Environment
At Barking Spyder, Cleveland (photo by Lady)
“It’s probably gonna get pretty environmentally bad. So, we probably have a couple years left on Earth. How do you want to go?”
I know how I’m gonna die. You’re gonna walk me to death. I’m just going to wear away, trying to keep up with you. I’ll keep getting smaller and smaller as I wear away. Pretty soon you’ll be looking down on me. Eventually you’ll just put wheels on the bottom of my feet and tie a string around my neck and pull me along.
“I could suck you to death.”
Maybe you are. You’re looking younger, I’m getting older, yet we’re on the same journey. You look alien, you know. You’re the bastard offspring of Spock and an errant elf.
Yes, I’d like to go painlessly, or during a climax. I’d go BOOM. Wake up on the Other Side, think I’m in the same place, feeling good.
“The tingle of the Afterlife.”
At my funeral, when you cremate me, I want a bale of marijuana burned with me. I want the smoke floated inside the church, so everybody gets stoned.
And after, at the wake, you can put little piles of my ashes on the sideboard with little straws, to snort. And before you burn me, you’re gonna remove a good section of my back skin and cure it, tan it, and you’re gonna bind my final book of poetry in it. Cripples will crawl from thousands of miles away, to kiss my poetry and be cured.
Alien Lady At Barking Spyder, Cleveland (photo by Lady)
Photo by Lady K, Beziers, France
From another letter to a friend:
I don’t know that I’ll make any money writing. But here I am with this awesome opportunity to write, and sure, we have Smith’s memoir but I really always wanted to write about my childhood. And it would be such a shame if I let this opportunity evaporate — never even try — and then go to work in Chicago and never have the opportunity again.
I know it’s a dream, but without trying, how can I ever find if it’s successful? And another thing’s floating in my brain. Smith says Philip K. Dick wrote his first books in a real hurry to try to bring in money because he was under financial duress.
It feels right right now, to write.
* * *
We just watched the short film Shock Doctrine. It’s a documentary project by Naomi Klein and the director who did Children of Men. Klein just published a book with the same name. The film’s intent is to raise awareness of the extent and causes of our disastrous predicament. At one point in the documentary, they show the boat Tomorrow that was at the end of Children of Men, and talk about how the boat is a metaphor for how people have to live now. We have to be mobile and rootless, create our own floating communities. You can watch Shock Doctrine here: http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/short-film
I think the flood myth is particularly relevant for our times.
I have a dream of security — you know the one — where I settle on some land and become self sufficient. One way people might survive is by creating sustainable lifestyles, living locally. Yet who knows where to establish a farm; the climate’s changing. There are going to be more droughts and floods and desertification and new pest infestations. Maybe no bees, no flowering crops. I don’t know if survival is possible.
I have this idea that Alaska might be a safe place to live. It’s warming up quickly and there’s a lot of wildlife. In the documentary, Naomi Klein says Alaskan land is going up in value and that people who find safe places to live are the ones who are going to survive. I was really surprised to hear this, because I haven’t yet heard anyone else talk about Alaska as a haven in the context of global warming. Yet I’ve also read that the government is pouring money into bridges and infrastructure there.
Smith says it’s a possibility. If we ever make money, we could buy land in Alaska and move there.
I don’t know any place is really safe. If civilization’s infrastructure goes under, Alaska will be cut off and will have to be an island unto itself. And it would be horrid to have such weird extended days and nights. And did you know this — it’s SHOCKING — I just now found out that in the “pristine” arctic, the indigenous people have a serious problem. Twice as many girls as boys are born now! It’s because all the contaminants end up really concentrated in the food chain there, the polar bears, the fish. The contaminants mimic hormones, and they affect the fetuses. We are IN the future now.
“Toxic Chemicals Blamed for the Disappearance of Arctic Boys” http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/12/3796/
Shock Doctrine
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/short-film
Vineyard in September, Abeilhan, France
We’re staying in Grape Country. This little town of Abeilhan is in the Languedoc region of France. We’re about 30 km from the Mediterranean and Pyrenees. Abeilhan is a hill town. I’m not sure how old it is, but it seems medieval to me. The old cities here are on hills, and in between the cities are grape fields. Almost all the land is cultivated with grave vines. It seems to me that they overuse the land. The climate is very dry but there are all these lush vines around. The ground that’s not irrigated seems parched to me. This area is supposed to turn to desert with global warming.
We were here in the late winter, and when we left, the vines had just started to grow. It’s neat to come back near harvest time.
Smith and I walked in a vineyard the other day. We plucked two grapes off a vine. They were the sweetest grapes I’d ever tasted, and they were rich, really grape-y tasting. I thought they’d make excellent grape juice. We didn’t take more, because the French are really really serious about these vines. (Although we did take some fresh cauliflower from a field in Croatia. The cabbage and cauliflower fields ran right up against the rocky shore of the Adriatic Sea. It was the strangest & most wonderful thing I’d ever seen.)
Here in Abeilhan we’re surrounded by beauty, but we’re marooned. It costs $20 to take the bus 18 km in to the nearby large town of Beziers. But if we’re to be marooned, this is where I want to be. It’s a quiet town, and I can sit in the nook of the kitchen window and soak up sun and write, or lay in the hammock out back under the fig tree and fall asleep to the susurration of wind in the leaves.
We also felt trapped in our neighborhood in London. The suburbs of London are grey and monotonous. Shop after shop after shop. Our neighborhood was more interesting than most, because it was so diverse: Caribbeans, Indians, Senegalese. And we had really nice neighbors. But any time we wanted to go downtown it cost about $15 to take the subway. This made exploring the cultural scene prohibitively expensive. I felt thoroughly depressed by how poor I felt. It cost us $300 to take a train to go camping in the north of England, which was just like 250 miles away. The Lake District was bucolic, but there was no real sense of nature let wild.
Clevelanders are lucky to have access to places like the Metroparks. The US still has great natural resources and it’s cheap to take public transportation. Before I came here, I had the idea that the British were much more progressive than the US when it came to sustainable living. But it turns out everyone’s taking Ryanair for a holiday weekend across the continent. Flying here is much cheaper than taking a train - it seems so wrong to me - the British establishment makes big noise about global warming but it turns out they’re just as hypocritical.
For kicks, I researched what it’d cost to take Amtrak from NY to Cleveland. Turns out it’s much cheaper than flying. So we’re going to do that when we land in NYC.
Vineyards in March, France
Sep 06 2007 09:15 am |
Environment and
France |
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thursday:
we went down to the large square south of the souks inside the walled city tonight. lady wanted to try the outdoor food. were warned never to eat street food, but lady read the stalls were fairly well regulated. they lied - lady regurgitated, fed the toilet bowl her dinner like she was its mother and the bowl her hungry chick. i’m waiting to see if i’m to suffer also. told you marrakech wasn’t done with us. marrakech is a mad hatter tea party for alice in unwonderland, only without utensils and a lot more people.
friday:
we leave for 2 months in essaouira tomorrow morning. it’s a sea town on the west coast of africa. used to harbor pirates, so i should feel at home. the area has been occupied since prehistoric times, but the walled city was built by the french only 300 years ago. unlike marrakech, there’s no cars, motorbikes, or donkey carts allowed inside the walls, so it’s cleaner, quieter, and since it’s 3 times younger than the marrakech medina, it’s cleaner and less of a rat maze. (medina - The ancient quarter of many cities in northern Africa)
gotta gather, evaluate, discard, pack, clean, smoke the last of our hash, go out to one last dinner inside the old walls, sleep, get up and leave for move #33 in the last 11 months..
i will wait for the quieter newer town and see what i feel once i relax inside its walls and sample the poetry of our new old apartment with its heavily patterned tiled walls, its lack of refrigerator and hot water, its nearness to the atlantic ocean beach. but right now, i’m tired of this. we’re in our 10th month of world travel, our 11th month of moving on since we sold our place last june. we don’t seem to be moving toward a resolution, just more evolution. but since we’re not flat earthers, i spose evolving’s good.
i may also be tired emotionally and physically from serially smoking seriously good hash for 31 days dazed. back in 2005 when i’d smoked every day for 20 years and most days for the 20 before that, i was in shape. people don’t realize heavy drinking or continuous cannabis use requires being in shape for your sin. before i quit drinking 16 years ago, i was drinking 5 gallons of cheap wine and smoking an ounce of grass a week - and still going to work for 50 hours. i found hangovers were conducive to programming computers because writing code gives you something to do while you’re waiting to feel less bad.
we’re going unstoned to the next town because it’s time to refresh. won’t even look for hash because a period of clarity is more desirable. i came to marrakech to smoke, and i smoked. i’m going to essaouira not to smoke, but to reflect and write. my 8 months straight out of the last 10 have shown me being straight hath its charms. my month toking here taught me getting stoned is fun but not the answer, and that being stoned can be work - especially when a city like marrakech can turn on you so quickly and change your plans.
speaking of plans - morocco through 1st week in july, 3 weeks camping out in scotland, 1 month london (to read poetry to an audience again), one month back in the south of france - then it gets iffy… either 2 months in cleveland and a month in mexico, or a month in mexico then 2 months in cleveland. after that we may live in mexico or guatemala or chicago or seattle for up to a year to finish our book/s. who knows said the shadow to the lack of light.
May 11 2007 11:27 am |
Environment and
Morocco |
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One friend’s visiting New York and another friend’s moving there. New York is a big black hole. I’ve been there but I can’t grasp it. I do have a taste of Chicago, though. Gosh, I really want to be in America sometimes. I want a hot dog.
Smith just blogged a picture from Cleveland juxtaposed with a picture from France. The Cleveland picture is of a counter at Cleveland’s West Side Market. Three plastic chickens stand on the counter. An American flag hangs between them.
The picture from France is of a healthy free-range chicken in somebody’s cozy yard. Whenever I walk by the yard I feel tremendous happiness and hope. The farmer’s decorated his lawn with antique equipment. On the fence he’s hung three stuffed animals, which are completely open to the elements.
How weird to see the American flag in the Cleveland picture. For eight months I’ve been in a reality where I haven’t seen any flags. I don’t even know what the flags of Poland or Croatia or the Netherlands look like, and I’ve spent months there. But if those countries were more like America, they’d be burned into my brain in reverse video.
Which reminds me–when I say American flag–shouldn’t I say US flag? I mean, America’s two entire continents. But I think everyone calls it the “American” flag.
“The West is destroying the world and the world is destroying the world as well,” I tell Smith.
He says, “Just before we go extinct, we’ll develop some really weird things. They’ll start interacting with each other. Bugs will glow in the dark every other Tuesday.”
He takes a couple tokes, breathes thoughts.
“The sum will start equaling more than the parts, you know.”
“This makes me think of the sinking water tables,” I say.
The Malthusian bust is finally happening. It’s this huge area under the curve and we’ll finally see it with water wars. I read that within 20 years, 3 billion people won’t have access to safe water (right now it’s 1 billion.) We’ve bought tincture of iodine for our stay in Morocco so that we can wash our fruits and vegetables without using fuel or bottled water. We also had some shots which will protect us from some water borne illnesses should we accidentally get water in our mouths when bathing.
I’m working on the blog entry for ArtCrimes. We’ve posted a poem and photo for three days. It’s easy for me to get Smith’s artwork from the web, so I’ve done that for the first couple entries.
“I need other peoples’ ArtCrimes photos,” I tell Smith. “I can’t keep using yours. Can you put them on your stick?”
Smith copies the photos to his memory stick.
“I need a big dick.”
“A big stick?” I ask.
“Yeah, a gig.”
“I’ll lick it.”
“As long as you don’t get my data wet. OK, we’re talking 300 MB here.”
I take the stick from him and copy the files to my computer. “Our computers are going to become self-aware,” I comment. “I think we — the humans — are just functioning as DNA zippers.”
About the water shortage
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0816-04.htm
About safety & scarcity
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0914-07.htm
About Coca-cola’s excessive consumption in India http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0307-30.htm