THE BLIZZARD OF '11

HERE

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.

JUST A LITTLE WHILE AGO…

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

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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

TIME MASTER

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.

Ceci n'est pas une maison*

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.

DAWGRANCH: SPRING '10

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.

"DIRTY"

… was one of those words that never entered his vocabulary for the same reason “fabulous”, “incredible” and “awesome” dropped out. Words that were, or had fashionably become, so ubiquitous as to cease modifying the nouns or verbs with which they were linked in any meaningful way, became mirrors of the speaker by their opaqueness.

“Dirty” was one of his first introductions to how a freeborn boy could be wrong around people who had traded their freedom to choose for lip service allegiance to pop righteousness. The poop in his pants, the soil on his knees and the words he heard daddy say couldn’t all be dirty. People that found dirt always smelled like soap. So how come mother called aunt Donna, who took more baths than anyone in the world, a dirty minded woman?

These questions and observations led him to see that using the word dirty was a kind of unconscious code with which the righteous could recognize each other as allies in finding wrong with actions outside what one must assume they consider their unnaturally sanitary soap box. It no longer mattered whether the modified noun was excrement, soil, reputation, sanitation, sex, ethics, money, job, habit, thought or language in comparison to how clearly it defined the accusing speakers, who were, ironically enough, always describing other than them selves. Imagine that.

His own meaning for “dirty” formulated when he began to feel dirty himself. Finding himself attending class with students who bragged on the obituaries of murdered residents of Carver Village and powerless to find anyone to believe it, or if they knew, to join him in opposing it, he dropped out of his new Mississippi high school and joined the Marines, both to get away and to learn to be more effective in opposing such lynchings. But he felt dirty, leaving such a mess.

Experience over four years of direct contact with and obedience to the military code of justice did nothing to expiate this stain of helpless cowardice he felt. Indeed, it only showed him the immensity of institutionalized enactment of the same kinds of atrocities against people of color in neighborhoods called nations. He talked to veterans returning from the Korean conflict who were just as shot loose from consensus reality as returnees from any of the admitted wars his country wages. If they were fit enough to retain in the service they were often recognizable by fresh material in the shape of rank chevrons removed from otherwise salty uniform sleeves. Chevrons awarded for ferocity in combat granted on the spot in the field. Chevrons taken away for inability to fold up their prize winning talents like the weapons they used by courts-marshal at home. He felt even more helpless to reconcile the increasing examples of other such duplicity dressed in the same flag. Dirty war is a term used by his country to describe resistance to its clean ones.

Over the fifty years since he left the service he tried joining only one more group he thought actually wanted to make the world better. When the company finally announced the product he’d helped engineer to fruition over nine years, he expected he’d begin work on a new project. Instead he was given the task of taking the material, design and performance capacity of his reliable new product to the point that it would break down as soon after warranty as possible to reduce the cost of making something for which the price remained the same, need expensive repairs earlier and increase product turnover. The duplicitous facade was everywhere.

He made a choice between wallowing in the dirty for dominating profit, like oil refinery towns love that smell of money in the air, or feeling the healthy remove from the trough of filthy lucre in the wilderness where the dirtiest he gets forking compost, cleaning chicken roosts and planting seeds feels like the epitome of clean. The word dirty never comes to mind.

LAST WEEK OF THE YEAR

late rising at eight

to a morning dark as seven

guided by the light

like the chickens

who greet him

meet him at coop door

run between his feet

for feed mix in the yard

‘til chill chases him back to his pod,

his yellow and sunset orange submarine,

too toasty ‘til he acclimates

then not warm enough.

from the bridge above it all

he surveys her immediate position

along the never dry river of time

outside her surround-around port holes

blocked only to the south:

imac portal back

to the man-made world

saying news he fears to hear

paying dues left by his career

playing diversions still held dear

posting thoughts finally come clear

touching minds far and near

quality beyond the hit counter

variety of insight incited

tethers to the myth examined

patter on soft skin drum heads

looses rhythm in complexity

gains rain’s tapping attention

another frosty foray for feed

for the dry beneath the roost

to their cackle bitching delight

three more dashes during the day

through rain drops

to catch egg drops

beckoned by loud hen cops

today’s done deeds

entered as 169-171 in his egg book

times, dates and mom’s took

along with omelets eaten

friends who got treated

running cost of the feed

being happy where he is

friends know where to seek him

season of return

spontaneous reunion

catching up the years

yarns of daring do

sympathies of aging

venture wiser view

future all too new.

2009 in Review: END OF AN ERROR

The sanity defined by civilization seemed to find ways to reinterpret my maybe musings about the human condition to be personal attacks in most imaginative ways throughout the year. I was all too often lured into personal responses, as if their demonizing party line stereotypes or quoting the bible represented willingness, much less the ability of the offended to carry on a rational discussion

Coupled with my having stumbled onto the 10^th Daughter of Memory writing exercise, the foregoing dilemma suggested I change the direction of this blog from philosophical ponderings about my observations of the living universe, so easily taken offense to by faith’s delicate certainties, to one of strictly fiction based on such observations. I am beginning to see the rationale for originating fables and fiction throughout the ages as a way to get a message across indirectly to those able to apply Mary’s Little Lamb’s problems to their own life, thereby avoiding the more direct identification with the real population referred to as mindless, faithful sheep.

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For those more willing and able to discuss opposing views with the understanding that the essence of the duality is the win-win objective rather than a lose-lose contest of righteousness, I have moved my ponderings to a new blog available to all who find it in plain sight. You are welcome until offended — at which juncture I would hope you’d be so kind as to throw yourself out into the street. Watch out for cars … headed for the cliff.

I came across three new examples of folks who get the whole idea of a living universe: Sandy Krolic’s The Recovery of Ecstasy: Notebooks from Siberia, Richard Grossinger’s, Embryos, Galaxies and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life and James Cameron’s Avatar. It is gratifying to find others describing the same ongoing event so well as to bridge the differences of viewpoint while enhancing the scope of all.

This year found me a keeper of chickens and an eater of their delicious free-range eggs to supplement my less than desirable progress in growing my food in the garden through Texas summers. This year was a disaster, with only Serrano peppers coming back after the drought — watering every day cannot beat 100°+ for several months — trees began shedding leaves in mid June!

Having a quasi roomie and companion for stimulating conversation through six months of the worst heat was a more than compensatory distraction from discomfort though it left me missing her quite more than I expected and a never before indulged chocolate addiction – acne at seventy-one?

The UN climate summit succeeded in only resolving that people in suits consider people otherwise dressed or from below the equator to be unworthy of protecting from the ecological disaster by supplying them money to achieve the same standard of living that is causing it in the first place. Rather than dragging people out of the rain forest and selling them an air conditioner we should be planting trees and naturally ventilating our houses in their shade with the fresh air they regenerate symbiotically. Don’tcha jus’ love politics?

As 9/11/01 fades, 12/21/12 looms … “ these are the times” … "this is a record of the times" … “we’re all going down” … “together.”

Stragedy plots a way to side step inevitability.

Only carbon based life could generate so much irony.

5 CHICKS & A TOMCAT

I realized the hits I may invoke only after I finished typing the post title and am loath to change it just because it may disappoint the voyeur in us all. As my role model in reverse, Chance the Gardener (Chauncy Gardner {Peter Sellers}) likes to say, "I like to watch." These days it's these chicks.

Be that as it may I am hereby updating the breathless world on the news of the crew's cruise 'oer the land of the free and the home of a knave. Watching Priest's predatory instincts wax and wane with his feline curiosity is quite intriguing. He can sit obviously enamored amidst all five scratching, pecking and chatting about the smorgasbug offerings as sedately as I could hope for and I've watched him stalk low all the way across the yard as if they were his last chance to eat or maybe his long gone sister, Vera, prone to play like kids' cowboys and indians. No matter how many times I catch and scold him he manages to carry out his faux fear mongering as often as not — enough to evoke a squawk and a flutter, no more serious than their own pecking order arguments over food — and, having grown up with him every day of their life, they come right back to what was so playfully, rudely interrupted, while I still mother hen them two weeks into their free range adventures.

As the video demonstrates, if I can spot one I know within the hypoteneuse of a 6'x12' triangle where the others are.

I panicked when I touch the soft shelled egg in the nest until consulting goog ole goodle and found it to be common among hens' first eggs after moulting among on line eggery folk like me. Now I've made it more common, just because it calmed me down. Robin is the name of the hen I inherited in a mixup when my buddy, Chuck, retrieved his three chickens I baby sat over a week of his vacation. She was moulting because she is about eleven months older than her new coop mates. When the the mess her feathers were calmed down into smooth new plumage the turned out to have mousey brown feathers with pin stripes of their quills shining on her wings and back and her breast turned as red as a robin.

You may have noticed the markings on the radiant blond I've been calling Whynot, evolved from Wynona out of "Y" for the markings on her infant forhead, which have prompted me to now call her Dax, for the Star Trek symbiot and my buddy Babyldorkgalactinerd. The shot below is of Nameless One who watched me move that chair, my sieto, to get her food at every dawn of her life, so has stationed herself there and pooped in it to show her appreciation. I'm waiting for eggs.

If course, being the Simon Legree of all I feed and feed off of, I have devised a task for them to do when they're not busy laying those eggs they're always in process of making: I pile several shovels full of compost into the sifting screen and a token sprinkling of feed which they jump up to eat and remain to sift through the whole pile of juicy bugs therein, pooping all the while … the benefits of symbiosis never end. I like to win-win.

GRADUATION DAY

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

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

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

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

LATEST COOP POOP SCOOP

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

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

Humorous anecdotes along the way are referenced by

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

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

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

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

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