Dreaming

Last week, on the Solstice, I wrote about how I'd been fired from big bank for dancing in an orange afro wig at my cubicle/work station. Word came later, which I mentioned in the comments of that post, that a few people had rushed out of the building terrified, one woman was afraid to walk to her car alone after work, and at least one called in sick the next day, saying she was too afraid to come to work. Big bank couldn't not fire me, and that the police were nearly called, led directly to me cleaning my house top to bottom, which had got kind of grubby, LOL - anticipating as I was a potential visit by the FBI, for having caused such a disturbance at big bank. I haven't seen them. :)

Never mind big bank seemed to me to be engaged in massaging loan documents, to pawn off the loan on Fannie and Freddie, i.e. gov. Not altering documents, that I know of, but certainly not including certain documents in the package sent to gov, to make the loan look less distressed. Not necessarily illegal, but then, what is illegal, when you are gov, big bank, corp or fed? Right, freak out about the guy in the orange wig. Suffice to say I am tired of working for shysters and hucksters, no matter how shiny legit they appear parading across the television.

Which, big bank, as I said, has not seen fit to forgive the mortgage on this house, in firing me. Suffice to say too, I was not particularly happy with the $200 each month left over, after I paid the various tributes to exist here (and I don't own a car), to do their dirty work (a "butt-in-seat, in the morgue/meatlocker/chop shop.")

Not sure what I'm going to do now, there being so many shysters and hucksters. I was thinking of "bleeding the beast" and applying for unemployment benefits, but for all I know I'm still "employed" by the temp agency I was working for, at the Behemoth in 2008. I never have applied for gov bennies since I accepted a few small, ill-chosen loans in the early nineties, for college. Might apply just to report on what happens - a little cushion would be nice too, though I'm dubious, all around. Meanwhile, I'll look for a job. Never have made more than $27,000 in any year of my adult life, and the average since I was 22 is probably more like $15,000, or maybe $10,000. I feel like maybe I deserve a good paying job doing something enjoyable and meaningful, not least that I am a hard worker when it means something, not least because of what I would likely do with the money, taking this house off the grid, growing as much food here as possible - but then, if such a job is available to me, I'm not aware of it. (When I was a kid, there was often talk from the media and the schools, that someday soon, technology would eliminate work. Now, it's all 'work harder longer for less,' with no social guarantee eventually. Presumably the uber-rich will be allowed to continue as they are, even until they print their first trillionaire. LOL)

The house itself is in stasis, mostly. The furnace doesn't work, and it doesn't appear like temperatures will be above freezing anytime the next ten days. I live mostly in the kitchen and my bedroom, two oil filled electric radiators maintaining a temp somewhere between 50-60F, the kitchen warmer on sunny days. The basement hovers around 38F, because of the water heater. The rest of the house stays around freezing. It's a pleasant enough place for me; I've lived in tents for months at a time. Not very livable though, certainly not for entertaining. LOL

I'd like to continue the work I started here. I imagine an attached greenhouse, fish ponds, hydroponic veggies, cisterns, solar radiant heating, even going underground and growing avacado and citrus. The tribute is high, however, and the resources I'd require, I've never had anything like, even though I could do it comparatively moderately, cost-wise. Making this a kind of focal point to help transform the region.

Of course, it's all madness. Considering this lot, in the midst of the squarest neighborhood in Minneapolis, in the midst of a 3-million metro food desert. I can imagine roving gangs of Somali, Latino, Black, White, Hmong, cop and Christian Fundies, zombie hoards, a vast military machine unleashed in the interior. Two nuclear facilities on the Mississippi, upriver and downriver 35 miles each way, melting down.

I get to thinking like that every time I spend more than a few hours watching teevee, like I did at my parent's this Christmas. I can't tell the difference anymore between CNN and FOX, the pandering, the conditioning for war in the Middle East, in Syria and Iran. Americans have seemed to mostly disregard the calls for armed commandos in every school, coming to the conclusion basically that it would be too expensive. I swear, American's are fatter every time I expose myself to the tube. And meaner, more invested in the status-quo, BAU, extract, acquire, consume.

Meanwhile of course, law enforcement top-to-bottom in this country is becoming little more than a pipeline for a vast penal system public and private, unlike anything the world has ever seen, deeply engrained now in our economy, from cops on the beat to prosecutors to drug testers to the many vendors supplying the many prisons, more military/commando authoritarian in it's methods every day. We even have public/private internment camps for "alien" Latinos, while middle class liberals consume earnest media retrospectives on internment camps for Japanese, during WWII; local law enforcement flooded with the "decommissioned" weaponry of our un-paid-for adventures in Iran and Afghanistan. Two things we haven't heard a peep from the media, in the so-called debate about violence following the shooting at Sandy Hook, are: What pharmaceutical anti-psychotic regimen was that young man on; and, this country has been at war for 12 years, our President is a known killer of children by drone, our military and CIA are in perhaps every country of the world, "protecting our interests", stirring up all kinds of blowback, that we 5% of humans might consume 35% of the worlds resources.

Last week I said too, all I really want to do is dance around the world in the orange afro. Remember that book, Catcher in the Rye? It's kind of like that. What economic situation we have is akin to coercion, ruled by hard asses, mean bastards and hypocrites. Holden Caulfield was merely an honest one, if he didn't really know what to do with that. All he wanted was to be a protector of the innocent, a life of purpose not built on lies, on things that cannot be said, on things that cannot be true. I figure I could dance like a dervish in the orange wig, with a tip jar out, making enough money to exist. I also happen to know people all over the world who are planning to build or are building interesting houses and big gardens. I also happen to be a former building contractor, and I have nurtured here a kind of Edenic oasis. That would be about the most honest living I have ever made, bouncing from place to place, helping however I can.

Ideally, I would keep this place too, until I finish the work I imagine here. How ANY of this happens though, I can't imagine. It seems like dreaming TOO big, based on the life I have lived to this point, considering too the increasing chaos in the world, and the fact that I'll be out of money again soon. So I guess all I can do is call it out, and let the Goddess sort it out ;). Otherwise, I don't see at this point how even to keep the house I seem to be renting from big bank, and a garden I am effectively leasing from the county, at a cost I seem incapable of paying. Not esp. if I would have to otherwise spend a fourth winter in this cold house. 

I turn 40 this summer. I'd like to go see my friend Luciddreams, meet his family and help them around the homestead. I'd like to go to Cornwall to help Jason Heppenstall and his family with their homestead. A kind of pilgrimage too, to that Island, from which I presume I have ancestors going way back. I know of another curious project in Tasmania. As long as I'm dreaming, I wouldn't mind dancing along the Champs-Elysees, and maybe in Africa and Mali particularly, or maybe the Congo, to dance something like this (speaking of ancestors going way back)

 To make any of this happen, what I imagine, I'm going to need some help. To that end, I've added an email option to the blog, in the right-side column. If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Fired

I got fired from big bank Thursday, Dec 20, 2012.

Fired, for dancing, in my orange wig, on my break, an hour before the end of day at big bank, before a five-day holiday break.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It basically went down like this:

Sometime about Monday, an idea about dancing at my cramped cave-like work station, took hold in my imagination. Like all great ideas, it felt exactly right, until I had a day to think about it, flooded with all the reasons why not to, there being many. Wednesday night though, the vision took hold again, and I pulled out my dusty glitter dancing shoes, the wacky jacket and the wig, the Bose sound system, the iPod and the necessary cords. Thursday morning I packed them up, and off to the bus I went.

On the bus I wavered. Then, listening to my mp3s, I heard the two songs I would dance to and then I knew. Arriving at big bank per-usual twenty minutes early, I walked into the back break room and started preparing. I put on the shoes, the jacket and the wig; when I turned around, ready to dance to my station, there was Bob, the head manager in the department, looking at me, smiling. "Hi Bob!" I said, and he smiled again and walked out of the break room, uninterpretable, but not seeming to mind. I followed him down the aisle about six paces behind, between regular big bank employee cubicles, bouncing around like I do, to the very song that inspired the costume (which only I could hear), which had looped to that point serendipitously. Heads were turning, mouths agape or turned upward with a light in the eye, I sauntered to my station, danced awhile, while I punched in online, talking to a woman seated near me, people laughing and giggling. Then I took the gear off and went to work.

My original intention had been not to pull out the gear again, until the last five minutes of the day. But there was little work to do, people were clearing out early to go home, so I kicked up the timeline to the afternoon break.

In the meantime, I struggled against a cold sweat. Dancing in my chair to stay warm. Serendipitously too, I found this article on the website Zero Hedge, as to whether or not one can remain moral, and continue to work for a big bank. I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion - I don't know what a moral is, it sounds to me like a dead fish - but I do consider myself a man of integrity. Then, minutes before I started to prepare for dancing, a guy behind me was reading a loan and he said, "Look at this, this guy is a Pastor of an evangelical church and school, making $20,000 a month. His wife is a teacher at the school and makes $1000. Saving the poor and disfortunate, I guess."

I put the jacket and the wig on (I wore the funky shoes all day), and at exactly two o'clock, I turned on the music.

The first song, Junek Bug Joe, only 2:18 long, djembe drum and mandolin based without vocals, by my friend Joe Credit, out of Missouri, or wherever he is now. (This link is to Joe's song about coffee, the only one I could find. Blogspot doesn't have an audio upload. You'll get the idea.) LOL. Up tempo, up beat. Nearly every head I could see was facing me, perhaps 70 people, and most of them were smiling. 

Before minute one passed, Jeffery, one of the work directors, who has a very genuine heart, leaned over the cubicle wall, and told me I needed to turn it off and take it to the break room. I asked him if I was going to get fired, and he said he didn't know, and I told him I was going to take that chance. He tried to convince me otherwise, but there seemed in his surprise, a hint of admiration. Work Director Mark, told me to turn it down, which I did, but then I turned it up again, and then Manager Jim told me to turn it down, and I told him I couldn't, lamely that it was my "dream" - trying to dance all this time. I turned it down, and then back up, and he stomped away angrily, "You're not going to turn it down then, that's just great!"

Mind you, it was never anything like so loud, that we couldn't speak easily to each other from a distance. Some time last week, when I was sitting at a computer out in the middle of the department for a day, all three of these guys had stood around me in my chair, while we discussed, puzzled over and tried to solve a mystery about a loan I was working on. Four adult men putting their heads together to solve a problem - it was quite enjoyable actually, and the first time I felt like I connected with these guys in a very real way. Now, it was all command and control. I heard Jim saying to someone piercingly, "You aren't taking pictures, are you?"

The first song ended, and there was a spontaneous uproar of cheering, clapping and laughter, MUCH louder than the Bose had ever been. I leaned back, cupped my hands around my mouth and projected out, smiling, "if the apocalypse is indeed upon us...I recommend...Dancing!" and there was another round of laughter.

The second song, G.B.A, by Xavier Rudd, out of Australia, began more ominously, though it basically being about making the world a better place for kids. He cusses twice, but we're all adults here, yes? Manager Jim had fire just about blasting out from his ears, and work director Mark stalked around giving me a look, ready to pounce. As I danced, periodically berated to turn it down, turning it down, turning it back up, I could feel the vibe darkening, and watched as people disappeared back into their atomized space, fewer and fewer looking at me. Jim finally gave up and stomped back to his desk. I continued to dance, trying to maintain my own joyous vibe, letting go as I could (I could see at least one wild haired woman intent on what I was doing, the very same "true princess") and when the song ended, there was a depressing, cold silence.

I sat down, took off the wig, jacket and shoes, packed up the gear, and punched out for the day. I saw both Jeffery and Mark standing around Jim's desk, so I walked there to talk to them.

"What do you need?" said Mark, hostile, ready for a fight.

"I just wanted to let you guys know, It wasn't my intention to try to show you guys up, at all. I didn't mean any disrespect. I realize this could get me fired, but even then, no hard feelings. I punched out for the day."

"You're leaving for the day?" said Mark, his hostility quite suddenly vanished.

"I think that's best. And if I don't hear anything tonight or tomorrow, I'll just show up next week." Jeffrey seemed to think that was reasonable. Meanwhile, Jim was seated at his desk on the phone, scowling at me. He got off the phone, I reiterated what I had said, for his benefit, but he scowled some more and got back on the phone without saying a word.

I walked back to the break room, sat down somewhat stunned, and then prepared as if I might have to walk home, as the bus would not arrive for another 90 minutes. Mostly packed, I picked up my long underwear pants, and began walking to the bathroom.

As soon as I walked out of the break room, I saw both work directors walking down the main aisle toward me. Mark said, "hold on right there," and I stopped, standing there with my long underwear in my hand. They rounded the corner, a woman with them, who I immediately saw by her badge, was none other than the vaunted Sheila, head dept-manager Bob's boss, the same dragon lady who I have criticized in this blog, who I never have met, who I have been told, "never look her in the eye."

Looking her in the eye, smiling, all three people before me prepared for a fight, she says to me, quite calmly but with the slightest edge, "Ok, what you did, you disturbed the other staff. Are you waiting for the bus?"

"I was; thinking about walking home maybe too."

"Well we can escort you out, or I can call security."

I laughed softly and shook my head and smiled. "That won't be necessary; but, um, would it be ok if I slip into the bathroom for a second, and put on my long underwear?" which I was holding out in front of me in my hand, and I'm pretty sure all three of them, even dragon lady, giggled.

When I came back, dragon lady was gone, replaced by Lanni, my contact at the temp agency. She got there quick. "Hi Lanni!" I said. "So this is it, my last day at big bank?" Mark pointed at my badge, and I said, "I still need to be able to get out of the building," and made a gesture smiling, as if to keep it, and it got awkward for a second, though not in any harsh way, Mark almost apologizing at that point. "I tried to do a good job while I was here," I said, and Jeffery and Lanni esp. seemed to agree that I had. "I just have a very real antipathy toward big bank," and then I wished them a happy holidays and Dec 21, Solstice, and they walked me to the door. On the way out through the revolving gate, Mark's goodbye was loudest, out of all proportion.

Outside the gate in the stairwell, Lanni told me she had received a phone call and raced from downtown to protect her employee.

I hypothesized out loud, laughing, faux serious, "There is a lunatic dancing in an orange wig, and he's yours. Come retrieve him." She hadn't heard the actual story, so I explained, briefly.

"Well that's relieving," she said. "Usually when people leave like this there is a lot of acrimony, shouting. You just made me laugh. After a pause, "Are you Ok?" She seemed genuinely concerned.

"I'm doing great," and then I lied a little bit, saying that this work is "not what I am here to do."

"When you think about it, all I was doing was dancing." I explained the costume and how I danced outside the Halloween stores I managed. She asked about the songs. She said some people here at big bank are on edge, in lock-down mode, understandably, that she's noticed that, everywhere she manages temp employees. She said if she hadn't been able to come down to get me, they were going to call the police. I said thanks for showin up (though that would have been interesting. Hi Guys!), and then we said goodbye. 

"Hey, it's almost the Apocalypse, right?" I said, by way of alluding to the weirdness of it all.

She had a faraway look then, "Oh right, when is that?"

"Tomorrow."  As I started toward the door.

She turned away, but turned back. "You don't really think the world is going to end, do you."

"Nope," I said, smiling, and walked out the door, seven miles home, on the heels of a Midwestern snow storm.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Looking back, my only regret is that I wasn't singing softly on my way out of the department, the first verse from the Blind Melon song "No Rain":

                               All I can say is that my life is pretty plain,
                                 I like watchin' the puddles gather rain.
                            And all I can do, is just pour some tea for two
                      And speak my point of view, cause it's not sa-aane
                                              It's not sa-aa-aaa-aane...

That, and I guess, when Sheila walked up, I didn't say, "Hi Sheila! We finally meet!"

There was video. My sweet friend Shelly, who I have also defended in this blog, like a true champ, pulled up a chair, right up front and got comfortable, with her phone. They chased her back to her seat, by the end of the first song, and I'm not really sure, but she may have been the one Jim interrogated about taking pictures. I called twice and she checked in by email, I asked if it would be ok with her if I posted the video here. She didn't reply until 3:42 this morning, saying that she learned it was security policy at big bank, no pictures or video, so she deleted it. I'm kind of crushed about that. But it's ok I guess, and there were a lot of smart phones in that space so perhaps there is a video floating around the internet somewhere. Perhaps I could petition the NSA for a copy. LOL.

Which is funny too, when I first conceived of this idea, about an announcement, it certainly wasn't then about getting "term'd" by big bank. It was more personal, about how all I really want to do is dance around the world in an orange afro. There's a lot more to it than that, but no room now to go into it, in this post. I will say, it feels confirmed for me now; not least as I sit here in the sun, drinking coffee, listening to the great advocate of Liberty, Wayne Lapierre of the NRA, like a a true capitalist/militant/fascist gun lobbyist, advocating for moral lock-down, a government database for the "mentally Ill," and a full frontal, visibly military State even in the schools.

I didn't anticipate the command and control response I got, in the specifics. I figured there was a strong chance they would fire me. I thought though, they'd just let me do my thing and then fire me. Oh well, I disarmed them, at every turn, except Jim, who is new to the job, neither of his superiors were there, and he's got two kids, a house and a wife. The "other staff" who were the ones "disturbed," were the regular big bank employees who could not have seen me dancing unless they came to investigate. That a djembe beat from a pot-loving starry eyed mandolin genius, a digerridoo based song about making the world a better place for kids, and a guy dancing in an orange afro wig, on a day when there had not been any work for most of us to do for several hours, would be mistaken for any of the various horsepersons of the apocalypse, shows IMHO how far gone these folks are. Though I'm sure any of them might see the error in their ways, if they would just lighten up.

To my knowledge, though, big bank has not in firing me, forgiven the mortgage payments I owe it.

So anyway, that's what I did, at the end of the Mayan Long Count.
                              

Here we are!

Here we are. The cusp of the long anticipated Dec 21, 2012.

I've been thinking about this a long time. Watching, wondering. What would become of the culture? To give credit where credit is due, the Maya prophesied this time, focusing us on this time. By way of the mystics Terence Mckenna and Jose Arguelles, with help from John Major Jenkins, dozens of other writers, lecturers etc, the denizens of the esotere, and Hollywood!!!.
 

The Mayan long count of 5,126 years ends Dec 21, 2012. Astounding, as the Mayans existed as a rising empire and civilization, from year 250-900 appx. How they would came by the detailed maps of the the stars and cyclical Time they did, in such a short period of time, without having invented the wheel, is a profound conundrum leading to befuddlement and severe condescension, among the cognoscenti of the West.

  

Terence Mckenna would have said, and I expect he did, that the reason was, mushrooms, containing psylocibin, particularly of the species Strophoria cubensis. His Timewave Zero was a significant advancement, in thrusting the Dec 21, 2012 date into the consciousness of the West, and indeed now globally. He was very fond of mushrooms too, through them he claimed, compiling from a pattern in the King Wen sequence of the I Ching, a fractal representation of Time that no one to my awareness has offered a satisfactory argument against.

What would happen! - this Friday! - he wavered. Without turning this in to a full exposition on Terence Mckenna, a portion of the West has distilled in part from his argument, and many others, that this is a time of profound transformation, some kind of hyper-dimensional, Time ending, evolutionary leap in consciousness. What that would really mean, no one can properly explain, by definition. And not least because mushrooms are among the most heinous social offences the government will allow it's law enforcement near free will over, in treatment of the partaker, lengthy incarceration and asset forfeiture being a very real threat - ruination - though Terence being a notable exception, by the power of his voice.

What is most extra-ordinary here, is the silence there seems to be about it, in the West, after the hullabaloo hey-day period of the boom-time 2000-2009, the Peak of 2012-phrenia in the West, another of its consumer gratification conspiracies for the economic consumer establishment. Mostly what is heard from Mainstream media about 2012 these days, is assertions by NASA etc Expert, that Dec 21 is NOT the end of the world. Thanks for that again, the apocalypse meme, mostly to the Media Hollywood acculturation empire, Monotheist particularly Christian apocalyptic exegesis, Governmental inexorable attempt to initiate World War, Corporate/Capitalist/Institutional adulteration of natural biology - that any living Mayan, or Terence or Joe wad ever said the world would end. Even the web community Reality Sandwich, a kind of epicenter of Terence Mckenna-like care and concern, is largely silent on the phenomenon (and the founder Daniel Pinchbeck wrote a prophecy of the return of Quetzalcoatal!) Really, there is very little frenzy, specific to any rigid Dec 21 meme. It thought it might be crazy! But wait!

It is a bit crazy, don't you think? Christians and Muslims and Jews, seem destined (in their mind) to create one great final conflagration. Never mind, that humanity appears in every way at a time of Peak water, fuel, food, debt, toxification, garbage, evidenced not least by mainstream promises of cornucopian abundance, assured to exacerbate the reckoning. The gun banners are a bit late to the party; the world is awash in weaponry, of every sort, enough to kill every last human, and every other species but the single celled besides. Technology is at a cusp of awakening us, or enslaving us, and every government esp. now America's, aspires to use it to surveill upon All.

I've never shied away from my esteem for the Mayan calculation, in this blog. Fact is, and I've said it many times and it bears repeating, 5,126 years ago, humanity had collected to a degree that we invented the written word, which is a big enough deal that it transformed the left hemisphere of the brain, to a negative degree on the right, which physical transformation corresponds precisely with hierarchy, patriarchy, and the rise of institutions. The death of the Goddess and the rise of the Monotheistic God. Militancy, religious amputation and poisoning of feeling for the earth, and then a scientific amputation of the spirit. Here we are.

10, 252 years ago, two Mayan Long Count cycles, corresponds approximately with the end of the flood, after the last ice age, after a rise and perhaps sudden rise for any established seashore civilization (?), a 400 feet rise over a period of 2-3 thousand years, perhaps much of it all at once.

Agriculture, in the aftermath. We started planting seeds. Monumental in the transformation of human consciousness.

Terrence Mckenna proposed that we spent much of the 100,000 years prior to the flood, in a mushroom/assorted hallucinogen, inspired transformation out of apehood into Logos, language, ambling sex fest around the planet. Though we had long since descended from the trees, with agriculture we were confined to a geography increasingly small.

Every 5,126 year Mayan Long count also happens to be 1/5 of the precession of the equinox. A curious phenomena of the planet's celestial passage, by which the poles ascribe a circle in the sky, 26,000 years in the making, round and round. 26,000 years ago being the approximate end of the species Neanderthal, corresponding to an approximate expansion in language, the Logos, among Homo sapien, perhaps beginning ten thousand years before the flood?

Thus, it appears to be without much question IMHO, that whatever tranformation is upon us, it is profound beyond conception. How much of that transformation I will see in my lifetime, assuming I live to anything like a ripe old age by modern Western standards (30-40 years more), I expect to see plenty, dwarfing what we have seen the last 40 years. Something very like the dissolution of the industrial nation state, which would be a very perilous, and potentially creative time for humanity, with the date of 12/21/2012 seen by many as a kind of bifurcation point, a shift of epochal proportions, unto a new Aeon. 

(Which, being near about that 40th Milestone for me, inspired in part by two bloggers I admire, Jason Heppenstall and Aaron McCarty,*** I'll have one more post about what this date means to me personally, a kind of autobiographical thing, with an announcement of sorts (Thanks Jason ;) this Friday.)

As for anything happening this Friday, Solstice, Dec 21, 2012, if we had to bet on any one prophecy, I'd bet on Daniel Pinchbeck's return of Quetzalcoatl; but not like some bird headed serpent god descending out of the sky, but a series of 40+ x-class solar flare direct hits, wiping out the global communications/electrical grid.

But I'm not betting, because I don't expect anything esp. surreal to happen (if things aren't already surreal enough for you), but continued, accelerating chaos instead. Which, if you know from physics or astute observation of nature, that the "game" is really all about chaos, and Western and now global culture is all about control, well, you're in about as good a place as anyone can be, facing the Apocalypse. And if I recommend anything, I recommend you greet the Mayan end/beginning with dance and song. Blessings,

  ***When I published this post, I spelled Aaron McCarty, Justin McCarty. I was mistaking him with the Artist Justin Wade. I think I did so because I needed a reminder not to take myself too seriously, to get in touch with Justin about his sight, and that I might have mistaken Justin for Aaron, as I find them both similarly profound characters.

I also managed to spell Jason Heppenstall's name Jason Heppenstahl. I think that is because he is living in Denmark, though he is an Englishman by origin. I think maybe I was a little jealous too, myself such a lame homebody by comparison. If you read his last several posts, I think you will agree, he has lived a most serendipitous life.

Adam

Friday morning I forgot my earbuds at home, and despaired for a moment, that I would have to spend the day foreclosing on houses, without music. The guy next to me borrowed me his. I wandered around youtube awhile, and found Fatoumata Diawara. After a bleak week, I was enchanted, in love and dancing, like I haven't danced in awhile.

Then came a break, and I opened a new intranet window to this story

December 15, 2012

       'EVIL VISITED THIS COMMUNITY'

Sandy Hook. That was about as bleak as I felt all week.

After work I biked to my sister's, and hung out with my 9-year-old niece before she went to her dad's, and chased my 2-year-old (tomorrow!) nephew around the kitchen, and let him chase me, and I let him throw me around ;) for 45 minutes, and put him to bed, holding him a long time and singing, while his dad took a long nap.

If aliens were to stumble upon America, knowing nothing of it, but able to understand the language, in the aftermath of the Massacre at Sandy Hook, what would they make of MSM (Mainstream Media) coverage of the Massacre, with the intermittent breaks for car commercials, et al? Had those Aliens been playing with me and my nephew, they would have witnessed too, a bald shark declare that the meaning of life is MONEY, while visibly, physically repulsed by the living.

There is a thing in mathematics called a fractal, loosely described as the scale of the universe reflected in every part. Think how the structure of the atom with the electrons spinning around the proton, reflects the solar system, and how the solar system reflects the galaxy.

"Fractal is a word invented by Mandelbrot to bring together under one heading a large class of objects that have [played] ... an historical role ... in the development of pure mathematics. A great revolution of ideas separates the classical mathematics of the 19th century from the modern mathematics of the 20th... the revolution was forced by the discovery of mathematical structures that did not fit the patterns of Euclid and Newton. These new structures were regarded ... as 'pathological,' ... as a 'gallery of monsters,' ... The mathematicians who created the monsters regarded them as important in showing that the world of pure mathematics contains a richness of possibilities going far beyond the simple structures that they saw in Nature. Twentieth-century mathematics flowered in the belief that it had transcended completely the limitations imposed by its natural origins.
 
Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not..."        - Freeman Dyson

It is easier undrstood in representation


                                






                                       
                                 
Maybe you don't know (sorry for you), how we humans tend to deny certain realities, trauma especially, and how denied those things tend to fester inside, and come out uncontrolled in unfortunate ways, "side ways," warping us in the long term, harming others irrevocably. If the one is reflected in the many, and likewise, then Sandy Hook might be described as a culturally "side ways" event, caused by a release of energy we as a culture have repressed and denied, turned toxic.

Now it is the law of the land, here in America, that the Government can take any American, detain him or her, anywhere in the world, and never tell anyone where you are, or even that you have been taken, as long as you live, and forever after. Our President can offer a tear for the children in Connecticut, but not for the Children who die by his order in other countries. His Brennan gets to kill children and not kill himself, declared instead the pillar of care and concern, the administration's "conscious". Nary an American has ever shed a tear for the children killed by our Military Machine, in consort with industrial corporations, withdrawing resources from poor, weak countries and people globally, destabilizing those countries and their people - necessary to maintain school districts like Sandy Hook, to maintain every aspect of what America has become. Notice how we fight to maintain the tax cuts seeded to us by the Bush, who fanned the flames of endless empirical war, low now more than a decade ago.

Religion and the Word separated us from the earth, and Science cut us off from Spirit, and here we are, separate and separated, mourning. Another Sandy said it far more eruditely than I can, about what letting go into the earth and spirit means. A different Sandy ravaged recently the delusions of modernity, East Coast style.

Sandy Hook. I did see on CNN a young woman who knew Adam, whose name was Israel. She said she remembered him from school, like he was a genius, "higher than us," she said. What is it about America, that we turn our geniuses into evil killers?

Among the mostly clueless things that have been said about Adam Lanza, I didn't hear anyone tonight say he heard voices. I had a fugitive thought, while I was playing with my nephew, watching the news, that perhaps Adam heard voices, that told him to do what he did, and that is why those children were here, to show us what denial looks like, and that they are well taken care of where they are now, better than any parent could ever hope to. That the parent's grief is about their loss, not the child's. And I don't doubt, wherever the child is, whatever it is now, it feels deeply the grief of the mother, the grief of the father, brother sister family and friend. 

We've closed off and denied the voices. Geniuses throughout time have spoken of it, including Socrates "The favor of the gods has given me a marvelous gift, which has never left me since my childhood. It is a voice which, when it makes itself heard, deters me from what I am about to do and never urges me on."  Descartes, the godfather of scientific materialism, was visited by a daemon (or an angel) who told him the conquest of nature would come by number and measure. Perhaps it's time we cherished those who hear voices, and listened to what they have to say, instead of demonizing the messengers, drugging them into silence, caging them institutionally, etc? Perhaps had Adam been free to speak of what was speaking to him, this would not have happened?


  

Anger

Sometimes I get so angry. Like last Thursday; I think the trigger was a Twix bar I ate after lunch. I was increasingly angry at work, through the afternoon, until I got home at 4:20 like I do every day, and puffed. I puffed alot! And I got ANGRIER; that's never happened before!? So I went and bought some beer, and smoked some more, and cleaned my garage, and sang and danced, in preparation for this.

Which cast-iron Kodiak stove I got, for the price of a 12-pack of Michelob Golden Light. From my neighbor. Turns out he has a potentially working furnace he doesn't want sitting in his dining room. :) That should solve the heating problem, temporarily. I'm not going to pull a permit for that either.

I got angry again yesterday. We're behind schedule, in our department at big bank, not because we are slow, but because the bulk of the work arrives at the beginning of the month, it is due in seven days and we don't usually see much of it, until it has "aged" five days. We were asked early, to quicken our pace, in the morning "huddle." I did, and found myself becoming increasingly histrionic about it (which may be why I sit at the most awkward, out of sight work station in the department), waiting as I am so often, for the network. Here I am, in the "morgue", the "meathouse" of one of the largest banks in the world, asked to do more and remember more, for less return, than any job I have ever had, in the the thirty to forty sum odd jobs I have had; and oh my god, the irony, that I should be angry that I can't audit home loans in foreclosure faster! One might imagine that the intranet/network for such a big enterprise as one of the largest banks in the world, would work better than Minneapolis city wireless at its best, but you'ld be wrong. But then, in the surreal world I now inhabit, literally half the people on the floor and all their belongings can be there on Friday, and gone including the computers, Monday, and no one else left on the floor will be overheard talking about it, this whole week.

Then at lunch yesterday, my only real friend in the department, Shelly, came to me in the lunchroom crying. Auditing a loan, and indexing electronically eight of the nine documents, she got distracted, and forgot whether or not she had imported them into the system. Thinking she was being due diligent, she imported them again. They appeared in the system as duplicates. She was given eight errors. Mind you, we can only score one good point per loan worked, which means it was like the last eight loans she audited correctly, had been counted against her. The expected threshold is 99.5% correct. Shelly would have otherwise been 100% for the month. The errors brought her down to 85%, which could take awhile for Shelly to recover from, perhaps months. (She is my friend because she is the sweetest one there, I think, and I can talk to her about whatever. Which as you might imagine, is rarely light material. LOL :)

I found out after lunch, they had given me three errors on one loan, for the same reason.

This sort of petty shit (the vulgar scoring process, not me caring about it) comes from outside the department, of course. The woman responsible is the same one responsible for us not being able to eat anything at our work stations, or keep any personal possessions there, and we HAVE to use the under counter keyboard trays (which rules I break daily), and black dude can wear a coat patterned in marijuana leaf (LOL), and hoodies are fine, but I can't wear my Smartwool hat to comfort my bald noggin in the drafty cold (which rule I have kept to, though I think it's bullshit). I mean, for fuck's sake, we are FORECLOSING ON HOUSES. But then, I had my first fugitive fuck you you deserved it, the other day, a first loan for something like $472,000, with a "subordinate" loan of $187,000 at 9.75%, some rancho wtf other el lookitme palatial boxfortards. LOL.

Excusing myself, what?

Of course then I come home and read this guys blog. Reader beware, do not drive through Collinsville, Illinois. The police there are thieves (real pirates don't work for Authorities.) You can bet too, if it's happening in Collinsville, it's happening elsewhere - out-of-state, older model vehicles, cops looking for, or planting marijuana, so they can seize the vehicle and everything in it. Such are the confiscation laws nationwide. It gets a lot uglier than that, in Griggs' blog. Like I told a friend, who said he could see reasons for drones, for law enforcement - nothing good AT ALL can come from militarizing the police. Which has been done, and is being done, all over, by the Fedz. And if you believe this, every digital communication you ever send from this point on, will be recorded and stored, so that, should you find yourself at odds with the government for any reason, they can download your digital communication history, and use it in the way that people wield such power. I will say though, the fact that Minneapolis just hired our first gay female police chief, assuming she isn't just another protector of the brotherhood, and the fact that Minnesota didn't alter its Constitution for the sake of gay baiting, is a sign that Minnesotans haven't entirely lost their minds.

I mean, aside from the fact that it's still legal in this state for the police to come in my house and take my house from me, because I smoke marijuana. Meanwhile the Fedz and SaviorO are conspiring a show of force, against the states Washington and Colorado, to make it clear who is king and who cannot smoke pot. Meanwhile, the State's legislatures conspiring behind the scenes, an economic coup, for the likes of ArchersDanielsMidland, Cargil, Monsanto et al (Only State licensed growers, distributors, sellers etc.)

That plant will grow just about anywhere. It is the most useful plant on the planet. But that's the thing, and they know it intuitively. If people started growing it, and exploring it's potential economically, as well as consciously, you would have a Revolution in no time at all. LOL.

Consider this guy, for a moment. You may find him perculiar, or not, whatever, he ran a tea house. He taught tea ceremonies. His tea house was a hub of the arts in San Francisco (until the Fedz stepped in.) And because he distributed, or didn't, it doesn't seem clear even after a second trial, LSD and MDNA, the State has decided to put him in federal prison for 10-15 years? Aside from the fact the guy looks like he weighs about a buck-twenty, who do you suppose he was distributing this LSD and MDNA to, if he was? Artistic people. Dancers and music makers and such. Tim Leary is reported to have said, LSD occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who haven't taken it. I never have, but I've smoked enough pot and that one shroom I took, to understand that the reason the State puts 120 lb taoist tea hosts in federal prison for 10-15 for distributing LSD and MDNA, is because IF LSD and MDNA were widely available, there would be a Revolution in no time at all, and it wouldn't look anything like the sixties. I don't know what it would look like, but I bet it would look a lot more reasonable about what we face as a species, and a lot more techie than you think. Just what we need right now, actually. But probably, a lot of people don't want to get high, for all the truth that would be revealed about the situation.

Anyway, I say REVOLUTION. I say, open those gates. I say, call off the dogs. If I want to grow, distill, create whatever I want here, to explore my consciousness, to share what I have with my friends, what man anywhere, has the right to say that I cannot? As for God, God emerged from hallucinations. Which is why I don't ask permission to put a woodstove in, or a new furnace, or to explore my consciousness. Which woodstove btw has changed the whole course of the plan for this residence. More on that to come.

Speaking of angry, I've been thinking a lot about the food issue. I told a friend the other day, how fun would it be to descend on a modest glass facade office building, and re-fit it, into a tiered perch (fish) farm? He agreed, that between the two of us we could probably find a couple dozen guys with various expertise, who would show up tomorrow. He asked, if I could wave a magic wand to fix the food situation, what would I do? I replied, that I would buy all land within a hundred miles of downtown Minneapolis, that is currently dedicated to industrial corn and soybean production, and I would offer it to young families and groups of people willing to live and build sustainable/solar structures on it, and grow healthy food for as many as they could, w/ zero interest loans, w/ a negative-interest incentive if they pay more each season, with forgiveness in the event of adverse weather, or extraordinary success in the way of community building. 

What say you, hedge fund fuck? Computer guru philanthro egghead bee-illionaire? I know, you can come work with me in the chop shop at big bank. You can sit at the work station next to me, we can talk about reality (don't worry, no one will hear, just about everybody is plugged in with earbuds or headsets.) You can sleep on the futon at my house. In the morning, we can bike to the bus station, maybe on my tandem; you can sit in back wearing the mad scientist wig. We'll get drunk by the stove in my garage on weekends and talk about life. After about six months of that you might be ready to redeem yourself. Maybe. Do something meaningful with all that cash, before it's gone.

As if on cue, about the food thing, Peter started a most fascinating thread on hydroponics, on the Doomstead Diner. Peter's a techie genius living on the shore of a Pacific inlet, north of Vancouver Island. They see week long fogs, and there's no road access, so fresh veggies are dear. He started experimenting, growing indoors, and I know I was amazed with what he showed us. Eggplant? Avocado? RE, Head Admin, said he'd finance a similar set-up here in the "McHovel," as a kind of Minneapolis Chapter of the Doomstead Diner Hydroponics Project, so look for that around the equinox, this spring. It would be nice to juxtapose against the progress,and work, of the garden.


 

So, I don't know. Anger can be productive sometimes. A kind of preparatory fire?

Hard to manage though, once let loose. Good to be balanced, earth, air and water.

Black Friday

I biked the mile to the bus stop this morning, twenty degrees outside and a thirty mile-an-hour headwind, blowing snow, at six am, to discover that this post-Thanksgiving Day Friday, Black Friday, is considered a Metro Transit holiday. No bus waiting. Hmm. At first I imagined, I would bike the five miles to big bank, which I can do, even under the conditions, comfortably enough. I imagined sitting down at my computer station, firing off an email to my immediate management and the temp people, informing them precisely what I had done and what I think about that. Except for much of the journey would be on the shoulder of a four lane 55mph speed limit everybody driving 60, it snowed and rained last night, the roads are slippery, and a bike helmet, which I couldn't find this morning anyway in a very symbolic Hmmmm, isn't going to protect me from a 2000+ lbs projectile moving at six or eight times the speed I am, bearing down on me from behind. By the time I got half way home, which is on the way to big bank from the bus station, I was like, that's fucking crazy. No WAY am I biking that, and no way am I putting someone else out, on a day that just about everybody thinks is a holiday (judging by the lack of automobile traffic as I write this), so I can go and FORECLOSE ON HOUSES FOR UBER_BANK_LEVIATHAN-KRAKEN. LOL.

So I got home, and called the automated overseer computer lady at big bank, and spoke the words, "William Duncan, Kodi {manager}, 7am MONDAY," in reference to the time I would be returning to work. I left a voicemail with my contact at the temp agency, and sent an email to the top two managers in my department. It's a liberty, what I've done, relative to my station. Still, I don't expect any push back. If I even hear about it, I'll be surprised, though it is strictly speaking, grounds for me to be dis-invited, to work for big bank.

It's not like I'm going shopping. Nor am I going to sit around smoke pot get drunk chow left-over Thanksgiving dinner watch Tee-Vee. It's not even very comfortable in my house, when it's this cold, with the wind blowing hard. Mostly, aside from drinking coffee writing blog posts researching, I will be working, insulating the house, which is a drafty sieve. Lots of work to do, here. Might get a buzz on too, eventually. ;)

If I lose the job, which is a possibility, I'll just tell the temp agency, listen, if big bank doesn't take me back, I'll write an op-ed in the straightest, most conventional clear easy to understand language I can muster, for one of the local MSM newsprint outlets, about the arrangement as it stands, in its full absurdity. I mean really, there are people expected to work the second shift starting at 3:30 pm, Monday, Christmas Eve Day, FORECLOSING ON HOUSES! Maybe they want to, but it's also like a threat of economic dissolution otherwise, and really when you are a "butt's in seats in the morgue, or the meat-house," a day off is also one less day of pay, when we are making about $7 LESS than the average American wage. Which is kind a of low grade terror, this sort of economic hegemony exercised with such ruthless, numerical logic. Which then calls into question the whole War on Terror, when, if you dare not participate in the making of dollars in the imperial way prescribed, you are fucked. Get with the fucking program?

It's not like I'm a weak performer, either. My numbers are solid, in their metric. 100% accuracy, in my last review. There is a threshold one must reach, in sheer numbers, before one is eligible for overtime, which I crossed some time ago, though I have not partaken of the so-called fruit (nor have I striven to do more, necessarily.) They can fire me, but if they do, I'm going to do what I can to return the favor. ;)

Meanwhile, the bulk of America shops. I was at my sister's yesterday, consuming tee-vee programming. Whether it was that or the industrial food she fed me, I can't say was the cause of my ill stomach. It was more like soul sadness, in the presence of such grotesqurie', as was splashed across my cerebral cortex, with such cynical abandon. In my last post, I said I am not a "moral" man. Do not mistake that for moral relativity, which Americans display with monstrous pride. On one Newz program, a woman was interviewed about her attack plan, shopping today. She advocated teamwork, with everyone with a plan of operation, "otherwise you won't get everything you need." She bought seven flat-screen tv's Black Friday 2011, most of which remain in the boxes. She was presented as an ideal of normality by the network, which she is, in America. We scoff at the savages, those responsible in the past for human sacrifice to placate the gods. By how many orders of magnitude worse, all those who have died that we might be free to shop - what is being done to the earth, to fulfill our "needs"?

My sister said she had been made to feel guilty for doing damage to the "environment", because she had ordered some product on-line, instead of in a store. The rationale, that those things ordered online travel more miles, than they would if they were housed in a centralized retail box. I laughed and asked her how long she thought 7 billion people could continue buying the resources of the earth transformed into consumer product to be thrown away as garbage, esp. when we are adding 200,000 people a day, globally? I didn't ask, but I'm guessing, she bought the turkey at Sam's Club, and most everything else for dinner besides. She gets it, the madness of it, she just can't imagine any other way, or won't. 

I recognize too, the slippery slope I am on, justifying my work at big bank at all, in any way. Perhaps after Black Friday 2012, I will no longer have to. 

This is what my lightning bug niece and I did Thanksgiving. It's hard to see her wings, but they are there. The bike, a gift from RE, head Admin at the Doomstead Diner

Hypocrisy

Last winter, living without a working furnace or income, I was ready to fix up this house and sell it. I was going to sell it, and go to dance in the wheat fields of England, to call down a sign, or call out the ones who do it. From there, to the Big Island of Hawaii, to walk around it, up to Dec 21. From there, wherever, perhaps deep in the amazon, in search of Ayahuasca and Strophoria cubensis.

Spring came, and I fell in love with the garden again, and I planted fruit trees. I started the work on the house, which went well up to a point, when I lost any energy for it, after a series of arguments with my father, who shares the mortgage on the house, and has been paying on it the last four years. I walked away from the house, longtime readers, and readers of my books, will recall, during the fall of 2008. I was hardly aware of the financial collapse, as I was in love, and recovering from Lyme disease. I lived with that woman and her kids, in Northern California and Wisconsin, the following two years, when we broke off the relationship and I returned to this house, which had been unoccupied all that time. That is when I started this blog, and expanded the garden. By mid-summer this year, it was clear to me that the house was not saleable to anyone but a speculator at a house-flipper price in a depressed market; and the garden had become like an enchanted place.

I couldn't go another winter without taking on the mortgage payment, and the Halloween store I managed in the fall of 2010 and 2011, had been sold to a buyer out-of-state, so I had to go looking for a job, which I haven't had, a nine-to-five or simulacrum, in four years, other than the Halloween store. I applied for about thirty jobs, went to one interview that didn't go well, skipped a dead-end one. The third interview, I almost skipped; which turned out to be serendipitous, and I am not one to ignore serendipity. They were vague, and somewhat cagey about the job, it being a high-class temp agency, but I would be working for a big bank, which I knew would make my father happy, and I could get there by bus after a one mile bike ride, in about 50 minutes after leaving my house. Not owning a car, and not wanting one, that was a positive (some people at big bank bus two hours each way.) It occurred to me though, the evening after the interview, restless in bed, that I might have been hired to foreclose on houses.

There was a three week gap between the time I was hired, and the start date. During that time, every single person I talked to about my concern, to a one, said, "it's a job." Not one person shared my concern, and while some of the people I spoke with are conventional, the majority are not. I was surprised. But then I am dubious about the vast majority of jobs. No one seemed very perturbed by the fact that I would be making less than I had been by the hour, working for my friend Organic Bob moving dirt around and landscaping, less than half I was making at that corporate job I had at the Behemoth in 2008, and only 25% what I was making during the housing boom, remodeling houses.

The DREAM JOB I had been angling for, I failed to be interviewed for, despite that I had a friend advocating for me inside. This, I chalk up to the fact that I failed to pursue the Masters and Doctorate I was being pushed to pursue by my Teachers, back in 2000, but I saw that I would be a fifth-tier Doctor with $150,000 in debt at 40, and besides, I felt the call of the wild. Too wild now, for a scholastic job writing and editing articles about solutions to environmental problems, evidently. So I took the one job I was offered, at big bank.

My concern was confirmed as accurate, day one, within ninety minutes. The trainer said the loans we would be working on were in default, that no one was living in those houses, that we would not be foreclosing on people. I liked him, and still do, but I suspected then and suspect now there is no reason to believe at all, that there aren't people in the houses on the loans we are foreclosing on. For myself, since then, every weekday but Veteran's Day, I awoke at five am to foreclose on houses for eight hours, to return home just under twelve hours later. The work has since proven to be more like prison work, than any job I've had, and I've worked in a foundry, and on 0-180 degree Fahrenheit flat roofs, roofing. My work now is to audit hundreds of on-line mortgage documents each day, most for loans that should never have been issued.

Still, the job has been a blessing in some ways. I'm paying the mortgage again, and I'm able to put money into the house, and the various projects around the garden I've long imagined, but had no resources or means to bring into being. The job may be set up like prison work, but there are no petty tyrants, none I have to deal with anyway. In fact, the people I work for directly are very reasonable, and the people I work with are like most people, mostly good. I've been able to listen to about 200 hours of old Terence Mckenna recordings. The job has also been a strong lesson in how wrong the housing bubble was for America, and how much fault does rest in average Americans, taking out loans that could only be paid off if the economy were to grow by 5%+ every year for the next several decades, and maybe not even then, with the systematic downward thrust of average wages, and decreasing good-paying jobs, climate change, resource constraints, et al. That, and a clear picture of how un-enlightened big bank is, as if the work I do is fit for humans. We are called "butts in seats, in the meat locker, or the morgue," I hear, trickling down from above. That may not sound like a blessing, those last two lines, but ever have I tried to pull back the veil of the ruling paradigm. :)

Not everyone is enamored of my work there. This is what one reader had to say, on the thread dedicated to this blog, in the Doomstead Diner, for members of the forum:

"Sorry, but IMHO working for one of the four big wall street banks is one of the most morally degrading things you can do at this time. Helping them instead of working to put them out of business? Being complicit with them is being complicit with what is wrong at the core. Anything but that. What is this called, " cognitive dissonance"? What is the use of saying or doing anything if you are going to do that?"

Another had this to say:
  
"you're a dime-a-dozen sellout but you're a first-rate poser. you're a stain on this place."

My role at big bank is one rung on a ladder as long as a DNA strand, though unlike DNA, those at each rung are largely ignorant of every other. It is a perfectly bureaucratic structure, big bank, though it ostensibly be a "private" business. It should also be said, big bank isn't "private", as it is sustained by free money from the Federal Reserve, which is socializing loses and privatizing the gains, at least until they destroy the dollar. The structure exists as it does, to provide plausible deny-ability for it's employees, giving them only the most scant responsibility for what is going on - just like every hierarchical Institution everywhere. Were we ever in contact with the actual "borrowers" whose loans we audit, the system wouldn't work, because that would be humanizing the work. As is, it is almost devoid, the process, of anything even resembling "humanity." And as you might imagine, most people working there show a singular lack of awareness about any of the deeper realities I try to elucidate in this blog.

Which, speaking of a lack of humanity, would the commenter's quoted above, feel free to walk into my department and declare such things before the throng? Of the 70+ people working in my department, about 20% are white. Predominant are people of African and Asian origin, first or second generation, and African-Americans. I am struck by the number of pictures of young children on computer screen-savers and backgrounds. Is it merely my knowledge that makes me a hypocrite, a sell-out and first rate poser? If so, what are these others, in their work-a-day ignorance in service to their families, in their culpability to the American dream made possible by vile imperialism?

When I was working as a manager of a Halloween store, I commented at length in this blog, and in my second book, on cheap Chinese crap, and the un-sustainability of crass American consumerism. When I was asked if I wanted to work in a Halloween store, by an old college friend, I said without hesitation, "fuck no!" At the time, I had just returned to Minneapolis, after Wisconsin, I had $80 and no job prospects of any kind. Immediately after that, I thought, he just offered me a job, I haven't seen him in five years, and I've been waiting for a sign. Working there, aside from being fun, and exhausting, made me not one whit more enamored of consumerism, not one whit less honest about what I think about it's prospects. Indeed, I have come to think of consumerism as a death-cult.

I am not a "moral" man. "Morality", such as it's practitioners hold forth righteously upon, is generally a construct over-laid reality, per-suppossing  humans are inherently evil otherwise, or mere animals who would immediately proceed to consume each other, without said righteous tight asses lording over us. Whereas, I believe humans to a one, are profound, divine, innately good beings, inherently corrupted by degrees, by the cultural paradigms, morals, ideologies, dogmas, pollutants, programs and pogroms, designed to control life, for the benefit of the few at the expense of ALL. Not being a "moral" man, I am not restrained by absolutist rigidity, which both commenters above show in spades, IMHO, even though theirs is a minority opinion culturally, about things generally. Nuance, being a thing of truer understanding.

As for me having a "truer" understanding, I have also come to believe, that not a one of us on earth has anything like a "true" understanding, of what this life is really all about, though there are no shortage of people who claim to, be they hiding behind a gun, or bizness or gov or Religion or ideology or money or plain ol' vitriol. Here is some of my response, on the Diner.
 
I guestimate that of all the loans I've seen, about 80% of them were loans in excess of $300,000. I wade through the wreckage of greed mostly. How do I justify it? I am trying to do right by my house, which I like to say I bought twelve minutes before the market collapsed, and I'm still around really only because my niece and nephew live only a mile away. My entire life top to bottom is paradox, and you are free to make of me any kind of villain you like.  
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IMHO, I am exactly where I need to be, to accomplish the things I imagine. Think of it as an alchemical transmutation, wading through the economic wreckage as I am, reporting on my experience, to bring beauty and love into being?  You might have some faith in me. I'm not asking much.   
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I would be a hypocrite if I did not document publicly, the things I do, and what I think about that, for free. I have two books available for free on my website, www.WilliamHunterDuncan.com. Also a novel I was working on until I was offered my current employment. I've written in my blog and one of my books, about planting marijuana on Federal, State and County land, here in the Twin Cities. I aim to live and write with integrity. I am the peace pirate Sir Vis, in service to the Goddess, former manager of the coolest Halloween store in the Midwest, who now finds himself under a mortgage ostensibly owned by the same big bank he now astoundingly finds himself working for, wading through the wreckage of the housing market. Meanwhile, learning skills that will be useful when big bank and the others like them fall. Which they will, as inevitably as the sun will rise tomorrow. Probably not tonight, but soon, very likely.

What possesses you to play the role [the commenter of the second comment listed] you do here, I don't know. We share a great deal, in our view of the world. You are on the right track about something though. Now is not a time for fearfulness. Terence Mckenna said, when asked what to do in the face of teotwawki, "flood the world with ART." Which is what I think about my writing, my garden, the things I build, and my life generally. And why I keep telling myself to follow through with the plan I see, to put together a band. Because what could be more important at the end of the world, than a joyful sound? 

Thus I make no claims about the "morality" of what I do. Indeed, as to the actual work at big bank, there is nothing particularly honorable, interesting, or empowering about it. It is merely where I find myself, at this time, making the best of it, not to waste the opportunity.

And you, dear readers, are free to trust me, or make whatever judgement you like, however harsh. Though I don't recommend harsh moral rigidity as a way of being. Rather, I would have you embrace the mystery, of this very curious life, joyously, wherever you find yourself.


    


           

Work, Life, Contemplation and Change

Winter arrives tonight here in Minnesota, in a hard way. Temperatures are expected to fall throughout the day, below freezing, with temperatures remaining below freezing through tomorrow, as low as 18 degrees. That will be a test of how well my oil filled electric radiators heat the house. I have two, one in the kitchen and another in the bathroom, heating the bedroom also, which is less than half the house. My furnace is broken and I have neither the money nor the inclination to fix it. I would certainly like to rip out all those forced-air steel vents in the basement, I've hit my head on a hundred times. I could buy a nice woodstove from a friend for $200, and install it myself for about $250-300, but the stove is not catalytic, which means it isn't designed to burn off most of the particulate, which is not a solution in the city; also as I do not have access to a wood lot. Though I could arrange with a tree trimming crew, to have more than enough wood dropped in my driveway, for free. A catalytic wood heater connected to a radiant water system which I would rarely use because the house itself would be solar radiant, would be ideal.

Back into the 40's and 50's next week, so no worries. Heating half the house with two oil heaters, cost about $40 last month. If I tried to heat the whole house, which is in mid-repair and a heat sieve, it would cost me $200+.  Assuming winter comes, even the climate being uncertain. My neighbor across the alley, a good Christian who I have never known to question authority in any meaningful way, remarked to me about it yesterday, unprovoked, in evident concern, while I was working on my new driveway. Much of the aggressiveness I have endured from the city, the last several years, about my garden, I suspect has arisen from complaints from him. The lack of attention I have received from the city in the last year, has coincided with his evolution in thinking about my garden, in part as a direct result of his awareness of radical changes in weather patterns. He is a hunter, fisherman and gardener.

My new driveway is made of antique Purrington pavers, 9 lbs each, originally, likely, paving stones for a road, here in Minneapolis, which were removed at some point to my sisters driveway, before it was hers. She has never parked on the driveway, which she has only ever used to grow soil on, by neglect. You couldn't see them; there was an inch of soil and weeds covering them. I asked her if I could buy them; she gave them to me. I stacked them up, rented a truck and paid my friend Jamie, a musician who lives in a rundown trailer you couldn't move if you wanted to, $80, to help me transport the 5 tons. He only wanted $40. I bought him a snack and dinner too. I'll have six cubic yards of class five crushed limestone dropped on my sisters driveway this week. She can grow weeds on that just as well. My father is furious, but he hasn't been proud of anything I've done, since I was MVP of my high school baseball team. Except that time I shot that eight point buck. He doesn't know either that I've painted my upper body green, put on faux animal pants, and danced with those horns publicly. Perhaps he will reconsider about the pavers, when he sees the driveway, the patio, and the front sidewalk to the street.

 The white pine table for the patio, three feet across.


Otherwise, since I started the work on the hoop house, greenhouse, with the white pine dropped in my driveway and the work on the driveway and patio, more of my neighbors have stopped by and spoken with me in a friendly way than ever before. :)

My father is happy to have me working at big bank. I am happy too, insofar as the work I've been doing here at the house would not have happened, if not for that job. I am also astounded, at how many people in the department I work in, are eager for overtime. It is the debt they hold, I suppose. I value my time more than money. The department head, in advocating for people to work overtime so that it would not have to be imposed, said approximately, "What are you going to do otherwise? I'm just going to go home and sit in front of the television," and many and maybe most nodded in agreement. No one seems much perturbed that we are foreclosing on houses.

I sit in my awkward corner at big bank, dancing sometimes to the global sounds on my iPod, wanting to sing, most days listening to Terence Mckenna on youtube, contemplating TEOTWAWKI. The election was encouraging to me, insofar as I was anticipating a potential hard Right turn. When you write things like the Benghazi incident is likely related to covert CIA operations having to do with Syria and al Qaida, and that Broadwell is CIA if I ever saw one, and not a bad way at all to excuse yourself from the drug money gorged, para-military, al Qaida affiliated cesspool the CIA has become, General; well, I have the sense that the GOP LOVES government when it comes to cracking down on alternative media, mindful as I am that the Obama administration has been ruthless in regard to whisleblowers, among many other things. I hadn't anticipated a repudiation of the Republican message, with the election, such as that message has become. (The reader might be advised to not take my prognostications TOO seriously.)

Thinking such things about the world as I do, I tend to keep to myself at big bank. The work encourages it. Besides, I'm a minority white guy, and bald besides. And I'm shy. People don't engage me much either. I'd much prefer to wear a hat and bandana, but that is against the rules. It get's cold where I sit, and it would soften the bald nearing middle-age white guy thing. I intended to wear the orange afro and the wacky jacket, Halloween, but when I woke that day it barely occurred to me, and I couldn't have cared less at the time, really. Though I did puff before I left the house, and closed my eyes and let go into the music on the bus. Peace pirate, Sir Vis, yet.

TEOTWAWKI. Terence Mckenna was much responsible for the mythology around Dec 21, 2012, having come to the conclusion through work with the Chinese I Ching, and a mathematical computer program he devised, that the end of time would occur that day, coming to this conclusion separate from any knowledge of the Mayan prediction. He wavered on his prediction, suggesting it could mean anything, from the destruction of the entire planet; the transformation of the entire universe; transforming ourselves somehow technologically, such that we would expand into hyperspace; to the invention of time travel; to his death merely, and we could all laugh that we believed him. Like Moses he would not see the promised land, as he died in 2000, from a deadly tumor in his brain, in the frontal cortex associated with the "third" eye. A curious end, for a mystic, particularly one so loved. In a cruel irony, his entire collection of rare books and manuscripts, and personal notes, were lost in a fire. The organization entrusted with them, Esalen, had seen fit to store them in an otherwise unoccupied office, off-site, next to a Quiznos, where the fire started - seven years after his death. 

It's interesting to me, how little I hear anymore about the Dec 21, 2012 Apocalypse meme. I had expected it to be more prominent a part of the dialogue, but it is not much at all, after all the hubub years ago. This, even as uncertainty has ramped up exponentially, with the economy, the fiscal cliff, Sandy, Benghazi, Syria, Iran, $100 barrels of oil, Fukushima, drought in the crop lands, and clear evidence for anyone who is conscious of the weather that a cycle has been broken. Even the most sanguine supporter of all things AMERICA, believes CHANGE is upon us, though notions of the how and the why are as diverse as there are people.

Terence imagined much more of a spiralling effect than we have seen. He imagined a kind of exponential condensing of Time, at which end-point we would emerge into a kind of psychedelic hyper-dimensional awareness. The kind of technological progress he imagined though doesn't seem to have come to pass; more it seems to me, we are seeing the global industrial machine grinding to a halt, and many of our techno-dreams with it, because of oil constraints, weather, population growth and too much debt. I don't think Terence was wrong, necessarily, and his psychedelic research and reporting on it has been invaluable to me, to sort things out; I just think maybe his psychedelic dimensional travels caused him to underestimate the staying power of the material universe, maybe.

I do however believe the Mayans were about dead on with their long count calender, which 5,126 year cycle happens to coincide with the rise of the written Word, the Logos transcribed; and the rise of agriculture about 5,126 year before that. Those two, ag and the written word, are without peer in their effect on Homo sapien. The Logos written, the Word, leading to a paradigm of control, which now seems to be both aggravated in it's desire, and slipping out of possible.

Notice that the definition of apocalypse is a lifting of the veil. What veil? The veil of authority. Consider the Catholic Church, or the Boy Scouts, or Lance Armstrong, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street and the Federal Government. The stories these entities and institutions, and everything relating to them, have rested upon, are everywhere revealed to be a fraud. A fraud for what purpose? A fraud to control resources, to control nature, to maintain power and influence, to maintain BAU. A fraud feeding at the foundation of everything life depends on.

I intuit we are closing in on some kind of bifurcation point, after which normal will be turned upside down, metaphorically. What that is going to look like, I have all kinds of ideas. Anything from a comet strike, to a solar wiping-out of the global electrical grid, to a collapse of the global financial markets, to a series of nuclear strikes, to an organic or inorganic destruction of a series of off-shore oil wells, to the collapse of the Saudi royal family, to mass starvation, and on and on and on, unto a widespread collapse in belief in the current paradigm.

The Mayans don't have the corner on cycles though. There is also the 26,000 year cycle of the rotation of the axis, the cycle of precession of the equinox. We are now in the Aeon of the zodiacal house of Pisces, the fish, associated by some with Christos. It will be another 200 years before the cycle of Aquarius, the water bearer, begins. Which I take to mean it will be another 200 years before a true healing of the waters will begin. With all the nuclear and poisons and off-shore oil wells around, how polluted we allow the waters to become remains to be seen. Perhaps enough, that there will be no human to witness the healing of the waters.

My hope is, though, the thing ultimately revealed, is that Homo sapien is a vastly more profound being than any control freak has ever lead us to believe. And the Sun and Gaia would not have spent billions of years bringing us into being in order to let us perish of our control issues.    

Cycles upon cycles upon cycles of time. Change eternal. To illutrate, my black-cap raspberry vines, sans leaves: