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Archive for June, 2008
Monday, June 30th, 2008
photo by ladyI believe we manifest possible realities. Every day I tell myself a mythology about two futures, one global in scope, and one more personal. In my personal future, Smith and I have great success with our books and artwork.
In the other future/present, everything collapses and there is no more civil society by, oh, say 2012. My personal, successful future is negated by this other future which seems more and more real. 2012 sounds hokey. But I believe in the collective unconscious and the myth of destruction seems to be winning over the myth of hope.
“Rational” people keep telling me that somehow the scientists are going to solve this environmental crisis and avert global catastrophe. I’m very skeptical of this brand of rationalism. (My own “credentials” in rationalism: I have an electrical engineering degree and have worked in the controls industry serving municipal sewer, water and power plants for ten years. Not that this sheep skin matters one iota.)
The scientific gestalt–for those in environmental sciences, at any rate–is in such a state that marine biologists break down in tears at press conferences.
The scientific gestalt–for those “scientists” in the petroleum industry–is that we’re going to extract every last bit of fossil fuel, no matter the consequences. We’re working on tar sands now, which when they are fully developed are estimated to only provide 10% of our fuel needs. If not the tar sands, then they’re in jubilation over the melting arctic and the possibilities of slurping melting methyl hydrate from the sea bottom, thus burning more fossil fuel, thus warming the earth more, thus melting the arctic faster, thus expanding the area of sunlight that is not reflected back into space, but absorbed by our dying oceans, absorbed by our warming planet, ultimate impact absorbed by us human feces species.
Environmental scientists are worried that the arctic’s melt will cause a gigantic “burp” of methyl hydrate, which would end life on this earth as we know it. And if the burp doesn’t happen, corporate scientists are greedy to extract the stuff anyways, dump it into our atmosphere. The only benefit of using methyl hydrate as a fuel is it produces 50% less CO2 emissions than coal. But believe you me, it’s not going to be a substitute for coal. They’re going after *everything.*
I remember when “rational” people were telling me, “Don’t worry, Lady, we’re going to use ethanol instead of oil. Brazil fuels their economy on sugar-based ethanol.” Never mind that Brazil uses slaves to do so because it’s such a labor intensive process it’s economically unfeasible otherwise. Never mind that we can’t grow sugar in America! Corn based ethanol? Never mind that it takes nearly as much energy in the form of fertilizer and fueling equipment to raise and process the corn as it does to use it.
Ethanol is a false panacea. Beware of people telling you that science is going to figure it out, that you won’t have to change your energy consuming ways.
Although I’m a fatalist, I still work on my soul. My soul urges me to divest myself of meat, of long commute, of plane rides, of energy-burning house, of car. (Still gotta stop riding planes and eating meat.) I want to invest myself in earnestness, in community, in good heart, in friendship with our home, the Earth.
Lady
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Posted in Environment | No Comments »
Monday, June 30th, 2008
wall and ad frag – foto by smithbeen trying for 20 months to put a label on my waking life. for a long time i used “endure,” but that has erroneous negative implications.
before lady came along, i had a hard time going. i thought i knew what was going on – i was wrong of course, but at least believed i could make plans, build tomorrow on today. then lady walked into my life like goldilocks on steroids in my 20th year of celibacy, my 14th year of sobriety, 3 months after mom died – and predictability went out the door,
since then, there ain’t no normal. there’s been psycho stalker, bulimia, cancer, operation, job resignation, radiation, nose polyps, another operation, loss of house & possessions & neighborhood followed by expatriatization and many countries in many months – all finally ending in mexico.
50 moves in 20 months leads to loss of routine, fogs expectation, makes planning difficult if not impossible. with no planning comes freeform discontinuity. there’s no continuity from day to day. one day we walk up a mountain. next day we go to a mixtec’s house for chili rellenos lessons. day after that we plot a magic mushroom trip, or we walk down an endless mountain through thousands of rabbits, or sit in a tent under a water sky, or eat ostrich in the bummed out grayness of a polish city, or watch lizards scamper in france or croatia or mexico. there’s no connect between one day and the next. the only reliable sameness day after day is lady and me being together – but even this is not exactly “sameness” because we’re both constantly evolving due to the journey. so every day i wake to a slightly new lady and we go through unknown and unknowable steps and people and adventures until we sleep and wake to the next day’s newness.
but today, standing in the afternoon’s after rain grey light looking into the lighted room where lady was working away on her laptop, it became clear to me – my waking life has become dream time. and like dreams, however odd the thing happening is, i go through it doing what i must to make it work as well as possible for as many as possible.
i don’t plan, i don’t schedule, i don’t expect. i try (and i’m getting better at succeeding) to get up and go through each day accepting what comes my way best i can.
now that we’re going to be living in one place for a couple years, some of this will change. i’ll find reoccurring cycles to play upon. and i do have my three daily rituals – bonding with lady, my daily blog, and my nightly toke.
weird life – i’m down to counting on the uncountable.
graffiti – foto by smith |
Posted in Travel Notes | No Comments »
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
political graffiti – foto by smithnumber nine #9
i was musing on the muses and was amused to find there are 9. or 18. depends on your back story. one source says they are 9 water nymphs sired by Zeus, king of the gods, out of Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. a second claims they’re more primeval, their father being Uranus and their mother Gaia. a third says both are true, that there are two generations of muses. this leaves 18 muses for 9 muse slots, so they’re going to have to fight it out in a game of mortal muse-ical chairs.
i was looking for inspiration and thought “aha – it’s the muse’s job to inspire so look em up. see what makes em tick.” disappointingly dry stuff.
1 Calliope – chief of the muses and muse of epic or heroic poetry
2 Clio – muse of history
3 Erato – muse of love or erotic poetry, lyrics, and marriage songs
4 Euterpe – muse of music and lyric poetry
5 Melpomene – muse of tragedy
6 Polyhymnia – muse of sacred song, oratory, lyric, singing and rhetoric
7 Terpsichore – muse of choral song and dance
8 Thalia – muse of comedy and bucolic poetry
9 Urania – muse of astronomy
closest i can come for my own use are selected bits and pieces. i’ll take #5 for tragedy, the 1st half of #8 for comedy, a slice of #2 for the past, the lyric of #6, and the love of #3 (with a dash of the erotic).
other than that, i can’t find much to make this muse muss interesting. looks to me like they’re laying down on the job.
graffiti – foto by smith |
Posted in On Writing | No Comments »
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
photo by lady
OUR MASTERS ARE IMMORAL ASSHOLES
“I feel like I’m looking at the past when I read business news articles.”
In a way, you are, aren’t you. ‘The Way the World Was.’
“Yeah, definitely. We’re not gonna be able to sustain this.”
Read the petroleum article. (End of the Petroleum Age?
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/28/9943/) They give actual figures about how we cannot sustain this. They talk about how much oil we use per day, the declining output of the major oil fields. 116 oil fields provide 50% of the world’s oil. They talk about the rate of depletion, the amount that alternative sources can add, calculate what’s gonna be needed by 2015. And we can’t do it.
“Whaddaya mean?”
There’s no way we can produce enough oil to keep the world happy in 2015. In fact, the largest oil field in the world, Saudi Arabia, has been using water pressure to keep up the oil pressure, which is a finite solution. Once that fails, there’s a DRAMATIC and DRASTIC DROP in output. So the point of the article is, you can’t keep the old game going, you best fund the new game, whatever that’s gonna be. Which they list as three: solar, biofuels, and hydrogen. And biofuels are not an option, not if you’re gonna feed folk.
“I think it’s time for us zombies to turn on the masters.”
Brains…
“That’s my metaphor. The zombie movies.”
I think it’s a pretty good one, don’t you? That’s the way we’re going through life. America, land of the zombies. That’s why my favorite zombie movie is Dawn of the Dead. It takes place in a mall.
“I just had this thought. In the near future war, soldiers are going to realize that they’re just fighting for oil. And they’ll feel OK about taking it, survival of the homeland and all. That’ll be their rallying call, ‘Blood for Oil! (grunt) You should be thankful we’re sacrificing ourselves to preserve your way of life!’ Our masters are immoral assholes.”
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Posted in Being, Mexico | No Comments »
Saturday, June 28th, 2008
graffiti – foto by smithSOP
It hurts to be a teddy bear
To sit alone, unused
No longer wanted anywhere
Just left alone, confused
I’m tossed aside to lie in here
This dank and musty chest
The dampness serves to hide my tear
The dark to mock my past
Not always thus, this has been no
I was her fair haired toy
She loved me once, I pleased her so
I shone, her chosen joy
Yet here I lie in darkest net
Her love for me did end
My love for her she deemed forget
She found a stranger friend
And now the stranger she does mold
And twists him through the air
While in this chest my heart grows cold
Alone and frightened, bare
graffiti – foto by smith |
Posted in Poetry | No Comments »
Friday, June 27th, 2008
tv shadow from Being There (Peter Sellers) – foto by smith~ ~ ~
“first you ask them. then you tell them. then you make them” – that’s the old policeman law. the new cop law is “Taser Nation over all, with liberty and justice revocable.”
~ ~ ~
african vervet adult monkeys have verbal danger signals: a loud bark for leopards, a two-syllable cough for eagles, a hissing sound for snakes. baby vervet s are born knowing the hiss snake warning, but must learn the other two.
~ ~ ~
got shot down by clint eastwood. lady’s and my age difference beat humphrey bogart and laura bacall by a year, but clint and his missus beat us by 8. this is all moot because tony randall’s wife heather was 50 years younger than he was, and anna nicole smith was 62 years younger than her old fart. lady and i have but a 27 year gap. of course all the above involve rich and famous old men attracting young female flesh. i got mine with neither fame nor money. i tell her she’s my trophy wife; she replies i’m her trophy poet husband.
~ ~ ~
i’ve noticed my myspace response time has noticeably worsened since my anti-myspace blog. why am i not surprised.
~ ~ ~
couldn’t raise my lizard in the closet yesterday. looked all around for him. felt sad cuz i like the little critter. then went into the bathroom and he startled me by running across the floor at my feet. either he was using the facilities, or he’s checking out the rest of the apartment.
~ ~ ~
in 4 weeks we’re going hours up the mountains to do the sacred magic mushroom dance. at Huautla, the town where the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Donovan, Aldous Huxley, Albert Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass and Stanley Osley (of Osley LSD) ate magic mushrooms back in the 1950s and 60s. we going where the cool folk went. of course we’re 40-50 years late, so how cool can we be? i did do Osley acid in 1968, so i have some street/hippie cred.
i was with the hippies, but wasn’t of the hippies. hippies were jobless and communal while i worked 40 hours a week and was a loner. i’m more lone psycho than family member. hard to believe i first dropped psychedelics 40 years ago. last dropped 10 years ago. 30 years – that’s half my life dipping in and out of acid. it was one of those things that just felt right, as if i’d finally arrived home.
graffiti – foto by smith |
Posted in Mexico | No Comments »
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
street graffiti art – foto by smithwhen you’re not in the flow, stuff happens. walking along the highway today, a pickup truck passenger squirted us in the face with a liquid as they passed. it looked, felt and smelled like water – but water here can be a deadly weapon. it didn’t upset me because were i young, mexican and poor, i’d resent every white face i saw. fortunately most folk here are super nice to us.
we’ve a new friend – a 4 inch lizard who lives behind our hanging clothes in the closet alcove. every time i move a hanger, he runs up the wall, turns around at the top, watches until i leave, then scurries back down. brown skin, black eyes.
Junkie Luv
My eyes slither open, shut
In golum time my tongue
Rasps brown lizards
As I hiss my want of you
In careful solitude
O my preciousss
Sleep whispers soft leavings
On my lids my head nods
Nods my precious
These fingers numb in spite
The clash of needle
And the floor
our bedroom closet lizard – foto by smith |
Posted in Mexico | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
resist – foto by smithi wrote this blog months ago. i didn’t post it because i hate negative blogs, i kept hoping MySpace would improve, and i kept having other more positive things to blog about. but finally my disgust with MySpace’s increasingly worsening response times has pushed me past my point of understanding.
MySpace is:
Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred.
This error has been forwarded to MySpace’s technical group.
MySpace is:
The connection has timed out
The server at blog.myspace.com is taking too long to respond.
MySpace is:
The rich-text editor is currently disabled. We’re working on a fancy new one.
(how many years has it been now?)
it’s gotten so bad in myspace that when i click on another’s blog or a different page in my own site, i play solitaire while waiting for a response because each initial click (and frequently each multiple re-click) returns the “unexpected error” or “timed-out” messages. myspace makes snails look fast and liars truthful.
this endless delay is NOT caused by my high speed connection or my computer because i can go to our WalkingThinIce blog, click on the same links in the same blogs, and get there IMMEDIATELY. MySpace linkages are hundreds of times slower than my WalkingThinIce linkages. same connection, same computer, same user. it takes 2-4 minutes just to leave a comment – IF you get to leave a comment at all.
i’ve also noticed it is harder and takes longer to access anti-government blogs in MySpace.
and what is MySpace exactly? mostly a sea of filth, violence, and perversion. if you glance at the top 10 blogs, they’re all sex, flesh, hatred, misogynism, and blind faith.
i have met a fine group of people on MySpace, and made genuine new friends, and i’m grateful for our small readership – which keeps me coming back. but it’s with a distinctly bad taste in my mouth that i sign on each day.
and MySpace has shown me what a plethora of incredibly creative folk we have out there, how many interesting artists and poets exit in the world. i’m blown away by all the talent i see.
and finally this piece of slanderous actionable garbage from tom – he could easily be sued for defamation for this:
You are about to leave MySpace.com
In an effort to stop phishing, we are warning you:
DO NOT ENTER YOUR MYSPACE PASSWORD on this new website!
This page is not meant to keep you from going to the link you’ve clicked on. It is just a warning to not enter your MySpace password on this site, even if the page you visit looks like a MySpace login page.
sex, flesh, hatred, misogynism, and blind faith – foto by smith |
Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
Oaxacan textile museum, photo by Lady
Chess Term: Skewer
“A skewer is a tactical device where an enemy piece is attacked by a line piece and forced to move, thereby exposing a second enemy piece to capture. It is also widely known as an Xray.”
Here are some skewers I’m thinking about lately:
Leftist intellectuals such as my idol Noam Chomsky dare not consider 9/11 conspiracy theories lest they are branded as hokey (the marginalization of people who ask questions)…
The skewering of progressives between the Democrats and losing all if they vote for the Greens–for pissy marginal benefit if the Dems win…
The skewering of freedom of press or illegal war planning via Judith Miller and freedom of press, protection of sources versus the crime perpetrated against Valerie Plame and Iraq…
The skewering of our attention between stuff like this and the sad, quickly worsening plight of the environment.
* * *
Marginalization is a process of framing the debate to limit the realm of “serious” debate to a scope which is acceptable to those in power. Anything that the power cannot accept is marginalized, censored, scorned by television personalities, “news” men.
What is this thing called news? What’s happening in Iraq? Why does the CNN newsroom look like a game show set? If I want to use television or a national newspaper to inform myself, can I? Do you remember when newspapers used to be interesting? Do you remember when NPR was enlightening? In just ten years much has changed, friends, much.
* * *
Pretty decent encapsulation of the zeitgeist:
“We cannot differentiate between illusion and reality. We trust courtiers wearing face powder who deceive us in the name of journalism. We trust courtiers in our political parties who promise to fight for our interests and then pass bill after bill to further corporate fraud and abuse. We confuse how we feel about courtiers like Obama and Russert with real information, facts and knowledge. We chant in unison with Obama that we want change, we yell “yes we can,” and then stand dumbly by as he coldly votes away our civil liberties. The Democratic Party, including Obama, continues to fund the war. It refuses to impeach Bush and Cheney. It allows the government to spy on us without warrants or cause. And then it tells us it is our salvation. This is a form of collective domestic abuse. And, as so often happens in the weird pathology of victim and victimizer, we keep coming back for more.”
-Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for the New York Times who sez he’s gonna vote for Ralph Nader this time
Read the complete article here:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/23/9822/
Article about Conyers and Impeachment:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/19/9740/
Article about Dems continuing extreme war funding:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/23/9829/
Article about Dems expanding spying:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/23/9840/
Article about being near the tipping point for global warming:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/24/9850/
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Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
foto by lady – oaxacan graffiti
There’s a whole buncha things
you cannot get around, sex, race,
age, economic status, height, build–
these are just the things you notice
visually, just glancing at somebody.
All these things can be overcome,
but they’re initial factors.
The biggest thing you can’t tell
right away, that’s how conservative
or creative they are. I need open
minds and souls. Any color race,
size, shape, sex.
Put a Republican mind in a beautiful
body, you have zombie trash. Put a
*beautiful* mind in an *ugly* body,
it’s a wonder to behold.
In counts more than out. Especially
over the looooonnnng run. Cuz we all
get rinkly, saggy, splotchy, cranky,
gaseous and broken. At that point,
the inside’s all ya got!
If you’re gonna start off with
somebody beautiful, there better be
something inside to keep you going
after the wrinkles come, cuz
everybody gets old.
Except rich Hollywood stars. They
have so many plastic surgeries, they
start looking like bad taxidermy.
Burt Reynolds *really* looks weird.
He can sneeze and not a single part
of his face will move. Looks like
it got wet and sagged and dried wrong.
Kenny Rogers, the country singer, he
looks like a bad special horror
effect in the movies. You can tighten
facial skin only so many times.
If I ever have plastic surgery, I’ll
have a couple scars cut into my face,
have myself disfigured, add some
character. And I’m gonna of course
have my left testicle removed.
smith n lady
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Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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