It Must Be the Vapors…

TO BE A CHILD …

2011-12-25T11:44:00.000-06:00

That first gasp of air … what did I feel? Was it the sudden chill on my damp naked body no longer sheltered by the womb? Was it a startled flash bulb consciousness of everything at once and therefore aware of no thing?

I have looked into the just-opened eyes of anewborn and recognized the ancient observer behind them calmly unwrapping thisnew instrument to begin sampling the experiment of life this time around.

With all functions set at default, sensitivecomponents begin reporting changes registered as pixels in the hologram itforms of where it is. As reports accumulate, similarities adjust settings to bettercollate them to estimate the probability of permanence in this constantlychanging time and space; the framework of reality upon which existence learnsto gamble its future.

These are automatic, involuntarily unfoldingfunctions evolved genetically into increasingly more varied, complex beingswith no other detectible purpose than to continue, nor limit but infinity. Thisbody, this instrument, in terms of the individual psyche, is what I think of asthe Id: the genetic memory of instincts to eat and not be eaten for survival ofthe individual, instincts to mate and co-create for thrival of the species, intuition of the purest sense of right and wrong.

It’s all hunky-dory, suckling and pooping along,until it’s just not enough to satisfy the sated survival instinct; no lack offood or fear of predators, but … what’s that over there? The emergence ofcuriosity, the instinct to grow beyond the givens, discovers a differencebetween reports of changes within (hunger, heartbeat, breathing) and of findinglimits to careless freedom without (bumping into crib, mother’s weaning andscolding for pooping off limits).

My most vivid recollection of self/other awarenesswas of the change the echoes of my crying returned fromthe walls when someone came to check on me. This primitive echolocation gavequality to my depth perception as my eyes learned to focus at differentdistances before it dawned on me they might be approached. Such preverbalunderstandings form the avatar, the ego, a hologram the instrument builds of itselfin relationship to the now exterior reality within which it appears to act.

Early on I recall imagining a game being playedbetween myself and the world where I had a cardboard replica of what I wantedto be perceived as being (the ego), which I held before me as I walked about.In turn the world erected cardboard facades like movie sets ahead of me andstruck them when I passed, ala The Truman Show. This personal myth was reifiedwhenever adults tested the validity of my mask with their questions andobviously invented most of their answers to mine when they couldn’t rememberwhat they were told back when they still had questions. Observing my parentsperpetuate the Santa Claus myth long after I’d observed the reality taught meto be a life long skeptic.

Ego develops when curiosity is called on to explainthe avatar’s place in the causal myth of whatever culture is asking. Therearen’t enough whys, wheres, whens, hows or whos to conclude a purpose to theliving universe without first inventing a timeline whose direction isdetermined by assigning cause and effect to the constant change life always is,no matter what we think of it. As the child seeks to achieve validity withinits sphere of activity, the responsibility for being able to account for itselfto a perceived social environment often takes priority over the id by claimingand basking in praise it does receive, and denying by masking from scorn itmight, from an audience that rarely cares as much as it does about itself.

In seeking validity from ones culture the ego canactually lose consciousness of the unique, natural gifts of the id leading to fearof being left alone bereft of anyone to obey and unable to entertain oneselfwith creative, original thinking since abandoning it somewhere in childhood inthe process of converting curiosity’s question marks into culture’s periods.

In this Freudian drama, the superego would be theunifying curve between them attempting to maintain the yang of the ego-avatar’sartificial doing in beneficial, dynamic harmony with the id-body’s instinctualbeing throughout a life of cultural training to exploit the difference foradvantage over others in a competitive ethic.

“Do unto others as you would have them do untoyou,” is usually understood to mean giving others treatment you want,precluding the reality that two unique beings rarely want the same treatment.The benefit of the dynamic the superego maintains depends on the ego’ssymbiotic attitude towards perceived otherness by realizing that beneath thecultural, exterior doing lies the common guidance system of the id’sinstinctual being.

It is impossible to come to a conclusion about aninfinite, living universe without completely extinguishing curiosity — customarilyassociated with death or belief.

FUCKING UP A WET DREAM

2011-12-21T14:12:00.003-06:00

I stole the following anecdote from a clipping found while tripping through Stumbleupon and post it here as the epitome of every contact western civilization has ever had with indigenous people, still living in symbiosis with nature.

Indian Chief “Two Eagles” was asked by a white U. S. government official, “You have observedthe white man for 90 years. You’ve seen his wars and his technologicaladvances. You’ve seen his progress and the damage he’s done.”

The Chief nodded in agreement.

The official continued, “Considering all these events, inyour opinion, where did the white man go wrong?”

“When white man find land, indians running it. No taxes, nodebt, plenty buffalo, plenty beaver, clean water. Women did all the work.Medicine man free. Indian man spend all day hunting and fishing; all nighthaving sex.”

Then the Chief leaned back and smiled, “Only white man dumbenough to think he could improve system like that.”

DRUM CIRCLE

2011-12-15T05:43:00.002-06:00

The elusiveness of truth is the impossibility ofdescribing the reality of the living universe no matter how vast onesrealization and vocabulary may be.

The reason no one can “tell it like it is” isbecause “IT” is too infinitely large, complex and ephemeral to begin speakingabout the truth before it’s different. To get around this, language separates “IT”into little “it”s: subjects of frozen specimens of instances, mini-truths likebugs plucked from nature, stuck with a pin, studied, named, added to thelanguage and extrapolated back as a set of truths, or rules, comprising a fixedpixel in individual and cultural pictures of a nature yet to be realized.

Further diffusion of even these specificallydefined word/mini-truths/rules comes with the infinitely varied evolution of eachindividual’s perception mechanism tinting meaning and blurring even thedescription of an event by many witnesses beyond recognition between oneextreme and the other.

Great social change gathers around the most basic,least misunderstandible expression for the overwhelming rejection of the statusquo being profited from and enforced by a word-controlling establishment. Thestrength and gathering momentum of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that itbest expresses the solutions to the system against which it rails by GeneralAssembly, evolving an entirely new model for social behavior among their manydissatisfied factions that, as separate causes, merely wanted to drive theirversion of the old model.

Together these volunteers, standing offmillionaire’s minions sent to silence and erase them, make the sometimes louddissatisfactions and as yet unexpressed, great expectations of this awakeninggiant resonate throughout the world in a visceral connection through the truthof the tune, no matter what language sings the lyrics.

A drum circle. A drum sphere.

THEY KEEP DRAGGING ME BACK …

2011-11-22T07:50:00.001-06:00

I guess the best I can hope for in my quest to getback to the garden nature has always been, since well before the firstcivilization convinced its members they owned and/or owed for any of it, is tobecome independently feral. I brought this here intertube portal with me to thewoods through which to check on the always-encroaching proximity of thecivilized sprawl I intend to avoid, like any problem one must get away from tothink rationally about.

This Occupy Wall Street movement has attracted mealmost as strongly as the lack of such active awareness in western civilizationdrove me away to my tipi in the first place. When I think of how best tocontribute to the …

…I’ve been stuck on thenext word for two days, during which I watched the entire N17 day of actionstreaming from http://www.ustream.tv/TheOther99until an estimated 35,000 protesters filled the Brooklyn Bridge from bothdirections at the peak of an adventurous day with the earnest reporter, TimPool. I still don’t know the next words to describe what it is I would becontributing to and, I suspect, neither do most of those people dedicated tofreely holding forth en mass about the same injustices that 99% of their fellowcitizens daily grumble about, shove down and chase with antacid and sleepingpills before bed just to cling to lives of still hired wannabes watching that goalat the top of the heap moved further away by millionaires’ minions sent down totruncheon the nasty away from the nice; worried how they look every day.

What draws me to the movement seems to be the same feelingof escape from the invisible prison I’ve been blogging about for five years.

I suppose the word I was looking for next abovewould be …awakenings. Awakening to the positive possibilities of changingsociety from a life long contest of amassing the greatest profit with the leastpersonal investment into one where old men plant trees under which they won't live to enjoy the shade. Awakening from the nightmare of a nation ofpetroleum junkies robbing neighbors for their stash to harmonize directly withthe solar source of energy that originally gave life to the decayed matter soupover which we now squabble. Awakening to the lethal cesspools we’ve made of ourwater, gas chambers we’ve made of our air and poison deposits we’ve made in theearth. Awakening to the millions of jobs created in the effort to replace oursooty chimneys with symbiotic sharing of ambient sun, wind, geothermal andtidal energies amidst which we’ve failed with oil all along.

It’s bigger than the economy — the economy is basedon creating the problem. It’s bigger than jobs — the jobs are to keep thestatus quo. It’s about a whole new way of life with the health of the planetour primary concern by realizing our welfare depends on how symbiotic we can bewith nature — not on how we can enslave it.

… OF A MORNING

2011-11-08T09:35:00.000-06:00

Chickens fed hen scratch and layer crumbles, dogs treated withbiscuits and a petting of their night dew dampened coats, coffee brewed, jointrolled — sitting outside for sunrise with Hetty and Monty at my feet and Priest in my lap. Overcast, a silence only moist air can bring, damp notebook pagesto write this on. No birds, no sun, no shadows in the diffused light ofreflected dawn. Congestion, settled deep during overnight shallow sleepbreathing, is tickled into begging to be expelled by the catalyst ganjavabreakfast is to respiration of bodily fluids and inspiration of mentalacrobatics like this…

•

Civilization is based on the premise that nature is undermankind’s stewardship as a gift from a creator of it all.

Tipi Fini

•

TO NATURE, CIVILIZED MAN IS THE 1%

•

There are no injustices within Western Civilization for whichthe corporate greed of the military-industrial complex is held responsible thatare not exponentially more atrocious when considering the effect of WesternCivilization on the health of the nature within which it exists to exploit andthe sanity of the contributing individual human exploiters.

The blight that ghost towns like Detroit appears to be isactually the process of each area’s escape from man’s stewarded gulag as itreturns to the nature within which it has long been forbidden to thrive.

FULL CYCLE

2011-10-27T08:20:00.000-05:00

The theory that the entire evolution of life onearth to the present is reenacted by all beings during their gestation from thefirst cell division after conception to the emergence of their modern form fromwomb or shell I’ve heard bandied about in many contexts. I have to admit suchcomparisons are quite plausible throughout the wide variety and scale of lifeforms covering the surface of this being of which we are all cells, Gaia,Pachamama, Mother Earth.

Like any theory that keeps kicking around in myponderings it has given rise to tangential extensions into nearly as manycontexts. The earliest of which concerns the idea that, given that extremelyabbreviated experience of earthly evolution to the present in gestation, theperiod of a modern human’s life from the first perception of sunlight to thelast appears to be a reenactment of the continuing social evolution of mankindfrom the first opposable thumbs to finding fulfillment living out their livesin cubic, air-conditioned isolation chambers viewing the natural world fromwhich they arose as an enemy to be conquered and exploited by pushing buttonswith stubby little fingers to make that now alien, civilized world better, moreheedlessness of the harm done to the planetary health none can survive without.

No matter where you go, there you are.

Lest I get carried away into my old crackpotnotions and forget the latest idea that made me abandon my sunrise vigil anddrove my stubby little fingers here to the keyboard once more; it occurs to methat, having come to an understanding of the paragraph above, I have beenslowly but surely returning to the preverbal existence of early man by my agealone. Over years of abuse, from screaming jet engines to southern sheriff’ssaps, my ears now seem only to hear vowels and tunes, with consonants andlyrics quite indistinguishable. My eyes seem only to see landscapes and geometricshapes in the foreground, with leaves and letters on those shapes quiteindistinguishable. I may not pick out your train of words, but through thedance of your body English and tune of your voice I can follow your train ofthought as a metaphor with interchangeable variables. I may not be able to seeyour facial features at a hundred yards, but if I know you, I will recognizeyour walk and mood.

When I couldn’t read the blackboard from the backof the 6^th grade classroom my vision was suddenly made more particularlyarticulate by being fit for glasses. I slowly began to rely on the writtensigns all around me and ignore the reality going on all around them. The authorityof the written word, from “Keep off the Grass” to “Top Secret”, becamesacrosanct; immune to any experience in the contrary. I became an avid readerin search of ethical heroes and scientific discoveries to challenge and/orenlarge my own heroic theories and burgeoning desire for the reward of fame andfortune in those books or imagined of their authors.

When I moved out of the city to the Dawgranch, Istopped wearing my glasses because there seems to be nothing so specificneeding to be seen as is found in the traffic of speeding cars and urgent signsof the city. At the pace of nature everything is as articulate as theirproximity requires my attention without fear of damage or delay. The oncehawkeyed sharp particulars in the distance have returned to being part of the naturallandscape I‘d learned to ignore.

When the cubical dwellers visit me I know when tocelebrate, sympathize with or object to anything they say by how they dance andsing, no matter what the song and dance may be about.

HOW HIGH THE SKY?

2011-10-15T11:41:00.000-05:00

Do my cells Know what I make of them?

Each one painting its canvas, a pixel in the hologram I call existence.

Do they know their lives are my sensations?

Brain meet Nebula, or is it the other way round

The aches and ecstasies passing through now like weather

inspire my will to look beyond my cells with an awareness,

Double Helix Nebula at the heart of the Milky Way

a being of which I have always been a cell

whose health suffers and celebrates as do I —

in response to its cells,

we Earthlings,

we Solarians,

we Milky Wayans …

FINAL RESTING PLACE

2011-10-01T22:07:00.001-05:00

While living among the pines of a forest east of Austin in a tipi I'd made of heavy canvas sailcloth and cedar poles thirty years ago, I began working on an all wood version. I abandoned that start to the silver fox family living under the hill on which it sat, but it never left my mind.

Those memories and a growing dissatisfaction with occupying a defunct RV whose warranty must have expired the moment it was driven off the lot prompted me to renew efforts to bring the idea into reality, first in Illustrator for the planning stage and then in Home Depot for the physical realization through shop tools and material..

Planning stage

TIPI

The initial parameters were to use 4'X8'X1/2" plywood sheets to cover the 16' diameter hole I'd dug earlier, in which to raise tilapia for consumption here at the the Dawgranch, before I discovered the intrusive government regulations into private fisheries. These resulted in 12 triangular panels leaning toward the center around a 15 foot perimeter, more than enough room to do anything I've ever done indoors.

I ripped twelve 2"X4"X12' boards with two 13.1° cuts on the outer edge to accommodate the plywood sheet's lying flat against both cuts of the two 12' 'poles in each frame. This made 6 complete wooden frames which I then linked with struts cut the same as the ones within the completed frames, resulting in the complete skeleton of the finished form hovering over the hole.

twelve foot rips started at the west end of my porch-cum-woodshop and finished out the east door

single frame in a jig to build all six

One frame launched and another one on the way

KIVA

Putting the floor of the tipi three feet below the ground is an adaptation of the cliff dwellers kiva to the plains tribes' tipi. On the good advice of my rock mason friend, Cyrus, the hole was enlarged a foot or so beyond the intended living space diameter and a foot deeper than the floor. Eleven 4"X4"X4' posts were sunk a foot deep in concrete and spanned by 1/2"X3'X4' plywood walls at a diameter of 170". Outside the walls and at least a foot below the floor level was filled with 12 tons of one-inch river gravel to serve as a drainage barrier against the occasional flood that has approached within a foot and a half of the top of the wall several times in my seven years living here at the Dawgranch.

Cyrus increases the diameter

Cyrus and Jose set the wall posts

The digging of the hole and setting of the posts (above) I ceded to fitter men than I to complete a job in one week that would certainly have taken my feeble frame at least two months in the constant 100°F+ drought we experienced this summer.

Wall wrapped in three layers of tar paper

Gravel filled into the outside of the wall holding cinder blocks spaced at 4' and level with
wall as footings for the bottom of the twelve foot frame sides (tipi poles)

COVERING THE TIPI

Instead of buffalo hides, I spanned the poles of my tipi with Autumn Orange colored plywood panels, the North, East and South tops of which hinge out to be horizontal rooves extending four feet beyond the base to form porches in the summer, to be eventually screened in. In the winter these panels will be snugged in and the small smoke flaps at the top will be closed on the windward and opened on the lee side for a draft to pull the smoke out when the fire pit is used.

Triangular frames linking around the kiva perimeter.

Smoke flap windows around the top

YURT

To cover the smoke flaps I devised a 45° conic cap that hangs over any open ones, designed on the same principle as the 60° tipi, but made with lighter 1"X2" strips and 1/4" plywood. After it was in place it occurred to me that I'd incorporated another indigenous home design into the mix, a yurt.

Peak Parasol

Looking north through the south porch-to-be

Smoke flaps and Parasol in place.

And now I have moved in so far as I have finished facilities to operate in the style to which I have grown accustomed. I have yet to build the kitchen, fire pit and winter sleeping loft (7' ceiling over the kitchen).

Computer station "Outback"

At home with Monty and Hettie

"How to stop pervs from stealing your naked pics"

2011-09-18T13:14:00.000-05:00

Seen on msnbc's lineup of today's news articles, this headline is possible only in western civilization. It made my spit out the cookie I was eating to guffaw, it had such a level of self-inflicted oxymoron about it.

CHECKING IN

2011-09-14T12:32:00.000-05:00

Just watched Stephen Colbert interview Al Gore, who stressedthat it was our wars over keeping oil that kept us from affording atechnological replacement for the internal combustion devce that causes climatechange. Good reasoning, Al.

The other night I watched an msnbc special, on the changesin America in the ten years since the excuse for the longest of those wars, duringwhich intrepid war correspondent Richard Engle remarked, “Lovely New Yorkwater, heh, heh, heh,” as he was being decontaminated after exposing himself tothe poisonous Hudson river in which he’d joined the “new” NYPD searching forterrorist’s bombs along the banks. Good priorities, Richard.

Here’s my point. Al Gore has stressed climate change as hisfocus for action to return to a more symbiotic way to exist within the naturalcurve of the planet by citing temperature trends and more drastic weatherpatterns. It’s not that I deny climate change is one of the symptoms of the industrial-agehuman alienation of themselves from the planet which birthed them, I don’t. Butof all the symptoms it remains the most debatable and debated boondoggle in anyeffort to lessen our footprint. Climate change is evident in geological andbiological records occurring in natural cyclic patterns throughout the historyof Earth, which tends to be deniers strongest argument. The strongest argumentfor climate change is measuring how extreme the weather has gotten in therecent past based on the ignorant hubris of civilized humans to continue tobuild “permanent” cities on the coasts (the land left after the last chunk quakedinto the ocean) and rivers (the trickles left since the last “no ice anywhere”period) because, miracle of miracles, earthquakes and hurricanes cost more in liveshuddled in more high rises every year.

Just like Richard Engle laughed off the admittedly deadlypollution of the Hudson river while demonstrating the efficiency of the NYPD tokeep the homeland free of theoretically possible terrorism, Al Gore pushes thetheoretically most debatable of the many arguments for getting off of fossilfuels while the horror of our pollution of water, land and air remainsundeniable and undiscussed, — from the Hudson river to the burning kitchen faucetsnear fraking operations.

What the frack.

A DAY

2011-06-29T07:45:00.001-05:00

Everyone was flirting with everyone without anyone coupling — so overwhelming was the joy of feeling kinship to a body greater than the sum of it’s parts … the rooster on the land to the east pierced the marbleized reality of the dream with a predawn declaration of existence. Without stirring his dormant frame he chased down tendrils of imagination gone wandering unfettered by sensory guidance into fantasies soon forgotten for their very novelty and rectified them with his memory of where he’d fallen asleep.

The cool April breeze through the open window by his pillow chilled the light perspiration on his body as he kicked off the sleeping bag and swung his feet over the side of the bed in search of his sandals.

Orienting himself upon standing, he foresaw his trip to the toilet to pee and then to the chicken feed bin to scoop out the morning’s ration for his brood as surely as the existence of those locations … no plan from the past or prediction of the future, but acquiescence to the inevitability of the constantly ever-changing present.

As he sat in the mist dampened lawn chair awaiting their arrival, he could hear the stir of the hens’ awakening and fussing over their order of exit from the coop. As they had since they were chicks, Dax came out first followed by Shiva. By the time he got the scratch and crumble spread all five of the Aurucana hens were enjoying the initial pecks of their daylong predation of bug life within the fence lines, interrupted only by returning to the coop to lay large pastel green eggs.

As they followed their interests elsewhere they were replaced by the indigenous birdlife dropping from the sheltering canopy of freshly leaved limbs. There were grackles and tits and waxwings and a variety of doves from the pigeon-sized white wings to the tiny turtledoves all dining so respectfully that the density of their population couldn’t be distributed more evenly over the area of the food grains by mathematical calculation. Nor could a stopwatch split the instant a silent signal sends them flying uproariously back into the limbs.

The distant tree line lowered itself to reveal the blazing source of his planet’s energy with a power that forced his arm up to shield his eyes against its glare. The garden at his feet was in stark dark green silhouette enhanced by the glistening whiskers outlining backlit stems and leaves, gleaming refractions through dewdrops and sparkling reflections off the shiny surface of the ripening fruits. The foliage and homes around the clearing brightened with occasional sweeps of the spotlight reflection of the low sun off the three spinning cds he’d hung from twine to frighten birds from ripe fruit. He could tell how many hours from noon it was by how far the sweep of the spots of were on the ground from the center above which they spun in the breeze — as if someone needed to know the time out here.

He reflected that this was the most promising spring garden in the seven year history of his conscious responsibility for completing his own food chain by organically growing and harvesting both his own sustenance and its sustenance, compost. He’d begun that journey over half his life ago when, at the age of thirty-four, he’d realized he’d never fed himself beyond learning to use a fork to scoop in food prepared by a related woman or mess hall and campus grill cooks. It had been a revelation that might never have occurred to him had his wife kept on cooking for him. Sadder, but wiser, he thanked her for leaving.

In his self-styled brand of perversity, he considered his seat in the garden shed his gym, where he got in condition to keep pace with nature, an exercise sorely neglected before he began realizing everything he’d been taught was wrong. He was prone to sitting and gazing at the daily doings of critters, plants and clouds with a pleasure enough to balance the frustrated boredom behind a world full of eyes gazing longingly out of classroom and office cubicle windows.

When the muse beckoned, he played his bamboo flute with the symbol for Om etched in Sanskrit just below the mouthpiece, reminding him to seek the resonance he felt throughout his entire body when intoning the syllable with his voice. On occasion, his untrained fingers danced across their holes with serendipitous, spontaneous syncopation to tunes neither the flute or he had ever heard with such delight as to take away the wind for the next note leaving him with an ethereal buzz and Cheshire grin for hours after.

The email bell on his iMac notified him of the client work that maintains his slowly accumulating bank account toward the day when he can erect his own portable home off the entire grid, save the intertubes. This peephole back to the greatest show on earth also kept him apprised of what he saw to be the weight of western civilization’s commodification of the entire planet straining the limb of human existence as it walks away from the trunk of natural planetary evolution. Becoming an example of the alternative, symbiotic with the nature of the planet way to live is his raison d’etre.

He spent several hours refining details of his design for a twelve sided, sixteen-foot diameter, plywood tipi to ensure low cost (common materials) and ready portability (twenty minutes from pickup bed to erect either way). He’d outfitted his porch with woodworking tools to insure the precision cuts required of efficient multipurpose structure parts. He could see erecting it on the other side of his garden in the summer and moving in by fall.

He purchased a movie from iTunes called Leaves of Grass, starring Edward Norton because he wondered how this talented young actor would channel Walt Whitman, his favorite poet. Much to his delighted disappointment, the grass of the title was Cannabis Indicus and Ed Norton was twin brothers channeling both halves of his own life at the same time.

With a grin on his face and adventure in his heart he returned to his dream out in the full moon-lit hammock, knowing he’s have to get in the sleeping bag along about three in the morning when the temperature dropped and chased him inside.

WHO AM I?

2011-06-07T08:48:00.005-05:00

'

Am I the imaginer of these thoughts expressed by the master of the minions flexing their laryngeal caverns to shape intelligent howls of the exhausted wind rushing for refreshing out there as meaningful bumps in the air?

Am I the imaginer of intelligent meaning to such vibrations as impinge upon and are reported by the sensate cilia of separate surface cells containing me and the beating of two drums deep in their separate caverns of my ears?

Am I the imaginer of my self as a biologically symbiotic body of cells that serves as one of myriad portals through which the infinite curiosity of the living universe observes and ponders itself?

As I do me.

Imagine that.

Is my name Mobius?

IN THEIR OWN WORDS!!!

2011-03-07T10:51:00.002-06:00

Well, well, well. Here it is folks. In their own words, the Xians interpreting their god to prefer people over the planet he supposedly created for them to be stewards of. I have made reference to the corruption the title of steward undergoes when manipulated by corporate commodification, but this video says it all.

Did you catch the twist they spin?

Humans, along with all other living beings that arose from the ongoing life of Pachamama, the earth mother, depend on a symbiotic relationship to the health of the planet that is our home and upon whom our own health depends as a simple fact of nature.

Being so exceptionally special in the eyes of the creator they imagine runs the show and who they believe gave them earth to do with as they please, this cult of reality deniers would have the entirety of nature dry up and blow away because their heavenly father wouldn't let anything bad happen to them, His Special children. Can you see that what they are saying was choreographed and scripted by corporate America to pave the way to further rape mother earth for the love she always gives willingly? They try to deflect this by saying that the threat is to Xianity not to their bank accounts. Anything as vulnerable to new ideas as they claim their belief system is only points out the total irrationality of their claims requiring the wishful thinking of staggering leaps of blind faith.

This may be my last post on religion. At least until some group of kooks out does this bunch.

WHO ARE YOU? Part II

2011-03-05T15:19:00.004-06:00

In response to the curiosity expressed in her comment on the previous post, this post is for my maverick Grand-niece Racheal Kellie Cooley, the only of my kinfolk other than L'ilwave to respond to this blog.

"Faith is being sure of what we hope for

and certain of what we do not see."

I couldn’t agree more with the quote, it describes exactly what I take each of those words to mean and the meaning of their being next to one another as they are arranged.

But I sense there’s a world of difference between what you feel about those words and how I read them. The fulcrum of faith in each phrase: “sure of” and “certain of”, are like tombstones marking the death of curiosity, just like the quote several posts back about, “children begin school as question marks and graduate as periods”.

Using “question mark” for newborns is as close to spirituality as I ever get when I examine my own motivations, the rest is just logical metaphors as a way of making sense of all my curiosity has revealed to me for myself. When I say we are all eyes on the same potato, the potato is as close as I get to describing what I hear others refer to as god.

It all begins with the definition of THE universe as being all there is. Imagining an intelligent being made of all there is leads me to realize it has nothing to observe but itself — talk about self-aware! But who is the universe gonna ask, you might ask? What do I ask when I want to know what’s going on? My primary source of information is the perception of my individual cells keeping data about the physical world hologram I call my mind updated every instant. I can ask the world what’s going on if I want the opinion of others to supplement my perceptions, but by the time they begin to answer they are no longer talking about what’s going on, but what is no longer going on, and since now is the only time existence ever occurs it takes all my attention to my perceptions just to keep up observing reality.

My metaphor is that the entire universe is alive and every part of it is reporting what it sees just as my every cell reports to me, I pass it on to the silent observer I know sees through my eyes, the potato, god.

There’s a whole other part of my cosmology about scale & mobius loops and the evaporation cycle of ideas, but I want to get back to my view of faith, hope, and certainty just to narrow a conversation about the universe down to the unarguable truth that each religion in history has claimed it alone possesses access to (all lebentybillion of ‘em).

In my cosmology, certainty is like what civilization does to our awareness of nature. It puts on shades, sticks in earplugs, turns up the air conditioner, steps on the gas and in every way possible makes the natural occurrences of the day helpless to update the mind of the hopefully, faithfully certain that certainty lets us be sure that whatever we want we’ll get no matter what shitstorms such hopeful certainty plows up in the natural world it contradicts at every turn.

The reason peace on earth exist at all is that from the core of every being the observer looks out, curious about itself. Although the world it observes is the immensity of itself it has become so absorbed in the observing, it must be reminded that the world is not out there by pairs of pairs of eyes recognizing who it is that’s looking out of both — cosmic love and the reason we are conscious of and curious about existence, if there must be a reason.

Yeah, I don’t have a certain bone in my body but I have accumulated enough experience to understand I have been up to any now in which I find myself without steeling myself against contradiction, in fact I welcome it. New varieties of contradiction only tend to broaden my cosmological theory. I don’t consider religion to be a part of or a contradiction to my theory because it is based on the very non-existence of wishful thinking that requires faith in the unarguable certainty “about what we do not know” for hopeful wannbes to declare the only permissible truth is theirs, end of story, period. Signed, sealed, delivered zombie ant.

That’s why I loved your exchange recognizing how mankind could be as our heavenly father intended, curious about the world they still consider to be themselves and are not yet aware of the otherness civilization makes of nature.

Nature reminds civilization of the stage upon which it plays at being God.

WHO ARE YOU?

2011-03-05T08:05:00.001-06:00

I love the rain! ptl for the sweet sound. on way back from dropping kids @school I see a little boy in front of my house walking IN the street and not on the sidewalk high-stepping it in his rain boots thru the puddles unaware of much else. made me smile. Finally.

Its amazing how the down to earth, simple little things warms our hearts and brings us back to a reality check of our lives. How care free a child's life is when they don't have the weight of the world on their little shoulders. That's what our heavenly father wants us to be like, if we could just let him carry our worries and our cares. Easily say than done sometimes. Love you little sis......Have a Blessed day.

Pretty much all my relatives back in Mississippi, and places of refuge therefrom, sprinkle their Facebook communications with little “ptl”s and bible quotes. It is the only direct exposure to Xianity in my life. Realizing they are no different than the overwhelming majority of people who primarily identify themselves as non-hyphenated-Americans, I have been searching for the crossover between who I have come to know as an inner observer reporting the gestalt of my sensory perceptions to a consciousness for whom we all serve as eyes on the material manifestations of nature, just as our cells report to us, and the omniscience projected upon an external being that created the universe and is in control of every instant. My problem has always been with the established religions externalizing the genius with which individuals are born and on which they rely when selecting the particular character of their version of some god out there.

Being unaware of or ignoring the ultimate responsibility for what one chooses has allowed individuals to commit atrocities by merely going along in the anonymity of the dominant mob with only their inner observer to weigh the difference between reality and one’s version. The sweet exchange I quoted above between my grand-niece and her friend seems almost like the crossover I seek when little children are said to be “what our heavenly father wants us to be like” as if aware that, having taken the entire culture based on gaining permission from others upon their little shoulders, people have unnecessarily complicated their lives with smoke and mirrors.

THIRD (IM)PERSON NATION

2011-03-03T19:15:00.004-06:00

Being the being we were born to be

takes a far back seat to

doing the being for others to see.

The imbalance in the dynamic of nature’s dual cycle engine: eat or be eaten, is the result of having no awareness of the observer within who, from the first opening of each newborn’s eyes, silently watches civilization enacting a mythical script with antagonism towards the natural stage upon which it plays.

All beings display self-awareness by remaining alive. Remaining alive accumulates experience with kinds of food and kinds of predators. The consciousness of a being must make sense of this experience to supplement genetic memory with updates on the present to prolong its life. Making sense of it all could be seen as each being‘s personal narrative, the efficacy of which is attested to by its length.

Unlike their fellow beings, humans have managed to inject a mythical story into the experience of its progeny that transforms the organic eat/eaten dynamic into a mechanistic pass/fail exam with no predators but one’s betters. Being given no credit for the innate intelligence of the observer much less time to become aware of and develop natural curiosities and capabilities as even human parents allow in the wild, the modern human infant is drafted into becoming a civilized adult upon its first inappropriate defecation, having eaten its first meal, the first step in its journey of isolation from nature as it occurs within and without.

When rewards for obedience to others’ nonsense have greater value than remembering it is a game we have a choice in playing, we are civilized; habituated to the game of conquering nature — one we cannot win. That we cannot win is being shouted from minarets and state houses by outraged throngs of people, from poisoned seas and polluted air by the planet. We must cease our antagonistic story of human superiority and become more symbiotic with the body from which we arose lest she shed us, like the diseased narrative we carry by telling our children how we’re supposed to live.

Having western civilization’s myth piped in from every experience involving people since I was born, it seems a bit arrogant to me that I can claim to now see through it to the way things are, to see what the myth is about after its wishful thinking and “facts” are gone. Either I fell for it, or my way was paved so long as I chose to go along and fill in the proper blanks, because I found myself on my own for the first time in an earnest, trouble-free, thirty-four year life; no one left to fail or be failed by. The combination of new experiences and perspectives I’ve had off the leash since make me unfit for leashes evermore.

In the mechanics of story telling there is the trilogy of first; (I), second; (you) and third; (him) person narrative. In the mechanics of Freudian psychology there is the trilogy of id (instinct), ego (actor) and super ego (conscience). Both fields deal with strictly human interaction because nature reads no books or enacts no moral purpose for a conscience to attend. But they are useful to demonstrate the manipulation of human instincts wrought by adherence to the myth by one’s own personal story.

Let’s let “I” be the first person narrative of the “id”: the point of view from the primal observer, the instinctual, genetic memory with which each being is equipped at birth. Then we can let “you” be the second person narrative of the “ego”: the point of view of the seen, being an observable object out there in the mix of nature and society. And lastly, we might let “him” be the third person narrative of the “super ego” judging the effectiveness of the ego’s act in attaining from others it’s personal purpose. Notice the hierarchy of transition from natural, as born ability to live in nature alone at one end to purposeful dedication to the authority of others in the mold of the myth at the other end.

In nature the id serves as a perfect guide to the ego's actions putting it in the way of food and out of the path of predators to attain the longer, harmonious life desired by the super ego. In civilization the id is a dissident silenced by the ego lest it spoil the performance of licking the boots of whoever plays the super ego to be pleased in its story.

Currying approval of the public has such a priority over knowing oneself in the reality of nature that, for many, solitude seems a death trap and in nature, filling the trap with tigers. In these days of wall-to-wall communication solitude must be sought out by painstakingly turning off every device in the house, not that there are that many who would. In nature, approval amounts to not being eaten and having what we eat nourish us. Among men, gaining approval and, ideally, authority, motivates every activity indulged beyond the daily bread — and it’s an arbitrary game — in which eating alone is pitied and not playing makes one the enemy.

Even the games played within civilization reflect its myth of overarching administration by gods or governments and the possibility of sainthood, president or celebrity for the most dedicated to making their version mean something to the most people, as if truth could be created by man, just as he attributes such abilities to gods and their books. Like gods, the pantheon of mini-stars of excruciatingly varied forms of vicarious entertainment have idolizers in virtually every smelly locker room, reeking pit stop, perfumed crotch pit, Oscar walk, radio talk, podium and pulpit — thereby sustainting their reason for living around betting on what happens next on their version of the soaps because it has more meaning than what they do between shows; their own existence.

COLLABORATIVE CREATIVITY PERSONIFIED

2011-02-28T22:12:00.000-06:00

In reference to the previous post about what's wrong with public education, these guys are probably drop outs, just to find room for this fascinatingly beautiful invention of theirs. I don't care if it does have a genre name.

THINK TANK SANK SUNK

2011-02-27T10:43:00.001-06:00

This is an explanation of the simple fact that

children enter public education as question marks (?)

and graduate as periods (•):

EVER WONDERED?

2011-02-21T09:30:00.008-06:00

(h/t Pisces Iscariot)

If you're talking to yourself, you exist. That you ask would indicate it's a curious skepticism of an existence. That you ask the world you perceive if it perceives you seems like a conflict of self-definition between the perceived and the perceiver.

Therein lies loneliness, loss of the thread of life that energizes us all, that reproduces our cells from the same cosmic dust and enables us to have at it as we mayhap.

Alone, I observe a world needless of my observations to carry on and I feel free as I can imagine being.

In the company of men I am trapped by supposition that I exist only where I, who I know myself to be, impinges on their unique sensitivities and agendas, waiting for that wink to acknowledge the unspoken link of being different eyes of the same cosmic observer. Without knowing oneself, one is held in thrall to rumor, reputation and gossip.

CHOICE

2011-02-13T03:51:00.004-06:00

The most obvious trait of the natural world is the eating. From atoms swapping electrons to black holes swallowing galaxies there is a constant transformation occurring throughout the known physical world. Once you’re born, you’re game to be eaten upon until you no longer exist. Being food for itself, it would seem the prime purpose of the universe is to perpetuate its life. One may extrapolate that the universe is expanding, another that it’s only inhaling in the prime cycle of respiration and yet another that what we observe is merely the growing body of one of the many beings of its size.

One thing for sure is that down here at human metabolism staying alive requires adaptation to the area in which we must eat so long as we can avoid being eaten. Being eaten can be resisted only when the entity is aware of and able to avoid or defend against other life forms, from saber-toothed tigers to cancer cells, munching on its vitality. Realizing how many eggs a woman is capable of hatching, it would seem we have a lot to learn about adapting to our habitat in order to live up to our genetic potential.

So here we are, smack in the middle of a good/bad for us world feeling like we must perpetually choose to either eat, befriend, avoid, defend against, attack, or surrender to events in our conscious life. At birth our motivation is to respond to and learn from the enormous physical growth still going on by stoking those fires with food and our consciousness with experience to better adapt to obtaining the next meal.

The genetic mini-factories pumping out replications of their Dna imbue each with what has been biologically called, epigenesis, and in my lexicon referred to as genetic memory, intuition, instinct, or the inner voice with which newborns are equipped to operate as individuals as soon as physically capable. This evolved memory is of primal truths such as eat or be eaten, fight/flight, fear of falling or caution around fire, like an organic I Ching into which the daily events of one’s life may be inserted like variables plugged into infallible, evolutionary time tested formulas. Human cultures attempting to part from nature have all been too fleeting to register in such a timeless, cyclic history of evolution.

As the infant is introduced to the culture within which is born, its adaptive behavior in obtaining food is influenced by a louder, more insistent memory in the form of tradition. Some cultures traditionally consider nature to be an evil to be conquered and begin educating their young as soon as the results of their eating makes a mess on the traditional couch. In such cultures the young quickly adapt, not to their habitat, but to the rules for conquering nature within themselves by ignoring those “Satan’s whispers” from our genetic memory and without by helping harvest and sell the entirety of our habitat to one another in a race to own the most at the inevitable finish line of planetary poisoning and starvation.

Being so buried beneath the immediate demands of one’s culture so early, individuals rarely get to experience themselves beyond their skills at eliciting favorable response from others, first for food, then for favors. Any reference to self-reliance is in terms of having money to pay others to provide all the necessities of life, which are far in excess of mere food in most cultures considering themselves civilizations. Indigenous cultures still send their youth on walkabouts and vision quests to ensure they are aware of their prime reliance on and responsibility to their habitat in a most symbiotic way. Western civilization’s version of a walkabout is joining the Marine Corps to travel to remote corners of the world and threaten to blow up that porcelain toilet (that another vision quest, the Peace Corps, convinced once indigenous peoples they couldn’t live without) if they didn’t quit fighting the leash and biting the hand that now feeds them.

With no experience of living symbiotically with nature since the presumption of totalitarian agriculture, western civilization relies on faith in authority over the inherent potential of that unbound curiosity with which we are all born:

“I’m hungry.”

“That’ll be five dollars.”

The instincts that could not be sublimated in the civilizing of newborns have been bent to the service of authority. Competitiveness among beings for food in the wild improves the survival abilities of both prey and predator and doesn’t include incapacitating the competition except among civilized people in search of authority. With no natural prey but their own egoistic shortsightedness, civilized humans confuse fellow competitors with the prey — still hungry after all these eons. Herding instinct, once for safety among prey and efficacy among predators, has been warped into might makes right and the inability to live alone in the wild … or the city. Which brings us to the biggest, most painful warp of all. This post was generated by a quote my dear, Lilwave, posted in Facebook the other day,

“The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread." ~Mother Teresa

I hardly know where to begin. The inarguability of such a metaphor mixed between physical reality and presumed spiritual necessity leaves me only the “hunger for love” part to address my response to the quote. Part of becoming acquainted with oneself prior to and beyond being the stylist adapting to one’s culture is discovering the being who exists when one is alone with the natural world so that one cannot be swayed by condemnation or flattery in representing one’s self honestly.

Now here’s where I make the humangoose assumption that I am not alone in experiencing the following — if I am, I’d like to hear from you. There is a term, agape, which I take to mean the feeling of love for the entire universe, including the misdirected malice of western civilization toward the womb that births it and horrible individual injustices wreaked upon one another trying to make the system work against our nature. This feeling resembles total harmony of every part of my body and it with all other entities in a dynamic generated by learning to choose to be symbiotic with nature by learning from our mistakes if we survive them. Humans are learning by trial and error what their genetic memory could tell them if they could hear it over the traditional memory’s public address speakers.

It may be evoked by solitary meditation, seeing events harmonize all the entities involved such as what just occurred in Tahrir Square, at an outdoor rock concert on a psychedelic, turning the compost and seeing microbes make plant food out of plants, in the fearless eyes of another looking from the same place, or in watching the world turn green at spring sunrise after every miserable winter of my life.

To hunger for love means to me that one has never discovered that fountain within them selves and are convinced love must be acquired from externals like food. Relationships are cannibalistic without agape, to further mismix the metaphor.

“Hey, boy! Whachu doin’ pullin’ that there chain?”

“You ever tried to push one?”

AGAPE

THE BLIZZARD OF '11

2011-02-08T01:57:00.000-06:00

SHUN THE HAND

2011-02-04T02:06:00.001-06:00

Storm against

The bars and stars

You pledged allegiance to

In the molding of your schooling

You are not

Fodder for the warring steel

If you can grow your own next meal

The unfolding of your schooling

Powerless

Against the razor steel

Peeling whiskers from your chin revealing

That Windsor tether to your schooling

Rise up

Dilate the cage of your crumpled form

When you face the truth you’ve long ignored

Since the scolding of your schooling

You are

The key to the cage

Not in rage but the will to disengage

From the emboldening of your schooling

Free

To walk away from your servers

Costing more than that tie could ever earn

No longer tethered to your schooling

This is what my asylum echoed while I was reading Bite the Hand, by my friend Pisces Iscariot at the Far Queue. We're saying the same thing from our own unique reality tunnel. Vive l'varietie

… from the asylum of my natural mind

2011-01-23T06:56:00.012-06:00

Commenting on the end of Countdown a friend lamented, “I don’t trust CNN these days.”

I couldn’t help but reply, “Trust?”

“Any of them?”

“These days?”

“Read Peoples History of the United States, check out Democracy Now! But don't lay trust on anyone but yourself, and don't do anything until you can.

Sorry Steve, those weren't really orders from me to you, just a brain fart about how trusting externals is the source of all misery and the company it keeps. It was the things that helped me realize why love is a source of pain when gratitude for feeling it at all is not enough reward and requital is demanded, like a whore taking payment — burdening loved ones with trust breaks better bonds.

I’ll go blog now.”

I guess I get a bit worked up around words like trust, faith, hope, prayer, wishes because I have seen through Maya’s veil to behold her natural beauty and realize it was all a vale of tears over such illusions woven so finely the world appears against us when we don’t get our way, as if it’s supposed to care because we wish it. The veil covers up the beauty of the present with the clothing of the past tailored to ellicit obedience from the future. What a fine tuned grinder the innocence of now is put through to accomplish tomorrow’s menu. We never see life as it is as we focus on the parts that fit our purpose and get blindsided by hopes become wishes become faith become trust become assumption become expectation become fact until — wham, a contradiction become powerful on the momentum of a life of denial.

All these ephemeral illusions to the power of just wanting something, from a dolly to a place in heaven when one’s done with making Hell of Eden, weave the world within which civilization believes nature is chaos to be conquered and put to work. Being warm and dry with food on the table is never enough for people believing in gods who create worlds by merely willing it so.

I am learning to love life more by freeing it from the fragmenting duality of expectation and let the story unfold as it will, despite my running narrative. I’ve learned the truth about trust is that the external object of our faith is not the determiner of our satisfaction, but the scapegoat for our own judgment of how reality can be made to work for us as opposed to learning how it behaves with or without us to better work with it.

The confusion introduced by my education delayed a realization of how the idea that existence has a master plan, a preexisting purpose, limits the comprehension of the universe and behavior by a far larger population than merely the creationists who swear by it, as mankind destroys the only specimen we’ll ever have on the assumption of knowing why it exists before having a clue as to how it exists. Getting clues from purposeless observation seems to lead me into endless fascination. Purpose observes through a pinhole in a cell wall gleaning anything that might be construed to be fact in the ongoing fairytale of mankind’s godlike “conquering” of nature.

PEOPLE WATCHING

2011-01-17T11:36:00.004-06:00

Legend has it that the Native Americans first photographed by white men believed the camera was stealing their souls just as their lands were being usurped in the westward expansion. The clairvoyance of these early inhabitants was matched by their ability to dance among the girders to construct the nation's first skyscrapers without fear of falling.

In the early 21st century the development of the cell phone made photographers of everyone. An internet application called Photosynthe allowed a global collation of uploaded photos to form a virtual world as solid as the density of photographs taken. Governments, always afraid of the citizenry’s learning of their duplicity, developed surveillance techniques enabling records of public events to be seamlessly complete both visually and historically.

By 2052 the only reason to leave one’s house would be to take pictures of reality. All social interactivity was conducted over the internet by organic computers ingested by the users as symbiots. Reproduction decreased to the point that the birth rate was a matter of concern for the survival of the specie who’d abandoned their bodies, volunteered their souls and integrated into the matrix of vicarious prosthetics once only found so complete among rabid sports fans.

In 2114 there were two distinguishable species of human, the dormant and the awake. The awake lived and played in the reality the dormants only dared to dream about. The lack of reproduction among the cybernetically isolated dormants resulted in a world view shrinking with fewer and fewer picture takers going less and less far from home. The awake kept track of the dormants’ limited world of interest to inhabit the places they’d abandoned and return to natures ways undetected.

Let there be enlightenment.

UP IN YER FACEBOOK, BUDDY

2011-01-16T16:28:00.005-06:00

On a thread that asked what can be done about nuts with guns I began”Each person lives in a different world, their version of reality if you will…” when I realized I had the makings of a blog post to express, so here we are.

Thirty years ago I was friends with a group of folks occupying three adjacent houses communally in a South Austin neighborhood. Two marriages, graduations and other things to do split us up until a 25^th anniversary gathering brought many of us back together for the first time. I realized then how extreme our different directions actually were despite our copacetic coexistence in the eighties.

I had dropped out of a nine year yuppie track at IBM and most of them, ten to fifteen years younger, were preparing to climb into it. There was only one out of forty among them who even wanted to share a joint. It was the starkest example of subverting individual potential into service of the American dream I’d ever experienced … a veritable who’s who of international nuvo riche…I was a fish out of water.

A year later I was searching for traces of the woman I never quite got over and tried Facebook out of last-ditch desperation. I haven’t found her, but I did find a plethora of people I’d known in the past who friended me when they saw I’d joined. One of them was part of that communal group who it appears has gone yet another route to the American dream. After several months of increasingly volatile Glenn Beck informed posts, my friend, “Codger”, peaked out by making his profile picture a gunsight and defying anyone to show evidence that Palin/Beck/Fox had anything to do with the Tucson massacre way before anyone had, just as Palin herself had removed gunsights from her web site.

By pointing out how inflammatory he was being, his cadre of tea party crones came down on me with personal attacks as incoherent as Loughner’s web postings. I unfriended Dodger this morning and will hopefully remain out of the line of their fire. This confrontation also found saner heads who’d known Codger from childhood and were worried about his sanity … thus the thread this post is an attempt to address.

The only solutions to gun violence is to cease manufacturing them … as clear and impossible as outlawing war in a civilization believing in ownership. Although I detest all reasons for guns with exception of subsistence hunting, I cannot help but share the sentiments of citizens who cannot trust a government who clearly does not trust its people, as demonstrated by the furor over wikileaks exposure of government duplicity.

The best fix I have heard of for gun violence is, like all law enforcement and medicine in western civilization, pathological, not preventative. It is to digitally code every bullet so that the anonymity of the shooter disappears. The effectiveness of such a change is bound to have a preventative aspect for crimes where detection is inevitable.

But if you’re around the bend enough to spray a group of anonymous people with automatic gunfire, getting caught is no consideration … in most cases the nuts have offed themselves … unless, of course, they are in the employ of a crime boss or a warring nation. These aberrations have plenty examples of killing being a justifiable solution to problems, no matter how loose the connection between three office buildings being imploded justifying two national wars of annihilation and being fired from your office job justifying going back to the office and putting everyone out of their miserable jobs with a machine gun.

I can imagine no solution to mass domestic murderers except better friends unafraid to intervene, a partial fix is coded ammo and less available firearm capacity.

… NOT MY OX, YOU DON'T …

2011-01-04T14:30:00.004-06:00

There are fixes … and there are cures.

The wretched excesses of our source of wealth being a growth industry became an undeniable blight on the American dream when the cheap litter of the disposable economy settled like leaves in suburban trees and lawns and awoke comfy family’s sense of outrage enough to become a national disgrace. There was enough momentum; had we wanted to cure the problem by clamping down on products and packages to either be biodegradable or recycled through the manufacturers, we might have done so. Here fifty years later it has become apparent we should have done more than plant a tree, a shrub and a bush and don “Don’t Mess with Texas” bumper stickers.

What did happen? Eeewww, get it out of sight. The dumpster and bulldozer industry flourished and the ugly truth of our disregard for Gaia was swept under patches grafted over her skin or injected into her circulation system at sea ——anything to get and keep it out of sight. That was the fix.

I have been aware of most such faux fixes intended to keep down awareness of inherent skullduggery ever since, from the purpose of the NSA, the Warren and the 9/11 Commissions to the excuses of the oil industry swallowed whole cloth by petroholic nations.

What prompted this post was an interview Rachel Maddow had with Paul Rieckhoff about the New GI bill and the influence his veteran’s group IAVA has had in its passage. In speaking of plans for next year, he mentioned addressing the alarming suicide rate of veterans. Wham, it hit me again.

Suicidal or otherwise mentally incapacitated war trauma victims are the canaries in a mine who are being treated as aberrations rather than the tip of an iceberg just so the mining industry can go on. Why would veterans want to cure the cause of the suicides’ problem, when they and so many that have gone before them have all been so thoroughly, obediently invested in its perpetuation. Our wars, food industry and gluttonous litter are to be kept out of the sight of polite society lest we glimpse the Ugly American.

I thank “God” for requiring the kind of faith that believes such cosmetics are both a necessary and an adequate cover — “He” makes them so obvious to we of little or none.

Often, what must be cured must have a fix on to survive.

The fix for Wikileaks' heroic exposure of national disgrace is to band together to criminalize the people's hero and perpetuate what he sought to cure.

NATURE IS NOT VICARIOUS

2010-12-05T10:25:00.003-06:00

Civilization morphs human beings into human doings. This morphology has advanced to the stage where, to experience the feeling of “just being” in our daily lives requires the doing of, not only getting chores out of the way to make room for it, but scheduling the time merely to do the sitting and observing the world from such a relatively inactive proximity to being … with purpose.

Squeezed as our leisure is between the purposeful doings of maintaining and advancing ourselves within civilization, it cannot be considered a waste of time. An overwhelming portion of human doings are devoted to providing the world's doings to be watched during the leisure allotment. An overwhelming portion of human leisuring is spent observing these artificial doings rather than first hand accounts of natural existence. It makes them feel relatively good to not think about what they do otherwise but not enough to quit doing it for good. The victorious, vicarious fan switches off TV and schlubbs back to a life of quiet desperation.

Two separate human doings have crossed paths in my attention in such a way that it evoked this post. One is the demonstrations of solidarity displayed by both fans of “350” and protesters of the BP oil spill. The other is an attempt to get all human faces off facebook to protest child abuse. When I noticed the second doing it hit me … some actually believe nature is as vicarious as they are if they think demonstrations affect the nature of the environment or the nature of the humans against whom they rail.

No matter how many people participate, no matter from how far out in space it can be seen, not one particle of pollution per million or one bad parent per 7 billion was removed from the natural environment by flying and driving to however many solidarity demonstrations we may ever dream up or childhood cartoon animals we post as our portrait. Exercising individual integrity and responsibility for the smallest footprint by being symbiotic with Gaia is the only doing that matters.

I am reminded of times when a show of hands is requested of an audience in response to questions of morality from the podium are posed.

AS ABOVE, SO BELOW … AND EVERYWHERE BETWEEN

2010-12-01T11:18:00.000-06:00

Moths drawn to a light

Photo by Steve Irvine

Atomic Cloud Chamber

BIPARTISAN MY ASS

2010-11-26T18:18:00.001-06:00

Crows seem to feel invulnerable to their natural predators when they are stalking each other, The electricity between all parties is amazing.

I FINALLY FIND A REASON FOR THE ACCORDION

2010-11-26T13:43:00.004-06:00

After spending my lifetime considering the accordion somewhere between the bagpipe (officially declared an instrument of war) and the banjo (officially played in Defiance) for the title of least amusing musical instruments, I am delighted to have witnessed its use in this most amusing way. The downside is that all the other uses of the accordion, with the exception of cahunto music, seem that much less than before.

DOING SOMETHING…

2010-11-22T11:44:00.003-06:00

…about the way it is. The way it, reality, is has two categories: natural and artificial. The natural state of existential reality includes the genetic evolution that gave rise to the human urge to interpret the environment beyond the fight/flight response guiding the daily adventure of finding food for all natural beings.

Creative representations of the environment arose from a sense of appreciation for the beauty and bounty of the natural world as a gesture of belonging.

Creative alterations of the environment arose when the sense of belonging led to the feelings of entitlement to enact preferential elimination of fight/flight instances within familiar habitats. Such measures of comfort require ignoring the increased frequency of fight/flight encounters along its borders. It is this denial of free birth sharing of existence that creates, of joyous being, a dismal doing … something … about altering yet another one of the human doings to better eliminate the less preferred. Eliminating doing is a return to natural being. The balance can be beneficial. I do not consider whatever it takes to scratch an itch a doing.

If a body may be said to own its cells, Gaia owns us. The mind fuck of creationism is that believers think a god made her especially for us to steward in Sunday principle and rape in weekday practice. The mere idea of ownership is the lie poisoning the heart of every distracting conflict along its borders, whether it be faith, nation, gang or friend. Ownership is isolation severing the chain of life. Eliminating owning is a return to natural sharing. The balance can be benevolent. I watch Priest calmly watch the neighbor cat, Willie, and the hen, Nameless One, as they share his bowl in turn this morning, here beside me as I type. I'm reminded of the thorough variation of species in the wild coexisting and evolving side by side by developing diets different enough to turn the cycle of natural life over so thoroughly while matching the population of each to that of its food in response to changing climate.

If our perception of the world may be said to be a fairly high resolution hologram formed by our physically sensitive cell’s input, photoshopped by our propensity to see only what we want to see when we have a question in mind … when we agree on that, I’ll go on. It becomes fairly obvious to the evolving infant consciousness that natural functions draw disapproval requiring altered performance to regain affection. The connection between satisfying authority to maintain good graces buries many wonderful, creative ideas and people waiting for approval to do something for themselves. In extreme cases the artificial self created and maintained to elicit approval is the only image abused children grow up being aware of with no sense of independent capabilities beyond the one who must fool others. They disappear in solitary confinement until the feedback of feeding time reflects their existence once again.

Doing something about how one is perceived is often ironically revealing about the arranger as in the case of the acquaintance I can smell a block away and whose embrace I avoid for the obnoxious cloud that engulfs my senses and leaves me with the taste of talcum on my tongue for hours. I can see no positives in such a doing aimed at impressing people for whom she obviously has no respect and who can only wonder what sort of horrible odor deserves such a douche. The doings about public perception require long memories or protection. Only ventriloquists can talk behind their own back where reputation is ultimately decided. Eliminating the façade is a return to the natural self, motivated by genetic urges and fuck all the too, too proper if they can’t live with it.

The forgoing is a scratched itch.

COLLECTIVE NOUNS

2010-11-21T11:35:00.001-06:00

Just as we call the biological cooperative activated by our cells our body, we erroneously consider the random collection of bodies, arising from and activated within the confines of the North American continent between Canada and Mexico, the “Americans”. Considering how this flock has represented itself to the rest of the planetary population since the end of World War Two, like crows, we might well be called a murder of humans.

Every commercial use of the word “Americans”, from political podium propaganda to snake-oil sales pitches to puritanical pulpit posturing is, in reality, like a blade dividing the ones who buy the particular use of the collective noun from the hyphenated and “un” American versions while ostensibly, ideally including everyone. And doesn’t everyone just love ideals?

The American Dream, conjured futures of wall to wall prosthetics and three hour work week for everyone, was the ideal prophesied upon the United States’ victorious emergence from WWII through the might of our industrial war machine being bigger than Hitler’s. Automation, yahoo.!

The American reality sixty years later is wall to wall prosthetics in the homes of the owners of the war machine’s corporations (those heroes) being powered by wannabes (US troops beta testing combat gear and inner city control techniques for swat teams back home) and wage slaves working sixty hours a week just to put food on the table and afford to buy the latest version of the greatest ever. As John Brunner so sagely observed, “It’s supposed to be automatic, but actually, someone must push the button.” The US is annexing button pushers world wide to keep the ideal alive for the prophecy profiteers and the employment up for “Americans.” If you can’t get work, I guess you know where your job’s gone and what subset you’re in.

Somewhere in the history of man someone declared they knew a purpose to existence that was so attractive to the human ego that it caught on despite overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary. Imagine one’s self as being the purpose of all existence, created for you by your omnipotent father and given you to steward forevermore with his behavior as a model of administration. Whooee, I’ll take som’o’ that, and som’o’ this here and get away from that, it’s mine and it’ll cost ya or I’ll turn ya t’ salt. Even scientific atheists cling to the privileged superiority of man as they twist and commodify nature just as money fueled purpose has done to them. It is no coincidence that money accrues to the heads of religions and corporations in a culture where the reality of the individual existence is subverted to the ideal of a corporate heaven, or else!

Shedding our collective nouns until we get to the always fresh reality of every instant of our life is a cure for the confusion they cause: American, Idahoan, Married, Accountant, Baptist, Black, Female, Animal, earthling ……… genetically guided response to existence by observing a sensory hologram.

This rant courtesy of Pisces Iscariot’s email rattling the cage from both sides of which we write and sometimes rage. I have found a period in my life where, with no oxen being gored directly, I have been satified with watching annoyances dissolve without feeling the necessity of expressing them to others anecdotally or tiraditionally. I have formed more words in scrabble with my pal in Chicago than I’ve devoted to philosophical revelations and to which I will return with the letters E-T-C-S-R-R-I to fit somewhere into Bert's first word, B-O-O-T-I-E.

EVIL BASTARDS

2010-10-24T12:00:00.000-05:00

SEEDED

2010-10-20T08:42:00.003-05:00

The lust for comfort murders the passions of the soul.

-Khalil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)

I am an event, part of an eternally changing instant. I trace patterns of similarity in events and feel the comfort of snuggling into labeling such likenesses with words used by some of the events similar to me. I am curious about my relationship to other events and ours to the ever changing here now of the present.

I perceive that the pattern of events events labeled human, by learning words to define similarities out of the variety of the whole, tend to become habitually dependent on the relatively inertial stability of confining curiosity to traditional labels as some form of impeccable logic by infallible authority in the tautological world of language.

I perceive that the most devoted to precision in this word world can no longer think without words or hear the less articulate. With language as prime stimulus for response these events most resemble sound activated voice recorders, silent unless spoken to or button pushed. Much like editors, their worldview is a collage of clippings of reports of hearsay from authorities outstanding in their field. Ideas no longer arise from the preverbal depths of their genetic memory. They can no longer sit still, alone, away from all signs of man’s existence without it being a test of endurance until they can find events they know the name of or someone to listen once more. Instinct and intuition have been demonized as the work of Satan, or worse, anarchy.

Without words, such hopeless addicts might never be led back out of their invisible prison by inspirational crumbs left by earlier departures in sublime poetry, song and tale about their very struggle to return to the clarity of our predefined nature, that focal point from which all perceptions, interpretations, patterns and words, emerge and remerge — precisely, here now.

It's the path I'm on…

FOUND

2010-10-19T11:19:00.005-05:00

“… children guessed, but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew”.
——e. e. cummings

This morning my friend, Nikki, posted just the right thought to trigger my return to this blog after a month of Scrooge-like stinginess in expressing the wealth of inspiration I’ve experienced.

The people and property adjacent to my stomping grounds within the Dawgranch have changed, and with these changes a more communal atmosphere seems to be brewing among folks who had seemed to be content minding their own business over the six years I’ve thrived here.

I had to comment on Nikki’s post, …”adulthood is a phase of forgetfulness, enhancing our appreciation of nature when we re-emerge into children’s guesses with such wisdom.”

Fences were torn down, abandoned gardens were weeded, the sounds of hammers’ banging home nails on Homer’s recording studio remodel of Donna’s bedroom and back porch rang out in random overlay of the bird song and dog bark spontaneous symphony of nature, all the dogs and cats and chickens and people mixing like never before. My inner child sees the realization of utopian dreams more possible in the offing than any time since the games I’d played with other pre-school children living along the deep, verdant ravine we made our world - away from adults and world war two. We’re back to gentle guessing, with the acquired wisdom of experiencing the fallacy in the certainty required to make of this same nature a soulless commodity for the machine that shaped us to be eager cogs from the first day of public education.

Who Knows? Time will tell and there’s more of that than anyone here seems to need to know what to do with. Maybe (RIP RAW).

NO THING IN NATURE

2010-09-14T11:25:00.006-05:00

If I knew I should die tomorrow,

I would plant a tree today.

~Stephen Girard

Photo: A H Palma

There are no things in nature. Things are the lifeless labels we attempt to attach to elusive events. We seek shelter from hurricanes as they occur and become experts at talking about the remnants of its event, the things we can pick up, name and pass judgment upon long after the event is being hidden from elsewhere. To the western civilized, educated mind nature no longer exists; trees aren’t beings, they’re things called trees, just sitting there; can make things out of ‘em, can burn ‘em.

Most of the very natural processes the human body experiences during a lifetime occur without the awareness, therefore without willful control, of the educated mind. Hunger and nausea, those bodily messages strong enough to get through the distractions of things being pursued in the artificial world to let its driven driver know the tank is either empty or overfilled with bad fuel.

Nature is one continuous, omnidirectional, purposeless chain reaction occurring to every scale of individual cell throughout the universe. Man has made of the endless event a thing labeled life, which he believes his god granted to those things that move without his pushing on them.

Lest I be suspected of picking on western civilization in respect to the marketplace thingathon attitude with which it treats the earth, histories older than any western medicine speak of the east considering health a matter of deep understanding of these bodily process through self contemplation; surgery and doctor’s fees were forbidden.

A Google earth scan of the island of Bali revealed that wherever the volcanic terrain was level enough there were tiered rice paddies and villages, right down to the shores of the island, along narrow ridges and in the craters. I knew this of eastern civilization’s respect for integrating their lives into the natural landscape symbiotically and of the age of the tradition judging from the complete coverage of the landscapes including pagoda temples on the peaks of the most precarious promontories. What I just recently grokked was how long the Balinese have been aware of the benefit of forests when, scanning the mountainsides too steep for paddies, I noticed the patterns in some of the most mature forests indicating that these rice farmers have been replanting their lumber supply for centuries. How enlightened these “primitive” people are.

If Bali is considered a third world, nature must be cooking up some sort of layer inversion to turn things back into events for everyone.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.

The next best time is now.

~ Chinese Proverb

COLOR BLIND LEADING THE BLIND

2010-09-11T23:24:00.001-05:00

As we filed into our bleacher seats I could see them all. A Howitzer among the grove of pines, a Patton tank draped to look like a hillock, the machine-gun emplacement beneath a log — they all stood out like shadow puppets on a blank wall.

“Out there before you, we have hidden several points of enemy attack behind camouflage,” announced today’s combat training instructor over his bullhorn.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the moment I crossed the threshold from avidly attempting to become a “normal person” in western civilization to preferring to remain who and what I find my nature to be, despite the arbitrary cultural meritocracy imposed on the entire field of unique variations we individuals are at birth.

That experience in the woods of Camp Lejeune, N. C. occurred when I was seventeen and here, fifty-four years later, I am still discovering ancient embedded warps blended in to make me seem normal to parents, teachers, drill instructors, professors, bosses, policemen, general acquaintances and strangers on the street — in so far as they care that their sense of normal is not violated.

Imagine three infants having colored lenses implanted at the time of birth, one red, one yellow and the third blue. None of them would see the colors of reality as it is. When anyone points to an object and tells them it is green, whatever color their filter causes each one to see they will call green — and every other object with that color they will call green. They will grow up agreeing on the colors of everything until the day doctors remove the implanted lenses. They will be viewing reality as it is for the first time, but, because of their conditioning, they can no longer agree on the names of the colors.

This scenario was initially dreamt up as a metaphor for three newborns from three disparate birthplaces absorbing the local mytho-cultural norm as a requirement to satisfy their longing for belonging to wherever it is they find themselves. The removal of the lenses occurs when the three separately acculturated grown-ups meet in a mutually alien location and must describe reality as it is to one another — they must first discover the existence of their filters before they may be used to triangulate the entire spectrum of reality as it is. I use three subjects for the possibility of a resolution to the direct conflict likely between any two, such as exploitation or war.

This post is inspired by the emerging realization of a second layer to the lens metaphor going back to the already absolute uniqueness within the range of the human genome of each of the three individuals at birth, the field for which each culture acts as the normalizing filter compensating for the natural differences, the color blindness of each.

Although it is quite natural for denizens of a habitat to form a familiarity with the ways of one another to not only find food but to avoid becoming a meal themselves by recognizing dissonance in the normal passage of the day, human cultures have, through language, created mythical, institutionalized norms by which each newborn is thoroughly indoctrinated before being allowed to experience nature as it is in the normal passage of the day. If we are not aware of the myth of the culture within which we live, we have no chance of seeing nature as it is, much less understand how another culture could see it so differently.

Humans are animals able to convince themselves nature has the purpose intended by a creator as a gift of property for their exploitation as its superiors. Cancer is a disease convincing the body’s cells to join them in making the whole rest of the body something to convert. If western civilization’s myth could possibly play out, the biomass of Earth, Gaia, will become nothing but humans and their genetically modified crops, period. The body dies before cancer can eat it all.

WHO ARE YOU?

2010-08-31T12:37:00.002-05:00

There seems to be two basic categories of attitude about one’s life held by my fellow humans. We are either organs integral to the living organism of the planet from which we arose and without whose health we wouldn’t exist or voracious tenants in a supermarket shopping carte blanche as granted us by the big spooky propiator in the sky.

The undeniable reality of our arising from and decaying back to the earth defines and qualifies our belonging here as earthlings. Belonging to the obviously artificial creations of civilization, nation, religion, corporation, et al ad nauseum has obscured the undeniable truth of our primarily being cells of Gaia, exceptional only to ourselves and the creatures we’ve domesticated to think like we do.

I experienced this difference in full force when I dropped out of my yuppie career with IBM and left their compound to integrate into the beautiful village of ’72 Austin. It was like a military base’s relationship with the townies, temporary and disinterested, another stop along the way. We as members of wastern civilization have a industrial/military complex about our existence on earth resulting in its commodification and destruction.

The global warming debate is a distraction from the undeniable poison and pollution our way of life injects into the circulation of the planet allowing oil profiteers time to suck the last drops from the most remote location, environment be damned.

You can either drink from the stream or a plastic bottle, still your choice.

NO THEFT

2010-08-23T07:18:00.000-05:00

Thank you for reminding me, dear thief

If I have, it’s only to share — you knew that

Of things, there’s always too many

As I learn to own up to my self

SAME STAFF, NEW JOBS

2010-08-16T15:01:00.007-05:00

I’ve had another of my hare brained (or is that hair brained) ideas that are born of two examples of the US government’s being run by dollars and sense is just small change. One of the biggest costs of health care, the bureaucratic staff who make the eligibility decisions, is unneeded in a single payer system, more than compensating for the increase in service given. One of the arguments against such sense, made by insurance’s congressional shill’s is that saving money by ending useless jobs is somehow cruel to the people hiding in them.

My suggestion is that rather than pink slipping these paper pushers we just start giving them new application forms to play little Caesar with. These would be applications for eligibility for continued future use in a petroleum independent economy. There is no necessary evil we must embrace, lest it be our need to be served we cannot face. Shedding the spoiled skin of what I’ve come to call wastern civilization (the happy accident of a typo) is the end of a dream become nightmare.

In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose. -Madame Anne Sophie Swetchine, mystic (1782-1857)

The entire government is elected by people living next to an oil refinery and breathing the toxic fumes emanating therefrom, saying “I know it’s terrible, but it’s the smell of money.” They're just an exaggeration of our own corruption. There is no anarchist meeting at which we all get better together — individual integrity revolts when it will.

•

Relevant addendum: Something to emphasize the contribution individuals make to the problems for which we like to blame the corporation that we support with our money — The entire amount of oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico this summer amounts to that required to produce just one day's worth of plastic in bottled water, as ubiquitous as cell phones.

FOOD FOR THINKERS, POISON TO THE FAITH FILLED

2010-08-04T09:17:00.002-05:00

Here are a few of the ponders I’ve gleaned from my journal that, once I condensed them to their essential kernels, may, taken with a swig of ganjava, result in an expanded mind…

•

The Golden Rule, a simple statement of the symbiosis required for man’s relationship with all of nature, including one another, is obviously either misunderstood or is being purposely undermined considering the booming business of incessantly passing laws to patch up flaws in civilization’s premise of human exceptional superiority over all other life forms.

•

“Majority Rules’ either strips individuals of their autonomy in the minority or protects those surrendering autonomy in preference to sycophantic anonymity in the majority.

•

Death is like sex in high school; if you knew how many times you just missed it, you’d be paralyzed.” — Dead Like Me

•

Language ignores the violence fomented by verbal misunderstandings while usurping the credit for understandings made possible only by the reasoning of the participants whose genetic memory is basically identical, regardless of the words transmitted.

•

Liberal advocates of government responsibility for individual welfare must ignore the debilitating effect on personally evolved integrity to the point that the government appears necessary.

•

Karma: looking over one’s shoulder in fear of retribution for hopefully hidden malice makes going forward more liable to injury in innocent situations.

•

Our institutionalized tradition of abusing our natural environment contaminates the internal systems in a cycle civilization is loath to cease, preferring instead to grow a pathological pharmaceutical industry to further nullify our body’s natural preventative and curative systems. This half-assed promulgation of pathology over prevention is also seen in the disposition of the disposable culture’s preference for land fills rather than stop the production of packaging and products destined for the midden.

•

Can we ever recognize what we learn from life without it being an answer to a question or has our education obliterated our ability to translate preverbal thought?

•

Certainty, like faith, seeks nothing but converts, while fresh ideas are dismissed for lack of footnotes.

•

Twelve step programs validate the parking of one’s pain in the sympathy of fellows equally unable to live alone.

•

The rules of war are suspended when it is waged against an enemy declared to be “illegal” combatants by the wagers. WTF?

•

When genetically generated instincts are declared destructive to civilized behavior individuals are persuaded to turn against themselves by fashioning an acceptable façade to fake self-esteem based on a favorable reputation. These traitors to themselves make mighty manipulable mendicants. Isolate them from others and they cease to exist and will do anything to escape solitary confinement.

•

Like the big bucket on strip mining behemoths mindlessly cutting through tree roots, water passages and animal dens searching for fossil fuel, purpose leaves destruction of everything ignored by its myopically intended goal.

•

What kind of culture is characterized by allowable questions?

•

Good ideas cannot be owned or patented since anyone is capable of independent recognition of truth wherever it occurs.

•

Gibbon’s observed that paganism’s multitude of nature gods were for the common folk equally true, for the philosophers equally false and for the magistrates equally useful.

•

Salesmen know that if they don’t take no for an answer people will say yes to get rid of them.

•

Nature weaves a silk noose as culture’s reward for its abuse.

•

Candidates political hypocrisy reinforces the opinions of voters from both sides and swing voters already know they lie and vote for the lesser of two evils, so their mendacity never hurts them at the polls.

•

Mistaking civilization for nature is like passing laws to make wishes come true.

•

The hairlessness of humans destined them alone to find fire useful.

•

Pride in accomplishment is the heretics next victim.

•

That’s enough for a while. The number and variety should evoke many comments from those who think for them selves and bewilderment from those who don’t

HERENOWTHERETHEN

2010-08-03T09:01:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow is the picture attitude paints of the past. Plans are attitude’s attempts to rearrange tomorrow to more match its painting. The present is where the painted and the arbitrary state of its paintings are on exhibit; the garden and the vase; where we are and how we want to affect this earthly home. Attitude is our most intimate responsibility as organs sharing the health of the living organism, earth. Understanding this leads to a freedom claiming to own any of it never will.

GEORGE KNEW

2010-08-03T08:30:00.001-05:00

A MOUNTAIN OF DIFFERENCE

2010-07-30T15:13:00.003-05:00

QUALITY/QUANTITY : ECOLOGY/ECONOMY

Here is a duality opposed across a mysterious point. Quality depends on benefit to the arbitrary purpose of individuals or the general welfare of a group and quantity is the account of an amount, verifiable by each and all. The confusion between good/bad with large/small seems to be a major disruptor in human’s ability to find peace on earth.

The appealing quality of quantity is the safe anonymity sought by the herding instinct found in all animal life. No longer a regular on any predator’s menu, humans had only to fear natural disasters — and each other when compelled to crowd into too tight herds around too little food. Totalitarian agriculture spawned artificial population growth around the silos of surplus. The quantity of days in the future one had food for in the present became a prime quality of life once the ability to hunt and gather nature’s seasonal offering was lost. Tokens relieved the necessity to store one’s share of the crops and soon became the medium of trade for more than mere food — so much so that in developed nations food is less than a quarter of their all consuming budget.

This brings us to the juncture of two seemingly opposed concerns around the same mysterious point; two words with the prefix, eco, from Greek oikos=house.

Add nemein=manage and you get economy, managing the affairs of a household. For centuries mankind was so busy trying to maintain his invented civilization that, until as recently as the sixties, household was the place from which nature was kept at bay. As the term, household, expanded with the growing dependence of individuals on economy of burgeoning civilizations, its relationship to nature has remained one of a manger of goods for human consumption to the rest of the world as his god granted infinite resource.

Western civilization’s attitude about the health of the planet reminds me of a story tellingly told me back in ’62 by the son of the mayor of Greenville, Mississippi about share croppers living on his family land, “They’re so ignernt, they tear siding off their shack to stoke their stove in the winter.”

When the conversation is about money no one but the personhood of corporations, from nations to fledgling factories, have the vocabulary required to express the logic of the bottom line, the bigger the number the greater the quality to minds bent on either owning the most of the last usable chunk of earth or, having shit this nest, traveling to the stars.

Well, sir, along came the scientists who, like Galileo, Copernicus and Darwin further dismantled the human homocentric myth of god granted exceptionality and expanded the household built of civilization’s commodities to the biological interdependence of the entire planet, spaceship earth.

Add logos=study and you get ecology. Science revives the indigenous understanding of Pachamama, Gaia, the living planet, the organism of which we have always been a part throughout our cultural path as self-evolved aliens requiring more and more isolation from our own individually failed responsibility for the usury and mindless waste we work every day to perpetuate. Land fills and oceans collect the charcoal left from burning the siding civilization tears off Pachamama to exact the ideal conditions for separately evolving neohumans.

Nature, considered as our household, cannot be managed without the purpose of making it into something other than it is. Considering nature a wondrous, evolving habitat event to be studied undisturbed until mutually beneficial interaction is understood, is a genetic quality every child is born supremely equipped to do. These tools are useless for managing civilization’s invisible big house and buried beneath the little red schoolhouse with the metal detector at the door.

Quality varies between extremes of ecstasy and suckage. Quantity varies between having everything and owing everything. Economy varies from complete control to complete submission. Ecology varies from healthy to dead.

HERE

2010-07-18T13:42:00.005-05:00

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
—Democracy, by Leonard Cohen

I arrived here when nature rained me out of my home in the heart of the city.

I’d only one reason to leave my comfortable cave after sixteen years of settling in and it didn’t stand a chance of my acting on it, what with my proximity to the headquarters of Whole Foods a block away.

When my wife left, I realized I had never fed myself — from mother’s mammon to military mess to campus cafeteria to married meals I’d always been served. Since rejoining the single way of life thirty-three years ago I’ve evolved an organic understanding of my body’s urge for and reaction to what I feed it. I learned to enjoy preparing healthy food from its life reaffirming spirit to the very physical benefits of satisfying my urges in the most beneficial way.

I began cooking for my friends out of a kitchen in our favorite hangout, the Hole in the Wall. The bean counter practicality of quantity over quality eventually reined me in and drove me out by requiring that I serve industrial food. I left with valuable experience of life in the service lane from both the server and the served perspectives as a metaphor for what keeps mankind on the treadmill of this ruinously ravenous experiment that is western civilization.

An unusual spate of rain softened soil around the roots and soaked the leaves of the hackberry that had grown out from under my house beyond the tipping point of its angled trunk. The roots popped the wall and floor beams next door as it crept to final rest across the street over several cars of patrons dining at the restaurant up the block. When the city came out to clear the road they also noticed how out of code the turn of the century building was and notified the owner to comply. The business from patron parking outweighed the rent the restaurant collected on the space, and once again, the bean counters disrupted a groovy gig.

Here is where I have learned to complete that cycle of feeding myself by inserting myself into the natural chain of life as a planter and feeder of the food I eat and pass on. My broccoli is built of the compost of last year’s garden and leaf fall and my eggs are built of the insect protein literally littering this eight-acre spot on the bank of the Colorado. I have yet to do well enough to avoid trips to the grocery store but I have learned enough to know I could with more incentive. My carbon footprint is a bus trip to town and back, pollution of processing and transporting what products I buy and my electricity bill. I have worked out plans for a solar driven tipi and will be working on that for the rest of the foreseeable future.

The only other axe I was grinding, my disastrous relationship with the daughter who’d not been in any of my homes since she was four, disappeared like a bad dream when we hugged each other standing by Ella Falls and Piddle Pond last month.

Here I am, as vulnerable as I have ever been. Hit me if you can find an opening.

Turns out that this is my 500th post.

LAST RESORT

2010-07-12T07:17:00.001-05:00

Posting this video represents my last blatant attempt to influence others' thinking about the prediction of global warming and their responsibility for the health of the nature from which we arose and to which we will return.

I will, however, continue to post personal experiences and the ideas they spawn about our responsibility to become less antagonistic to the rest of life over which we have, by some disastrously perpetuated mistake, assumed mythicaly granted dominion and to become more symbiotic with the health of the planet of who's body we are merely a dependent part.

FOR THE RECORD

2010-06-28T23:01:00.001-05:00

Rachel nails both big oil and government safety concerns in one swell foop. She also brought national attention to the untended indifference of their merely announcing the miles of boom deployed with no intention of making it work.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

HOW DARE I?

2010-06-26T04:59:00.004-05:00

How dare I not only desire to maintain my life but to enjoy it? Maintaining life entails protecting it against predators, diseases, competitors and fatal acts of nature; those things that would end it. Enjoying life entails consciously evolving the experiential wisdom to better assess events as they exist, irrelevant to any purpose with which one might intend to access them.

When I first began my graphics business I gave it the slogan “dare to be happy” when I realized what a challenge it was to remain happy in the public face of gloom painted in pixels of individual faces drained of brighter possibilities as they wrestled with the daily demands of a past traded in for a promise.

This “happy” I dare to be can be thought of as the intrinsic energy of the being I always am, from birth to my inevitable death. Daring the happy being to manifest itself in events is a matter of realizing benefit results only from the generosity of a happy being — all else entails new debt.

The challenge is in remaining aware of this ample energy while daily dealing within a society constantly being conditioned to atone for multiple inadequacies from original sin to acne by authorities damning the naturally happy individual variation of the human genome we cannot help but be at our deepest core, no matter how buried under guilt and almost forgotten our own energy may be.

The belief that happiness is a carrot on a stick, to be earned to be deserved, is the western civilization version of the middle-eastern, “Man is riding a camel in search of a camel.”

Photos by Heather Knight, my daughter

HELPING

2010-06-25T12:53:00.005-05:00

We couldn’t help but know. We were looking in all the holes in their pods and even had mobile agents inside. It was a brilliant plan.

We’d known about them since before the bristle cone pine was a seedling. Like all the rootless ones, they had to actually touch each other to reproduce. Like all the rooted ones, we appreciated their proliferation of our reproduction through postprandial perambulations across the entire intersphere.

About 3.5 degrees ago, there appeared among the rootless ones an upright, relatively hairless kind of nursing being, totally unique in the 15 orbits since the birth of the intersphere. For the first time a kind of being began manipulating other beings for more than life sustaining food. They mutated large areas of the intersphere without considering the well being of the lives they sacrificed for their own greedy convenience.

Such convenience snowballed exponentially until the increase in population around such nodes could no longer sustain life. They devised isolation pods, both permanent and mobile, within which to survive their own poisonous excesses spewed into the atmosphere. It appeared this latest world leading civilization had become sufficiently advanced technologically and narrow minded enough in their greedy purpose to set the life of the intersphere back at least 11 orbits.

Having spawned from the same matter as the rest of the intersphere, they eventually manifested their genetic tendency towards symbiotic balance by creating a hardwire system of transmitters and receivers of airborne signals just to mediate their isolated loneliness. Since it was so like the organic intersphere from which they’d isolated themselves, it was no surprise they called it the internet.

For the first twenty orbits of the intersphere around its food the internet served to expand technological and sociological exchanges at a phenomenal rate until it just couldn't keep up with the growing demand. We also noticed the dwindling ratio of rootless beings touching each other for reproduction to those touching them selves unreproductively and thereby the birthrate among them fell as well.

It was too slow to avoid the obvious environmental crises their still overpopulated indulgences made inevitable unless the internet improved. We helped it along with free uninterrupted, high speed, hi res, instant reception by connecting it to the intersphere. It's been five hundred solar orbits now and today we’re are going to sever our connection, having successfully eliminated the genetic flaw that once caused beings to value the spectacle over direct experience with the nature from which they arose. The upright survivors are the progeny of those who were never fooled by the spectacle to begin with.

They sleep in our limbs and on our leaves … and are fully aware of the intersphere.

GETTING PRIORITIES STRAIGHT

2010-06-25T07:26:00.003-05:00

When I stated there was nothing left for me “to do” in my last post it was in reference to action resulting in my gaining better symbiosis with my environment and personal relationship with loved ones. Its not that I couldn’t improve my responsibility further, but that having learned to see nature as it is needs no doing of maintenance beyond remaining aware of the glaring difference between such direct experience of my life and second hand information becoming more virtually realistic every day as every conversation seems to be an exchange of memes received from the electronic “real world” of western civilization.

The connection re-realized between my daughter and I last week has let me feel confident that we are one person in two places to the degree that information from her is as pure as my own sensory system supplies me. She is my eyes on the Mississippi Gulf Coast as she tells me of her son’s work captaining a boat for BP every day and the experience of the filth and fumes on his clothing now that globs of crude oil have reached the barrier islands off shore. I no longer have to wonder what is the truth about the reported disaster, the results have gotten beyond my mistrust of the media and are affecting my grandson’s health, no speculation to it.

My hip requires me to stop and regenerate if I walk as far as a quarter mile at a good clip. I would be no better than a glob of oil on the beach if I were to go there to try to help in a job that may require every able-bodied person in the country to actively participate in remedying the situation far more directly than holding hands and praying. Although I always thought it an ironic obviator of faith to the faithful, I’ve gotta agree that their “god helps them who help them selves.”

The Gulf of Mexico is the spawning ground for a giant portion of sea and shore life and the food supply for walking, hopping and flying life all over the planet. This blossoming vortex continuously unwinds its contents out into the larger Atlantic and the rest of the world; a slow motion version of Ice Nine, enough crude oil could kill us all. Whether you go alone or with a club, if you are able-bodied and care about planetary life I recommend an integrity check on your ability to respond in a directly effective way.

As indirect as it is, this blog is my best idea for calling for individuals to get their priorities straight about life on Earth. If you can find something more useful for me to do, don’t hesitate to let me know.

FINALLY, FATHER'S DAY

2010-06-20T14:32:00.000-05:00

It feels as though my life has always had a direction based on overcoming the friction opposing my curiosity’s free will. Like the tail orients a kite, my concentration has been on reconciling a rift between my daughter and me by both working on myself and attempting to communicate with her at different stages throughout the 38 years of separation. Each failure was like tying another bow on the tail threatening to drag the kite down unless the wind of my desire strengthened.

Sometimes physical metaphors don’t do justice to spiritual phenomena. For the past three days Heather has sat beside me as we hung out in my little Dawgranch haven as if the past was a figment of both our imaginations. Any idea of forgiveness or atonement or injury or righteousness dissolved upon our initial embrace and we were as we were when she was a child.

I’m not sure if there is anything left for me “to do” in this life. I have only the will, but not the capacity to move western civilization toward a more symbiotic relationship with nature. So I think I’ll just let experience wash over me without filtering it for clues to my imaginary discomforts for a while and see how that works out.

ATTITUDES OF OWNERSHIP

2010-06-18T10:55:00.002-05:00

Synapses stretched like piano wire between nodes of knowing nature as free as it is and points of perceiving the suffering man’s usury has wrought upon it all, I strain to speak the simple truth about the origins of atrocious war but words mean far too many things to be so clear.

There is nothing I have learned that can spare anyone the experience required to learn it for oneself. The closest I can imagine anyone coming is through metaphor poignant enough to remind one of the already known in genetic or experiential memory.

The history of the biological evolution of homo sapiens sapiens is replayed in the gestation of the quickening egg. The history of the western civilization’s evolution is replayed by enforced education in the local culture like molten matter injected into molds spewing multiple, invulnerable action figures varying around the theme of entitlement to all-you-can-eat-and-take-home-for-later.

By enacting such god granted stewardship with our attitudes of ownership we have abandoned hunting and gathering to take up assembly lines of crops and crappy crutches for crippled capacities to do anything but serve or be served wherever we sit, consuming and disposing in front of the silvery screen spectacle of the “real world” produced for our protection, our mental prophylactic against direct contact with the natural world.

It’s not like we’re living like there’s no tomorrow. Western civilization believes in tomorrow so much it ignores the present, right at our feet; the only place anything ever happens. While death to an entire ecosystem pours out of a gaping wound in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the criminals and the police piss away the emergency of the still ongoing crime arguing the specific ownership of guilt and reparations to be settled sometime in the theoretical, non existent future. Had he been a CEO of US or BP, the Dutchman that saved the dike would have failed miserably, having no fingers not pointed at everyone but himself.

Efforts to stop the flow are stragedies of the worst humor and the antiquated cleanup technologies are inadequately deployed in a toxic atmosphere being underestimated by the same department who sent first responders to respiratory hell during the 9/11 cleanup. My grandson missed a trip to visit me with his mother today so he could stay home and captain one of the cleanup boats off the Mississippi coast. Heather, my dear Lilwave, says they haven’t noticed any peculiar odors there in Pascagoula, but, I gotta say, anyone who can live in the already toxic atmosphere of that little burg has foregone any claim to olfactory discrimination. They sarcastically refer to it as the smell of money. Oh, yeah. The real world where everything is ours to have.

BUSTED

2010-06-13T06:14:00.008-05:00

Printing was to the bible what the internet is to politics. When the infallible word of the creator was made manifest, to be devoured by candlelight in the hovels of the more common folk, the patchwork quilt of a story, originally told to keep the clergy on the same page as they paraphrased purity from the pulpits, became shredded like a pig in piranhas. And the miracle was that each variety of bite taken remained infallible when digested and shat, despite the contradictory odors of the piles. Ah, certainty, such a relief from thinking. Don’t like the infallible, fine. Make up your own version and call that the truth, “… so help you god”. Ever notice that, no matter how personally individual one’s variety of belief in the same brand may be, faith requires all others to be wrong and on the road to hell. Such an outlook has made hell of living on the natural heaven this Eden of a planet is within the environs of the Gomorrah of western civilization, just to put it in biblical terms.

There also occurred across the land a falling away from the entire guilt trip the church had been laying on the faithful for the past fifteen hundred years as the more perceptive recognized the book to be a sales guide/brochure cobbled together from selected legends and myths five hundred years after the “fact” of the hero’s existence. Among them there formed two camps, the atheists who rejected the existence of a controlling spirit in a curious, chaotic world and the exploiters who began using the mechanisms of faith in the myth to pose as earthly authority over the material portion of humans no matter what they believed about god. Along with being unable to enter heaven without god we’re now unable to enter life without papers from earthly authority.

The internet fact checked John McCain out of contention. The internet is fact checking Barack Obama’s campaign promises into lies, just like every other shill for the shadowy shilling that’s come down the pike.

The disaster of this oil spill exposes nature to a blow the entire world will suffer for generations. While helping set booms in the gulf individual volunteers were searched in a cull for illegal immigrants by ICE; such meticulous attention to irrelevant detail. While leaving the inevitable overreach of greedy technology being operated by bean counters to gush billions of gallons of suffocating, poisonous crude oil into the heart of a planetary life blossom endlessly cycling her contents out among the continents, the responsible, real criminals, their overseers and the government elected to oversee the overseers have all been found to be one not-so-clandestine corporation. The shock and dismay. Bad oil companies. Bad government. They made us spend half our income on prosthetics only aliens to earth would consider necessities for life — within the Borg ship as it rapes and shits on the planet.

My previous video post, If Cursing Makes You Feel Better …, featured the lack of any real concern about the cleanup of the oil spill, even with the antiquated inadequate boom technology to harness surface slicks. Rachel Maddow either saw the video or picked up on the same glaring lack of concern on her investigative journey to the barrier islands off Louisiana and has taken it national.

Without waiting for Obama or any other blameworthy irresponsibility to give the orders, responsible, fit individuals should charter buses, catch trains, head for the most imperiled part of the gulf coast, don hazmat gear and begin proper booming and skimming. Full disclosure: I am not going to the coast-my lack of strength and stamina would only be in the way. There are technologies of absorption (aerogel) and separation (Costner’s Centrifuge) finally being given the green light, but the oil is reaching the wetlands now. BP get out of our way, there’s a revolution going on.

Or ought to be.

IN A GARDEN OR A VASE?

2010-06-12T19:02:00.006-05:00

“Lived here all your life?”

“Not, yet.”

As open to sharing my love now as I have been at any time in my life so far, I feel fairly certain I shall never meet another person for whom I could feel such a complete love as I shared with Mary Gardner.

She was a bartender and I was a drinker. She was twenty and I was forty. She was the wisest person I'd ever met and I was an eager disciple. When it became apparent that we couldn’t get enough of each other in the bloom of new love’s discoveries about each other and the oneness we formed she gave me a book by Jorge Amado, Gabriella: Cinnamon and Cloves. The message of her gift I took from the situation wherein our heroine, Gabriella, is the best thing to ever happen to the cash register at Nacib’s bar.

Her beauty and lively warmth kept the seats and standing room full of his jealous and admiring friends, business was good. Nacib and Gabriella were in love and their mood had much to do with the respect with which his friends flirted with her and how safe that made her feel to flirt freely in return. It was win-win for everyone.

Beautiful story short: they got married, mood changes, business fell off, acrimony, misery —— Nacib consults his oldest friend who asks him to consider, “Which is more beautiful, a flower in a garden or a vase?” The simple metaphor was so powerful it may have had the effect of a self fulfilling prophecy on me in that, when Mary left to attend art school in Atlanta, I cried over the broken vase in a shameful display of attachment rather than be glad for her return to the garden of her natural habitat.

This post is inspired by the realization that this metaphor also applies to the threshold between the beauty of humans and the effect of putting their blooming evolution in the terminal isolation of the vase of civilization like some sort of Petri dish purpose cooked up by people who did not bother to understand that with which they fucked. Public education is a self-replicating pottery shed with no garden in sight.

I’ve missed Mary for thirty years now, glimpses of human beauty come and go with the vapors from the vase.

Like the tide follows the moon,
My spirits rose and fell
With the corners of your mouth.

Tearing the hook from my heart
I threw you back to the sea
To see you better reflect the sun.

You’re so unique —
Nothing reminds me of you
But what you've touched.

You've touched me
And my eyes see everything.

There is nowhere you aren’t.
You’re inside me
And I sail everywhere.

•

This is a reprint from my otherblog, dualiytilaud, as I bring it to a close

JUST A LITTLE WHILE AGO…

2010-06-01T10:18:00.012-05:00

Me and Mabe and Homer were sitting around Mabe’s front porch enjoying the changing angle of the shadows of the early morning Earth turn, sipping coffee and passing the pipe.

The dogs were either lying around calmly soaking up rays, scratching their back with their feet up in the air or sparring with each other in celebration of such a beautiful dawning day.

A hen announces her proud accomplishment from her nest while her sisters devour some crumbled corn tortillas at our feet gossiping in quiet purring clucks only they understand.

Small birds nervously drop down to the chicken feed cast in the yard, relying on their fellows in the trees to warn them of the cat. The cat, in his new, improved, tail-down stealth stalk, approaches from the direction with the tallest grass, still unaware of the lookouts above. Although I keep his bowl full and he has yet to even get close to catching a bird, his instincts demand he try just for the sport of it all. A grackle joins the game by flying directly at him a mere three inches higher than the crouching cat’s vertical, claw extended paws outstretched explosion a good six feet straight up.

The chickens, cat and small dogs run for cover when the giant red hawk’s shadow stains their open play ground while the big dogs chase the dark spot in hopes the hawk will come down close enough to pluck out of the air as they have several panicked chickens and a peacock.

Sparky, the bass player in his and Homer's band, the Cramdens, let’s himself in through the gate across the road to here and is greeted by all the dogs. As he strolls through the dappled light beneath the trees, a thought of Kurt Vonnegut’s uncle’s mentioning paradise whenever he recognizes he’s in it let’s itself into my consciousness of now and is greeted by Homer, saying, “You know? There’s a lotta people in this world that would commit suicide if they had to live like we've learned to.”

It was the first time I ever laughed at one of Homer’s jokes.

I still am

•

Addendum: There seems to be some question as to this description of a day on the porch having any application to reaching the summit. Other than actually climbing a mountain, all summits to be reached are ideals in metaphor. Pisces Iscariot got it so well he suggested using "un-learned" for the striving to reach the summit I speak of, since he knows, as I do, that it is our introductory education into the spectacle and faith in the authority of its mythology that must be questioned to reach a life more symbiotic with the nature of the planet whose dependent cells we all are by realizing how belief in man's ownership of it all increases our destructive usury every day. The invisible prison is insidious.

Where do you grab a naked man? — Awestun, Tejas circa 1978, UT Campus

I sometimes feel like this fellow who lost it in public trying to get through the walls to let the civilized world know what beauty is being destroyed outside by it. Added 6/8/10

REMEMBERING

2010-05-31T07:23:00.008-05:00

What It's All About

Don't let nostalgia cause short term memory loss

•

Protecting
the
United States of America
from
ever
having
to
walk
anywhere.

IF CURSING MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER …

2010-05-29T19:06:00.005-05:00

•

RIP Dennis Hopper

THE CAVE

2010-05-28T13:11:00.004-05:00

It was inspired by the wisdom of the I Ching’s ability to phrase sixty-four examples of the natural curve of events throughout evolution in such open ended metaphors that any particular variation of daily vicissitudes brought to the collection as a meditation can find wise council by the chance of casting yarrows to choose which particular example to consult in each case. This symbolic tying of timeless wisdom to the immediacy of the moment serves to intensify greater consequences in a bigger picture than the meaner, more personal concerns brought to the ceremony for solution.

Prote noted that the written word was disappearing from public culture as the biggest show on earth made every expressible thought so realistic no one knew where or when they actually were in the reality of the natural universe. Only conscious purveyors of the spectacle’s endless memes used the written word to communicate preshat ideas for scripts, business agendae and subliminally recognizable symbols for ads. It became like a programming language that only geeks who loved to lie knew how to use even though everyone perpetuated its purpose by speaking. Government documents no longer required redacting no matter how damning the words. The Bible wasn’t read but from the pulpit. Like General Motors, Standard Oil and Goodyear bought up all the trolleys to kill competition for their industries, the spectacle bought up all the books as material to no longer be read but to be more artfully reified. Libraries became as abandoned as auto plants in Detroit eighty years after the trolleys were destroyed. Scripts for the spectacle became the only form of literature, like Latin for priests, lawyers and doctors. The last person outside the spectacle industry that still knew how to read succumbed to Shakespeare, Hunter Thompson and Charles Bukowski on audiobooks played on her maxi-pad before she died.

He knew that if people were ever to recover their direct contact with the living body of which they, in the reality of the nature of the living universe, are dependent symbiotic cells, it must occur as individual realizations rather than yet another following the latest leader or copying the guy next over as they learned to herd within the spectacle.

His idea began with noticing the variations of pitch in the speaking voice that could be generalized into categories of emotional states. He collected data on individual’s normal speaking voice to establish a baseline for the variations in vibration frequency recorded when stating various problems being posed and when speaking of the understanding gained by the consultation.

With much cross referencing and codification he managed to devise a large chamber, the interior walls of which were composed of areas of varying reflection and absorption of sound waves such that anyone, asking any question within the blackened cave it appeared to be, would hear an echo in their own voice replying with words they were genetically predisposed to interpret as “Follow your own light, just as you did when you first chose to follow another.”

A DIFFERENT DOING

2010-05-23T18:19:00.008-05:00

Oh to lie back and let myself be amused by ideas and thoughts drifting by like the clouds forming, dissolving and passing overhead on a warm, sunny day. Ugh, to have those clouds obscured by dense, grey clouds of particulate results of petroleum combustion suggesting that the natural happenings of the clouds need something done about the blight in between.

We have a tremendous capacity to normalize change as part of the genetic sanity of adapting to the environment for survival. This capacity has evolved over millennia prior to the introduction of human innovation and has developed a healthy immune system with a broad range of tolerable climatic conditions. We cannot survive outside a range of temperature and humidity that desiccate, burn, freeze or drown us. We cannot survive instances when the dynamic forces of our living planet peak and locally release poisonous gases, molten lava, tsunamis and cause mountains to either collapse or rise to loose sudden havoc in the area.

We have learned to survive in increasingly vaster areas of our planet by means ranging from the evolutionary advantage gained by hairless apes being able to handle and eventually exploit fire to our thus encouraged curiosity creating prosthetics enabling survival anywhere.

So, yeah, humans are, by our evolved genetic memory and innovative curiosity, well able to deal with all but the most catastrophic natural conditions. Within the conditions of human civilization our genetic capacity to adapt is used against us by forces of authority threatening survival to manipulate behavior of the obedient. The warp that enables such exploitation is the simultaneous demonizing of the instinctual survivor we are at birth as the gremlin in culture’s machine, and praising and rewarding the conformity of our public image to artificial standards in an endless pursuit and maintenance of an approved reputation.

When one’s self esteem is dependent on one’s reputation, insanity occurs.

I finally grok that there are fellow humans out there who cannot be alone because they cease to exist without a reflection, so buried and hated who they actually are has become to the external suit of reputation they were taught and learned to prefer thinking of themselves as being.

In a civilization whose citizens vary from fully self-realized to externally controlled automatons we find the dysfunctional heart of the devolution machine lies in the codependence of the sheep and the shepherds. Like any dynamic, one cannot exist without the other. The shepherds’ concern for their reputation is so obsessive they seek competition, podiums and audiences to surpass mere approval on the way to supreme reverence, none of which can be done without dependent worshipers. The sheep’s concern for their reputation is so frightened that political correctness seems like a plateau below which they live in the abject servitude to the authority of the shepherds with “right away, what color and how high?” Even the flocks in which they gather to fend off deadly solitude, from social clubs to religions, armies and governments, take on the sheep-shepherd dynamic at all levels

As economics would have it, this dysfunctional clot in the stream of human evolution takes on the form of a pyramid from the top of which the bottom looks less considerable than ants. This is what the belief in human superiority over the rest of the body of the planet within which we are a dependent part creates out of every newborn, so well equipped to survive in nature but never ready to live on lies.

So, to the different doing I mentioned in the title: it is not an action per se, but more of a mental doing. It is a purposeful de-hypnotizing ourselves from the propaganda we’ve had lied to us from such a saturated cultural environment all our lives that we live in fear of nature as a threat, like cotton plantation owners feared their slaves. Should we be able to recover our appreciation of the intuitive observer we have always been, watching our hocking original thinking for the illusion of reputation, we might see our way clear to following a desire to become more symbiotic with a former threat in our personal lives by becoming self actualized rather than going along to get along waiting for the shepherd to steer us right.

The only humans who taught me well were living examples of being self actualized.

•

My fickle anarchism has now decided that separating serious debate about the fiction of the myth from the fiction about the truth of the effects of the myth were both about fiction and the separation was intellectual masturbation — thus this post and several others to come will be republishings from that shortlived diversion of my other blog, Dualitytilaud, the palindrome of duality and a key to unlocking one's too taut knots we're not taught to think beyond.

OUTSTANDING IN THE FIELD — LOST

2010-05-19T15:05:00.010-05:00

The Pharmacist of Ampurdan in Search of Absolutely Nothing - Dali

YOU CAN’T MOVE A SAILBOAT BY BLOWING FROM ON BOARD

We are born owning nothing but our body. We experience our body’s hunger reaching out and sensing an environment that may feed us. This appetite requires the body to get stuff, distinguish its benefit as food, and eat the good parts to quell its overwhelming motivation. In the process of searching for food an intellectual process, slightly more abstract than sensing the taste and satisfaction of hunger afforded by every bit of stuff come across and stuffed in the mouth, begins to develop. I call it curiosity, the mental companion to physical hunger and the assumer of total responsibility for the survival of any living being.

Curiosity involves recognizing other beings in the stuff and patterns amongst them, attributing a value system based on their value as food. One needs not put too much stuff in ones mouth before realizing that some of it not only tastes bad but objects to the point of trying to stuff oneself in their mouth! Curiosity is very useful for making these determinations ahead of their recurrence for those who survived the first time. “Everything that doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

Hunger reminds us we must interact with the world to exist. Curiosity is the means by which we sort our sensations of the environment and direct our responses to them. When hunger is satisfied curiosity continues to probe the environment in the play of happy solitude or with others of our kind. The combination of food and play so tests the capacities of beings, a periodic return to the dream world of metaphorically encoded clouds which, as our genetic memory of evolution, formed in the womb and daily thereafter birth serves as the universal formula into which the variables of current events may be plugged as a guide to natural solutions.

So much for our individual motivation and capacity to survive in nature.

Curiosity is intrigued by possibilities of the unknown and imagination is whistling in the dark to help it guess at the shapes by the echoes returned from the concert hall of nature. Bad guesses can survive only so long as the tune whistled keeps everybody dancing without regard to the nature they trample to dust. The culture evolved by western civilization is based on such a bad guess and stuck to the same tune for so long that, of all the beings on Earth upon finding themselves in an unfamiliar environment, only humans would look for work to make money to pay someone else to feed them and willingly pay the establisment’s usury fee on the privilege of being allowed to earn and buy the same things the rest eat raw directly from nature. The only idea offered to rectify the bad guess is warring over who gets to whistle their version of the same tune.

So much for the motivation of the marathon dance, the perpetuation of the whistler’s fee and the willing surrender of personal survival responsibility to culture’s daycare/nightbleed vampire farm.

It’s not rocket science. It’s a heavy metal lullabye.

WHERE ELSE COULD I BE?

2010-05-18T07:52:00.004-05:00

The too sweet odor of rotting fruit littering the ground beneath the loquat and chinaberry trees is tempered by the just right piquancy of jasmine and honeysuckle blooms. As I turn the compost pile, the fecund excretion of its microbial denizens exudes earthy wafts promising well fed food in the garden and my bowl. The balm of the hen’s poop cushioned on the hay straw lining their coop mixes with the doughy aroma of their feed’s crumble chunks of meal soaked by last night’s sprinkles from the sky. Priest hops into my lap for another head scratching mutual affection session and once again I am amazed at how clean he smells as I rub my face in his long fur.

Grackles and jays squawk at the other end of the scale from the tiny turtledoves’ dulcet cooing, while the chickens run the gamut from gentle stuttered purring to ear splitting announcements of new oval ova arrivals. More mature, two legged or four wheeled arrivals are announced by the thirteen member canine choir’s cacophonic greeting at the gate across Fetchit Drive. The distant clanging of Johnny’s hammering heated iron in his blacksmith’s shop reverberates off the porch wall in competition with the merry gurgle of the fountain fresh pond water in its return cycle down the falls. Muffled now by spring foliage growth, but still too audible, tire treads and combustion cycles move noisy air down the hill from the too close highway. Brazen completely unmuffled roars that make seasoned veterans stop talking and cover their ears pass overhead whenever dragons approach or leave their international nest too close to our east.

Muscles cramp in my calves as I stretch awake in the silken lining of my Christmas gift sleeping bag after a nap demanded by the fatigue of trudging the several miles it takes to supplement my garden’s limited selection at the grocery store. I barely notice my failing hip joint in my normal perusal of my stomping ground as morning dew on long grass dampens shin hairs, zephyrs chill them and the sun heats and dries them in turn, each step of the way, but a shopping trip or climbing to the top of the stairway up the bank from the river reminds me of it all too well. My perception of the contrast in textures and times maximizes as I brush sand from the smooth skin of young Finn’s plump feet with the calloused gnarl of my desiccated, septuagenarian hands.

I can never distinguish imagination from reality in the ill defined realm allotted to the sense of taste both because it is so connected to the savory olfactory and because my prepared meals have been enjoyed from the first pangs of hunger, through the imagining what would be most beneficially pleasing, the smelling of each ingredient before and after its inclusion in the concoction, the determination of its readiness on to the actual eating of them. The cross over continues as I judge the efficacy of the meal’s benefits by the aroma of my farts, as sure an indicator as asparagus in urine.

Opening my eyes, the question is answered. My sixth sense, my mind, is functioning and well satisfied. Seeing is believing. I am here, now.

And now. Amazing.

More creative, for Amy. ;•D

THE PLOT (PROPHESY) THICKENS (SICKENS)

2010-05-17T16:56:00.007-05:00

Somewhere between learning from experience that the government lies about cannabis and UFOs and witnessing multiple videos of the free fall speed collapse of the only three steel buildings to ever do so, all on the same day, I have been sure of the government’s duplicity and have theorized on a long range ultimate agenda hidden behind the distractions of its public corruption and ineptitude. I have read extensively into the same material Dan Brown has completely bastardized for his popular novels, Howard Zinn's Peoples History of the United States drew from and the dearly departed Robert Anton Wilson so deftly skewered with hilariously scrambled conspiracies in his Illuminatti Trilogy. I guess you could call me a conspiracy theorist. It’s okay, I don’t mind. I prefer not being so dependent I fear to doubt.

Such suspicions were rather idle speculation until I began questioning the ultimate reason mankind finds itself at the threshold of self-extermination through the insane intentional refusal to adapt to the nature of its place of birth. Daniel Quinn showed me the historical transition from hunter-gatherer to totalitarian agriculture as the turning point, but I still failed to grok a reason for it. I suppose I have my daughter to thank for discovering what I have come to propose is the justification that converted relatively symbiotic humans into the scourge of the Earth — the mythology of mankind’s inheritance of Earth’s stewardship from its creator as our special gift is the backbone belief of every monotheistic religion since it permitted man’s slaughter of great swaths of nature to establish his food supply in greedy exclusivity over sixteen thousand years ago. Concentration around the new food depots in cities further cut off man from his natural environment until we come to the war on everything period in which we now exist suspended by our own petard.

That seems to cover how mankind began operating as master of all it surveyed, and I can kind of see how believing man superior to his environment could surface as the genocidal behavior exhibited by small pockets and huge armies of terrorists against their fellow man, but I’d yet found no ingrained mythos in my admittedly shallow research into Xianity and its roots in mythology back to the forcing underground of Paganism.

And then one day on Facebook during heated comment banter with my old buddy Roger about the difference between racism and anti-Semitism someone comes up with,

I see the United States as being an Israelite nation. Being that the US is a ruminate of the Tribe of Manasseh. Both Ephraim (England) and Manasseh (the United States) were son's of Israels son Joseph. We are God's chosen people...however, we have been allowed to go our own way, until we are at the point of blowing ourselves off the planet...then ... and only then, will God intervene. That Is the only way man will learn that his way will not work, and thru that learn to accept God and his Word. So yes, we need to protect the country of Israel because the United States was born from her.

Who knew? Am I the only one who missed this detail? Ah those crazy myths. There’s a set for the masses surveyed and a set for the masters of all they survey. If that tidbit didn't match current events in the unreasonable leniency being shown the genocidal Israeli treatment of Palestinians I wouldn't have even noticed that quote, much less posted on it.

LIVE LIKE THERE'S NO TOMORROW

2010-05-16T15:29:00.006-05:00

Alone on Preikestolen

Whenever someone advises me to, “live like there’s no tomorrow,” they might as well say, “Walk like you were born unable to fly.” Both are true, neither are choices; there IS no tomorrow and I CAN'T fly

Though we may speak of making big plans for future events, and as often as the idea may occur to us in different states of change during its development, the event itself is merely another such state happening in the same here and now from which the plan arose and within which memories will recall its having occurred. Experience can be had only here now. Time is an invention by which we speak of things not now, mañana, but we can only speak of and experience thinking about the concept in the eternal here and now.

We all live within a culture that practices the creation of artifacts representing our perceptions and conceptions of reality, and promptly forgets such symbols aren’t what they represent; worshipping golden idols. The only reality to such creations are the experiences of conception and manifestation on the part of the maker and of perception and belief by witnesses. It is fairly simple to perceive that a painting of a flower is not the flower in the vase sitting next to it, while it is literally impossible for believers to distinguish between religious dogma and wishful thinking — especially tenacious where scriptures are full of contradictions to one’s actual experience of the natural environment and prohibitions of one’s own natural behavior. It is as if culture pushes the idea that the more one must deny reality to live in accordance with the conceived artifacts, the purer the merit for reward in a fantasy afterlife. “If you want to get ahead, you gotta stick it out. My country, right or wrong.”

I fly with ease in my dreams. It is so enjoyable that I am a bit fearful of heights without a handhold when I’m awake. The concept of my flying is so temptingly real I can envision feeling that special organic intuition that signals my ability to levitate in my dreams, walking off into space to finally break through my own shreds of disbelief and fly away. I know the difference between reality and dream fantasy, I fell thirty feet from a trapeze when I was thirteen — straight down, no gliding. I am just as acutely aware of the difference between experiencing reality directly and experiencing the mere second hand information, at best, to be found in symbols created by other’s perceptions.

I have always walked like I couldn’t fly. I’m in the process of learning the benefits of living like there’s no tomorrow, in the here and now, and discovering the debilitation of living like there is some other when or where experience can be had by sacrificing awareness of being here now.

•

Tangential to the forgoing essay is the matter of gaining enough life experience of the conflicts between one’s direct experience of nature and civilization’s antagonistic exploitation of it to begin questioning the authority under whose aegis one’s own nature is trained to obey and whose favor one’s reputation is designed to curry. Without such doubt in external authority’s righteousness in defining proprietary behavior, one must abandon any reliance on the intrinsic value of oneself to consider one’s own existence valid. Such people can never be alone because they cease to exist.

A real horror story would be to be unable to love myself unless I felt loved by another; as scary as meeting city folk who have never walked on the grass or were unaware Big Macs come from cows. Civilization breeds such zombies more or less successfully.

SOCIAL REVOLUTION OR INDIVIDUAL REVELATION?

2010-05-14T06:05:00.004-05:00

This is a reply to Troutsky’s astonishing claim that the life of the Time Master in the previous post was easy, because living outside the artificial spectacle was LIVING IN A DREAM — that actually dealing symbiotically with nature is less realistic than the energy starved prosthetic culture we have isolating us from it.

I am beginning to notice a tendency of Socialists to deride back to nature commune examples of living by socialist ideals as dreamers copping out on the real work of the revolution to drive the big bad machine of central control. This is a reflection of the United States’ top down version of democracy’s tendency to, not only deride, but overthrow self determined democracy arising without its consent or aegis. The larger the government the more consideration of the quality of people’s lives is replaced with the quantity of the burgeoning economy’s usury of those individual lives — no matter who’s driving.

TIME MASTER

2010-05-13T02:18:00.007-05:00

His people called him Cronot, the time master. Little did they know he had nothing to do with time — absolutely nothing. His vocabulary contained no temporal terms of either the chronological or spiritual variety, which he considered the same thing. Nor did he refer to the material world in terms less lively than event or being; there existed no mere things.

Off the track of time, that clothesline from which the spectacle airs its latest developed film, he became like the camera left in a field throughout spring whose film when played back at an accelerated rate reveals the interrelated lives of its plant and animal denizens. Knowing he was the accumulation of all the events of his life experience he could observe the any period in the same way by enveloping the succession of events in the event of recollection at any time he chose.

So too could he serve as a fair witness to the minutest changes in what those distracted by time’s impatience would consider a rigid thing. Knowing that the eternal present is the only instant of existence he maintains stability unachievable within the spectacle.

While all around him his people pursued promises of a carrot just like they eat in the penthouse in the tallest building in the world through a maze of multiple multiple choices and tricks to be performed, he reached down and pulled a fresh one from the fertile loam in his garden.

As his people schemed on capturing the golden goose for the perpetual something-for-nothing golden eggs promised to be out there somewhere he collected his breakfast daily from his hens.

Knowing all too well the race as intimately as any of his people still nipping at each other’s heels on the stairway to the penthouse, he laughed heartily at his dogs frolicking in the open field while he massaged his healing heels.

Having worked from dark to dark to earn a brighter future that never came, as most of his people yet feel compelled to do, he took profound delight in watching the Earth expose and hide the sun any now it was a good idea.

Once the willing maker of better traps for gawking mice along the spectacle midway, he sympathizes from the distance afforded by the internet and the wisdom to realize it is still the midway, gaining more variations and seeming more real every day.

To his people it seemed like he could disappear — at times.

LITTLE THEFTS OF NOTHING OWNED

2010-05-11T08:14:00.006-05:00

There’s a second part to the advice given young men contemplating marriage that is never given. Its omission could be responsible for the other half the divorces, the first half being the advice given prospective brides, but this is my experience, and I am male, born and trained.

Dads tell their sons, “Look at her mother. How would you like to grow old with that?” Despite its emphasis of a woman’s looks being a poor basis for projected lovability in a relationship, omitting it’s corollary can make it all the worse.

Prospective grooms should be told, “Look at her father, that’s who you’ll be expected to become.”

I was nothing like my father-in-law. We had nothing but loving his daughter in common. I never had a conversation with him that wasn’t in front of his TV. He’d come home from his welding job at the shipyard at four in the afternoon, unbutton the top couple of buttons on his pants, sink into his chair where he’d eat dinner on a TV tray and be trundled off to bed when his snoring sent his adoring wife onto action. At Christmas he gave all the men the same aftershave and the women the same cologne, every year. I’m still using the last of mine to clean my keyboad, vintage circa 1970. His slide show of a two week rent-a-trailer, touring vacation we shared consisted of nothing but crystal clear, sharp focus photos of all the historical plaques filling the frame — not one picture of the scenes commemorated.

None of that was me. I was an engineer who put 10-12 hours daily into my yuppie career with IBM going for the unlimited future. I played golf and sailed on weekends, neither of which she cared to share. She said I abandoned her

I married her to relieve the discomfort between us after we’d visit and endure her parent’s scorn at our unwed cohabitation. Ten years and two daughters later, she gave up trying to make me her father, took our girls home to him, sued for divorce claiming ridiculous exaggerations of how unlike him I was and won sole custody of the children. The marriage was to make her happy, I treated the divorce in kind and never contested any of it.

In my first test on what was to become my lifelong research into the ultimate duality of nature versus nurture I failed miserably. After repeated visits to see the girls resulted in the fireworks of her defensive isolation skirmishes, I realized they would always remember me as a disruption of their nest, so I backed off in the belief that relations could resume when they could write and read my letters. I never imagined, as she confessed many years later to me and the surviving daughter, that she would throw my mail in the trash, including a fairy tale I spent two years writing and illustrating.

When it seemed letters had not helped establish a better connection I consoled myself with the hopes that genetics would win out and her curiosity would exceed her mother’s old ex-wife’s tales — another case of naive wishful thinking.

When she did reach out to me it wasn’t out of curiosity — it was to express her regret that I couldn’t be at the afterlife party in heaven with the rest of the family because I couldn’t accept Jesus as my lord and savior! I realized how much she had irretrievably become her mother.

The other day I heard my self telling my friend Crystal’s grown son how small he was the last time I saw him and it took on the reverberations of echoing down a long hall built of the many other times I’d expressed my fondness for loved ones whose childhood was not my experience and my knees buckled.

The grief I’d stoically borne of years with only child support checks getting through uncensored, my daughter’s insistence to this day that I’d abandoned her, her refusal to invite me to visit her family, her eldest son’s graduation from high school came crashing down with all the weight of the cruelty manifested in the world by the unshakable belief in ownership — granted humans by the mythical creator of it all. What a crock of pain.

Roger says it all —
in civilization
"WHAT GOD WANTS, GOD GETS"

Ceci n'est pas une maison*

2010-05-07T08:59:00.008-05:00

This is a PICTURE of Donna's home

The following paragraph is what I was typing when the ensuing paragraphs ensued, er, ah, events occurred (gotta keep the reality and its story distinguishable from one another or I’ll be back in the invisible prison).

Guy DeBord’s spectacle is what I call the tautology of the invisible prison. “When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle.”

Oh, the irony of it all. In the midst of discovering Guy DeBord, often referred to by Troutsky, and reading his Society of the Spectacle, the Dawgranch dawgs break my concentration with their raucous greeting at the gate of perhaps forty members of a TV entourage here to scope out an upcoming scene for an episode of Friday Night Lights in my neighbor’s uniquely styled home evolved as an outgrowth of her life in the bus she parked under a giant pecan eleven years ago.

Ack. The very tentacle of the spectacle has come to annex my everyday direct experience of nature here in my retreat from the grid to integrate it into the spectacle lived by the never-left-the-couch dolts plugged into “Reality TV” 24/7 even when they believe they are out in the “world” discussing the latest episode of Office at the office around the old water cooler bottled water machine.

And wouldn’t you know it, if I sign their disturbance agreement paper, my premeditated tolerance of whatever the hell they decide to do in the course of their production for the spectacle will earn me a hundred dollar share of the big bucks lavished on the preservation of the invisible prison. If they don’t run off or over the hens or tromp through my gardens it’ll be a breeze to do my share, with the first hand direct experience of witnessing the creation of the latest spectacle to be decoupaged onto the ever denser walls of the invisible prison thrown in as education. Yahoo.

*After Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" he lettered beneath a realistic painting of a pipe just to keep the invisible prison visible, and not a prison when one is conscious of tne myth.

NO REASON

2010-05-07T08:00:00.002-05:00

In the eternity of the timeless instant there is no reason for me to do anything nor a me to do it. It is only when I wonder and stick my licked finger in the air that I recall the momentum of the river of events and am free to choose whether and to where I swim until I once again bake away such purpose on the eternal bank to observe the river of reason for no reason. This is my experience of meditative contemplation; to observe reality as it is prior to any memory of names assigned, priorities assumed or direction proposed.

Civilization is an endless ocean dedicated to eroding the shoreline both figuratively as regards loss of contact with our natural instincts and literally as regards the real rising seas as a result of generating enough energy to make and move our growing fleet of prosthetics, so that drowning is the only possibility of not swimming; as if life was an ride uphill on a bicycle which must be constantly pedaled to keep from falling over. The relatively leisurely pace of natural existence is energized by the dynamic of all life, finding and avoiding being food, becomes flooded with frantic distractions demanding arbitrary tricks to earn the right to sit down to dinner and deceptive dedication to serve the ravenous to stay off a rich predator’s menu. This is the reality of domesticated obedience to cultural education’s muting the instinct to intuit the eternity of the timeless instant or recognize the purposeless observer we were before school taught us to make our marks at the top of the heap.

I am learning to untie too taut knots we’re taught not to think beyond; where the loose strands of consciousness yet twine in the primal brine where nature swims in evolutionary metaphor unadorned by language, incapable of duality, yet to be born as premise, faith or fact. I may never go beyond desiring to share the adventure.

HERO

2010-05-06T10:35:00.005-05:00

I guess this speech will knock anyone off the fence they ride hoping to rationalize remaining a convenient inhabitant of the invisible prison I speak of so often. I hereby commend to you another unique example of what I call heroes.

Hat Tip once again to Pisces Iscariot at Far Queue

GO ALL THE WAY HOME - DECRIMINALIZE

2010-05-05T13:48:00.003-05:00

I have more than a passing concern for the hundreds of thousands of folks whose privacy is invaded every year by the very wrong-headed righteousness of victimless crime enforcement from whose oppressive threats their personal cannabis consumption served as an effective, though unnecessarily costly, stress relief — until caught.

As yet another example of the invisible prison made of the fucked up myth by which western civilization unconsciously behaves, I am witnessing the death bed scene of an atrocity against human intelligence born a couple of years before me. The half-assed measure of legalizing cannabis* stops at the invisible wall of civilized acceptability and is not allowed beyond; returned to nature as decriminalized; innocent as born.

It’s the economy, stupid. The only reason legalization of pot is gaining enough attention of the brain dead unconcerned is the hole our something-for-nothing economy has left in their ability to buy more stuff deep enough for them to even hear “cost of one billion dollars a year to incarcerate otherwise innocent potheads” and “income of three biliion dollars a year on sales and grower income taxes — in California alone” Pretty slick, I wonder if we can do that with winter rye?

Every time Obama reneges on promises he made to the “American People” he now claims it’s for the good of the “American Economy”. Rather than admit that the cost of the bureaucracy required to filter out unqualified medical problems is more than enough to pay for all care regardless of conditions, no insurance required, the idea of single payer was replaced with mandatory insurance for everyone. With regulations like that, who needs preexisting conditions to feel ill? For the first time in history I am required to pay for my existence whether I get sick or not!

The economy is the code word for the imbalance of least population with the most money, while true wealth remains in the hearts and minds of those most in touch with the natural curve of planetary life despite the piles of money attempting to legalize it.

*cannabis = Marijuana: a name invented by Harry J. Anslinger to target Mexicans — just like George W Bush, Inc. invented the name “Al Qaeda” to make separate terrorist causes appear to be a united front against which to declare his preemptive war.

PICKPOCKET

2010-05-03T13:17:00.007-05:00

Never having been filthy rich, I was a fool to suppose I knew how the excessively wealthy regarded their excesses. How was I to know that beyond a certain point acquisitiveness saturates the very purpose of living, like alcohol saturates the cells of the liver, in an accumulating toxic cocktail of fear of inadequacy to both fulfill the promised expectations such wealth engenders in competitors, investors and sycophants and protect it from a public suspected of being as unscrupulously greedy as was required for such an accumulation.

I figured that since losing a fin out a wad of bills totaling around a hundred bucks was no big whoops to me, this guy would never miss a million out of his hundred billion. What I didn’t realize was that no one gave a shit about my measly fiver while his every penny had a hundred million dollars invested in a security system and a staff of bean counters, plus millions of anxious stockholders, tax collectors and relatives checking up on their share.

Little did I know how he shuddered off the ghostly chill of envy he experienced when he passed the homeless one-legged vet panhandling at the corner of his downtown Dallas branch office building this very morning. I should have known how mean great riches had made him when I saw him stumble over the man’s only foot in his attempt to ignore his existence and give him only a dirty look as its acknowledgement.

I realized at that moment how this mutated human being had built his ridiculous personal wealth by owning the mercenary corporations' looting public funds in payment for worse than inadequate support of the fodder being made of the nation’s poor in a war of yet more acquisition. The look in this man’s eyes was the look in Humphrey Bogart’s eyes upon discovering leeches on his body in African Queen and I knew — it wasn’t the leeches that wanted some of his financially spun cotton candy wealth he so much feared, it was the ironic leeches on his ability to achieve the happiness for which such acquisition was reputed among slobs like me to be the reward. He acknowledged with his resentment that I was happier than he.

My old gal, Mabe, slapped him back to reality with, “There he goes folks. The richest man in the world kicks a fellow human being like wasn’t one his own self, but I can see his shriveled dick right through that fine three piece, pin striped suit of emperor’s clothes.”

The crowd at the bus stop and for half a block around turned their focus on the kingpin. So discombobulated by interacting with the unvarnished truth available only outside his many sycophant filled ivory towers was he that he reached in his pocket for the bills he’d just withdrawn to pay the new girl to say she understands his torment convincingly enough to give him an erection and slammed them down in my hat.

“Dinner on me and Mabe! All month.”

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: PICKLED BRAIN

2010-05-02T18:58:00.013-05:00

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

—Volaire

Someone challenged my perception of the invisible prison within which western civilization lives by saying, “The whole thing is in your mind.”

I could only reply, "That’s the difference between you and me: it’s in my mind, so I can think about it while it is your mind and you can’t.”

Recipe for Pickled Brain — or — Thinking About What We Think With

Test for Ripeness:

1) Can answer all questions likely to be asked within 40 miles of home.

2) Hasn’t asked a question arising from curiosity for the last five years.

3) Takes authority to represent truth from pulpit, podium or plutocrat.

4) Never read a book voluntarily.

Preparation for Pickling:

1) Sever nerve paths capable of reporting unique experiences to conserve the energy normally required to ignore such messages for use in healing injuries caused by the same mistakes endlessly repeated.

2) Surround organ with an environment about which certainty is impenetrably dense.

3) Fill container with a fluid mixture of faith, trust, hope, belief and wishful thinking as a cushion against any latent instinctual resistance to the container.

4) Put on a shelf to ferment for the rest of life in isolation, within warehouses full of mindless millions pickling in their juices in the invisible prison.

Serving Instructions:

1) After aging long enough for all the heresy and doubt to be leeched, the once clear cushioning fluid will gel and turn as opaque as a proven fact. It is nowready to serve reliably.

2) Care must be taken to release the gas pressure of desiccated curiosity extracted in the fermentation process before handling individual brains.

3) Served individually they are digestible as paper pushers, bean counters, assembly lines and lifetime retail clerks. Not recommended for dealing with the vagaries of nature.

4) Served in mindless masses they delight the palate of the democratic process, tax base, demographic retail, preemptive war fodder, righteousness of the mostest and other forms of mob rule by deception of the willingly ignorant.

•

I always wondered how the active verb, “ignore,” lost all sense of personal responsibilitly when the adverb form “ignorant” was applied while “unaware” serves a more precise definition of the condition of not knowing. Ignorant always carries the major context of having willingly and knowingly ignored that of which they are ignorant and their situation is self induced.

•

A sure sign one is outside the invisible prison is inquiries begin searching for something truer than the answers that form the prison walls. Certainty is the border patrol around comfort zone zapping any illegal curiosity. Labels conclude the curiosity of the taught and are springboards into the unknown for those actually learning.

•

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
—Leo Tolstoy

BETWEEN THE SHEETS

2010-05-01T14:24:00.009-05:00

She found it while leafing through her leather bound edition of Leaves of Grass. It was a shade leaf of cannabis indicus the size of her palm. She’d placed it there at a different time in a different world.

Looking up from the page on her pagan promontory perch, the vast expanse of the sea to the western horizon became dearly desiccated by the visceral, visual recollection of overlooking a desert; so endlessly featureless from afar, so constantly alive wherever one looked down at one’s feet. A sort of reverse twist on “the grass is always greener.”

They were camping on the east rim anticipating a lunar eclipse soon after sundown, which announced its advance by gradually saturating the entire vista in the golden orange hues of grain, pebble, rock, boulder pixel remnant shards of this shedding mountain perch with the prism of the western atmosphere casting a glow around their elongating silhouette creeping eastward into the illuminated scene.

He passed her the freshly rolled joint she’d awaited since he’d proposed this entire weekend a month ago. She’d always been curious about the stuff but found no reason compelling enough to risk jail just for kicks. She found Zeke to be more than enough. She knew a lot of people who abandoned the club during music breaks to “get high” out back with the band while she stayed behind and worried for them. She knew Zeke went out with them most of the time, but she didn’t know him until the night he picked up her empty glass on his return, went to the bar and brought her a fresh one.

“Nothin’ like another cool one after goin’ out there with those folks and dryin’ your whistle,” he said, standing there watching the band get reorganized.

"I don’t go out there, but thanks for the drink anyway. I haven’t wet mine enough yet.” She immediately tried to inhale the variety of possible nuances those words conveyed and didn’t exhale until she realized none of them were wrong; she’d long admired him from afar and was loath to pass up a chance for friendlier proximity now.

When her kissed her at her doorstep and left she realized a friendlier approximation was far from adequate. The next time she saw him the mutual beam connecting them was visible to anyone who cared. Like love struck zombies they got their drinks, moved to the back and sat together at an empty table without looking at anything but each other.

Although she’d always taken rejection as “their loss”, she couldn’t help but clarify something that had bothered her for the two weeks since he’d walked her home. “You were welcome to stay the night, you know?’

“Yeah, I got it that might be the case, but I have to get an overt invitation to begin assuming anything. I am too familiar with the influence of alcohol to make me perceive everything going my way until my face hits the floor and the morning after trying to recall from whence come vague memories of something too intimate to be so forgotten.”

“I’ve never made the first move, men seem to begin the groping and I either grope back or back off. I was out of my element with you. Would you get me high far away from police so I can enjoy it?”

His face lit up. “Oh, wow! This is perfect. I am going to harvest the first buds of this year’s yield next month and was planning to take some to the wilderness to celebrate the lunar eclipse. Would you come with me?”

She watched him separate the glistening purple-green bundles from their stem and expertly gather them between the sheets of zig-zag paper into the perfect cylinder he licked, sealed and declared to be the lunar fatty. He lit her first toke with much pagan fanfare but said not a word thereafter, just watched.

Their slowblime lovemaking fell in pace with the nature of their surroundings as the sun disappeared leaving the glow of the roach the only light for light years until half the eastern horizon became engulfed in the maw of a gigantic moon reflecting the sun in silver light upon them snuggled between the sheets. As the fullness of the moon grew perfect the earth interrupted the sun with a shadow on a further desert as it began to eat the moon in turn. The wolves, who’d been harmonizing to the lunar tune as their pitch rose with it, slowly became a random cacophony as it disappeared and revealed stars once obscured by its brilliance. Their shared orgasm occurred at the peak of the howling at the dark of the moon in the middle of the milky way and they remained in afterglow until the moon and vulpine harmony returned in full.

She returned the leaf to its place between the sheets of onion skin vellum pages, closed the book, scrambled off her perch, grabbed her cane he'd carved for her from the stalk and made her way home to the ferryman’s house.

SLOSH

2010-04-24T17:48:00.005-05:00

If my cells didn’t have walls to contain and separate their 60% water content, I would slosh to the detriment of any precision dexterity my clumsiness now enjoys. Humans are cells in the living body of Earth, the civilized of whom are being continually convinced that solidarity of belief in the myth of our stewardly ownership of Earth’s material property granted us by its creator serves us better than we can serve ourselves as separate, self-responsible entities free to behave spontaneously as the variety of our experience and instincts contribute to evolving wisdom.

The notion that “might makes right” guiding imperialism throughout history has been translated to “quantity dictates quality,” by modern society’s attempt to appear more reasonable than those other barbarians when getting one’s way. Thus we have worldwide recruitment, drafting, colonization and occupation of adherents of this religious faith or that political certainty to amass the quantity required to dictate the quality of life for all.

Such aggregations slosh rather than function with any detailed concern for local precision. Breaking up such groups, so large no one knows everyone, into tribal communities of kindred spirits capable of survival alone would be like trading in a waterbed for one with a million innersprings keeping local disruptions local; each lending stability with its independent flexibility rather than the destructive momentum of closed minds in solidarity unable to stop the slosh of obvious corruption.

My favorite wishful thinking is about the day in each person’s life when it occurs to him/her that the billion dollars for wars on other countries and bonuses on wall street are the candy spun by corrupt leveraging, hedging and theft of the essential value in his/her own labor being paid too poorly, spent too dearly, and decides to go to work for themselves, grow their own food, consume no products of exploitive corporations, form internetworks of kindred spirits living off the map and out of the system without a revolution — the paradigm shift of a good idea independently recognized and enacted without disruption of the bad idea — just withdrawal of a hope fiend from the habit of the hope filled. Sisyphus Shrugged.

Blue Planet Men

2010-04-23T08:19:00.001-05:00

DAWGRANCH: SPRING '10

2010-04-22T11:30:00.005-05:00

After an unusually cold snap for winter in my neck of the woods defrocked several plants that have stayed green year round 'til now, I am glad to post evidence of the resilience of plant life in the greening of the pond, garden and indigenous foliage.

Happy Earth Day!
Hope you didn't drive anywhere to celebrate.

PACHAMAMA

2010-04-21T12:27:00.010-05:00

The other day a friend showed me a source of my frustration with the lack of response to my rants about civilization's rape of the planet and the complicity by indifference of consumers fueling such deadly aggression.

"I give you a ride to town and have to listen to your hatred of cars."

Snap. I all too rarely spotlight heroes on the positive side of ending the corporate globalization of capitalism and its commodification of everything. Well this morning Amy Goodman, my clearest information about current events, is in Tiquipaya for the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth hosted by Evo Morales, the original leader of the indigenous population's oust of Bechtel's claim on the water of Bolivia and now its President, who said in yesterday's opening ceremony,

We are here because in Copenhagen the so-called developed countries failed in their obligation to provide substantial commitments to reduce greenhouse gases. We have two paths: either Pachamama or death. We have two paths: either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies. Either capitalism lives or Mother Earth lives. Of course, brothers and sisters, we are here for life, for humanity and for the rights of Mother Earth. Long live the rights of Mother Earth! Death to capitalism!

The clip I have embedded is an interview with an attendee who articulates the spirit of the gathering and speaks of an entirely new form of culture whose respect for Pachamama (a Quechua word, not derived from any colonial language or myth), Gaia, Mother Earth is restored to the fore as it has been preserved by the indigenous peoples despite colonization by western civilization. I intuit this gathering may well be that ground swell of good examples required to effect a true paradigm shift for the very reason that it comes from nature, the nature of people, and not the lifeless priorities of corporate states juggling the bottom line. Maybe.

HOUNDED

2010-04-19T04:34:00.007-05:00

When I was very young I thought I went on forever. Bumping my head on the crib seemed no different than sticking my finger in my eye; it was all me. The same part of me that offered a breast to suck later shoveled spoonfuls of prechewed food into my sucker. Having learned where my sucker was I became very adept at tasting every part of me I could manage to bring to it.

It was long about then that I became aware of a mischievous part of me that would make various other parts angry with me. I became very uncomfortable because I didn’t know how to make all of me feel good again. The more I seemed to disturb those parts the more they seemed to withdraw from me and I came to see that the misbehaver and those he ruffled were not really me. He became my naughty companion, Drill, and the parts he annoyed turned out to be my parents. The only reason I even recall having what they called my imaginary friend is my parents recalling my bringing him home to share it when I was called to lunch.

Drill was my favorite playmate for adventures in the deep ravine behind our house and might have continued to be if he hadn’t talked me into eating that strange smelling skunk cabbage we found one spring. My stern grandfather who always wore a vest was visiting when I came in with some leaves for everyone to enjoy. He made me drink several glasses of soapy water to make me expel that evil poison and when I puked he said it was the cure working. The combination of the traumatic physical sensation of transiting from groovy found flavor to soapy induced vomit and the mental confusion of such skewed logic from such an authority figure made Drill disappear forever. He didn’t go far, just out of sight.

His cantankerous mischief would show up whenever I began to wonder why the big people like my parents always got their way whether I liked it or not. Like talking me into eating poison, Drill would make me stomp my feet, slam doors, throw things and find a place to hide to get away from such tyranny. Instead of such behavior helping me feel good again it always brought the wrath of the big people down on me all the more. Just like my breath after eating skunk cabbage had offended them they said my bad behavior was due to my “unruly instinks”, so I figured we all knew it must have been Drill making me do it.

For many years Drill hounded me from behind the scenes whenever I would bump into authority imposing corrections to or limits on whatever I happened to be doing. School seemed like a gauntlet determined to rid me of Drill’s disruptive influence with discipline so counterproductive it only got his back up to the degree that I dropped out of high school with several hundred detention hours remaining to be served. Determined to shake my nemesis and become a good boy who could pass any test authority could put me to, I volunteered for membership in the institution I was convinced offered the most effective discipline available in the process of making one a real man.

Four years later, when my enlistment was up and he felt it was safe to come out of hiding, Drill’s persnickety ways prevented my remaining by dangling an opportunity to go to college where people got their own authority to run things. Somewhere during the course of my courses in college and promotions in the lucrative job it landed me I began to understand that Drill was far from being my antagonistic nemesis; he is the instinctual being I had been taught all my life was a nature to be dominated; he is the me as I was born and cannot help but be.

The person Drill hounded throughout his life was the person culture convinced must obediently seek its approval to be valid; the person for whom instincts were counterproductive to the purpose of becoming civilized. My experience of attempting to create and maintain that exemplary personality at the expense of the rich council of my genetic memory has stood me well in recovering my early intuition that my connection to the world goes on forever.

Now feral, it is culture by which I feel hounded, but only when I let it in through the doggy door of the intertubes.

IMAGINE THAT …

2010-04-17T05:20:00.008-05:00

There is a land that thrives on the profit from production and celebrates the convenient use of real, verifiable weapons of mass destruction that constantly kill three times more of its own citizens every month than were victimized in the world trade center on 9/11/01 and exploited as justification for an, as yet ongoing, vengeful genocide of over a million residents of two countries not at war with it. In this land twenty-seven thousand individuals kill themselves using these weapons every year, taking fifteen thousand collaterally damaged innocent bystanders with them every year, and knowingly release a chemically poisonous gas as an afterthought killing an additional sixty-three thousand by respiratory failure every year, year after year like clockwork, give or take a couple thousand rounded off and rubbed out statistics. The lands being reduced to rubble in retribution just so happen to be rich in the energy required to maintain the suicide/murder pact agreed to in the land that loves cars. Imagine that…

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My friend Rita began losing her eyesight and muscle strength as she grew older to the point that when she plowed into a curb one day I had to tell her she should stop driving, to which she replied, “Don’t worry, I won’t get hurt, I have this big old Cadillac to protect me!” I’m so fed up with the leaf-blower version of responsibility so rampant within my culture I feel like publishing an angry post about the hundred and eighty pounds of rich, black, fertile leaf mold I just harvested for the spring garden from the pile I raked last fall — with the rake I walked three miles to Callahan’s to purchase — but I can’t. Just thinking about learning to live the alternative to cultural crises calms me down.

CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT BOX

2010-04-16T16:18:00.010-05:00

So vast no where or when is without
No being too small to enlighten from within
Signs of life; cycles of blood and breath
Signs of consciousness; hunger and curiosity
Signs of intelligence; finding theme in variety
Signs of love; celebrating theme with variety

Water seeks the lowest places on its way to the center
Turned back at the bottom by hot farts from the core
Boiled off at the surface by hot farts from the sun
Oceans are the dressing in a spherical heat sandwich
Sloshing to and fro keeping up with Sol’s sway as the Earth turns away
Streaming steam into cool shadow’s shaping of it clouds
To rain upon parched land, gathering again and giggling in puddles
Running off in rivulets to creeks and culverts, cascades and canyons
Rills and rivers, chilly spray from spring shower shivers
On water’s way to the center.

Curiosity urges observation to get to the bottom of the question
Foiled by language turned speechless too close to the truth
Crushed by granite authority demanding jackhammer proof
Observation is the white filling in the consciousness cookie
Reflecting on one’s perceptions of seeing and being seen
Dissolves hard edged objects into fuzz-fringed fur balls
Nodes in the energy field of now’s network stretching to connect
With other dimensions and frequencies, traditions and heresies
Crossing other variations melded in meditations
On wisdom’s way to the theme.

Born to seek the longest path of least resistance on our way to dying
The observer we’re born is rewarded for causing smiles
And tamed with shame and blame for causing frowns
Newborn mind is molten mettle minted between god and country
A coin tossed between the certainty of faith and the logic of law
Lands sometimes on a cutting edge exposing where lies lie
Duplicity exposes the mendacity of sanctity and legality
Debilitation of leaning so hard none can walk alone
Shucking the prosthetic environment of culture’s crutch
On our observer’s way to enlightenment.

If civilization is a lemon
Let learning from our mistakes be the lemonade we make of it.

HAWK EYED

2010-04-10T03:02:00.004-05:00

The constant screeching of the predator birds

Demonizes their prey with provocative words

Feeding their babies who feast on such fishes

Feast on the faith filled’s most fervent wishes

Feast on sheep drowsing in gullible herds

The constant screeching raises the pitch

Blaming painted enemies for theivery by the rich

Lying about what our troops do

To an “enemy” just like you

Keeping a news fed nation’s trigger finger on itch

I see it on the street when e’er I go to town

Hawk eyes glaring from beneath many a frumious frown

At life long fellow neighbors

Who dtd them no harms or favors

But always wore that terrorist’s gown

The white wash of what just leaked

From the ass of the eagle beaked

Condemns them all, demands recall

From innocent nations held in thrall

By corporate nations until oil peaked

BEGUILED BY NIGHT

2010-04-04T09:57:00.010-05:00

This is part of a larger video about the pond, but it's here because I've always been beguiled by night

Fascinated by sunrise, I sit my seat in the garden shed well before false dawn creeps across the land where I live. As Earth rotates Priest and I inexorably east, the materiality of the atmosphere’s rare air high enough to see over the now silhouetted shadows catches glimpses of the radiant energy source and transmits them down to us as a gradual approach to full daylight.

Well after it is bright enough for me to write these words, Sol himself appears in piercing shafts of light, unabsorbed by the hungry leaves that recently grace the filigree of winter’s black branches with clothing of spring foliage, to strike our eyes with shocking directness despite the gentle announcement of its coming. These rays of pure white energy from that fiery orange ball are parsed into the daily spectacle of their sparkling spectrum as they strike the shiny slime trails of slugs’ overnight devouring the remnant meal of chicken feed and the spherical Pink Floyd prisms of dewdrops condensed upon the leaves of the garden vegetables.

Bemused by noon hour when shadows are their shortest, my flute and I respond to the spontaneous symphony of nature’s voices in a harmony unrehearsed, though variations of nature's theme are repeated every day. In a response learned in early chickhood, my fowl family returns from scattered scratch, scratch, peck, pecking for the resurging burgeon of insect life to be found over their eight acre hunting grounds, to enjoy the tattered tortilla’s I strew for their midday snack and a headcount by the mother hen I've become.

Intrigued by dusk, my seat in the shed transports me into the turbulence formed by the heated air of the day being cooled and driven upward by the cooler darkness of earth’s shadow overtaking us at the insensible pace of a thousand miles an hour as the light wanes as it had waxed in the morning. As if by precision meters, the girls return at a time varying with the length of day to roost for darkness’ duration.

Beguiled by night, my imagination is unleashed to create realities of invisibility to posit materiality behind the reflections of man’s puny lights off of beings found during the day by their shadows. Toads gather in the pond for bufo orgy time, filling our ears with roars belying their tiny size as they procreate polliwogs in a plethora of ova contained in ribbons wrapped around the stems of papyrus recovering from recent frostbite depletion them selves. The scent of a skunk, approaching with a curiosity equally beguiled by night, grows from my nostalgic fondness for its freshness to an odor threatening my gag reflex and fades again as she passes on. Priest is sensed more than seen as his paler shade of dark brushes my shins and hops into my lap for the umpteenth mutual appreciation moment of the day.

THE REAL WAR

2010-03-30T03:58:00.010-05:00

All the different reasons we declare war against one another, whether they’re as small as feuds between personalities or as great as ideological confrontations of corporations enlisting half the world‘s population in a war against the other half, are all mere skirmishes within the ranks of our corporatized civilization’s war machine set on establishing dominance over the nature of the universe as it manifests here on Orth within and without we Orthlings' hides.

Being cells in the body of the living planet, the upright Orthlings’ aggressive antagonism toward and ignorance of the well being upon which our own health depends is as though one’s left thumb nail set about converting the rest of the body into toughened keratin to set things to rights for its own good.

In the spectrum of Orthlings’ reality tunnels from scientific atheists to religious zealots there rarely arises anyone arguing against the so obvious sawing off of the limb from the tree of life whereupon we all perch oh, so precariously.

The method employed by the inciters and maintainers of our civilization’s war against nature may seem more familiar in a much more recent series of events, still being played out, that went into overt motion within the memory of anyone older than four orbits of Orth around Ra, to wit:

Needing a cheaper source of energy to enable its agenda to ~~own~~ lead all of Orth in the future, the corporation, Usuki Inc., made the decision to covertly provoke a war against the weakest of the planet’s energy rich corporations. It sacrificed three thousand of its own employees to rouse the remaining three hundred million to revenge. While the terror reigned, the flames enraged and the dust to which the Temple of Gold had been reduced was still settling, corporate security, in the first competent action since allegedly being caught off guard with forbidden airspace penetration by ~~remote controlled drones~~ terrorist hijacked ornithopters crashing into the temple twenty four minimims earlier, found the identification cards for all of the terrorists amongst the powdered rubble of stone, office equipment and three thousand Orthlings — the only things left in tact. And surprise of surprises — they all happened to be from the alliance of corporations with just the energy resource Usuki Inc. needed.

The stooge Usuki Inc. hired to be its political branch CEO lumped scattered, independent dissident groups together by his declaration of a war of retribution against All Kinda terrorists, to define the enemy and of the battle weary corporate grounds of Aghastfistan to be the beleaguered arena for their strategic war.

For protection of their own employees from the same torture they wreaked upon the enemy, their lawyers defined Usuki’s mercenaries to be “legal combatants” in a war of retribution, occupation and usurpation against any Aghastfistanis who objected, defined by the lawyers as “illegal combatants.” As impossible to justify as the war is, none of the corporations that suck up to Usuki have sucked up their guts and objected, lest they be declared “All Kinda” terrorists as well. And thus the demonization of employees of enemy corporations was successfully inserted into the mythology of Usuki’s employees’ belief system.

The much earlier example of this stragedy scenario was enacted soon after the dawn of the upright Orthlings by an embryonic corporation in the form of totalitarian agriculture needing to morally justify wholesale annihilation of vast areas of naturally evolved life forms. To get relatively symbiotic hunter-gatherer-gardener culture to accept such apparent desecration of their environment a two part fable was forged into their mythology. The first was that all of the nature with which the Orthlings had thrived by communing was a creation of an omniscient being who granted ownership to his exceptional creations, the upright Orthlings. The second part depended on this exceptional superiority to justify the demonization of the traditionally revered spirits of nature by morally prohibiting their sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. It was just such evil spirits they were to blame for the instinctual sense of evil they felt when felling a forest for a freshly furrowed field.

All the violence within the ranks any of the corporate civilizations set on owning and exploiting the nature of Orth is the karmic result of individual’s deeply intuitive acknowledgement that they are contributing to a war against universally inexorable natural forces which thwart their warp at every twist in the path to extinction. It is not really a war when the deaths at the hands of the aggressors encourage once innocent collateral damage to rise up against them whether it is other Orthlings or the entire body of Orth.

NUMBERS NATURE TAUGHT US

2010-03-29T14:24:00.012-05:00

In the midst of writing my next post, The Real War, My dear friend Amber emailed me this beautiful video. It is particularly poignant right now because of a confrontation I've had with an earnest socialist who reminds me of the adage, "The surest sign of an impending nervous breakdown is believing what you are doing is supremely important."

In answer to my visits to his blog I have gotten replies like, "There are a million blogs out there all about butterflies and silky clouds. This one is about what needs to get done but isn't.” and "Maybe you should write a poem about it and send it to the Universe." And on a visit to this blog commented, " opting out. SELF sufficient, the privilege of distance, so that one may critique free from risk or consequence. Unless the very radiance of ones enlightenment somehow enters the universal stream and bestows a bit of glow on everyone?"

Well Troutsky, here's one of the million blogs who appreciate nature for what it has always been without needing to get anything done about it.

WORK

2010-03-28T09:33:00.009-05:00

It begins at childbirth. Labor pains. It will always be a laborious process, but whether it is painful has much to do with the variety of creature giving birth. In all of nature, one species has evolved a physical characteristic that pretty much ensures its birth will involve the excruciating pain of passing its cranium through its mothers birth canal.

The surest sign that civilization has become part of human evolution is the unusually large brain to body ratio and its effect on our pain to pleasure ratio. Civilization is so counter to the natural course of life on earth that humans have evolved an over sized organ to keep track of the arbitrary vagaries of civilization’s regulations imposed on the behavior of otherwise natural creatures.

My favorite metaphor for this phenomenon is that of a morbidly obese businessman on vacation, mounted upon a scrawny, wise burro assigned him at the Rubber Rose Dude Ranch, reading from his traveler’s guide he pontificates upon the beauties and developmental possibilities of wherever the steed takes him. When he returns from his ride he must refer to the travel guide to recall his adventure to others, while the burro knows every evolving inch of the same territory by heart.

The Cajun comedian, Justin Wilson, tells a similar tale of a young barefoot boy walking along a two rut road in the swampland of Louisiana overtaken by a Cadillac driving, ten gallon hat wearing, cigar smoking, diamond ring wearing big shot who demands, “Hey, boy. Where’s the Post Office?”

“I don’t know.” replies the lad.

“Where’s the County Courthouse?”

"I don’t know.”

“Where’s the highway to get me out of this God forsaken hell hole?”

"I don’t know.”

“You don’t know shit, do you, boy.”

“I know I ain’t lost.”

In both instances the appropriately named, over-sized modern brain assigns its own values and priorities to an environment that the lean, essential primitive brain understands with the genetically evolved, intuitive understanding of millions of years hanging out on the planet.

Only humans make a job of getting from womb to tomb. The rest of the natural world follows the path of least resistance. Engineers know that work is measured in units of energy spent in overcoming resistance by the nature of the universe. Conquering, containing, exploiting and mutating the nature of individual humans and the environment in general is the proud purpose of civilization’s mission, ostensibly assigned it by the creator of it all. With the exception of the minuscule portion of mankind that remains naturally indigenous, the natural evolution of man has been arrested by belief that he is an exception to the laws of nature granted by an imaginary inventor of it all. Authorities, pushing man’s laws on every newborn, promise that living outside its protection is to risk annihilation by a wilderness whose savagery can only be described in terms of the atrocities man has perpetually perpetrated in the name of his self righteous exceptionality.

The foregoing is to give some depth to my chuckle at the comment on my previous post, Does Not Work Well with Others, offered by one whose life is dedicated to making man’s laws to his own liking, to wit, “… opting out. SELF sufficient, the privilege of distance, so that one may critique free from risk or consequence.” And later on his blog, "…kindly fuck off and crawl back into your hole...or get off the fucking fence you fucking pussy and get into the fight!"

Such a staunch upholder of civilization knows intuitively that the real danger in life is found within the fight to make civilization as convenient to human exceptionality as nature is to the rest of life on Earth.

It is a wry chuckle, I’ll admit.

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I realize that this post is in violation of my vow to post only fiction on this blog, but I figure that since civilization is the epitome of an ongoing revision of a fiction, perpetuated by those with faith in it and by the faithless unable to envision doing more than going along to get along in the anonymity of mobs relying on quantity over quality, it was within fiction’s purview.