‘They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing’

It’s not that I care any less now, about the politics or war or the war machine.

I’m just caring more, about other things.

I never did yet tell you about the incident with the check engine light, or how it turned out not to matter at all, except for the glitch of fear it caused in me.

I haven’t even edited the big pile of trip video.

I think that as I sink down into being home again I will probably be talking about what’s next.

It starts with a ball joint for the pickup and getting the RME looked at by a second expert closer to home.

Then, a hitch.

And how the road may someday loop back to Argenta del Norte.

The fun stuff.

It happened officially and precisely just 22 minutes ago local.

We celebrated with a bottle of Willamette wine and hours of talk.

There is nothing more to report at this time.

It’s all good.

Possibly last post for a few days; I’m going, for real this time, after this’un:

The Moar:

How To Replace Subaru Leaking Headgaskets SOHC EJ25 (No worries my doves. It’s not leaking, yet, even a little, and it’s only $2500 for a pro to do it right if it starts.)

How to Check for a Bad Head Gasket on Toyota and Lexus Engines (Exactly the same as on Subarus, but with other kinds of wisdom toward the end)

How to change a Subaru Head Gasket without removing the engine

Subaru Cheat Codes Ep 2: How To Dress And Install A New Longblock (bare ej25)

How to Remove a Subaru Engine Checklist and Demonstration Explanation

The Easiest Car Brand To Own, Maintain, & Repair?! | Subaru, Of Course! Here’s Why!

***

Outback Wilderness No Build Camper

Building A Minimalist Camper in My Subaru Outback

Subaru Impreza Camper Build

5 Essential Items For Your 2023 Outback Car Camper

NO BUILD SUV TOUR | 2015 Subaru Outback | Living in my SUV

The $60 DIY Awning I built for my Subaru Forester

***

Campgrounds vs Dispersed camping in Colorado: The best overland campsites

***

RME, Mr. Auto

RME, Autotrader

RME, cars101

2002, cars101

2002, cars dot com

Car Camper Conversion Under 100 Dollars | Subaru Outback Tour

Theirs is only two years newer than the one I’m (probably) getting in the next three days, and I feel like they have no more money than I do, maybe less.

Much more on this topic dumping soon.

“The Apex of Subaru Engineering”, Kenyan edition

Or you know, just confirmation bias.

By the way, the top half of the ’02 Outback is a color quite officially called Savanna Green, which is also a girl name.

I am thinking of the lower half as a Rocky Gray.

The boy part.

Perhaps “offbeat older brother’ is being generous, or even: Too Nice.

Anyway, the only thing stopping me from buying it for sure right now is that $1200 rack and pinion job.

And the only reason I’m hesitating is: the dealer claims it was done.

While the mechanic says: ripped rubber, leaking fluid …

… both things cannot be true.

I will attempt to negotiate a further discount on the basis of that white or black lie, and wait, to have that repair made right at my own expense after I get back.

With Rocky. Or Savanna.

In the driveway.

With the mattress.

When this is over I will tell you a long story about why I think this (RME) is better
(than a nice new Crosstrek)

Well. It’s not over yet.

It’s only … 93 percent done or thereabouts.

Here anyway is a start on the story, if not Most of what I know about it so far.

One, I can’t stretch out full length to sleep in an unmodified Crosstrek, so we’d be talking about a new base Forester or Outback.

Two, and this is the main thing, Mr. Subaru says (and others say it too) that 2000-2004 was the pinnacle and apex of Subaru engineering. Before that, they were a scrappy little auto company who were still perfecting their tech. And, after that, they started slowly sliding toward being just another corporation and profit machine.

This was epitomized by their 2010 decision to move to CVT(ransmissions) and to begin phasing out stick shifts.

The slide deepened in 2011 and 2012 when I was buying the Pearl. Their engines started to secretly burn oil, and more oil faster as they aged. And Subaru knew, and said nothing.

Worse still, the car itself didn’t say anything either. Even the simple low oil light didn’t come on until the engine was already cooked dry and destroyed from the inside out.

That happened to me at about 130K–the first time.

Like a maroon, I slapped another engine, flawed in the very same way, into it, with six grand of mostly family charity money.

It failed for the second time last month.

Subaru is coasting on its outdoorsy, dogloving, queer-friendly image on the one hand, and its legitimately superior Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive (arguably the only AWD worthy of the name) on the other.

The new ones, even the lovely hybrids and the proud bearers of Wilderness trim badges …

I honestly believe they will turn out to suck, and mainly due to end-stage capitalism.

Just like a Boeing.

So I’m honestly supporting wife’s intention to go with a Kia when the time comes for her to buy her forever car.

Pending further review of the evolution, and in the case that the new and superior Chinese automakers continue to be cock-blocked in the US.

And as for me, I’m headed back to the golden age. The ’02 RME is not flawless by any stretch.

But a manual transmission is far cheaper to fix than a CVT.

An old EJ 251 engine predates the oil burner issues, and their documented head gasket issues at least give ample warning long before the point of catastrophic failure.

If I go through with the purchase, I’ll be spending $6300 to acquire, $2200 on a timing belt and spark plugs and wires and a number of other do-it-now issues, probably twelve hundred more sooner rather than later on the rack and pinion, and, someday, whatever a head gasket costs (too much, but the independent inspector/mechanic says it looks quite solid for now).

And, in three years, a 2002 will be eligible for its own historic copper plate.

Thus enhancing its already substantial retro cred.

***

Further notes

sUbArUs aReN’t ReLiAbLe OvEr 100K MiLeS

Avoid This Engine Like the Plague

2002 Subaru Outback – That Weird Time GM Owned Part Of Subaru!

Buying A Used Subaru Outback Or Legacy?! Here’s The Good And Bad Over The Last 20 Years!

Should You Buy a Used Subaru Outback?

How To Check for Head Gasket Leaks

Donnie’s Subaru Outback Is A Camp Ready Adventure Wagon!

Again. The bastards.

Children and generals alike are dead.

First reports coming out at midnight here on Friday the 13th.

I don’t know what to tell you.

I was Liony then.

To the people who loved me, fed me, wiped my ass, that was my name.

To the people who tolerated me or disliked me, I was Liony.

I am Liony still. He is here with me, as I write these words.

***

These days, I wipe my own ass, just like a growed-up man oughta.

I feed myself, and I’m getting pretty good at it.

When I walk into the grocery store and type my fake phone number into their database for fifty cents off on a pack of sausage, my fake name comes up as Rocky.

Rocky Anderson.

When the checker looks down at the receipt, and reads my name they say:

Thank you, Mister Anderson

Recently one clerk, far brighter than the average, said to me

Every time I say that I think of the Matrix.

And I saith unto her, well that tells me flat out that you, Ma’am, are no NPC, in spite of your dead end job in this nowhere little town. You’re a fair bit brighter than the average bulb. Good on you, and please never let the bastards grind you down.

Because that’s exactly why I chose the name Anderson.

I did not say to her why I chose the name Rocky.

***

Rocky is also the name now of the latest stray, who went to the vet today, probably for the first time in his life.

I paid half. Almost half.

In a few days’ time it will be the name of my latest car.

“Rocky” is not nearly as good a nickname for me as Liony was.

But anyway, it’s not a nickname at all in any usual sense. No one calls me that, or has, not even once or ever in my life.

But Rocky the cat is here with me, and soon Rocky the car will be too.

I’m not doing a very good job of explaining.

***

Rocky had a face all pushed out of shape like tenderized meat. In that movie. He was not bright.

I too have been all pushed out of shape, by life, and maybe I’m as ugly as that Rocky —

don’t really know don’t really care any more

Sometimes I’m damn fuckin’ dumb, profoundly concussed maybe.

***

Liony is here with me now.

Even if I look and speak and act more like a Rocky, at my advanced age. Even if in some metaphorical sense Rocky, Rocky Rockford and all the Rockies, are here with me now.

Yo

Adrian

Here’s Why Despair Is So Commonplace Today

The despair you feel, sometimes or all the time, is not about yourself or your trauma or what is broken in you.

It is the quasi-intentional by-product of the toxic culture you have been steeped in since birth, and the literally toxic environment you grew in (There is a teaspoon of plastic inside your brain, right now, as you read these words.)

***

Problems.

Like “smoking”. Like loneliness, and the destruction of community and connection.

Like this one (and a million more on top):

Problems to Look Out for When Buying a Used Subaru (Forester) – All Generations

Going back “15 thousand years”.

More or less.

The first real trash day in three weeks, and a remarkably productive one.

I’m sorry to have been incommunicado through it. I am working very hard. In many different ways.

The plan, still, remains intact–on Thursday night or Friday morning we will leave here together and drive back up to the metro of urban richness and suburban doom, via ABQ and little Trinidad at the Raton Pass, as fast as safety allows.

And that on Friday, and Saturday, all energies will be concentrated upon the RME that currently lives at Mr. Auto; on getting it from there to Rocky Mountain Auto for inspection, and, pending a successful inspection … how to pay for it with as little damage to my financial well-being and credit score as possible.

That by Saturday night I will know what the right thing to do is, one way or the other, in the context of this … conscious week … on this rock in space that all we monkeys are flying upon, in what passes for community, in these dark and sober days.

Spaceship of the Planet of the Apes, yeah? Yeah. Let us pray.

Palestinian Woman Confronts Gabor Mate’ Over Surviving Genocide

Jesus MFin’ Christ all I can say is don’t watch unless you are ready to weep for this world and what we’ve made of it.

Evil is real.

There are saints and they are just as real.

Let each of us resolve to live in such grace, whenever we can, however we can, as best we can.

This ENTIRE Subaru Engine IS SCRAP! So Much Damage In A FORESTER? EJ253 RIP

Caution: this autopsy is not for the faint of heart or those given to queasiness.

Subaru: Boxer Engines. Lineatronic CVTs.

From my fanboi perspective, these technologies are not, strictly speaking, “unreliable”.

What they are is manufactured by a smaller auto company with relatively razor-thin margins.

There’s a lack of … tolerance, here. There is very little margin for error.

This circumstance is directly reflected in the internal physical operations of the major drivetrain components themselves.

The slim margins are cast into the very metal.

Most of the time it all works out fine.

But the older things get, and the less perfect the adherence to the maintenance schedule, and without going over and above it by doing things like checking the oil every 1000 miles instead of just letting them check it whenever the filter gets changed …

The narrower the tolerances become. And …

When as a result, things do go wrong, the failures ramp up and start to cascade quickly.

Within minutes. Sometimes within seconds.

That’s the real real truth of it as best as I can make it out, and say it.

***

Subarus are, in a very specific sense of the word, Fragile Inside.

And, in a different specific sense, very tough on the outside.

No one and I mean no one else has the true miracle that is Symmetrical AWD.

Like I said 15 years ago when I chose a Subaru to be the first (and possibly the last) New Car of my life, what I care about most is my car’s ability to stick to the pavement no matter what, no matter whether that pavement is covered in blowing and drifting snow, hydroplane rain, or glare ice.

By that metric, it was, and is, the little japanese emperor, the pint-sized king.

10/10, would and will buy again.

Now to figure out …

Just how to make it happen, in the dollars and cents sense.

***

Contrary Opinion: Subaru Sucks (and it might be Toyota’s fault)

So yeah. Buy a very old one, with a manual transmission and as few miles as possible.

Like the Rocky Mountain Edition, right? Dammit.

(“I was under the impression that Subaru had sorted out the problems with their CVTs by the ’14 or ’16 or ’19 model” yeah me too but apparently not.

Ultimately the problem here isn’t CVTs or Subaru or Toyota or anything obvious like that.
Ultimately the problem is this world, and civilization, and the profit motive, and the necessity of hiring expensive lawyers to have any hope of anything resembling fairness, much less justice. Shit like that.

Mayhap the generation of my nephews or niece will be allowed to import or drive some nice sweet capable Chinese EV that can tow a camper without breaking the bank.)

Two blown engines and I am more of a Subaru fanboi than ever. (Weird. Weird.)

So is this guy, and he knows two or three times what I do, or likely ever will.

From watching him and others, I’m getting more knowledgeable over time anyway.

What I end up buying, whether it’s an old one to get the manual transmission, or a new one to get the sweet new hybrid engine (and/or Wilderness badging and perqs), that’ll be a product of my learning and evolving as time goes by.

That old 2002 RME probably hasn’t sold yet, and if there was a way to lay hands on it for $7500 and do the timing belt and water pump for another $3K all at once, it might be close to the perfect solution, but …

There isn’t a way.

Maybe the van will sell tomorrow and there suddenly will be.

About such things, none of us knows anything.

***

Invaluable Resources Dump

cars101
old-car warranties
what is x-mode
Special finance, Subaru Certified Pre-Owned used vehicles 2025-2020 model years
leasing
lease to buy

Anthony Fauci continues to prove himself as the absolute front-running candidate yet for the actual Antichrist. That is one evil bastard.

Shame on you and me both for not realizing it sooner, especially if we saw (I did) Dallas Buyer’s Club when it came out in 2013.

He was demonic way back in the eighties, when the film is set, decades before the repeated lies about Covid.

May we all pay better kinds of attention, going forward.

Up at Wolf Creek Pass, way up on the Great Divide, there was another story (look there goes another one, just like the other one), with a woman stranger.

But that one will have to wait.

I’m back now. It’s over, except for the part about getting my truck out of hock from the airport. It’s over except for a couple of van tires that don’t exist yet; maybe another five hour wait so that someone else can collect another five hundred dollars. Small stuff. Chicken feed.

The cats were all still alive.

The, uh, abyss is $758 deeper, four hundred on the one card and three on t’other, gasoline and epic bars, but it could have been worse. It’s not $7500.

All said and done I got forty dollars and two packs to get me through til payday.

And that’s with the water bill paid, too.

It’ll do.

Still sometimes you know

I wish I was a bluebird

Today we made 400 miles or so and did a lot of good.

Tonight we are bedded down in Durango.

So many interesting and wondrous things happened. I can’t tell you about most of them, because they were not exclusively my story, and I’m still trying to work out where my story ends and the stories of those I love begin, and the morality of that shit.

I can tell you this one. It was for sure exclusively mine.

I was in Pagosa. Inside the Natural Grocers. Alone.

I had just taken a picture of the things that were in my shopping basket. I was on the last aisle, just before heading up to the checkout.

Down the aisle came a woman.

This woman thought that her husband was walking right behind her, and she growled something low that she thought were for his ears alone.

He didn’t hear her.

But I did.

She said:

I am in control of this radio.

You will submit to me!

What could it mean? I didn’t know and still don’t. Some private joke I guess.

For once in my goddamn life, I was quick enough to say the perfect thing on the spur of the moment.

I looked up and I said to her, Well now, Ma’am.

That is quite an offer.

And then her husband caught up from behind her, and he said:

What’s so funny honey?

I smiled and stepped away before she could compose a coherent answer. Stepped away quick, but not too quick. Just ambling. Grinning.

I wish I could be that appropriately inappropriate every moment of my life until I die.

That will never happen.

But a boy can dream.

And right now I think I will.

For real and literal.

And I am.

But I had to share this because of a Perfect quotation at about the 12 minutes mark. From the movie Syriana, starring George Clooney, 2005. Paraphrasing:

“Corruption, and wars everywhere all the time, are what keep us safe and warm.”

It’s bad enough that this is so exactly true.

It’s made ten times worse IF you let them turn you into a zombie that wants to bomb Putin or “Hamas” or the Houthis or Iran or China with shiny new Raytheon ordinance paid for with your own tax dollars.

Fuck the corruption. Fuck their Liberty Machine, even if it does give you a sense of false security.

Bring the boys home. Keep them home. House them and give them real, free health care, and their mommas and babies and babymamas too.

Or, you know, wave that flag and indulge your bloodlust, whatever. I am not the boss of you.

Why I Chose a Subaru: Winter Car Camping

My video production skills will never be this good, mainly because I don’t care about them being so.

Everything else though?

Some day.

His latest video is really good too.

We’re moving on. Lessons from Living in 580 Sq ft

Germany THREATENS Israel Over Gaza Genocide

You get to decide, who my title for this post is actually referring to.

The plans are in constant evolution just like always of course.
–Folk Song

That said, right now, the tiny house will be 10 x 10, 100 square feet.

Really that’s uselessly small for my purposes, except for a couple things.

1) At that modest size I could drag it up the driveway and out my gate with ease. Perhaps to sell it (you’ll recall that this property my house sits on is commercially zoned, and Anaprim’s remit could be expanded to the selling of … sheds, or emergency housing for people with none).

2) The main point really is doing it for practice.

In case down the road I wanted to scale up to a 20 x 20 four hundred square footer.

On a lot in, say, Silver City.

This month and next, it’s a pure wild hair of a pipe dream, and most of the pipe dreams I have never go anywhere at all.

But I think this one has some promise.

Let’s square away the rest of these god damn cars first and see how that promise looks in August.

When we all go to the Chile Festival in Hatch.

Until five minutes ago I didn’t know this was even possible.

Thus begins, officially, the month of small twisted miracles.

If you zoom in real close you can see the old radio antenna, just barely bending.

Let me tell you, that made one hell of an unholy racket hitting the roofline.

***

Edit: And look. To the right.

There’s a hundred feet of clear paved driveway there.

For now.

I think I might build a tiny house on it.

Watch me.

(the other)
I helped her out of a jam, I guess
But I used a little too much force.
We drove that car as far as we could; abandoned it out West …
The only thing I knew how to do was to keep on keepin’ on

like a bird

that flew

***

(the others)
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenters’ wives
Don’t know how
it all got started

I don’t know what they do

with their lives

***

(one left)
But me, I’m still on the road
Headin’ for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it

from a different point

of view

Sometimes I really wish I could shut my brain off and go to sleep.

This is in Fort Collins.

Theoretically, though not sanely, I could … afford it. At least my card limits could.

If it’s still there on Tuesday I guess I have to go look at it.

First thing is that luscious pickup truck.

There’s a lot of things I love about it, and top of the list is real 4WD, plus eight long feet of bed.

The downside, the main way that it is limiting me right now, is … 10 mpg. Related, through money, is the fact that if something goes wrong with the 300K+ engine or some other major component, I don’t have any easy way to fund a fast fix.

Right now she’s in maintenance mode for those reasons, a daily driver that I don’t dare to push too hard or too far. As I have time and scraps of cash, I will have the suspension looked at and upgraded. And I will rehab and install the shell I found that covers that eight-foot bed so precisely, so potentially beautifully.

Same goes for the exactly matching trailer (also a 1999, also white). One day, they will make the perfect mobile and modular home for shorter trips, oh Lord, up into the holy Gila, or over in the the vicinity of Blue, Arizona. Down to the fictional south Laramie, which is Deming.

But there needs to be one to drive less expensively, as far as the real Laramie up north too.

That’s where the Pearl replacement I am owed some day factors in.

(And to your point, Grace, once that replacement happens, trading this house in, for one on the land in Silver, starts to become more realistic.)

***

The plans are in constant evolution just like always of course.

But I am 99% sure that it will be another Subaru.

I was sure that it would be a Crosstrek too, and I’d still prefer that, but there may be a tiny problem with that idea.

Which is that it may be on the edge of impossible to sleep comfortably in it … maybe.

I need to measure one for real. The picture shows how the last best hope would work.

To be clear, I don’t even want to sleep right in the car. But I do very much want that to be an option, for emergencies or for extreme minimalist adventures.

Thus: Rather than the Crosstrek, I am at least considering a Forester or an Outback, both of which would add something like 20 cubic feet of cargo capacity, including those crucial few inches of cargo length.

***

A late update that makes a lot of the link-dumping I was going to do here irrelevant.

2026 Subaru Outback, with Hybrid Power and SUV Looks, Is Worth Waiting For

35 mpg for as little as $30,430 base price, per the article.

Which would be damn close to the perfect vehicle for me.

And if that wasn’t enough …

In the last few days, Subaru made another announcement, to the effect that this slick new Outback Hybrid thing will become available, later into 2026, with something called the Wilderness trim.

Which for my purposes means: A hybrid vehicle that is also capable of towing 3500 pounds.

As opposed to the standard 1500.

Do I care? I’m not sure I dare to care yet, because that kind of beyond-perfect also pushes the price past 40K.

And … I’m currently focused on minimalist trailers that weigh closer to a thousand pounds, easily yankable with the very modestly priced brand new Outback Hybrid version …

Making the ten/twelve/fifteen thousand more dollars seem at least extravagant, and maybe even, hate to say it, superfluous.

***

I really need to quit this shit now.

And do some work that matters to contexts much sooner than next March.

As in, like three or four days from now.

Out.

Okay look.

Yes I’ve been prolific, and I would say the quality of the produce has been high, and I’m genuinely proud of all that.

But I’m giving myself permission to take a week or ten days off if necessary, and it might be.

The next five days are going to have to be hardcore trip prep, including paying all the June bills at one grinding go.

Then there’s at least 2.5 days pounding the road itself hard.

And on the other side of that there’s even more doing that will explode into being of necessity due to certain nuances of my softheadedness.

I should be in recoup by Sunday the 8th or something like that.

Expect one more massive messy dump of a post as I get these hundreds of browser tabs closed properly.

At then a long moment of stillness.

For the Pearl.

Among other things semiprecious.

That one cliche’, about ‘surrounded by alligators while trying to drain the swamp’.

First of all, you shouldn’t be frivolously destroying wetlands that way. La Cienega is not only a blessing. It’s the habitat and the ecosystem those gators depend on.

What you blithely think of as swampdraining is, from their perspective, both ecocide and genocide.

No wonder they’re pissed.

But that’s not really why the cliche was on my mind.

There are ghost gators around me in this moment, sure, but less fear than one might think.

In such moments, I remind myself that this is the place I drain into–spill into, and how and why that is important.

It’s both a kind of secular salvation

and The Objective.

New RV puts family in the ER

When I sent the other link out to the fam yesterday, I talked about the connections between things like simplicity, anti-sedentism, and

“well let’s just say et cetera”

This is part of what I meant by that phrase.

Our ultramodern way of living makes us sick, in so many large and small ways that it can be hard to see, and overwhelming at the same time.

Specifically, no matter who “they” are, or what they’re selling, they’re motivated by profit and greed, and never by what’s best for you, not even a little bit, and no matter what they say.

That is a major contributor to the rot at the core of everything this society and culture and modus vivendi are about.

It makes no difference if you’re buying team red or team blue, GM or Subaru, Boeing or Airbus, Google or Apple. It doesn’t matter if you shop at Piggly Wiggly or Whole Foods.

It’s a game and it’s rigged.

It’s a big club and you and I ain’t in it, just like George Carlin preached to us.

You can shut your eyes tight and la la la.

You can open them to the utter Despair of the real situation, and feel it deeply, and hurt, just like this counselor woman is doing toward the end of the video.

Those are the real choices, and no amount of diligence and seeking out a “reputable dealer”, or even putting your faith in a label that says Organic or Grass-Fed can fundamentally change it.

That bitterly and brutally hard work of change is your mission and mine alone.

Should we choose to accept it.

***

Another example regarding the bad news.

Dealership Tactics During RV Inspection! Why My Client Walked Away

And then, from virtually the same source, a slim ray of hope.

What I found During This RV Inspection was Odd!

And some acumen besides.

So I went ahead and made the world a tiny bit better of a place.

With “coffee”.

2024 Subaru Crosstrek (2.5 engine) | Real-world Highway Fuel Economy and Range

For real reals, the test on a new one is 34 mpg highway.

Which equals 500+ miles on the 16.6 gallon tank.

Which equals $60ish in gas on a round trip from here to Vegas.

$100 at least from here to the Front Range and back.

$200 for the full Silver-Riverton-Silver.

Though that would of course all be without towing anything.

Which means: either building a barebones bed in the cargo area …

or doubling those trip costs, roughly, for the most rudimentary of trailer-based sleeping solutions, meaning 1000 pounds max, and at least $5000 more spent up front.

Forty thousand, eh?

Yeah we’ll see.

And while we’re on the subject:

“Subaru has also unveiled the 2026 Forester Wilderness, a version that prepares the small SUV for even muddier adventures with raised ground clearance (9.3 inches), upgraded suspension, all-terrain tires, and myriad cosmetic enhancements inside and out.

That new version, along with the new Crosstrek Hybrid, will go on sale in fall 2025.”

I’m all talked out, but not quite all shared out.

Before All Of This. Ever Went Down.

And then the world changed. The average person says it was for the better.

The Birth of Civilisation I (20000 BC to 8800 BC)

The Birth of Civilisation II: Cult of the Skull (8800 BC to 6500 BC)

The Birth of Civilisation III: Owning Things. Property. Evil City #1 (6500 BC to 3200 BC)

Here are the defining characteristics of that change.

The best of the changes was the last one, Writing, a mere 5000 years ago. But even so, it developed as a tool for expressing the deeply harmful concept of Owning Things–Property itself.

We created symbols, impressed into wet clay, to say: So-and-so owns this grain, and here’s a list of who owns which grain, and which land, and which … people.

Inequality was Invented, and continues to be re-invented today, and will be tomorrow too.

The earliest writing, in its very reason for being, was thus inextricable with the worst of the changes, social hierarchy. From the beginning, it wasn’t art, like a lion man sculpture or a cave painting. It wasn’t Poetry. It was … Accounting.

As for Agriculture–Cultivation is Labor, and labor can be exploited for the same ends as writing.

Hunting isn’t labor. Gathering isn’t labor. There were no laborers, before farming. No one forces other people to hunt.

Slaves built the Pyramids just as they would one day build the White House. There’s your monumental architecture, too.

Only … as Robin Greenfield has pointed out recently, there’s no such thing as a slave.

There are only human beings that have actively been enslaved.

No “illegals”. Just people made via Civilized law illegal by the fact that they crossed nomadically over some line in the sand that is just as made-up and fake as the law itself.

By “civilization”.

No workers of the world, but only people who have been forced to work, or starve, because they don’t have the option of hunting buffalo any more.

Working, primarily within urban environments, Egypt or Detroit, for Fixed Rations, or “wages”.

Civilization, via ownership, having made hunting and gathering illegal too, then killed all the wild, un-owned, undomesticated buffalo.

Just to be damn sure.

***

They want you to stay focused on what all this has done For You.

And to never think about what it has done

To You.

***

They want you to celebrate the illusion of your liberty.

They want you to forget that everything you get (“for Free”) is paid for with the liberty

of someone else.

Perhaps a nine-year-old girl in Rafah.

Or the homeless veteran at the traffic light, yeah thanks, for your service, old son.

Or the battered drone who sat behind you in class, who was never as smart as you, or worked so very hard as you, and was left behind, very tragic and all

while you rose through the … Meritocracy

and reaped the benefits

of living in this so very Free and Civilized way.

They want you to believe that you are blessed.

That it is your duty to vote, for either the shill, or the puppet.

That God smiled upon you and danced a divine jig when you weren’t born in a … Shithole.

That your freely given Charity and your flag decal will get you into some kind of heaven someday, even if you’re too smart to believe the one about God.

***

I have a lot more to say about it all; “in Writing”.

I wanna do right.

But not right now.

***

Part Two. Speaking Practically.

I’m not mad at you for killing off the Red Pearl mainly because she’s already been dead to me, for me and my purposes, for a long time already.

Here is how it gets made right.

***

The very minimum: 4WD, or at least AWD, and sufficient driver legroom of 41+ inches

Longevity/Reliability: I want it to outlive me, and do it cheaply, including …
Fuel / Mileage: at least 25 mpg, and
A round trip of (say) Silver-Riverton is $250 for 2000 miles–50 such trips = 100K miles

Then …

Cargo Capacity: of one Twin XL mattress, 38.5 × 79.5, plus minimal luggage
and/or
Towing Capacity: 2500ish pounds. 2 Twin XL Mattresses. 2 E-bikes? A barebones kitchen.
I have some cheap ideas, about what to build and tow (**see note below).

So …
Sure, maybe it’s a Crosstrek/Wilderness. Maybe an Outback.
Maybe a Kia. Maybe something else.
Whatever best meets the criteria
and does it sooner rather than later.
I won’t live forever.

***

I’ll be holding onto my Lariat as a daily and local driver to get me to where I want to walk, and patching it up as needed.

Everything else, including the van and the current cargo trailer, is expendable.

(The van by itself is a poor attempt to do it all-in-one, pretty expensively and not super reliably. Therefore, spending money on it beyond the absolute bare minimum is just wasteful, and temporary. I’ll pay for two more tires, but after that, meh.)

***

**Note below:

I absolutely love this guy’s paranoia because
1) It’s very much like my own, but …
2) It’s carried to an extreme that makes it seem absurd, and so I feel better about myself.

My own variation on this approach … maybe it will have cameras.

But I am not going to care about Stealth in the parking lot of a dead hardware store, because … I don’t want to sleep, OR be awake, in the parking lot of any store, alive or dead.

I would much rather drive out to a place where I’m just not seen at all.

And I don’t care about the hockey game.

And bro, I don’t want to keep my food in plastic bags, either; it’s just ugly.

The Truth About People, as things stood the year I got here.

After the first five minutes, I said, This is really good.

After the first fifteen, I said it again.

After that, it had its ups and downs, but yeah. I was right.

This is really good.

“No, you’re not a flop.
You’re a gift, infant.
Underneath that beautiful face there’s a street brawler.
But underneath that there’s someone that no one, nothing has ever dirtied.
The way people were meant to be.
That’s what you are.”

The truth, and he spoke it very cool.

Yes there are two ways you can go by
but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on

Chicago Syndicate (1955)

Lots of street scenes showing what it looked like in the days of your parents.

Scandal Sheet (1952)

The Donna Reed that you didn’t know about before viewing.

Cat Women Of The Moon (1953)

3 Movies the NFL Doesn’t Want You To See

They’re killing babies in the name of Freedom
We’ve been down that sorry road before
They let us hang around a little longer than they should have
And it’s too late to fool us anymore

We’ve seen the ones who killed the ones with vision
Cold-blooded murder right before your eyes
Today they hold the power and the money and the guns
It’s getting hard to listen to their lies.

And I’ve just got to wonder what my Daddy would’ve done
If he’d seen the way they turned his dream around
I’ve got to go by what he told me
try to tell the truth

And stand your ground

—Don’t let the Bastards (get you down)
Kris Kristofferson (June 22, 1936 – September 28, 2024)

The false choice according to the least awake looks like this:

Left/Right! Red/Blue! Trump/Harris!

Just dumb, just no.

The false choice for the slightly more thoughtful; the types that might have once supported ol’ Bernie for example, comes down to embracing the system and attempting to prosper within it.

“Socialist” tweaks to vulture capitalism, or

“Stakeholder” capitalism vs. the traditional pure shareholder kind.

Like that.

Still all false.

***

The real choice.

Keep your eyes tightly shut and live within the illusion of the matrix, as above.

Or.

Open them, and face living with the facts on the ground, and total Despair.

The long version

Short version:
General Wesley Clark Tells The Truth About Middle East War

Long Version:
Netanyahu Is Getting His War Between The U.S. & Iran

NYU Yanks Diploma After Graduation Speech Punks Israel

He never mentioned the word “Israel”.

Just Palestine.

How’s that system of liberty and opportunity working out

for you

my bright ones?

(On this side, I slept for 10.5 hours straight through without an effort.)

via Ms. Rachel (yes again sorry dears) and The Dissidence

***

Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother

***

“to drive the conversation into useless directions”

Alone on this earth, I’m no more academic, within cells interlinked.

There are other kinds of dysphoria beyond the popular kind about gender, to be borne.

All that is left are the sick, the poor, and the forgotten.

I think I’m going to stop placing any attention on the ancient trailer and its trim and screens, and envision a world in which I have a new one to play with someday. I want to instead fix the shell, build a practice tiny house in my backyard, and then concern myself with Transmission.

The 1982 Bladerunner was all LA, or San Angeles, but in the 2017 sequel the wave hits that pacific seawall and bounces back into the Vegas desert just as if it was written by HST and not PKD.

The Strip is a toxic orange.

Every frame is lonely.

The Joi of the movie is exactly the same joi that those blue droids were trying to sell you last year.

To be special is to be something more, something greater, something unique and unprecedented. Something that cannot be … Replicated.

Our hero’s world has been flipped, not upside down, but right side up.

Sure, you’re real for me.

Proximity to something honest.

(Time isn’t real, but it consumes us and forgets us nevertheless.)

Proximity.

To Purpose.

Amblyomma americanum, the lone star tick, can bite you and make you permanently allergic to things, including all meat and certain kinds of seaweed like the one they use in the modern production of industrial ice cream.

A real thing that happens to real people, even though one poll showed that less than half of all medical professionals have even heard of it.

Is the spread of this tick caused by bio-engineering and a sinister billionaire plot?

Might could be, but to get mad about it specifically is to lose the big picture.

‘Cause the whole thing, including most of what I have believed and most of what you still do is acquiescent and compliant with the real, less flashy, far more widespread and insidious plot.

The one that has made this world so much more like the one that Phillip K. Dick was imagining as the future when we were still children.

We left off with the idea that the consumption of cheese is ancestrally inappropriate.

Since then I have been living more appropriately than ever, and finding out about my true and unmedicated self.

That self turns out to be hormonally lacking; and thus emotionally unstable, indecisive, unproductive, full of lassitude, and relatively weak-willed.

I wonder what the appropriate respond is to learning that.

The knee-jerk is to finally find a way to again medicate it.

Sure, yes, maybe.

Not just yet.

The Chicago Bears have a mascot, and it’s a bear.

The bear has a name.

The name is Staley.

“The club was established (in 1919) by the A. E. Staley food starch company of Decatur, Illinois, as a company team.”

The first Staley, not the mascot, paid George Halas five thousand dollars to take the team off his hands.

Halas moved the team into Chicago and called them the Bears because the city already had a sports team called … the Cubs.

In a couple weeks we’ll be going back there.

Blade Runner 2049: The Ache Of Isolation

“It’s not an ancestrally appropriate food.”

Unfortunately, that makes perfect sense to me. But for now, I’m going to gloss over that part and tell you what’s better and worse anyway.

Organic is always a good sign. Just as important and maybe more is: grass-fed, and preferably “100%” grass-fed.

Stay away from anything “skim”. You want the fat for fuel, especially in keto terms.

Aged is good too. More time for the lactose to get eaten up and processed before it goes into you. Pasteurization, not so much.

The source animal matters a lot. Generally, goat and sheep (feta, manchego) are just better. Also, one theory says “buffalo mozzarella” is from buffalo milk, and that’s a good thing in America because all buffalo are mandated to be 100% percent grass fed. (I’m not totally sure on this–study your labels.)

If you have to go cow, try to make it from A2 cows rather than the far more common A1 (it’s a gene thing).

Beyond this, the most convincing guy I heard said blue, gouda and Swiss in that order. Also there are some specialty Euro-varieties I haven’t had any luck finding anywhere, called parmesan-reggiano and romano pecorino.

Make America Healthy Again is a good idea, regardless of what you think of Trump and all.

Unfortunately there seems to be a whole lot of infighting over what the idea even means. I won’t go into all the BS, including the fact that the Donald and Robert Kennedy are both claiming that the new Surgeon General candidate is the other guy’s idea, but …

The best attempt at analysis is here.

By Any Means Necessary? The 275th Evolutionary Lens with (Weinstein/Heying)

Money and power ruin everything they touch.

I’m in full flight from them both and studying myself carefully to see if that’s the right thing to do.

You don’t know me
but I’m your brother
I was raised here
in this living hell

You don’t know my kind in your world
but fairly soon the time will tell
You, telling me the things you’re gonna do for me
I ain’t blind and I don’t like what I think I see

Taking It To The Streets

Building My Hidden Stone Sanctuary: An Off-Grid Cliffside Cabin Journey

I don’t know how realistic or practical this is, particularly given the handy and lovely creek full of pure water and edible fish, but I do know that I watched it in one sitting and was not bored, but rather quite Inspired.

It’s apparently a whole genre. See also:

A Man Built a House by the River. Building in the Forest and Fishing

Man Builds House with STONES and LOGS in the Forest

I Built a Hidden House in the Forest in 5 Days

Two Men Build HUGE CABIN Underground | Start to Finish

In this last one: A Cabin Anyone Could Build | Start To Furnished | Alaska Off-Grid

… they’re using something called pier blocks for the foundation.

(… speaking of inspiring, you might want to watch the last two minutes first …)

Apropos of nothing I’m sure, the space just in front of my 8×10 shed measures about 16×20, and together they would make up a house that just barely qualifies as Tiny, at about 400 square feet. How tall would it be? Connected in any way to the existing back door on the main house?

All very speculative. So far.

The Ghost Town of THURMOND, WV – A Good Town Gone Bad

IMHO the creator is overstating both the former goodness and the current alleged badness.

This is little more than just the wreckage of what capitalism does, and leaves behind.

***

Essentially, no food has been allowed in Gaza for the past 60 days.

Activists were attempting to do something small about that when Israel bombed their ship.

***

Please don’t fly any more.

And if you insist, at least avoid the hell out of Newark.

Thanks.

***

Dying NEW MEXICO Mountain Towns In A Rarely Seen Corner Of The State

Hurley, yes. Bayard, okay. But Silver City isn’t dying, and that’s not the only way this guy is … let’s be nice and say mistaken.

The fact that its population did actually dip by a couple hundred from census to census is a feature, bro, not a bug.

Driving to the Bottom of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River

Apparently, if you leave the pavement at Peach Springs, grab a $15 permit ($20 more if you want to camp), and drive 22 miles down a dirt road, you hit the river and the Canyon at their western edge.

I feel like I should have known this a long time ago.

I know it now though, and I’m feeling quite motivated to make it happen someday.

Big O isn’t just for tires, but for a moderately broad range of general mechanical stuff.

They have a place in Prettytown, another 2 hours further west at Kingman, and a third less than a hundred miles after that near Gibson and 215 in Henderson.

In a worst case scenario, that gives me a place to get towed to, for free, from almost anywhere on the trip from here to Sin City.

Also, I do need a tire or two or four anyway.

So if I can get them to give me a card, I can get the tire(s), and have basic coverage against trouble, and be able to budget all that at six months same-as-cash.

Given all that, I’ll apply. We’ll see.

If it works, then a trip is just a matter of having two hundred for a round trip’s worth of gas, and I’d be bringing the sleeping shelter with me besides–no motel or camping in someone else’s house necessary.

The same could apply, more or less, to shorter trips (the ice caves/ABQ) and potentially longer ones (Colorado).

That’s the van.

***

The pickup just needs suspension looked at next, nice and eventual-like.

The bike needs a new rear valve stem and I’m working on a trip to Pinetop for that, and a bunch of other things while I’m there.

In the meantime I’ve set all the vehicles up with a basic kit of tools, first aid, and the like, and that means the front room is emptied out and looking very neat and clean.

It’s all feeling both savvy and precarious.

I’m trying to pull it all off without stress of any kind.

It’s harder than it looks, but I doubt it’s impossible.

Exact same story, yes, again, just with regard to the meat supply.

The *REAL REASON * No One Wants US Beef

1.5 million views in a week. Maybe people are finally starting to get it?

Anyway. On average, an American farm is 10 times larger than one in Europe.

Just that one stat itself tells you a lot of what you need to know about “Big Ag” and the industrialization of agriculture more generally …

Over here.

In the land of the “small family farm”, don’t you know.

How Open Source Is Slowly Being Locked Down

Exact same topic from a different angle. This time the corporations live in Silicon Valley.

Sweet old geezer whose heart and brain are generally in the right place, explaining how companies like IBM/RedHat, Google/Alphabet, and (yes) Apple are motivated (some would say obligated) to steadily embrace, extend, and extinguish the Free from Free Software.

Specifically in order to turn something gloriously free and cooperative into something profitable.

Said geezer goes out of his way to say several times that this whole process isn’t evil.

But on that point he is absolutely deluded and categorically wrong.

Stallman was right, and as of this writing, in spite of his advanced years, he still is.

This is how our world and system work, and it is, virtually without exception, ugly and twisted and directly opposed to what you and I would say we believe in.

That phone is corrupt. Carrying it around with you is corrupting.

The average person is not going to do anything about that, except perhaps deny it’s true, because doing so would just be too inconvenient.

Time will tell if, how, and when I can figure out how to be better than average.

Today I did all the maint I’m capable of on the pickup, the van, and the e-bike, and figured out the things that need to be done soonest by more capable hands.

While I was doing that, I listened to a bunch of air disaster videos.

In one of them, some poor survivor expressed a sentiment about there being no price that could be put on a human life.

I’m sorry for your loss, dear one, but you couldn’t be more wrong.

Airlines around here are just corporations.

And corporations will always try to guess how many lives can be lost or destroyed before it becomes unprofitable for them.

They put a price on all our lives every day.

And that it the sickest thing of all, about the so-called Civilized world we inhabit.

How a Deadly Boeing 747 Explosion Changed Aviation Forever

JimDore-as-Art-Bell Part Two

It makes no difference if you or I believe in the more extreme versions of Earth destruction like the weather control or aerosolized viruses described in this one.

With or without those, we’re fucking over the wild in every way precisely to live more comfortably domesticated and ‘civilized’ lives.

That’s the true meaning of saying that we’re living in the Anthropocene era now.

Whether or not our lives are clean and trim and prosperous and cozy or not, we are domesticated almost inevitably simply by the necessities of living this usual life.

Which makes us different from who we would otherwise be.

Where you and I might disagree slightly is on whether those differences are good, or make how we live and who we are ‘better’.

My gospel preached to you is: No, and …

There is something we can do about that, and …

You’re right; it will be uncomfortable, to even try, and …

That’s no god damned excuse at all, for failing to even attempt it.

The ducks, at the pond, they are, almost impossibly, still wild.

Plus, out there, there are almost never any exogenous preta around.

Which is why I pick my way there, skirting around any signs that say no trespassing.

And why I am tormented by these scary dreams of going there to sleep a night, and heal.

***

Why do they fly in alarm any time I come within a hundred yards?

Because their wildness makes them very smart.

Just as my domestication makes me very dangerous.

***

… there are almost never any preta around.

Except the ones I brought along, inside me.

Yes it’s true, that the very liquid they swim in is something called Reclaimed Wastewater.

But that is also true of you and me, and

yet they are wild

and you and I are domesticated, enslaved and oh so very hungry

ghosts.

***

Yes, I’m always right, and no, it does me know good?

Just as I am Superior to the birds, with all this excess cranial capacity and alleged cleverness, techno and otherwise, for sure, and that’s nothing but a very mixed and iffy blessing.

I have so much to learn from them

about being an animal

wild and free once more.

‘The conditions of the civilized modern have turned all societies into vicious distorters of man’s true potential. The self-created conditions in turn create populations of preta–hungry ghosts, with giant appetites and throats no bigger than needles’.

I think Snyder is really onto something here, except that it’s much worse than he says.

We automatically push these preta off into some category of their own, some pile of Others who aren’t Us. This is a natural defense mechanism. Perfectly understandable.

I think that the Conditions that make preta thrive, boiled down to the essence, amount to a singular thing, and that we can safely call it:

Domestication.

At some point in the past, there was no such thing.

Everything was Nature, and everything in nature was Wild.

Back in the Magdalenian, there may have been some early signs of trouble involving certain canine and feline species–be a good dog and help us with the hunt, instead of hunting for yourself, and we’ll throw you a dependable bone and toss in some simulacra of love and affection on the side.

Later on similar things would happen with sheep and goats and cows and, uh, comfort lizards, but first, in the time of the dawn of agriculture and the civilized, we made the worst mistake of all.

We domesticated ourselves.

We collectively offered each other a deal very close to the one we offered those hunting dogs.

We collectively made that bargain, and we said: It Was Good. We still say that. Oh Lord, look at the miracle of medicine, and longevity; behold the glory of centralized heating, ventilation, and air conditioning.

Look at my beautiful truck and what it lets me do–pay no mind to the climate meltdown it helps cause, or the fact that I need piles of something called money to pay experts to maintain it.

Thus we become, to greater and lesser extents, preta ourselves.

But oh! you mean and despicable man, look here at the sweet pet dog we feed and care for, to say nothing of the many cats, indoor and outdoor, that you care for yourself, hypocrite!

It’s okay.

You’re right.

About those specific things.

And wrong about so many unspecific ones.

And I have been too.

Diplomacy Theater While Seeking The Next ‘Good’ World War

Making the world safe for democracy as an irradiated wasteland: the plan culminates.

***

Meanwhile, never mind their schemes. It’ll happen like they want, or it won’t.

I’ve been studying the satellite images and then going out on the ground to visit what they mean. There’s been some luscious progress and one way or the other I’m expecting just a little bit more of it.

Then suddenly I dreamed myself sleeping out there with the herons like I did once before almost fifty years ago.

You bet I’m afraid, but I see the path laid out in crystalline clarity. Inventing and manifesting and walking there with a sleeping bag this time is the way past the fear.

It doesn’t cost any dollars.

Finding out what it does cost is an unlocking born of doing.

It’s trying to rain.

Facts Of Nature Science Can No Longer Ignore

Renaissance is rebirth.

Just as in the Genesis myth, we got a Cain and an Abel.

Cain’s way is Newtonian atomism, industrialism, and the rise of Capital.

Abel was a shepherd and his flock made a pastoral Romantic/Idealist congregation that included William Blake, Keats and Shelley (and the latter’s wife Mary), and too Emerson, and dear Henry David Thoreau. “Matter, as classically conceived, does not exist.”

If Dr. Kelly is right, this rebellion has already been fought and won, but the mass collective unConscious is only on the cusp of realizing it.

The other cool thing I picked up here was a word:

Panenthe

pân, ‘all’
en, ‘in’
Theós, ‘God’)

I got rid of the -ism part, for reasons of my own.

***

If it seems like that might be a bit too much or feels too dense and geeky, there a pretty okay version of the same thing, hosted by the actress who played Amy on the Big Bang Theory, on offer here:

Thomas Campbell Part One

TC Part Two

The second part is more spiritually nutritious, if you can stand both parts being stuffed full of way too many ads and a consumerist subtext.

***

Unrelated?: A map that shows where the pond of blue herons is, in relation to town.

I think this tiny slice is my favorite MORR thing ever.

The tldr; is that the transmission shift lever came undone from the gears themselves.

So The Man reached way under the truck and just put it back in a good-enough gear by hand.

Pure genius and I am consumed with envy about this casual demo of real skill.

Real Life, before then (in the very last moments of a purely non-digital world) and also: after now, in the version of our towns called Laramie, NM, which doesn’t exist either.

“You got three choices. You go to school, you get a job, or you get out.”

Gas Food and Lodging (1992)

(If you watch really close, you will find some clues that Laramie equals Deming.)

(There is more than one set of 3, too, my one.)

(His name is John and he drives a Ford pickup.)

Shedeur finally went to the Browns in the 5th, a story that matters less than zero.

***

Lots of salad, plus, just today, a round of beefy tacos too.

***

I studied all the mechanics in town and made a list.

There are two at the bottom already crossed off.

There are a few in the middle that seem to only do limited things, like transmissions, or quick lube.

There are a couple of major maybes, that do a wide range of things but feel kind of dirty and junky and disorganized.

And finally there are two cleaner shops, both of which have signage specifically saying they do suspension work, which is the first thing I want to get done.

I think I may ask each of the final two for an initial diagnosis and estimate.

But what I really care about is how far they are capable of taking the restoration and revitalization of my lovely old truck, specifically with regard to the body work of getting the shell on, and then (eventually) the major drive train things like swapping out for a new or new-ish engine.

***

Inside the house, things are very clean, and somewhat paused.

On the desktops of the laptop, they are all torn up and in process, but in ways that feel very productive.

***

I’ve been pounding the floodwall grimly and dependably for my walks, but I’m done with it, over it, for a while.

I want to go back out to the parklands beyond the golf course next, and see where that road goes, past the gates and on foot. I’m craving something like that, that’s a little more Pretty.

Here is where things stand as of a Saturday evening.

The other day I briefly mentioned the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH 370 a dozen or so years ago, and by implication got on board with the idea that the pilot disappeared it on purpose.

Now comes a guy named Ashton Forbes, with a very different theory.

The link is to a recent clip from the Jimmy Dore Show, and that interview has a nominally more interesting Part One.

I’m inclined to do the easy thing, which is to note with a smile how Jimmy is turning into Art Bell, and leave it at that.

But …

Although I think the theories on offer here do sound pretty half-baked and bogus, I have to note that the popularized explanations regarding the physics are really every bit as bad.

Zero-Point Energy Demystified (from PBS, 7 years ago)

Is the whack-job conspiracy guy more or less right than the calm polished public television professional?

I don’t know. You don’t know.

And that is true in many, many cases, and by many, many metrics.

Yes, I’m thinking about anything to do with COVID, but also about the wave of assassinations in the Sixties, the Twin Towers and Building Seven, and a whole lot of other things that break down just the same along cultural party lines.

Including the fact that the term “conspiracy theory” was itself a conspiracy promulgated by that one three-letter agency when we were young.

We know so very little about what is Real, in the modern overcivilized world.

And for the most part, the powers that be are quite happy to keep it that way.

As far as I can see, the only way out of this double-bind is to stop listening with credulity to anyone’s version, and sink within to listen to what our best heart and inner cogitational sight tell us.

Mostly, I trust myself.

I can’t say the same for the Experts, no matter how well-credentialed or well-dressed they seem to be.

And as for “trusting Science”, and related cop-outs, I’m sorry, but that’s nothing but a bullshit begging of the question, and a blind appeal to authority, every bit as nonsensical as believing in the word of any god or any holy scripture you care to name.

You shall know the Truth?

Well … er … maybe.

And the Truth will set you Free?

Deeply unlikely.

In my frail human judgment.

Which is all there is to go on ever.

No thanks.

If this plan fails, the next step is to ask them how they feel about the concept of juries being able to nullify unjust laws.

Which is a real and argued thing.

In essence, the goal is formation of a unified, consistent, and coherent theory from which questions from the largest to the smallest can be measured, and at least addressed, if not comprehensively answered.

Largest, as in: What do I do today and why?

Smallest, as in: How do I sleep well and safe tonight no matter where I am?

Science, politics, religion/spirituality, philosophy, art … Bushcraft.

Every commonplace notion which We hold as a given and take for granted is destructively wrong–just look around and that much will be obvious to your heart.

To hell and be damned with the gospel according to Oprah and Donald and Diddy and Joe and every boss or commander that ever lived, and whatever your lovely evil iPhone is telling you right now, including these words.

Rip those wrong notions out by the roots and start over.

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

The Way is a small seed inside you.

The stalk that cracks the shell and reaches for the sun is your spine.

***

no one is united
and all things are untied

perhaps we’re boiling over inside
They’ve been telling lies

Who’s been telling lies?
There are no angels

There are devils in many ways
Take it like a man

…

Drag on the system, drag on my head and body
There are some facts here that refuse to escape

…

Tomorrow night maybe be too late

Both moons are full

By far the oldest piece of this whole thing is Green Anarchy / Anarcho-Primitivism /Rewilding: just go watch PMB, and this gem in particular.

***

Physics and Consciousness

Very briefly …

The guy who got me truly started on this part is Federico Faggin. The guy I’ve studied most is Bernardo Kastrup, who calls his specific variant “Analytic Idealism”, sometimes and rarely also referred to Metaphysical Idealism.

Here are the two of them in conversation with Nobel Laurete in Physics Roger Penrose, via a key channel called the Essentia Foundation.

A third name to know: Donald Hoffman.
See, very briefly: The 2022 Nobel prize was a nail in the coffin for materialism

***

Non-Ownership

Grounding inspiration from Thich Nhat Hanh, but really and practically and happening in the now: Robin Greenfield.

Here is his very latest update as of this writing. (The very most interesting part of this update for me was the last five minutes, where he talks about crazy and losing one’s mind, and also the idea of Earth Code. I tried to find more information about that last part and the best thing so far is here.)

***

Buddhist Anarchism

The concept of linking these two things is at least as old as I am.

Yesterday’s essay by Gary Snyder, linked

So far, I haven’t found a single great video on the subject.

However …
See this one
plus maybe: mr1001nights
and also …
The closest I’ve come to finding Great, and the place I learned about the essay, is this from Peter Coyote.

Though I find Hosho Coyote’s musings here problematic on many levels, there is a total gem at 38:04. It goes:

“The implication of Nirvana is that in the very next instant
you can do something new. That’s what freedom is.”

That is an admonition that has already saved me once, and I think it will again.

***

Slush

Hosho Coyote once more
You Think You Can’t Meditate, But You Can – April 1, 2020

I tried, successfully, to find out who was behind posting Snyder’s essay at “theAnarchistLibrary” and found Ken Knabb
and “Situationism”
and was also reminded about the once and future importance of Carlito, as in:
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda

Searches in progress:

buddhist anarchism and anarcho-buddhism
earth code robin greenfield

No one today can afford to be innocent, or indulge himself in ignorance of the nature of contemporary governments, politics and social orders.

The national polities of the modern world maintain their existence by deliberately fostered craving and fear: monstrous protection rackets.

The “free world” has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire which cannot be satiated and hatred which has no outlet except against oneself, the persons one is supposed to love, or the revolutionary aspirations of pitiful, poverty-stricken marginal societies like Cuba or Vietnam.

The conditions of the Cold War have turned all modern societies — Communist included — into vicious distorters of man’s true potential. They create populations of preta–hungry ghosts, with giant appetites and throats no bigger than needles.

The soil, the forests and all animal life are being consumed by these cancerous collectivities; the air and water of the planet is being fouled by them.

There is nothing in human nature or the requirements of human social organization which intrinsically requires that a culture be contradictory, repressive and productive of violent and frustrated personalities.

–Gary Snyder, Journal for the Protection of All Beings #1 (City Lights, 1961, rev. 1969)

The answer to the perennial question of “Where’s my flying car?” is now finally available.

It’s in China.

When the onboard computers go stark raving mad
qantas 72

When the experienced professional human pilot does the same
malaysia 370

Welcome to Civilization.

How I Became Particle Physicists’ Enemy #1

What I like best is the functional symmetry in our backstories, she and I.

Call out their bullshit. Be right about all of it. Fail even harder precisely due to it.

What I like least is the meta-narrative point at the end of her video: So go buy my course at Brilliant, and sign up for their gold plan, because they’re a sponsor too.

Ick.

There must be another way, even if it’s not Better, and: there is.

This is it. I’m here living it.

Add in a little Bernardo, Robin, Peter for the foraging, and this is my physics.

When a plane falls on your house

Death as the result of a sluggish bureaucracy combined with ruthless capitalism

In a world where birds sucked into jet engines is just part of the routine

When your husband the pilot has a heart attack and you have to land it yourself

“There’s nothing like daylight between the ribs to clear a man’s mind.”

Rabun is the northeasternmost county in Georgia.

As of the 2020 census, the population was 16,883.

The film received positive reviews from critics. John J. O’Connor of The New York Times stated, “although the surface of Foxfire is gentle, as basically decent people try to understand each other and themselves, the subtext is far from comforting.”

But comfort isn’t what we came here looking for.

no one is united
and all things are untied

perhaps we’re boiling over inside
They’ve been telling lies

Who’s been telling lies?
There are no angels

There are devils in many ways
Take it like a man

The world’s a mess it’s in my kiss
You can’t take it back, pull it out of the fire

Pull it out: in the bottom of the ninth
Pull it out: in chords of red disease

Drag on the system, drag on my head and body
There are some facts here that refuse to escape

I could say it stronger,
but it’s too much trouble

I was wandering down at the bricks, hectic ennit?
Down we go cradle and all

The world’s a mess it’s in my kiss
Go to hell see if you like it then come home with me

Tomorrow night maybe be too late

Both moons are full

—eXene and John Doe, 1980

The Fall of the American Empire

All ya’ll gonna ‘like’ the tone of this one, because the fall is happening under, and for sure being accelerated by, that orange guy you hate ever so.

Just please don’t be deaf to the rest of what is being said, about those Leaders you prefer, in propagating the collapse, going back for the entirety of our lifetimes.

Owning lots of things and having lots of money while the other Half (consisting of something north of 96% of all sentient apes) starve and explode and die in other colorful ways for our comfort–lord my loves: Blue is no god damnable answer to anything at all, and it never has been, and it never will be, all democratic tailfins and Yankee moxie and thank you for your service aside.

Beginners Guide to Prolonged Fasting | 24-72 Hour Fasting Instructions

Late on a Monday evening, I’m already well past the 72-hour mark on my fast. So far I just haven’t wanted food, but I can feel that starting to change. I’m doing tea, which doesn’t break the fast at all.

After looking at a few videos like the one above, I’m going to try extending it to 96 hours at least, while adding a walk and some low-intensity weightlifting into the mix.

At some point after that, into the fourth or fifth day, the advice is to start the real breaking with good clean fat, and MCT oil will probably be the first thing. Maybe cod liver oil too.

Then I’ll repopulate the cleaned-out microbiome with things like kefir and kraut.

Then a salad heavy on leafy green and avocado, before transitioning back to a more usual place of eggs, cheese, fish, fish and meat, and a more usual five miles a day while getting more serious with the weights.

And also, I’ll get back in touch in ways that aren’t this. Apologies for any cause for anxiety or offense given. I really did do nothing but sleep and heal, for the last three days plus, and it really didn’t feel like a choice or an option, but a simple physiological necessity.

As Friday rolled on my throat got progressively more sore. Historically that’s how being sick has always started for me.

It was hard to believe, because I haven’t had any flu since before the lockdowns started five years ago. Not going out in public several times a week to teach classes was good for me in many ways, including that one.

But now somehow it was happening again. I must have got too close to somebody’s germ at the grocery store.

I oiled the sore throat with whiskey and then broth. Then I quit eating altogether and went to bed and slept straight through for most of the last three days.

In the old days I would have been pounding Dayquil and Nyquil to keep the grift of a job rolling along. This time, there was no pressure or motivation for that kind of thing.

It was interesting. It was even a little bit fun. I’m grateful to the experience for killing my appetite and letting me do a three-day fast without effort. No food of any kind. No coffee even. Just water and lemon juice spiked with my own special electrolyte mix.

Just now, nearing the 72-hour mark, I finally let go of a satisfyingly immense poop. A very good sign. My sinuses are still full of crap and I’m coughing up more, and the fever isn’t quite done with itself.

I still have no desire to eat, but I did start thawing the last big pork roast in the freezer for whenever the hunger does come back.

I’m laying back down for a bit now, and …

It’s all good.

Pro-Israel Group Levels Smears Against Children’s YouTuber

“Eventually, the world turns its attention elsewhere.”

Feeling Left Behind by Age? These 5 Buddhist Truths Will Change Everything

Also, waves. And ripples. Again and again.

Yes, the script and the presentation here are AI garbage.

However, the truth isn’t, and nor is this retelling.

All I really want to say is:

The Ultimate Reality | Thich Nhat Hanh

Oh, why don’t you save all the money you earn?
If I didn’t eat, I’d have money to burn.
…
When springtime it comes, oh, won’t we have fun;
We’ll throw off our jobs, and go on the bum.

—A Folk Song from 1908

There’s a Week-9 update out for The Experiment of Non-Ownership, and I want to point out two things from it.

One

In the physicalist worldview, you imagine that I am not you, I imagine you are not me, and neither of us is the stray cat that limps, or the endangered polar bear.

That all these things are separate, separated, existing in separation.

And this imagining makes it easy to live lives defined by:
exploitation and pillaging and destruction and uglification and unequal accumulation.

“Civilized” lives in a hegemonic capitalist context, yeah?

Two

The intention of the experiment is not to get you to live or believe this way or that.

Rather, it is to get each of us to ask:

Are we happy with the way we’re living; living the lives we want?

Are our lives of separation causing destruction? … and … are we really okay with that?

Are our lives creating equality and harmony in the world
or rather playing into the mass usual consensus trance of Inequality and Disharmony?

We both know the honest answer, right? Right? So …

How exactly do we go about moving in a better direction?

How is it (even in theory) possible, to reverse these horrifying trends: to reverse the trend of civilization?

***

The first step for me and for you is to return home to ourselves and take good care.

And the second is to enjoy every moment of washing the dishes.

That’s what Thich Nhat Hanh said about it last time, and so far I’m on board. Also:

Sometime in “October” there comes an impulse to add artificial heat to the environment by starting to eff with the thermostat and thus the furnace. Then half the year later in “April”, it can be shut off again and ignored for the other six-month.

That is the point we’re at now. Day highs above 80. Night lows above 40. Done and so begin, Alleluia.

***

The Four Noble Truths “are traditionally identified as the first teaching given by the Buddha”, but there is widespread theological disagreement about what exactly they are, or how important.

The Fourth Noble Truth embodies and reveals the 8-fold Path.

The Noble Eightfold Path (Sanskrit: आर्याष्टाङ्गमार्ग, romanized: āryāṣṭāṅgamārga) or Eight Right Paths (Sanskrit: अष्टसम्यङ्मार्ग, romanized: aṣṭasamyaṅmārga) is an early summary of the path of Buddhist practices leading to liberation from samsara … (and) consists of eight practices: right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right samadhi (‘meditative absorption or union’; alternatively, equanimous meditative awareness).

Again and broadly speaking, that’s all good. To my eyes, some interpretations of the Path seem vitally necessary and spot-on, while others feel like Rules, or culturally bound suggestions, or even completely optional (are we meant to take the stuff about reincarnation literally, and does it even matter?).

So on this April morning, I am by my own hand shutting down the furnace, and nominally (let’s call it) “converting to Buddhism”, but neither action specifically solves anything.

By Halloween, provided that my consciousness still exists, and in this same environment, I will still feel the shiver of cold, and will still be compelled to address that unique form of suffering, maybe by just turning the damn creaking thing back on again, maybe by lighting the first fire in a brand-new and properly vented wood stove, or maybe by means completely unforeseen here before the beginning in the space called Spring.

Likewise, with the belief systems, and the chosen practices.

Early in the Horse talk, the venerable Thay (god rest his soul) spends a lot of time explaining why there will be no god-damned Facebooking permitted during the upcoming meditation retreat. I agree completely with the rationale.

However, there’s no email allowed either, and that would and will be a much tougher nut to crack, way over here in this Plum Village brother … not necessarily impossible; still pretty hard, but …

I don’t intend to whine about it.

What I do intend is a question in the process of answering itself

Now.

Tomorrow’s post is already written and will auto-publish just after local midnight.

So, for now, I’m ‘done’ scribbling, but

Not done meditating, and

The practice of spilling and the ritual of meditation are

Converging

Mixing like cream and coffee

Losing Separateness

and i thot you should know it

There is no such thing as a car.

The proof for that assertion is here, specifically between minutes 36 and 37.

The thing I call my consciousness or self chooses to nod assent to that assertion and that proof.

Can you therefore label and/or dismiss me as a metaphysical idealist?

Yes, you can; please go ahead, for all the difference it will make.

Likewise, Pluto will still be a planet over here in the far exurbs miles outside the city where the Lowell Observatory rests.

Also, there is no such thing as the Lowell Observatory.

All of this can be true and even, take a breath, Right, and internally consistent, and a fundamental building block of a worldview that I apprehend and in time adopt.

Next we can move on to the question of whether horses exist.

The Horse is Technology | Dharma Talk by Thich Nhat Hanh, 2013.11.10

Listening to the monk, I laughed aloud a few times, and that is rare. It was repeatedly a laughter of recognition.

Once it was when he spoke of how we, how I, use all this watching and listening and consuming of media to try and avoid the feelings of suffering within us.

And then, again, when these actual words came from his mouth:

“… then he can reverse the trend of civilization”.

***

For months now, this has been called a book called (workin’ title).

For hours now, there has been a private post.

Those two line traces of fact are converging, and when they do, I don’t know what will happen.

It’s even possible that everything could vanish in the fog of their impact, and why not?

I will though let you know, when the time comes.

I looked things back over like I sometimes do, and decided that

1) I felt pretty shy about talking openly about my deepest fears like I did,
2) I was gonna leave that soul-baring stand as it is, and
3) That after 9.5 years of doing this, I was ready to experiment not only with password-protected posts (as I have once in a while in the past), but fully private ones.

Thus, there’s a post you can’t see wedged in between this one and the one called Strength and Security.

I will leave it there, continue to work on it, and maybe post a version of it in the clear at some point.

In the meantime, back to our regularly and daily scheduled programming.

***

Pod Yourself A Gun: Episode 305

In the first three minutes of this pod (which incidentally is as much as I could stand to listen to), the guest expert makes an interesting point.

“The best thing about the Sopranos is that it’s a television show about a bunch of people from New Jersey who don’t feel appreciated … (and)
feeling not-appreciated is a part of Our Culture”.

Yes. Not just a part, but a defining feature.

I also listened briefly to two rich heavy-hitter liberal pundits talk about Attention as the key resource in this world of ours. One of them wrote a whole book on the subject.

I think the mass chronic feeling of under-appreciation and the constant pressures of the modern attention-deficit economy are deeply intertwined. The first has been around for 20+ years (as evidenced it being a theme in the mob show), and the second was made radically worse by the explosion of iPhone culture and social media in the last decade of the 2010s.

In my own mind this clusterfuck is also related to the last few posts here, about feeling strong or fearful, about (in)security, and about how modernist solutions like the Gospel of Believing In Yourself can be so insidiously counterproductive, and so fundamentally illusory.

From 26 to 80 in the space of a long day, and briefly brushing 90 in the next few, so they say. Then the wind brings back something more seasonally apropos in the week to come.
70-something days, 40-something nights; as near to perfect as they come in these parts.

Also, the last of the April money and the first of the May dropped simultaneously.

So I wrapped all that into a day of preparation.

In front of me in the line to pay the water bill, a woman was setting herself up to access the local city fitness center.

So I asked about it. There are no showers or locker rooms. But … you do get 24/7 keyfob access to the weight and cardio machines, for $12.50 a month, which seems really reasonable.

Downsides: I don’t want to sign up for another bill, and I hate the idea of a regular daily place that would be less than perfect in its solitude.

The main reason to consider it is that it would save me a lot of space in the house. I wouldn’t need to allocate 100 or 200 square feet for the weight bench and a place to stretch, and I wouldn’t have to invest in unwieldy heavy items that exist only for being repetitively lifted.

Ultimately it’s a fish to be fried after returning in June, I think.

And, before that tripping, there’s getting ready for the shorter one, over to Bluewater, and that means caring intently about three vehicles. The truck, which I gave a full 25 gallons today. The van, which needs some fluids and a jump. And the e-bike, which requires crafting a long-term solution for the Airing of tires.

That’ll be the focus of the quick hot spell. And then there’s the monthly Azure order.

And the correspondence (my apologies, on that score–I’ve been very mental about it).

Here we go. The warm, and for real.

See also: Why believing in yourself is actually holding you back

It’s been suggested by a patron that I do something nice for myself.

This is roughly what I’m planning in response:

El Morro and El Malpais are both National Monuments.

The volcano and ice caves are a private concession: Introduction to the Ice Caves Trading Post

Not listed on this sign is the State Park at Bluewater Lake, which I will also check out. But there’s bad news about the old deal with NM State Parks. As of the start of the year, the great deals once available on state park camping are no longer a thing–they’ve jacked the rates radically. The non-resident yearly pass of $225 is now $600. Electrical hookups went from $4 to $10 a night, dump stations from $5 to $10, and water from free to five more dollars.

It won’t be feasible again as any kind of long-term strategy unless and until I am at least a New Mexico resident. And even then, the motivations will consistently evolve toward boondocking, and carrying more water on board (at eight pounds to the gallon), and generating my own electric.

Which honestly is not so much of a bad thing.

Because it’s closer to simplicity and self-sufficiency, which is sort of the whole point.

***

In the meantime I am nursing a summers-only Plan B centered around the North Platte River and the Wind River Range up north.

But of course all of it is just high theory until there is a well-designed and dependable rig to drive/haul anywhere. So that rolling home, alongside the fixed abode(s), and reductions in monthly costs, will be the primary focus, starting now on the cusp of the improving weather. Below-freezing nighttime temps are once again in the rearview mirror, probably and perhaps for the next six months this time. With the blessing.

Way down deep past anything rational, it seems my deepest fears are about not being able to meet my (let’s call them) Obligations.

I just had a shallow nightmare in which the worst happened on several levels at once.

I learned that my job was over and done with; that I would not be Renewed at the end of the contract year and that somehow there were no other jobs. (I’ve already lived through this exact dread in real life, and survived it, but the fear is still inside me anyway, and that might be the most troubling part.)

Then out beyond that, I couldn’t remember when I was supposed to show up at work, at the job that was ending anyway. It seemed likely that I had already missed at least one shift, or class I was supposed to teach, but I just didn’t know for certain.

Then, on top, it seemed like I had rented multiple places, but hadn’t been to them for a while, and wasn’t clear about when the rents were due or if they were current.

Finally, my important stuff was vulnerably scattered in a public place, and when I got it all stuffed back into bags I could manage to carry, I realized my wallet was missing and probably swiped. There was only a little bit of cash in it, and no money cards, but I no longer had possession of a driving license and was trying to remember what other papers had now gone missing.

“Making” money. Paying bills. Externalized memory and lists as compensatory behavior. Being owned by stuff at least as much as owning it.

These are the exact issues I spend most of my waking time working on, and the exact strategies I use to manage them.

And: almost none of it is real.

Donald David Hoffman is … a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer Science.

And, in spite of all those things, he still manages to be a brilliant and compelling speaker, to my ear. You could decide for yourself, but that’s not why I’m writing to you, either.

I’m writing to give a proper answer to that question about what The Matrix is, and is-saying.

Why am I doing that?

Clearly, I am motivated in large part by irrational fears.

But also …

The desire to transcend them, and the civilized matrix itself, in some definitive way, before my time is up.

This is the point where what looks like Physics starts to look a lot more like what the Buddha was laying down.

Not because any flavor of either science or religion matters, but because if there is any solution, it has to involve traveling a path up out of the illusion, and past the nightmare.

Transcending it.

I would and will do it differently.

But …

In many ways this rig checks many more boxes on the list of ideals for a home away from home than anything I’ve got in the works currently.

The root motivating evil of Insidious Cultural Sickness is: Archons and their Arkheins.
(Greek arkhon “ruler”, present participle of arkhein “be the first”)

It doesn’t really matter why an alleged human being sets themselves and their intimates up as First over others (or anything else).

The setting-up itself is the original sin, and the source of the uglification and sickness and evil in this world of Ours.

Sometimes this is obvious to the meanest understanding. Anyone white and christian setting themselves up as de facto better than someone black or jewish is a racist.

More often it’s not nearly so obvious, as in the case of ‘meritocracy’. “I have more money than that homeless person because I’m smarter, and/or more hardworking, and not as dumb and lazy.” (Variation on the theme: “Thank God for Daddy positioning me to go to a good college and expanding my opportunities [which I then took advantage of, naturally, by being more bright and diligent].”)

***

For now let’s break it off there and just restate/reframe.

To ‘rule’ is to “be” ‘first’.

Which: I don’t want to “be”
–nor second
–nor forty-third
–nor last.

I am, rather, aiming to live UNRANKED
and outside the Higher-Archy: an arrangement of (Anything) represented as being “above” or “below”

ta hiera “the sacred rites”
hierarkhes “high priest, leader of sacred rites”

Thus:
the biggest problem with Caring What Anyone Thinks
is that it’s the same as putting concern and life energy into how anyone
might theoretically be ranking you
on any scale.

(as a man
as a writer
as anything)

“Taking a compliment” is hard and even counterproductive
… because …
“You’re great” is very nearly as insidious (and maybe moreso) than “You suck”.

***

The development of agriculture and sedentism (quitting hunting-gathering) seems very much like the Original Sin …
but whether these are, or not, is a matter of semantics.

These things just (automatically?) lead to hierarchy via granaries and surplus and accumulated wealth, and thus inequality and the divine right of kings, and thence to the Sickness called Civilization.

***

Notes.

The Secret History of Israel/Palestine, part I: The Jews of Europe and the rise of Zionism

… and …

Do you believe that clouds are Real?
Do you believe that you are smarter than an octopus?
What about … a rock?

The Hidden Flaws In Our Common Worldview | COURSE (1/7) | Dr. Bernardo Kastrup

***

The what-is-politics guy, and Bernardo, and my own musings about an-arch-ism, and a lot of other pieces besides
are all trying to sort themselves within the figment I call my self into a

coherent theory

or something.

(Completely unrelated? The actress who played Adriana on the Sopranos. Yes, Again. I know.)

I walked to the store and dropped my last remaining $20 for a while on eggs, berries and guac. There was big wind, and blowing snow, but I got that minimum hikemile in, and while I was out the crockpot was doing its thing to a chuck roast. That’s a Wednesday.

They-say it will remain grey and cold through the weekend and then go back to hot spring with temps at or above 80 and plenty of sun, and enough of a cash trickle to refill my gas tank, which is as close to dead empty as it has ever been.

A week out from that, the May cash cycle finally cycles. Then things are more or less set up (I guess) for some road-tripping in early June.

I’m thinking about what can be done in two months, and why.

The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman

Hours and hours of podcast on the subject of a relationship that began barely over three years ago in real time, and which is now in the hands of lawyers, judges, and assorted other Authorities.

Some interesting facts that might or might not shed additional light on the story.

–Gaiman by his own account has been a promoter of classically liberal ideas, including feminism, for decades.

–The primary creator of the podcast is the sister of Boris Johnson, very much a conservative and former Prime Minister of the UK.

–The concept of ‘neurodivergence’ comes up more than once here in connection to both the author and his accusers.

–Gaiman’s parents were high-ranking Scientologists when he was growing up. He himself got through several of their levels or grades at an early age, and worked for the organization as a young adult before he became a well-known writer and apparently quit.

–Not only is he an extremely talented creative artist with tons of hip cred, but married one as well, namely Amanda F- Palmer of the Dresden Dolls.

Palmer is named in the lawsuit as well, but is only mentioned briefly a few times in the reporting of these episodes. She did manage, in my view, to sum everything up neatly in a single bright and characteristically poetical phrase:

“Insidious Cultural Sickness”

To be fair, she was using it in a very limited sense in the days of Me-Too, to describe the horrifying state of the relationship between the genders.

But her intentions in the moment aside, she couldn’t be more right, about everything in civilized modernity.

From our food supply to our economics to our sex to our politics and to the finest works of our best and brightest and beyond …

It’s insidious sickness as far as the eye can see.

***

When I look back over the choices I’ve made and the paths I’ve taken in this life, and compare them to those made by anyone and everyone else I have known or admired or loved or hated or heard of …

I see, or feel, a pattern.

I am inevitably and deeply a product of the Sickness.

I have pretty consistently, though not always effectively, fought bitterly against it.

So there are days when habitually doing that helps me feel like a true noble warrior.

Then there are other days when I am sick as a dog, and completely overwhelmed by that very omnipresent and insidious sickness, and do nothing but shiver under the covers.

The nature of the battle has shifted considerably.

I no longer harbor any ambition about curing the disease, or imagine that such a thing is even possible.

All I know how to do, can do on the bad days, is to rip sweat-soaked sheets from my body, fling them to the corner, go make another pot of coffee, and maybe just maybe fight back hard enough to get them laundered and made back into a proper bed before the moon returns and night falls once more.

On a few rare days when there is enough sun and not too much wind, I can walk five miles.

I can speak out and tell the you that isn’t there about what I see, probably spitting through the narrative in frustration because it seems so fucking obvious, thus rendering the attempted communication from consciousness to consciousness intermittent and broken.

This is the life and world we’ve collectively chosen.

The best we can do.

Under the circumstances.

We are American Gods.

That is the pattern.

We know a pile of things
and pretty much nothing
at the same time.

How Looking At Ice Got Me to the Edge of Scientific Understanding

The 74,963 Kinds of Ice

Why no two people see the same rainbow

Every one of us is an independent Observer with a perspective, and an interpretation.

There is some fundamental difference between matter and consciousness.

But none between success and failure.

I know you’re not on the text thread but happy birthday anyway Grandpa.

South

Why the Americas Still Aren’t Connected by a Road

Sometimes it’s politics no matter how hard we run from that.

North

It’s a thousand miles from Silver up through Moab to Riverton, which doesn’t mean much in the short term, but might could make nowhere places like Rangely or Dinosaur into theoretically more meaningful meeting places than Salida someday.

1961: First Year of the Minnesota Vikings

At the end of the latest abbreviated sleeping session I was awakened not by memories good or bad, but just by the sound of random and null names.

Tua Taga-Viola.

Ashton Je-auntie.

Football players. Pure mental gloomf. Gloomf is my own poetry word for the stuff you clean at the end, from your clothes dryer. (It is said that I invented it as a precocious child.)

This is a kind of victory, or at least a fighting of the past/trauma to a draw, a slightly better alternative to early-onset dementia.

Also, there was born a new answer to the question of how am I, and it goes:

War never changes.

Per the link, the quotation encapsulates the idea that no matter how much Civilization appears to march forward to Progress, that which is worst about the whole broken enterprise traps us like flies in a fateful amber.

In this way it is a poetical epithet for the core cult beliefs of anarcho-primitivism.

My beliefs.

My hat, no cattle.

Stagecoach (1939)

The original John Ford + John Wayne cinematic masterpiece, culturally significant and admired by people I admire, like Orson Welles.

Honestly I couldn’t bring myself to be impressed, and would take Once Upon A Time In The West any day of the week.

For some reason though the reptile part of my brain is sucking down a lot about team dynamics. The nine people on the stagecoach. The Cleveland Browns. The Genovese crime family. The crew who does offroad recovery in Hurricane, UT.

They’re not my teams, in any way at all. They’re narrative filler and something to chew on while this solo space comes together in the way it is, and will.

One more from the front lines of the civil war.

New Mexico’s ‘War Zone’ – The Most Frightful Neighborhood In America

25 years ago I dwelt on the far fringes of this hood. It cost me $375 a month for a nice small house within a mile of a food co-op, and an excellent 24-hour diner, and coffee, and a bunch of bookstores … all the good city things. For comparison’s sake I think I was making about 27K per year at UNM.

Now it’s a human disaster area. I didn’t watch much of the video, but I’ve been to Albuquerque a few times in the recent past, and I don’t need to visit it virtually to know and feel what it has become.

Moreover, in my current somewhat fragile condition I don’t think it would be healthy to sit through an hour of it. I have my own wars and they need all my attention to be handled with any semblance of grace.

Mostly I’m fighting with the aftermath of having too much stuff. It has smothered me for a long time, and now I’m engaged in managing the breaking jam of logs, and the memories slewing around randomly with every flailing and sodden wooden chunk.

I’ve carved out the hole for the Real Sleeping Space and the Conceptual Deskery. The bathroom and kitchen are not drained, but are functional enough. Elsewhere out in the yard and in the corners and in half of the big main loft room piles of chaos and boxes of unresolved damage still rule my life and mind.

I am both parrying and attacking, and fighting in a way that feels relatively smart. Whether that perception has any validity is a metaphysical question and perhaps even a metafictional one.

The story goes that the moon is my salvation, and the myth feels right on many levels.

One of them is that it is a place of wide open empty spaces.

An aspirational lunar Wyoming.

I want my rooms to look like that.

Squatters break into RV storage lot in LA and take over 50 campers

Before you (as a property-owning, potentially RV-owning Comfortable Person) get too upset about the headline, do realize that these RVs are not owned by your grandma’s friend, but rather are stored overflow stock from some RV dealership.

So yes, you can be upset as a potential capitalist businessperson–that’s legit.

For myself, as nothing but a potential homeless Palestinian type, I’m conditionally fine with it–you got homeless, you got homes sitting idle in inventory; why didn’t the fucking city buy the trailers and house their poor?

Why did it have to come down to breaking, entering, and squatting?

A purely rhetorical question, of course.