WALKING ON THIN ICE

i have one happy wife, thanks to a private 10:00 a.m. wine tasting. we were walking down a country road looking for a place to buy wine, came across a small building i thought might be a garage, but was the Lotantique winery. kathy asked in french if they sold bottles. the owner called his wife down who opened the shop for kathy. gave her small glasses of 4 wines to try - sauvignon, lou papet, la muscadelle, vendanges manuelles - as they conversed in kathy’s limited french. bought bottles of all 4 for $28 total - and the lady threw in a 5th bottle of florette.

makes me sad i over drank my welcome on this planet back in the 1980s… had my last drink of alcohol april 21, 1991. if i didn’t have 16 years sober, i would have joined today’s tasting. o well, we all make our own beds, build our own prisons, choose our own paths - nobody for me to blame but me. and i can’t really blame me - i am what i am now because of what i’ve been along the way. i like me now, and wouldn’t be this me without that me. as the new testicle said, my father’s house has many conundrums.

kathy had 3 years high school french 1988-91. she’s spending hours studying every day now to get it back. so far she seems to understand every other word they say - while i understand zero. my first two french lessons were torturous - the language sings in my ears, but feels like novocain on my tongue. and to be honest, i never did enjoy studying, even in school. somehow i’ve faked most my life without it. i’m a master at monkey see monkey do, but a mere minor at monkey hear monkey say.

our village of abeilhan (abbey-on) > history dates back 2900 years with the Roman, but it was in 995 that the fortified castle of Abeilhan was built. This has since been destroyed, however the 11th century Church and “circulades”- the fortified walls and houses built around the castle - still stand… village is a quality wine producer.

i’m a wee bit lost here in france. have 24 hour internet access and little to say. have neither ambition nor drive. last night we watched a 33 year old jack nicholson in Five Easy Pieces (1970) - great movie, but totally sad… no hope for jack’s character from start to finish. now that i’m on a mission of hope, i wonder why i loved such hopeless films 37 years ago when i was a wee 24 years old - maybe in my immaturity the film’s artiness was enough. now days i seek redemption.

we’ve been window sitting in the sun on the sill absorbing heat energy and color. it hit 70 degrees fahrenheit… we’ve had 1 cloudy day and 5 days of sun so far. i like this place. if it’s this warm here in the winter, i can see why the stores close at noon and reopen in late afternoon - in the warmer months it would be too hot to work or shop.

took these fotos in an antique shop window in beziers, a town of 80,000 twenty minutes south of us near the mediterranean coast. in london and amsterdam we saw a mixture of all ethnicities, nationalities, colors - but in poland and croatia only caucasoids. we don’t know yet what we’ll find here in the larger towns in the south of france - but the villages are white.

the town of beziers (where we’re heading tomorrow) > The site has been occupied since Neolithic times, before the influx of Celts. Roman Betarra was on the road that linked Provence with Iberia. The Romans refounded the city as a new colonia for veterans in 36/35 BCE and called it Colonia Julia Baeterrae Septimanorum. Stones from the Roman amphitheatre were used to construct the city wall during the 3rd century.

kathy sent this email to a friend… i think it sums up stuff:

RE our changing states: overall, we are a lot more tolerant of uncomfortable situations. We initially had mild arguments when we got into new cities over which direction to go. I don’t know why my initial state is to want certainty. It’s good to let things get looser, to not hurry, to not be so concerned.
 
I was so worried about going to the hospital in another country, but we’ve done it a couple times. No problem. I learned to write everything out in advance because a lot of times ppl don’t understand my accent.
 
I was also so worried about what everyone thought of me. But now I’m pretty darned proud of myself. I know I can go anywhere, can approach almost anyone. Making a fool outta myself in 6 languages quickly eliminated apprehension. I just had to get over it.
 
Steve’s pretty darned easy for me to get along with. He hasn’t really changed much. He gets tired in transit but recovers after a couple days. He feels a basic dissatisfaction with himself if he doesn’t constantly create, but this isn’t a change.
 
By this constant study in contrasting cultures and environments, I grind myself to the whetstone as well. I refine my desires and dislikes. I’ve learned that I live for beauty, for my eyes, for my health. That people and plants and animals, the sky, the water, the earth - all these are more important than things or music or food or even ideas. I’ve learned that I intensely dislike working for other people in structured settings. I’ve acquired a continuity of consciousness. I’ve acquired an ability to work on one thing intensely without feeling guilty for not simultaneously improving myself in all other areas.
 
Take care, Kathy

(we’re in the spaces between the pages - smith)

i insulted my love’s taste in music - not what one should do on valentine’s day. the bus driver to beziers was playing sade, and i compared her sound to ambient elevator muzak - said it was toilet paper music, except toilet paper at least had a function. just call me mister smooth. it’s neither wise nor fair to run down music within other’s hearing. if one must judge - and judge one must - judge within, quietly. evaluation is important. as novelist Maxine Hong Kingston said, “All human beings have this burden in life to constantly figure out what’s true, what’s authentic, what’s meaningful, what’s dross, what’s a hallucination, what’s a figment, what’s madness. We all need to figure out what is valuable, constantly.”

i myself have shameful music in my past. used to love the mantovani orchestra. mantovani took all the hits of the day and played them as slow syrupy instrumentals, making each song sound the same - elevator music before such a category existed. he also pop-ized classical tunes for those needing classical-lite. even more embarrassing, i once loved the ‘poetry’ of rod mckuen - whose words are closer to american greeting card verse than poetry.

these are shameful memories, but not necessarily shameful acts. i now realize we need all the rungs of the musical ladder from low to high, bad to good, easy to hard, simple to complex. in my youth, i used each rung to climb to the one above. without listening to andy williams, i never would have graduated to tony bennet - without bennett, i may never have found frank sinatra. without the mindless mantovani, i may never have moved on to the mental meat of meat beat manifesto, or the might of miles davis.

for some, each rung leads to another. for others, a particular rung is enough. if one derives pleasure from rap, who am i to say it’s crap? pleasure is pleasure, to each their own.

this is true for all aspects of life.

i was in a british petroleum elevator when a mantovani muzak instrumental oozing from the speaker kept tugging at my brain… took awhile to realize it was “i can’t get no satisfaction” by the rolling stones. what a sad delicious moment to realize these icons of dark spunk had been inducted into the hall of sham. same thing happened when the queen knighted mick jagger. sad to see society co-opt their enemies, and the enemy acquiesce. i sometimes think even the strongest outsider would quickly sell out for a piece of inside pie. my price would probably be fame.

i’ve lost my wife to the Second Life on-line simulated world. she signed on last night and was gone for hours before staggering off to bed. today she’s back there. she even suggested i log in so we could talk to each other in cyber-land. we’re sitting side by side on the couch - why would i want to go to some unknown server so my avatar could talk to her avatar in sym-time - unless we could maybe have some cyber sex and i could sit here and watch. i’ve lost my wife to second life when she hasn’t even mastered her first. o well, we’ve had a delightful 17.5 months relationship and a darn fine 11 months of marriage. maybe i’ll sign-on on our upcoming wedding anniversary and wish her a happy first year.

tried to log on to Second Life just now for my first time - to be with my wife - and was told by that world i did not exist. i think they just want my woman - they probably fear my power. they admit they recognize my name and password, but refuse to let me in. it really ticks me off when i play by their rules and still get fricked over. so, frig them, their fickle finger führer, and their pile of it.

which leads to… walking back from the next village, we smelled animal offal. looked about and saw a humungous pile of deep chocolate brown manure - must have been 50 foot high. can you imagine the size of the dog needed to do that? biggest pile of crap i’ve seen outside washington d.c.

on the subject of large piles of waste, this is a quote for those in congress who voted against america by killing habeas corpus and legitimizing dick cheney’s and george bush’s war crimes by voting for the military commissions act:

“The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.” — Winston Churchill.

even churchill is calling the cheney-bush beast a nazi.

It’s so so beautiful here. The French manicure everything. Almost all the trees are clipped so that they grow queerly. All the bushes are perfectly round.

I’ve often heard that the light of the sky here is sought after by artists. I always thought this bull but now I realize it’s true. The sky is pastel, and everything glows. Looks like an impressionist painting. The landscape is twisted olive foliage and dusty brown dirt and yellow beige grasses. Much of the land is cultivated for grape vines. 20 kilometers from us are the foothills of mountains, but we’re in this kind of rippled olive/brown/beige land.  20 kilometers the other way is the ocean. We’re dazzled by life and light.

We went to a cemetery at sunset last night. Some of the graves look like cribs.

All the shops close from 12:30-5. We go to the bread shop every morning for crusty wholegrain bread with sunflower and sesame baked into the crust. And two flaky, delicate croissants.

We walked to the nearest town, Servian. I tossed bits of creamy gourmet cheese to a cautious yet hungry cat.

in this vis-à-vis world of text versus context, reason versus revelation, insiders versus outsiders and good versus evil, i’m the slightly seedy hero - for how do you know what’s far enough until you’ve gone too far? you must taste both sides of the equation to find the answer. we each find our own. my particular answers only show you one way to go, or not to go - your own path, vector and speed are your choice alone. all i know after 61 years is you can’t let another choose your life for you because only you pay the price.

i have one-way legs. couldn’t get the bicycle tires pumped up because i’m a mechanical idiot, so we walked an hour to the next village (servian, france), walked around it for two hours, sat in the sun, shared a lunch of fresh french bread and goat cheese with a cautious street cat, filled my back pack with fruit, and started back - whereupon my legs decided we’d walked far enough. didn’t do them any good though - when you’re on foot on your own you’re on foot on your own - nobody else is going to walk it for you, no one else is going to come along and carry you home - not alive anyway. sort of like life. my attitude sure has changed since we sold our cars last july and started walking around europe - now i think nothing of walking a couple miles just for pleasure. walk a mile in my shoes and you’d see some pretty cool stuff.

kathy started her fresh stash of french trash on our walk - gathered bits of cultural detritus from the road side for her assemblage art.

i’m trying to learn a wee oui bit of french. the language is graceful to my ear, but stumbles in my mouth. our village of Abeilhan is pronounced Abbey-on. i’m on the road to abbey on, years beyond abbey road.

our last place - the istrian peninsula of croatia - was a giant rock thrust from the sea and covered in wild green growth. here in the south of france the land is peaceful, gentle, tranquil, domesticated, tamed, manicured, serene, used. france has much more people and is much less wild. of course both istria and southern france are headed for desert along with the entire southern half of europe according to the global warming warnings.

although, i no longer believe we’re going to have to worry about global warming, because the government’s crazy ideas to re-work the earth’s atmosphere to get around it will probably wipe us out before then - per this excerpt from the Inter Press Service Feb 6, 2007:

‘many of the most heavily industrialised nations find the economic costs of stopping global warming hard to swallow. Instead, some, led by the United States, are looking at geo-engineering schemes — large-scale attempts to manipulate the environment to produce environmental change, according to the ETC Group, a Canadian-based non-governmental organisation. Many such schemes are currently under scientific study, and include deliberately polluting the stratosphere with tiny sulphur dioxide particles or putting trillions of wafer-thin reflectors into orbit. Both of these measures are intended to deflect sunlight and cool the Earth, according to the ETC Group’s report “Gambling with Gaia” released on Feb. 1. Other mitigation plans have already been launched over the past few years, such as dumping tonnes of iron particles into the oceans to trigger phytoplankton blooms in the hopes of absorbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. “There’s a little bit of panic brewing, governments are taking these wacky ideas seriously,” says Pat Mooney of the ETC Group.’

we broke out of a graveyard last night. came upon the walled village cemetery near dusk, and i wondered how we could get in (without dying). found a gate i assumed would be locked. opened it. went in. tarried 20 minutes. came back. tried to leave. gate was deadlocked. we climbed out over the wall.

the cemetery was right next to the playground. from the playground to the graveyard - i detect a metaphor there in.

found some magic mustard. in french it is Moutarde a l’ Ancienne - mustard of the ancients… in dutch it is Mosterd op Oude Wijze - mustard of the old wise. it is so hot it brings tears to your eyes. kathy used it today to clear her sinuses. we’ll smear a slice of bread with just mustard and sit around eating it while we cry. delicious, and addicting. as are the breads - compared to french croissants, all the ones i’ve had previously are amaturish imitations. the french breads and cheeses are delights - and of course two things i’m not to eat due to my high cholesteral. maybe i’ll just eat myself to death and get it over with, go out happy - they already tried to lock me in the local graveyard.

the door to the rear hallway is 5 foot 8 inches tall… i am 6 foot 3. it took three serious light inducing tear bringing wappings to knock some sense into my head. pain is a wonderfully effective teacher - if you’re willing to listen. now when i walk toward the door, my body automatically cringes downward.

now begins the process of becoming in this new place. i feel a wee bit lost, aimless. i know where north and south and the village square are, and that’s it. i’ll go pump up the bicycle tire and we’ll head off down the road to see what we see. i know it will be rich, rewarding and fun - just have to do it. guess that’s the moral here - just do it. put one foot in foot of the other, the other in front of the one.

to those who think i protest too much the cheney bush crimes against humanity:>:>:>:>:>

“No longer can any American citizen or organization simply sit on the fence and say, Well, we don’t take a position on the war, because the war in itself is unconstitutional in many forms, and we as Americans have to step up and say either we agree with what’s going on or we disagree with what’s going on…. If you disagree…then you are going to have to ask yourself what are you willing to sacrifice of yourself in order to correct the injustice and wrongs of this government in regard to the Iraq War. We all take part in it–if you pay your taxes, you’re taking part in this war. We all have a responsibility, as they determined after Nuremberg, whether you’re the lowest soldier or the highest ranking general, or just a regular civilian, we all have responsibility…to resist and refuse enabling and condoning this criminal behavior.” - Lieutenant Ehren Watada

i served my country by doing 5 years in the navy… i earned my right to dissent. i started protesting the vietnam war once i was honorably discharged in february of 1968, and i’ve been protesting illegal acts by our government these 39 years since. i’m no traitorous military deserter like george bush. i’m no cowardly draft deferment sucker-upper like dick cheney. and i’ve not used 600 billion dollars of american’s tax money to kill 650,000 iraqi civilians while stuffing my friends’ pockets with missing billions like the cheney bush beast has done. some folk wonder why i can’t be silent - i wonder how they can be.

^ Venice, Italy: Reflection of father and child in a pool with strewn confetti

I thought before these travels that it would just be shy little me and outrageous Steve going from country to country. But into our seventh month, I’m a more confident person. I feel I can do anything. I think that the journey is a transformative machine. We cannot pass through different environments and remain unchanged. We are affected by what we do.

Steve and I went in to Pula via bus for the last time Wednesday. I took all my unfinished art pieces and sat them against a 2000 year old 50 foot tall arch. We took photos and then watched them for a while, and then left them there. Steve said it’s my first solo art show. On the back of each one, we wrote our contact information and “Free Art.”

^ My art “installation” in Pula, Croatia. The arches are from 27 B.C. We were sad to leave Croatia. So far, it’s our favorite country. We felt at peace here because of the natural beauty. We had the ability to create art and write, unhindered by most social obligations. Friday morning, our host family drove us to the bus station and we bused to Trieste, Italy. Then we took FIVE trains from Italy to the southwest coast of France.  

Pula Arches  

We’ve got a gradual revelation of what we want and are able to be and do. Traveling is tiring. Moving from place to place is awful. Living without permanent conveniences and luxuries like blenders and baths frays the nerves. But seeing beauty and learning about a different way of life and language is fun. It’s big fun exploration–a big wonderful discovery–once we actually get unpacked and settle in.  

It’s not fair of me to categorize entire countries. But it’s all I seem to do! We find our impressions of countries are affected by our own moods, the weather, and regional differences. We went to Zagreb, Croatia, and it seemed as gritty as Krakow, Poland. And Zagreb is very very different from the coast. If we had only gone to Zagreb, we would’ve had the wrong impression of the entire country.

Here are my impressions of young women. I’m always checking them out, trying to make sense of fashion. These impressions are based on my limited experience and misunderstanding. Again, not fair:

Pula, Croatia: beautiful, sincere, artistic, articulate, contrary, intelligent, serious, jeans everywhere, long hair straight and highlighted or short hair cut in French pixie style, fur trim popular on coats

Krakow, Poland: beautiful, mercenary, contrary, depressed, jeans everywhere, asymmetric and razor-edged hair styles vogue

London: beautiful, stylish, materialistic, snobbish, irreverent, tech-savvy, no jeans and dressy sneakers and very cute short jackets

Amsterdam: punk, artistic, noncommunicative, irreverent, snobbish, sloppy, no jeans, sexy boots

Ohio: sloppy, humble, friendly, optimistic, uninformed, stubborn, innocent, jeans and white sneakers, neglected hair

Italy: spunky funky and sometimes sexy. Some wear hair in skinny long braids like dreadlocks.

France: beautiful, delicate, nuanced. Hair in gorgeous disarray, sometimes gathered and twisted with random braids.

Other observations: No one wears white sneakers or sportswear or t-shirts outside of America. No one jogs on the streets. And everyone goes to a salon and has good or weird hair. All the young men in all countries look the same, even in Amsterdam. All the young adults speak English. Older adults do not speak English unless they work with the public in a major city. Everyone smokes cigarettes everywhere all the time. In continental Europe, everyone goes to cafes. There is no food at the cafes. Only hot and cold drinks. In Croatia and Poland, everyone drinks alcohol, all day long. In Croatia and Italy, you can get cocoa, which is like watery hot chocolate in the U.S., or you can get hot chocolate, which is like melted chocolate candy bar. I’m addicted to the latter. I miss, miss, miss Ohioans. I miss the friendliness, the curiosity, the optimism, the humility. 

Abeilhan, France 

our new home for the next 7 weeks is old and charming, in a village on a hill in the south of france, about 20 kilometers from the mediterranean.  out our front second story window we see the village rising up the hill. we sit in the window in the afternoon and soak in the sun. out our back bedroom glass doors we look down to vineyards below and mountains in the distance.  we walked the village of Albeilhan this afternoon (without a jacket) and saw the few shops all close from 12:30 to 5 in the afternoon, then re-open from 5 until 7:30 in the evening. since they open at 8 or 9, that’s a 6 or 7 hour day. personally, i’d hate to have to go to work twice a day… i had enough trouble making it once a day.

the 3 fotos above - the top 2 are out our front window, the 3rd out our bedroom door.

the 10 hour overnight train was like being shipped surface mail in a rabbit hutch. the compartment was 6 foot deep by 7 foot wide by 8 foot high. there were three swing down bunk beds on each wall, the beds were 2 foot wide, 6 foot long. i am 6′ 3″ long. kathy and i each had a top bunk. there were three other folk in the compartment so no room to sit, just climb in bed. being in a bound box traveling through the night, we saw nothing. lying in my couchette bed, i did like the swing and sway of the train’s travel, and the sound of the wind and the rain on the train. woke at 4 a.m. to find us sitting still on a side track - eerie to store sleeping human bodies on side tracks in the night.

it rained all the way from croatia thru southern france - then an hour from our destination, the sun came out in reward.

took 2 cars, 1 bus, 5 trains, and 32 hours to get from start to finish. there were no salt-less sugarless healthy food units to be had along the way.

the braille of the sea surfaces to touch from bastion of be to pluperfect plus.

read a bit of shakespeare’s “as you like it.“ not one of his better efforts - basically not worth the read, so my answer to “as you like it” is i don’t. did get one cool quote though: “sweet are the uses of adversity.”

the trash bins here say “sictom” which my eyes read as “sitcom,” which is where sitcoms belong.

today’s thought - the more you go bad, the harder it is to go good.

hope for the best, expect the worst - that’s how i live my life. now that the neo-con-jobs and the religious wrong can no longer lie about global warming, it comes down to one yes or no question - are we going to do something about global warming in time, or are we not?

the answer is obvious: we are not.

neither china nor the u.s.a. is going to cut greenhouse gas emissions before we’re past the tipping point. no matter what the rest of the world does, china or the u.s. alone is enough to push us to the dark side.

because of this, whatever the u.n. report says about the possible temperature increases over the next 50 years from global warming, it will be worse than they estimate - and it will happen faster than they think.

think about it. this u.n. global warming report is what 1,600 world scientists could agree on among themselves - you know their estimates are conservative because that is the way of committees. ergo, it is worse than they say.

so be happy now.  you have dreams you want to live? live them now. places to go? go now. things to do? do now. words unsaid to loved ones? better say them now, my friends, because tomorrows come in limited quantities from here on in.

welcome to the down size. this is the it it is.  and we all helped make it so.

but just in case we’re not too far gone, it wouldn’t hurt to let your politicians know you’re not happy with what they’re not doing. after all, politicians are a crooked and cowardly bunch of weasels - they are easily frightened into doing the right thing. it’s time we scared them straight.

speak up, speak out - or start doing all those things you’ve been putting off. in fact, start doing all those things you’ve dreamed of anyway - it’ll be good for your soul.

kathy and i are doing just that.  we sold our studio, gave away our possessions, and left america august 1, 2006. 2 weeks northern england, 3 weeks london, 1 week amsterdam holland, 7 weeks krakow poland, 13 weeks liznjan croatia - and now 8 weeks in the south of france. after that, spain, germany and greece are potentials - then hopefully nepal. we were headed for thailand until we learned of their draconian grass laws - mandatory urine tests whenever the police feel like it, no matter where you are. and to think the best grass i ever had was ‘thai stick’ in michigan 31 years ago..

thailand recently had a military coup, and life is never advisable under military dictatorships - a fact america will be learning when cheny bush declare martial law just before the next elections … probably use their new war in iran as their excuse. welcome to the american brain camps with their thought police and morality masters monitoring all.

governments are going to get worse too as global warming displaces billions, and the powers that be forcibly take over the remaining oil fields. the rich always do what they want no matter what, and everybody else pays their tab of greenhouse gasses, polluted seas, foul air, and mass disease.

but being an eternal internal optimist, i still plan for the future even though i expect no future. no, let me amend that - mother earth will survive, she will get rid of the messy poisonous irrational virus called man and grow on her merry way.  but bye bye blogging, bye bye internet, bye bye air, bye bye sea, bye bye agriculture, bye bye baby bye bye.

this is smith reporting from the ugly rotting tarnished silver underside the mirror.

smith 1956 - 10 yrs old

smith 1963 boot camp san diego

smith 1965 midshipman u.s. naval academy

smith 1973

smith 1975