detection we’d need television.

THE LOG OF THE GOOD SHIP, CURIOSITY

She shoves off from the safe harbor of Certainty, enticed by the perfumed air blowing in on the breeze from the Sea of Everything Else to explore its many secret charms her crew intuits inland while absently gazing out windows whenever inside. They are all avid volunteers whose focus long ago dissolved the slats of the bamboo curtains while reaching for the larger picture so far beyond the glass barrier. They sail in defiance of threats like, “there be dragons,” from frightened keepers of the faith in the prophecy that, if order could possibly be indisputably established anywhere, the wilderness outside won’t really matter and will go away.

She needs no recruiting posters. In the beginning so many felt wanted by the vast unknown the founding elders realized they must act to prevent an ldeaspora‘s dissolution of all they were trying to nail down. They relocated the population further inland to a territory they dubbed the United States of Absolutica, away from the temptation of doubt lapping at the entire fractalized coastline, not just their original landing site, Curiosity’s point of departure from Certainty. In recent generations Curiosity’s fleet has begun sailing other ships out of other ports; the happy ship, the Wrong, sails out of the well defended port of Fort Righteousness; the super streamlined yet slow boat, Our Desire, out of Sinisabad; the weird ship, the Anomaly, out of Normalcy; the intuitive ship, Yearning out of Comfort Corners; Question out of Patanser; Beginning out of Land’s End … you get the idea.

Moving to the heartland of the new homeland, clearing the area of wild ideas and building the great isolating wall of definition worked very well during the lifetimes of those who’d remained involved in the passionate debates about the righteousness of every rule laid into the wall and who’d invested energy in the labor of leaving it alone once put in place. It wasn’t too many generations along when the sacred wall, referred to by all as the DICTATIONARY, began revealing leaks spied by inattentive students’ wandering attention during the endlessly boring process of doubt erasure their public schools were.

The process of patching the DICTATIONARY with a new rule for every inventive infraction became a distraction from considering the impossibility of enforcing them, much less the loss to the vitality of the community of its most creative criminals by diagramming their sentences to jail. The prophecy became as threadbare as the emperor’s new clothes when the more imaginative among them recognized the similarity of their culture to the process by which innovative farmers surrounded each budding pumpkin blossom with a mold of the head of the head founding elder to harvest a lucrative commodity just in time to save everyone from the mess of having to carve them themselves and the shame of probably getting them wrong at Halloween.

The experience of being surrounded by so many mirrors reflecting one’s proper image packed so close together, sealed within the fortress walls as they were, stirred the embryo of an irritation within even the most indoctrinated among the orthodox.

Tentative attempts to escape constant reminders of such mindless conformity with forays into the wilderness were always accompanied by a gigantic vacuum/snail device that extruded an asphalt trail wherever it went to transform the land wherever it stopped by sucking it up into the mold of a road crossing with options at each corner from an approved list of necessities including bank, gas station, fast food, car wash, bar, car dealership, church, parking lot and personal technology retailer as a support for the relatively isolated, practically identical rows of individual sets of walls of personal fortress sprawl they named homes.

These adventuresome heretics were slowly granted permission to decorate their indistinguishable homes, built on the design principles of exactitude laid down so long ago, with the blasphemy of modifiers. A dab of green letters and numbers spelling the name and registration of the homeowners on the mailbox in front of one of the standard black and/or white houses was open defiance of tradition. The first person to hang an adjective on the wall in their nouning room caused a stir of controversy throughout the colony.

These outlying boxes remained connected to the fort within fortified capsules whizzing these rebels back and forth along the slime trail or virtually through the series of Ted Tubes from their homes to the trough that sustains them from within the bowels of the fort, the fountain of truth, the reward of a promise, permission to exist. Being natural entities these strangers to a stranger land gradually enacted an innate curiosity as unconsciously as the depth to which their education had buried it, but just as surely — as if "curiosity" or "why" were actual words, much less symbols for concepts they recognized and could discuss.

Ayn ran away from her stifling nest within the ironic curtain because there were no words to express to her parents’ and teachers’ satisfaction the questions she couldn’t ask about a world greater than the DICTATIONARY could behold much less cared to contain. As chance or the salt air would have it, her parents’ home was in the closest proximity to the coast of any of the fort’s outposts so that her flight away from the prosthetics and the walls and the asphalt through this garden of unexplainable phenomena was the first time any of her people had breathed unconditioned air or witnessed the environment without glass protection for three hundred generations … and it led her to a beach.

Ever since stifled reports of her survival in the wilderness without definitions began leaking into the fort, wakened curiosities have leaked out and trickled down to the coast to build this outlaw community of sea farers sailing the Sea of Everything Else and re-porting their ships to share novel words about novel experiences of larger samples of the infinitely big picture of the universe.

She’s sailing under the full moon tonight. Come on along for the endlessly interesting voyage of the good ship Curiosity. Your life will be its logbook, its entries, your direct experience; no hearsay. You won’t need words until you choose to re port.

ANONYMOUS: Mental Concrete Pt. 2

The most beneficial effect I can see the internet having on the civilization it is saturating is the growing realization that truth needs no authority. The first installment of this series, Mental Concrete, dealt with the strategic misuse of stereotypes as demon paint to rally opposition to straw men as sole bearers of a particular all-consuming characteristic that the propagandist opposes that, in reality, is found in everyone to some degree. This time I want to home in on the mentally lazy habit of needing footnotes and degree initials to recognize obvious truth or of being persuaded by them to swallow propaganda.

My strongest experiential connections to other humans (beyond realizing that we are all made of the same cosmic stuff in extremely complex variations as cells in the tissue of the living body of earth) are our love of music, the occasional display of our deep-seated instinct to know right and wrong in the unrehearsed spontaneity of the moment it is required, and the rarer examples of our ability to capture and communicate that instinctual sense alive with a series of symbols as abstract as words or paint. The truth shines through the page whether it is a venerable old acolyte’s hand drawn parchment by candlelight in a musty cloister or the soiled brown paper bag the MD 20/20 came in scrawled by the shaky claw of a junkie by barrel firelight in an alley or the canvas of a saintly artist deliriously daubing every photon of light striking his dilated pupils from that starry night sky. Hell, I’ve been inspired by things I misread – and was no less inspired for finding my mistake. That’s what this post is about. The authority required to be genuinely inspired!

We seem to be so conditioned by our education to respect authority that we are paralyzed without its approval of our behavior and beliefs, religious or not. The internet is instant access to virtually anything anyone has ever wanted the world to see, and much of what they didn’t, for an entire spectrum of reasons. It is possible with very little effort to assemble every word, song or videotape relative to any subject, except those redacted by the government’s black ops authority over anything too amazing for the common man they swore to serve.

With such a plethora of information one may surmise the popularity and profundity of any subject by the quantity and range of the variety of views from every reality tunnel and camera ever applied, with scattered attempts to establish “facts” about the subject denoted by the particular acronymic symbol following the names of that particular specialty of authorityhood who’s word dare not be questioned. A comparison of the great, unwashed, unlettered, anonymous’ synthesis against the officially accepted facts always yields interesting, often intriguing insight into the agenda of such official versions; especially when the difference is great.

The idea of authority in both audacity of assumption and specter of surveillance makes of any system based on it fraught with little Caesars polishing their act, to expand their sphere of influence among the lowly gullible, and their apples for those whose rules school those fools who would achieve their stool with lickspittle obedience. Some shit.

It seems to me that western civilization is brewing a situation where the authority resides in a collective tower of mental masturbation at some floor or other. Authority requires levels; what else is left to achieve when you know it all? Outside that tower is the chaos of independent reality tunnels based on the individual life experiences of people who don’t assume they know anything about how or why civilization exists, much less perpetuates the establishment of edifices and new rules. Nor do they care except when intruded upon in their daily, relatively symbiotic lives in local nature, so far as authority permits.

It appears axiomatic that the strength of influence one assumes for one’s authority will proportionally disable the possibility of experiencing life as it actually is. Authority distorts perception whether the observed even knows authority is there or not. When authority asserts itself, the subject must as well, whether it wants to or not.

Authority is officially recognized and rewarded for accomplishments in furthering religious, political and scientific snow jobs that keep the people praying, obeying and paying. The most ubiquitous source of recognized authority is the initial “$”; able to buy the obedience of political whores betraying their constituents, the forked tongues of Madison Avenue snake oil salesmen on infotainment mainstream media and the guns of mercenary mobs to force fear on the unpersuadable priceless that remain. This collection of stereotypes I just used is marbleized throughout civilization; no one is absolutely evil or without a price.

Ah, well, they litter the internet, those authorities. I try to stay away from them, but I guess it doesn’t even pay to talk to it without “doing” something that qualifies, much less question it any more – to its face that is. I guess I’m as guilty of stereotyping as anyone; I question all authority but that which I perceive self-evidently shining through another’s unqualified behavior like truth on a page. Is it me, or does that sort of authority seem to be most likely found in people who prefer remaining anonymous?

LATEST COOP POOP SCOOP

Dateline: Dawgranch, somewhere along Fetchit Drive this month, six former debutants came out once more in the technicolor parade of Aurucana testimonies to a new level of maturity in pastel shades from lilac to sage. In just the short span of three weeks they have hit the three eggs a day pace of maternal extrusion. I have notified the egg eaters who have taken an interest in their development that they are welcome to help themselves up to the last three eggs in the collection basket. And we’re off …

With any intention there comes analysis of progress according to even the most nebulous of plans; if that intent is of an ex-engineer who enjoyed analyzing data in matrices for patterns, like myself, you employ something similar to the nearly completed first page of egg size and color per hen plus her choice of time and nest for her latest issue.

Humorous anecdotes along the way are referenced by

the asterisks on the first month’s egg chart above.

* Positive identification of the hen and the time: I looked in just as Shiva shuddered her egg out and I heard it hit the box floor. I left her in her post laying trance. When I came back thirty minutes later I learned hers was the second in that nest and there was already a third egg warmer than hers, but I couldn't be surer who laid the second one, I was looking right in her glazed eyes at the time..

** Positive identification of the time: I heard someone call my name several times in a beckoning falsetto. I looked out along Fetchit Drive, got into a brief conversation with Hank of the Hennery and then checked the egg nests since I was out in the sprinkle anyway. There was this egg as fresh as they come — has one learned to cackle my name?

Ongoing research into improved mobility seems headed for the time when I begin letting them free range. With the roost and nesting boxes the only functioning part of the rig, there’s little reason to move the whole thing to greener pastures. Another case of perceived necessity being obviated by inevitability.

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Addendum: As a sign of the individual shifts to more home based food sources I offer this example in obtaining 100 pounds each of layer mash crumbles and hen scratch a month and a half ago for $25 compared to the $40.50 I paid yesterday for the same thing. The real question here is, is this representative of individuals changing their food source or my local feed store predicting a trend and heading it off like any greedy capitalist would with their 62% increase of the cost gouging those with the intent of going independent of chicken factories? My guess is: the probabilities are against my better wishes.