FOOD AND SHELTER

Walden Pond

To eat and not be eaten
Are life’s odds to be beaten.
Just ask a gnu
Found in a zoo
And he’ll tell you
A cage does not life sweeten.

To thrive and stay alive
The purpose of this human hive,
None here to eat us,
Just us to beat us
In games that complete us
With our drive to survive.

Is our cage a fight or a flight
From wars we dream up at night
All safe in our beds
All lost in our heads
We lock in our dreads
That our behavior's not quite right?

Sanity in the natural realm
Is knowing to heel to the helm,
When it changes go with it
To not is to myth it
Coming about, you might miss it
And let the boom your head overwhelm.

Sanity in the city is such a pity
Nodding yes and looking pretty
The helm is under lock
The ship’s aground on rock
The only boom’s in bombs and stock
Intelligent design by committee.

The way out is clear and here,
Mind’s distorted by our fear
If I hit you and you don’t hit back
I will await your impending attack
Until the proverbial cows come back
While you’re at the pub sharing beer.

All we need is food and shelter
Not factories' and cities' helter-skelter
Heating up the atmosphere
Herding up the sheep to shear
For profits taken far from here
By the elites who own the smelter.

VALVE #1; LETTIN' OFF STEAM

The best thing that human civilization could do to help regain the edenic health of the planet we have devastated and survive the cure it will require over the next five hundred years, would be to turn off all our switches and go dormant for the next five hundred years. The next best thing we can do is quit wiggling in the quicksand, by turning off all our switches and leaving the slightest imaginable trace of our ever having existed on the face of the earth, sort of a community service, wherein even the most removed from and antagonistic to nature among us must learn to survive by symbiosis with what was once considered mere property.

I was a very impressionable kid when the “good” war was being taken to Tojo, Hitler and Mussolini. I knew because of the newsreels after the crowing white rooster and the unmistakable characatures of Roosevelt’s “axis of evil” in the cartoons that followed that. Just as strongly I remember our saving balls of string, balls of tin foil separated from gum wrappers and cigarette packs, stacks of paper along with every household in our neighborhood. Garbage collection almost went out of work. As a whole, like I haven’t seen this country unified to such an extent since, the tremendous personal contributions to the war effort made the air alive and exciting for me. I sold apples and cherries from our trees out of my wagon for the red cross and drew fighter planes on every piece of paper I came across.

Here it is, sixty some years later, with a threat of human caused planetary climate change that has consequences making all the axes of evil ever since, put together, look like little kids playing with pea shooters, and where is that gung ho spirit I remember? There is a dedicated field of individuals independently self appointed to reduce their foot print and quietly enlighten others to awake and lighten up as well, but far too few to influence the unity I saw as a child. It looks like this is one of those times to do things ahead of their time, as Robert Redford was heard to say. It is time to quit making our mark in life, the earth is scarified enough.

Some time back there there was a big public outcry about how trashy things were, so, rather than buck the packaging lobby bribes, legislation was passed providing more trash cans and sponsoring litter campaigns to get it all out of sight and a too slight nod toward voluntary recycling, with nary a peep about the proliferation of trash by the packaging industry, the true source of the blight. So now the garbage collectors are giving the earth plastic and styrofoam implants on hollows just outside of town — where the next subdivision will be in twenty years. All public involvement not focused on war has gone downhill since then, and that protest needs some heat as well.

I have heard various plans to hit the mule of the industrial military complex in the head hard enough to get its attention to the source of its life blood, our paychecks, from everyone surreptitiously hoarding six months worth of necessities and, as one, stop shopping (in disobedience to Bush’s post 9/11/01 triage) for six months to something as bizarre as actually kicking the addiction to the American Way of Life for the sake of cultures around the world being forced to eat mcdonalds. The finances for US exploitation are supplied by its citizens' heedless greedy consumption and the labor of the exploited.

I have heard congressman Conyers, just yesterday on Democracy Now, say that he would love to nail the Bush/Chaney regime with impeachment but there is not enough time before their terms are up and the congress must get on with the 2008 elections. Riiiiight!!! With a government bureaucracy so corrupted by these crooks’ reign for seven years, not to mention the electoral system that let them in in the first place, protecting the status quo schedule seems like trying to keep everything in its place while the titanic goes down. We must nail the lying bastards while they still hold jobs working for us under oath.

Okay, that’s enough steam for now. I wish it could power a congress willing not only to rearrange the furniture, but rebuild the entire moldy house.

GETTING THE WRONG WAY RIGHT

sorry about the text, can' t avoid it in copies

I received this video via email, out of the blue from an old marine buddy I haven't seen in fifty years. Enjoy yet another version of guitar mastery — nature, ya gotta love it. Has anyone ever heard Los Indos Tabajaras, two Brazilian native brothers who found a guitar and fashioned their own use of it, recorded by RCA in 1943, ended up touring the worlds classical music halls?

KARMIC DESSERTS

I remember a feature Omni magazine ran one time of various folks’ independent projections of what humans would look like in another few thousand years. They were quite imaginative and varied but there was a thread linking them all: giant skulls and atrophied extremities, fingers only distinguishable enough to push buttons and far too short to grasp anything. My take at the time was, there has to have been a species split along the way and this consensus of a physically useless being survived by maintaining the ability to be served by the primary species, those less atrophied, less indifferent to the reality of nature. As John Brunner said, “It’s supposed to be automatic, but actually, you have to push this button.” Civilization’s dynamic of the served and the servers has evolved from outright ownership of a fellow human, through the burgeoning factory and service industries funded by the progressive distancing from personal responsibility for the results of acting on ones whims indulged by the wealthy with the same status recognition amongst themselves of having had many slaves, and finally to Omni’s projections where ones activity with the control panel is the only one left not supplied by machines or service personnel. Think Bush feels less responsible for his horrors knowing someone else just didn’t get the results he commanded while playing soldiers? (As I type this, Alberto Gonzales resigned as USAG, collateral damage to Bush's naked ambition)

In the dwindling number of the elite growing effete as a result of their efforts to eliminate the middle class and increase the mass of beholden factory slugs and service toadies, there lurk CEOs of large, ostensibly charitable service fronts among the richest, as they rake in the modern tithe, guilt money from people more helplessly worried about problems of others half way round the world than about the planetary problems to which their very lifestyles are major contributors every day. As the planet's premiere consumer nation, the US is a parasite on what healthy parts remain on this apple it is trying to own and none can live without.

Throwing money at modern problems is our hush money, a bribe for staying out of the dirty work of actually dealing with them, and we all know how rich lazy people create willing servants. From the cess pool cleaners to police rousting the smelly homeless we are sated with services to pamper our spoiled discomfort, prosecute ex lovers and build a better isolation chamber against the future.

Who’s gonna pay you to amend your contribution to the junkification of our very real planet. Who’s gonna subsidize you for turning off your planetary heat generating isolation chamber cooling air conditioner? Who’s gonna offer you incentives to leave your poison belching car at home and vote for the mass transportation system every day by being a passenger. Who’s gonna reimburse you for diminishing landfills and the packaging industry by buying only in reusable bulk containers. Who’s gonna refund your money for the seeds it takes to learn to grow food as well as flowers to lessen the dependency on agribusiness when it runs out of oil. Who’s gonna give you compensation for making your own cloths, toys, dinners.

Just askin’.

We are our own reward.

A KITCHEN WITH NO EXIT

As a bare foot lad growing up in Tampa, it seemed like all the houses had these wonderful cooling devices called attic fans. Not only was their cooling of baking houses and sweaty bodies effective, there was the added feature, for the kid I was anyway, of vigorously slamming all the doors leading to the room or hall whose ceiling had the fan. Big fun. Pulling air from outside through all the open windows created breezes throughout the rooms whose doors were propped open and pushing it through the stuffy attic to the vent at the other end did double duty as summer heat relief.

At some point after WWII German jeeps began dripping oil on US highways. I remember that along with air cooling and minimal annual change in design there was the added feature of an airtightness that required an open window to slam the doors.

Okay, based on my experiential, empirical examples of the behavior whose academic study is fluid dynamics, I would like, just as plainly, to talk about the cooling device of choice throughout western civilization and how its advances parallel the situation in which we find the planet due to heedless advances in industrial/military corporate technology.

In modern homes and cars designed for air conditioning the airtightness of the early Volkswagen is a virtue, ostensibly to keep the cold air in. So okay, you turn on your air conditioner and for a little while it begins compressing the air into the airtight space until it meets its match and sounds like it changes gears to hunker down and settle for working against the pressure of the air filled room content to only cool the air allowed to pass through due to leaks in the house. Sounds pretty bad, eh? There is something that still passes unheeded and unfiltered into the room until its concentration far exceeds out doors — particulate matter pollution far too small for the strainers air conditioner filters are. The isolation chambers we have designed for habitation and transportation on this planet whose water we can no longer drink and whose air we can no longer breath are actually little force fed pollution pits due to the cooled, incompressible particulate matter that falls straight down with the coldest air to our wall to wall luxury pile carpet for stirring up at any occasion in the future. Carrier never mentions what they carry.

And all this without mentioning the ozone depletion caused by photodissociation of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) compounds, commonly called freons, without which our cool little pollution packers couldn’t even cool the air.

In an earlier post I refer to the same sort of blithe ignorance by the head of the UN’s global warming task force, committee, procrastination. If my mixed bag of experience and education has lead me astray in the foregoing, I would be only too happy to be disabused of such. But if the oven’s too hot, learn to love sushi, ceviché and salads, but whatever you do, don’t air condition the kitchen.

"THIS IS NOT A PIPE"

Winter in Alaska, one supposes

Like many of my posts, this is an overgrown comment in response to questions after my own heart by a blog bud, this one is of exceptional character in that, like my very life, I cannot stop coming back and revising it with fresh insights, like a flower following the sun. I will pin this post here for the rest of the month for public display of its gestation, rather than do a chapter two:

—————————————————————————————

Red Dirt Girl, you are welcomed to quote away to your heart’s content. Better yet, just synthesize what resonates into whatever it resonates. I have two full pages back in my to-be-posted file that began as an attempt to give a comment sized answer to your evocative — evocative hell — they are all the very same question that drives all the other curiosities ecstatically indulged by the corporeal entity that types this reply.

Truth is not found in civilization’s versions, the facts of what (agreed language and description), where (point to a place or map and agree), when (point to a star or calendar and agree), who (point to a person or group and agree) or how (we have owners manuals for everything but nature, though religion has their books, scientists still agree they are theorizing, albeit with full knowledge of who pays their checks). All those questions seek to dissolve, correct or enhance civilization’s misguiding myth.

Truth is observed best with no questions at all, but for the sake of answers, only through the question of why, because we can’t point at it with our fingers and words from our minds either glance off or become absorbed in its indescribable lack of intention. Why are metaphors so beautifully simplifying and so infinitely plentiful? Why does the truth of existence appear clearer the more I identify with either the body of which this body is but a cell or the cells that make up this body? As above, so below. And we, always in the middle, make our own meanings, our own paintings of a pipe.

The endlessness of the questions in answer to cosmology of why may be the essence of life, the noticer of extremes we call consciousness, the unbearable insufficiency of our words to do more than caress something they can never capture. But that is personal truth I have and, by its nature being the way of everything, will forever inadequately describe. Maybe.

As for the interweb holoscan as a source of things in which belief may be invested so that righteousness may be assumed or sides may be taken come hell or high water — forget that. I find it to be distracting to build theories (the closest I come to belief, or describable truth) based on the desire for certainty, infallible bedrocks of unshakable faith against the evolutionary stream of all future experience to the contrary.

I like theories, lots of different ones, continually free to find resonance to all my experience, to taste the spices and test the spin in all the information. When they begin to coagulate around a pet set of purring premises my curiosity sets off an alarm that it has become forbidden its customary stroll through now heretical neighborhoods on early curfew. Vivé l’varietié.

Wisdom says understand the heretics of civilization, and see the sodden mob they insist on dragging into the future clinging to blinding beliefs in creationism, god granted ownership of all we survey, worshiping our godlike fucking with everything on this edenic planet, manifest destiny, etc. I am working on the big momma theory of all theories that can make peace with war, and lies, and soulless people-users profiting from their power to create fear and salivation whenever they ring their terrorist bells — but they keep blowing it up, or was that my bell?

FLY ON A THINK TANK WALL

So long as she keeps on having them on Democracy Now I will be Amy Goodman’s town crier in my part of cyberville to raise awareness of people who have inspired me by their clarity, passion and compassion. This post is to draw attention to Naomi Klein’s speech at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting. She grabbed my attention when speaking of a third way, using the best parts of democracy and capitalism to defeat the evils in the excesses of both. She spoke of the examples of June 4 1989 Poland (Solidarity elected) and Tiananmen Square (Student democratic up rising) and South Africa’s (election of the ANC to end apartheid) to demonstrate the power of elections being turned to profit by shock capitalism.

"We did not lose the battles of ideas. We were not outsmarted and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks."

I am reminded of a line delivered by Prot to his psychoanalyst when asked how people on K Pax could know the difference between right and wrong if they didn’t have any laws, “Everyone in the universe knows the difference between right and wrong, Doctor.” Such a laying bare of the reality that laws and leaders are designed to obfuscate our better nature to further their profit taking in the expedient shearing project has never been stated so clearly.

FROM DAEMONS TO DEAMONS

I don’t remember reading many books and gaining my own vision of the story before seeing the movie; There was Battle Cry, based on Leon Uris’ first book and my incentive for joining the Marines before finishing high school. There was Payton Place, Life According to Garp, To Kill a Mockingbird and of course the classics we read in school. I never read Lord of the Rings. But in general, my reading is pretty much off the best seller map, following traces in the spaces of a flexible curriculum so attractive to my irrepressible curiosity. Among such ponder wanders I fell into the imaginary world of Philip Pullman following the opening page of The Golden Compass when the little hero, Lyra Belaqua, her daemon, Pantalaimon and I set out upon an adventure in a world where humans can speak with the rest of the animals. I read the entire enthrallogy plagued with that sappy hope that the world could be that way some day. What can I say, I’m a sap.

I have begun rereading the trilogy in preparation for seeing the movie version due out in December — I hope they don’t make it Xmasy. I wonder if the reread is to bolster my memory of my version against any omissions or contradictions? Can I let my version go sufficiently enough to immerse myself in the movie’s version? So far these considerations loom with the flies on the wall of my mental asylum as I literally revisit a beloved land before developers move in to make of it what they will — or leave it in its virgin state. Riiiiight. Previews are promising.

Speaking of saps, I would like to say something in defense of the etymology of the word fool and of often gladly being one when the time is ripe. Originally a fool was defined as one capable of being fond and found favor as compassionately wise council to authorities. The negative campaign against this definition was waged by the blood thirsty righteousness of traders, raiders and crusaders against conscientious objectors refusing to rape, pillage and murder. Today, our leader has no compassionate wisdom at his side, no daemon — all that is on the other side against his war, the seventy percent who see the simple fact that we cannot achieve peace or make friends with the people who’ve survived our killing of their loved ones every day for four years. The thirty percent who stick with this madhouse regime, are hoping to share in the loot, or at least get eaten last. Congress critters cry that to call for a compassionate end to the killing bodes termination of their precious careers and every one of ‘em say they’re nobody’s fool.

THE PERSEIDS ARE COMING!

August 12, 2007 — the Perseids cometh

Tomorrow night, when the moon is new and the sky has been dark for a couple of hours look to the East at the Perseus constellation and the shiny red ball of Mars and you will see the beginning of the annual shower of meteors from the tail of the Swift-Tuttle comet for the rest of the night coming at you live and in increasing density until it reaches one meteor per minute as the curtain raises once again for dawn.

CHECK IT OUT

THIS
is what it's all about.

Thank you Mr. Damon

JOHN PILGER - JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY

Just saw John Pilger, on Democracy Now, speak about how “professional” journalism has become understood to be from “official” sources and true journalists become heretical “agents for truth rather than courtiers of power.” While American citizens get mindhandled into belief in their exceptionally righteous purpose and benevolent intent, the United States has overthrown 50 foreign governments, some duly elected democracies, and bombed 30 of them, staking the absurd claim to be making the world safe for its citizens any damned where they and Visa Card want to be.

He told of a Czech claiming to be lucky in a dictatorship in a way Pilger wasn’t in the US or Australia, “In a dictatorship, we don’t question whether the papers lie, we know they do.” Another added, “We don’t believe anything until it is officially denied.”

Impartiality is a principle to be dispensed with when the government is threatened and the rpms on the spin doctor corps revs up the sound bytes to normalize the unthinkable, make atrocities unhappen, disopen leaks, call bureaucratic huddles forever.

The giant, spoiled baby of public opinion pops in the mind controlling pacifier of the latest on Lindsey, Britney and Paris and sympathizes with its pained leader, betrayed and abandoned by his own appointees, advisors and generals.

As eyelids droop the happy place is found in knowing, “… at least I’m not him.”

“I wonder if he’ll eat me last?”

HERE • AND THERE

We're watching you

Back when I first found Reverend Dodson’s quote, “It’s a poor memory that works only backwards,” I placed it lovingly into the category of amusing metaphysical absurdities along with Douglas Adams’ flying instructions, “Throw yourself at the ground, and miss.” Just having noted that quote tainted my perspective ever since to the point that I now have found a feeling I can only describe as nostalgia for the present, especially when planting trees I know I may never sit in the fulsome shade of. The present also has episodes in which I seem to be experiencing the sequence of events that at some moment in the future will evoke the déja vu sensation, as if I have learned to notice the moments of importance in real time living color rather than in memory's time distorted mirror. I have long favored the idea of future memory, but only lately has anything like the reality become my experience. I have long listened to messages from my genetic memory, why not interpret coagulations of extrapolations of probabilities in the present as the nebulous form of the future? It's all pattern analysis.

•

So enough about me and my feelings about my feelings — my feelings are also very strong about the abomination we refer to as a representative government. With what Pisces Iscariot dubbed a kind of rap track,

I give you

While We Obliterate Iraq…

How have the deciders divided
The American states once united?

Crumbling from home land neglect
By a budget to inspect us to protect
Us from anyone with the gall to object
That it’s their home land we’ve wrecked

Rumbling with home stand inquisitions
Into the machinations of hidden conditions
To hype the fear coming from all directions
Be it car bombs or our selections’ deceptions

Mumbling stifled truths behind chain link fences
Writing journals conceived in chain gang trenches
Finding resolve as tight as the captors’ wrenches
Karma brews a storm that hits in the clenches

Stumbling from first coffee to night cap warm milk
Informed by sources behind the official silk
Guiding the gullible with duplicitous bilk
No dissent from the journalists’ ilk

Imperial Constantinian Christians
Brand their peaceful prophetic brethren, traitors
Imperial Zionist Jewish powers
Brand their orthodox, un-chosen, anti-semite
Like demolished twin towers
Religious glue serves as thermite
In just the right conditions

•

…!

Mellow Tallow Mandala

Follow the Feeling Mandala

…last rays of sunset