Joplin, MO

We are camped at the KOA in Joplin, MO, surrounded by Interstate Highway, Industrial this and Retail that - Anywhere, America. The roar of traffic is incessant. It blends together in a way it did not at the AOK Campground in St Joseph. Here, it is a dull mono-tone, no vehicle but the occasional motorcycle standing out amid the cacophony.

Lights are all around, sometimes blinding even from a quarter-mile. I block certain lights with certain trees as I dance. I'm in the middle of the campground, dancing to the sound of tree frogs, about ten thousand of them within hearing at various distances. I key on one and then another. Sometimes an underlying rhythm compels them all and I am caught, as by a wave.

I stop dancing to hang a tarp above the tent. Val Kyrie is showering. A group of men are milling around a rentable trailer between the campsite and the shower house. It occurs to me that Val has been gone a long time, longer than seems necessary, and I begin to worry. There is a code to get into the shower house, but the code is the same for the men's and women's showers. An abundance of discomforting images fill my head as I walk to the shower house to check in.

Every so often air pressure is released, suddenly, behind a fence, truck and trailer air brakes maybe. It sounds like a giant animal snorting aggressively, maybe a dragon. Thinking about my fear, this fear of men, of what men are capable of. Where does it come from? Why should I be afraid for Val?

Thinking of St Joseph, four gigs in two days and a strange paradox. Exceptionally well attended, as library gigs for Val Kyrie go, yet so many attendees just sitting there, staring, vaguely hostile in some indefinable way, as if predetermined not to be open, not to enjoy the performance. Val, at one point in the last performance, a bit exasperated - from the heat, humidity, and overall unresponsiveness to her words, to her music - mentioned corn and soybeans. It was clear, many in the crowd had never given any thought to mono-crop corn or soybeans, or what they mean.

The energy, the vitality of a landscape funneled upward and elsewhere, the land poisoned and polluted, local community destroyed and the people made fat, listless and angry. I see the name Jesus everywhere, and yet this tour through the breadbasket has been a strong reminder - in America nothing is sacred but Hierarchy, and the Market.

Who are the men who have brought this fear of mine to this world? Who are the men who maintain it? Walking through this campground in this small but very busy city, revolving security on golf carts patrolling the grounds, I realize in some Nations, I could not say the things I say. In America, we are allowed to say almost whatever we like. We think that is because we are a democracy. I say it is because we are fat and listless, and in our fat listlessness we do not threaten the men who rule this Nation. We are angry too, though we blame everything but hierarchy, and the expectation that we must bow down to the Market. Sky gods telling us hierarchy and the Market are inevitable, that they sustain us, the only reason we do not live like apes.

I can say what I say because there are only about five or six people listening. If there were ten million people reading my words, then sky gods would have reason to be afraid for hierarchy, and the Market that sustains that social pyramid, which they benefit so greatly by.

Val is fine. She is flossing her teeth as I knock on the door and call her name. I walk back to the campsite and continue dancing to tree frogs channeling the Divine. All around us are the tones of Empire, the mad machinations of the Market, the crass, grasping, insatiability of the Machine. Yet even here, the rhythms of the Earth are calling and I know, there is a greater power inside me than any I can be given; I need not bow down to anyone, or anything.

And a message to Deerslayer, who set the tone for this whole tour with a violent criticism of Val Kyrie, in a public forum, though he would not take full responsibility for his words:

I have renounced the gun. What can you say for yourself?

sky gods

I planted carrots yesterday. About a thousand seeds, maybe two thousand. Most of the carrots I planted in early June didn't come up. Too much rain, I think, the ten days or so after I planted. Many things didn't come up, the savory, romanesco broccoli, kohl rabi, beets, turnips, the Hopi ceremonial tobacco, most of the peas, calendula and Anasazi spinach. It was too late to plant most of it. That, and some of the seed was third rate, a year old, discount commercial. Ultimately though, there was just too much rain too often, for the seed to germinate.

Remember when money seemed to be falling from the sky? Oh those heady days around the turn of the millennium. Eventually the tech stocks crashed, but the Dow Jones climbed ever higher, the price of homes levitated far into the ether, and credit was easier to find than the car keys. And how luxurious those cars became! What did it matter that it took two gallons of gas to drive to the nearest big box retail outlet and back?

Then it was revealed the sky gods had made it all up. They weren't raining down anything, as the oh so duplicitous concept of "trickle down" would suggest. They were just minting money out of that ether, skimming off the illusory credit extended to people and communities, handing that credit back and forth from sky god to sky god, again and again, pretending more money was minted each time. It was and remains nothing but 1's and 0's, even though, when the illusion was revealed, the sky gods at the Federal Reserve started printing dollars as fast as they could, dollars as empty as those techno-graphic 1's and 0's.

But the debt from that credit remains. The sky gods at the Federal Reserve built a multi-trillion dollar safety net for their sky god accomplices in Finance. The rest of us down here on terra firma are left to hope we don't lose our jobs, the jobs we need to pay at least the minimum payments on all that debt; or, we are left to hope we are the one chosen, of the 500 other applicants for that one job that doesn't pay as well as the one I used to have.

And somehow, as the sycophants at Forbes giddily reported a few months back, there were 59 more billionaires in America the Empire in 2009, than there were in 2008, in the midst of the worst recession in recent memory. Even as the estimated value of derivatives, those illusory extensions of actual wealth, are valued at one quadrillion, or one thousand trillion, which is more than ten times the value of the GDP of all the world's nations combined.

Of course, how dare I question the sky gods? If not for them we would all still be apes. Right, Americans?

Sky gods. They are only men. Men who embrace the ethic of every man for himself, who embody the will to rule, who have climbed to the top of a hierarchical social pyramid, sacrificing all that is sacred along the way. Men who excel at plunder, who define the economy that is so detrimental to the health of all things biological, the economy that puts the health of the whole of the Earth at risk.

Which is why I'm planting so many carrots. Because I refuse to participate in that hierarchy. Because I expect the whole bloody system will come crashing down someday soon. Because such insatiability can not be sustained.