Junkie State of Mindlessness

I've noticed that all the lessons anyone claims to have learned from hurricane Sandy were about needs to reinforce and improve infrastructure against obviously worsening, hostile climate extremes now admitted to be due to global warming, with no mention of how it is just such attempts to isolate ourselves so antagonistically from nature that pollute and heat the planet upon whose health we all depend.  Seems to be an unwillingness to hold our own, individual addictions to artificial convenience responsible for our natural, karmic discomfort at the threat of having withdrawals that foster the destructive attitude of "going along to get along". Let's get them there gas guzzlin' generators and cars fueled up and running as soon as possible.

NATURE IS NOT A MACHINE

I’ve become quite divorced from the printed word since I moved to the woods, what with the internet, to keep me appraised of the alert level back in the intensive care units commonly referred to as cities, and Netflix, to show me the latest paintings rendering the ongoing saga on the cave walls. I’ve even backed away from the written word, sparsely maintaining this blog and barely reading others out of a sense of futility in dealing with western civilization’s mechanization of nature.

I mention this hiatus to emphasize the inertia being overcome by my growing fascination with a book I’ve been circling since it was published: Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. His investigation, into the evolution of human eating habits, and mine, into the evolution of human culture from symbiotic hunter-gatherers to fast food fed corporate nations exploiting citizens like so many feed lot cattle, find the same truth at every turn.

I was struck by the metaphor for the corporatization of all phases of daily life Pollan creates with this eloquent indictment of agribusiness’s expedient substitution of synthetic chemicals for nature’s time evolved cycle of soil:

To reduce such a vast biological complexity to NPK represented the scientific method at its reductionist worst. Complex qualities are reduced to simple quantities; biology gives way to chemistry. As (Sir Albert) Howard was not the first to point out, that method can only deal with one or two variables at a time. The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake all we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation for a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to the plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to pesticides to fix his broken machine.

When I first read the foregoing I entertained an overlapping image of public schools’ expediently injecting the establishment’s code of behavior into each crop of children whose obedience leaves no time for independent symbiotic experience of the nature they are being systematically taught to impatiently exploit. Once the children become educated cogs in the machinery of western civilization, one step follows another, so that when the synthetic laws containing them make them rage against their fellow man and more vulnerable to psychotic meltdown, the establishment turns to prisons, insane asylums and the death penalty to fix its broken machine.

The living universe is too complex to be reduced to any lesser metaphor without its quality giving way to simple quantity; a good story giving way to dogmatic, evangelistic truth whose deniers become punishable. Nature’s one ball of wax.

… OF A MORNING

Chickens fed hen scratch and layer crumbles, dogs treated with biscuits and a petting of their night dew dampened coats, coffee brewed, joint rolled — 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 pages to write this on. No birds, no sun, no shadows in the diffused light of reflected dawn. Congestion, settled deep during overnight shallow sleep breathing, is tickled into begging to be expelled by the catalyst ganjava breakfast is to respiration of bodily fluids and inspiration of mental acrobatics like this…

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

Tipi Fini

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TO NATURE, CIVILIZED MAN IS THE 1%

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

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

HOW HIGH THE SKY?

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 …

CHECKING IN

Just watched Stephen Colbert interview Al Gore, who stressed that it was our wars over keeping oil that kept us from affording a technological replacement for the internal combustion devce that causes climate change. Good reasoning, Al.

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

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

Just like Richard Engle laughed off the admittedly deadly pollution of the Hudson river while demonstrating the efficiency of the NYPD to keep the homeland free of theoretically possible terrorism, Al Gore pushes the theoretically most debatable of the many arguments for getting off of fossil fuels while the horror of our pollution of water, land and air remains undeniable and undiscussed, — from the Hudson river to the burning kitchen faucets near fraking operations.

What the frack.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS!!!

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.

THIRD (IM)PERSON NATION

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.

CHOICE

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

NATURE IS NOT VICARIOUS

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. 

DOING SOMETHING…

…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.

A MOUNTAIN OF DIFFERENCE

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.

LAST RESORT

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

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

HELPING

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

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.

ATTITUDES OF OWNERSHIP

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

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.

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

REMEMBERING

What It's All About

Don't let nostalgia cause short term memory loss

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

IF CURSING MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER …

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RIP Dennis Hopper