I've been thinking about our soldiers in Afghanistan, lately. It seems our military has made some impressive progress in their conflict with the Taliban, a direct result evidently of an increase in night raids. The Taliban has been seriously affected, and not surprisingly. While they believe themselves warriors of Allah, they still have to sleep. It's comparatively easy to capture or kill Taliban while they are dreaming of those carnal pleasures Allah is preparing for them in heaven, as payment for their brutality here on Earth (actually, as they live exceedingly violent lives, no doubt their dreams are equally violent,) it's not so easy to kill or capture them when they are pointing AK-47's at you. Everybody has to sleep.
I do admit, it makes me uneasy that my military is training men this way. I recognize it is simply a tactic of war, inevitable in the face of an enemy as wily and vicious as the Taliban. What I'm concerned about is, what are these men going to do when they return home? The ability to pull bad asses out of their beds is a very bad ass skill, very impressive, but not very useful, stateside, in the context of the Constitution. It's hard to imagine what is going to fill the gap left in the absence of that particular adrenal rush.
Some of these men are likely to become mercenaries. Such a skill could prove very lucrative, in resource-rich third-world countries, in this age of global resource constraints. Not all will become global mercenaries. I'd like to put them all to work in a garden, on a real farm. They can go to work growing and raising food for those poor we are yanking the rug out from under. Somehow I expect they will want something more vigorous and manly than that(though I can assure you it is a good deal more vigorous and manly than you might think.)
Consider Grover Norquist, the monk-like chairman of Americans For Tax Reform, the samurai-like enforcer of his no-new-tax pledge, preying upon the self-interest of GOP legislators, threatening to end their careers should they vote for any tax increase of any kind, ever. It is that pledge that rests at the center of the impasse that is the budget debate, threatening the stability of the global economy. Most Americans at this point are willing to reduce the deficit and the debt, and they are likely to accept cuts, but cuts in domestic spending it seems are the only thing the GOP is willing to accept.
At this point, I'd support a return to a 91% top tax bracket, for all income above one million dollars, for all the moral rectitude the uber-rich have shown in the discussion about the future of this Republic. 91%, and seriously limit the scope of Government, until we pay off the debt. After that, we can reduce taxes in every way for everybody. What, you don't like it? Can't live on $1,000,000+ a year? Fine, get the fuck out of America. A great many Americans have lived very fine lives, as expatriates. You are very clever, if you make that much money. I'm sure you'll make billions.
I'd settle for a considerably more modest increase in taxes for the uber-rich. Some sign that you are not just invested in taking over the world.
There was a bomb threat at the offices of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, this week. My attitude toward bombs is, those who use them are potential dominators, no matter what they say about themselves. Counter-productive in every way as a political statement, indiscriminate, and perpetuating of the very ugliness one claims to be fighting against. Instead, I'm thinking, roofing Black Jack (or tar sands) and a bag of chicken feathers from a Tyson slaughterhouse. Leave him squawking in a public place, and make sure the public can capture the picture. Send the message that you can't wage wars and build infrastructure and expect our children and grand children to pay for it; you can't dismantle the safety net for people just to hand that money to the uber-rich, in the form of safety nets for corporations, banks and executives; you can't continue to allow Wall Street and the Fed to dictate the direction of America.
My feeling about this increasing gap between those who benefit most by the economy, and everybody else, is that the uber-rich recognize on some level, humanity is on the path of oblivion, and all hell at some point is likely to break forth; they are hedging their bets, building their fortress, and America as a bastion of freedom and justice and a model of graceful entry into the Age of scarce fossil fuels, is not necessarily part of that vision. After all, they likely believe this is simply a material universe, therefore without meaning; or they believe themselves the arbiters of God's will; each justifying whatever they do, choosing primarily out of self-interest. That same self-interest trickling down infecting America, pervasively. Dooming it, perhaps.
Actually, guys, I don't really recommend night raids pulling people out of their beds. It's not a skill with long-term prospects. I'd prefer if you simply took responsibility for the women and children you know, the community you live in and the Earth. Look to plants for healing. Think not that they will pacify you, but become your allies, on the path of the true warrior, on your path toward freedom. You are a divine being, and justice is a good deal more mysterious and subtle than your commanders would have you believe. Serve that justice, and you will find, the answers you need on your path will be revealed to you.
Your Government is functionally bankrupt, and the economy has been handed to private parties of immense power, who do not have the best interest of America, or the Earth in mind. We are in this struggle together as Americans, as people; or we are in it for ourselves, to hell with everybody else, to hell with everything, let me get mine and keep it. I vote for sticking together in service. I vote for community sovereignty and peace. I vote for freedom from tyranny, of the military, industrial, financial, corporate, bureaucratic or cultural kind. I vote for responsibility. I vote for healing.
And saying so, of course, means Grover Norquist is a divine being. He is also a political operative with a sorcerer-like control over the consciousness of the GOP. Should you choose that path, do him no harm physically. Be respectful. He is a warrior. It is only his ego, and his reputation, you might aim to knock down a few pegs with an ol' fashioned tar and feathering. But be aware, your actions will be used by the Government to increase authoritarian control over Americans, supported by the gullible, fearful children of Empire.
*I hesitated for 36 hours, before publishing this piece. That was, until Majority Whip McCarthy and Representative West used a clip from the film The Town, to rally the GOP troops in the budget "battle", seemingly oblivious to their advocacy for the right to fuck people up, shoot them in the leg, and tell them if we see you around again we're going to kill you. Implying a threat of violence against at least half the nation - against elected representatives of the American people.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Planting the Seed of Revolution
My Minnesota Government this week agreed to end the State Government shutdown. We might have sent the message to the rest of the USA, that sense would prevail. Instead, our legislature decided to borrow money to fill the hole in the budget, from the schools and future tobacco payments, avoiding the topic of a shared sacrifice. A deal they might have made without hobbling the State economy for two weeks. The deal means the poor and middle class are likely to suffer. The richest among us can rejoice.
Our Federal Government is so dysfunctional it's about to plunge the world into an abyss of Empirical default. Why? While many in this country are fed up with petty bureaucratic tyranny, the GOP seems only to care that the rich elite, who have done so well the last thirty years, not have their taxes raised slightly, to help us out of this collective mess. The richest elite are saying nothing. Meanwhile, I recently read that GE, which paid no taxes, grew its profit by a rate of 21%. I read nothing about any jobs being created. Presumably, as Jeffrey Immelt, who is the President's jobs czar, and also the chairman of GE, if GE had created jobs it would be headline news, repeated ad nauseum. I consequently presume that like most of the largest corporations and banks, they are shedding jobs, quite efficiently. And then word comes of a potential corporate tax holiday. Job creation stimulus, don't you know. More like, a looting of the treasury.
The Fed fined Wells Fargo 85 million, for defrauding homeowners by pushing them into higher interest rates than they qualified for, and foreclosing on people who were not in default. Who will receive these 85 million American dollars? The people who were defrauded? That would be news. And complicated. It's easier for the Fed to keep it, to surely return it to Wells somehow, someway. And what is the Fed, anyway? A private bank, that's what.
I also read speculation about the possibility for uprisings in America, with this increasing gap between those who benefit most by the economy and just about everybody else. I commented that as long as there is abundant industrial food product, TV and gasoline, the children of Empire will take just about anything. And what would we revolt into? Religious fanaticism? Environmental degradation? How many Americans know what century this country was born in? How many Americans think the universe is 8,000 years old? Good god, the leading Tea Party candidate for President doesn't know American history. If Congress gives corporations and banks a tax holiday, Congress could burn for all I'd care, for all the good it is doing America. And if Congress burns, those corporate "persons" and their conspirator banks are sure to follow. And then we can descend fully into that truly capitalistic social darwinianism scientific materialists have been so good to bestow upon our consciousness, that has been so detrimental to America, and biological systems everywhere.
We could create a kind of Eden for everyone in America, if that's what we wanted to do. But that would require a return to the garden, which most Americans know as much about as they do about building and maintaining houses. As if the growing and building of things were the thing to revolt from, and not this empirical overshoot, this economically defined and enforced madness, tilting the world toward ecological oblivion. I keep voting for a graceful recognition and entry into this coming age of scarce fossil fuels. A healing time for people and the Earth. That would be nice. My reason keeps reminding me that the children of Empire are more likely to hunt down gays, pot smokers, Mexicans and single mothers, than stand together in the face of the looting of the treasury. Americans stand together to face the looting of the treasury, and the destruction of the biosphere, ideally. The children of Empire descend into the chaos of economic ruin, into madness, devouring each other, with ever the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Mostly what I think about in the times ahead are the families I know with small children. A neighbor recently told me he thought I was the sort of man who would gather the neighborhood together, in the event of a social breakdown. In this neighborhood? was my reply. These families I know mostly live elsewhere (though his family is one I would fight to protect). Your vegetables aren't going to save you, he said. I replied that I don't grow them with the belief that they would save me in a social breakdown, but to show my neighbors what is possible with a city lot. And to learn what it takes to grow enough veggies to survive the winter. It's not as hard as you might think. The trick isn't growing the food, it's saving a diversity of seed. Because a diversity of seed is a diversity of feeling. And a diversity of feeling is essential to health and well being.
Neighbors two doors south of me defaulted on their home. There was a crowd of men, mostly young, emptying the house and garage this past weekend. If I met these neighbors, I don't remember. Whoever they are, they didn't just give up the house, they appeared to give up everything. "Look at all that shit," said Sam, a delightful old black man with the slow, gleeful cadence of a movie star, pointing first at the front yard, then a dumpster, "That's the second dumpster we've filled." He was collecting steel. The front yard was stacked with furniture of an age and appearance that wouldn't recommend them to any but the homeless, the remnants of a life gone stale and somewhat sordid. There were about six TVs. By the size of the house, one might deduce that they had a TV in the bathroom, assuming most of the TVs worked. The crowd of thirty mostly young men were having fun, and everybody wore a mask. The topic of dissolution didn't seem to be on their minds, and I didn't bring it up. I didn't know what to say. There was a cheap steel plant rack I thought about asking if I could take. But it wasn't very sturdy, or that attractive, and I didn't want to bring home that energy. I returned home to weed the garden, which is one of my favorite things.
The quack grass is encroaching at every angle. But my soil is in good shape, and in the beds they are easy to pull. In addition to the beetles I pictured last week, I've found many others like them, many in the act of sex, and many of a smaller, iridescent beetle. It is like an orgy of these iridescent beetles, and I admired them until I realized they were defoliating my Frontenac grape vines. Then I crushed everyone I could, with my hands, though there is nothing very pleasant about it. There was a dragonfly stranded in a coffee shop I frequent, I tried to save. I actually felt her mouth open and clamp down on my finger. I let her be.
Our Federal Government is so dysfunctional it's about to plunge the world into an abyss of Empirical default. Why? While many in this country are fed up with petty bureaucratic tyranny, the GOP seems only to care that the rich elite, who have done so well the last thirty years, not have their taxes raised slightly, to help us out of this collective mess. The richest elite are saying nothing. Meanwhile, I recently read that GE, which paid no taxes, grew its profit by a rate of 21%. I read nothing about any jobs being created. Presumably, as Jeffrey Immelt, who is the President's jobs czar, and also the chairman of GE, if GE had created jobs it would be headline news, repeated ad nauseum. I consequently presume that like most of the largest corporations and banks, they are shedding jobs, quite efficiently. And then word comes of a potential corporate tax holiday. Job creation stimulus, don't you know. More like, a looting of the treasury.
The Fed fined Wells Fargo 85 million, for defrauding homeowners by pushing them into higher interest rates than they qualified for, and foreclosing on people who were not in default. Who will receive these 85 million American dollars? The people who were defrauded? That would be news. And complicated. It's easier for the Fed to keep it, to surely return it to Wells somehow, someway. And what is the Fed, anyway? A private bank, that's what.
I also read speculation about the possibility for uprisings in America, with this increasing gap between those who benefit most by the economy and just about everybody else. I commented that as long as there is abundant industrial food product, TV and gasoline, the children of Empire will take just about anything. And what would we revolt into? Religious fanaticism? Environmental degradation? How many Americans know what century this country was born in? How many Americans think the universe is 8,000 years old? Good god, the leading Tea Party candidate for President doesn't know American history. If Congress gives corporations and banks a tax holiday, Congress could burn for all I'd care, for all the good it is doing America. And if Congress burns, those corporate "persons" and their conspirator banks are sure to follow. And then we can descend fully into that truly capitalistic social darwinianism scientific materialists have been so good to bestow upon our consciousness, that has been so detrimental to America, and biological systems everywhere.
We could create a kind of Eden for everyone in America, if that's what we wanted to do. But that would require a return to the garden, which most Americans know as much about as they do about building and maintaining houses. As if the growing and building of things were the thing to revolt from, and not this empirical overshoot, this economically defined and enforced madness, tilting the world toward ecological oblivion. I keep voting for a graceful recognition and entry into this coming age of scarce fossil fuels. A healing time for people and the Earth. That would be nice. My reason keeps reminding me that the children of Empire are more likely to hunt down gays, pot smokers, Mexicans and single mothers, than stand together in the face of the looting of the treasury. Americans stand together to face the looting of the treasury, and the destruction of the biosphere, ideally. The children of Empire descend into the chaos of economic ruin, into madness, devouring each other, with ever the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Mostly what I think about in the times ahead are the families I know with small children. A neighbor recently told me he thought I was the sort of man who would gather the neighborhood together, in the event of a social breakdown. In this neighborhood? was my reply. These families I know mostly live elsewhere (though his family is one I would fight to protect). Your vegetables aren't going to save you, he said. I replied that I don't grow them with the belief that they would save me in a social breakdown, but to show my neighbors what is possible with a city lot. And to learn what it takes to grow enough veggies to survive the winter. It's not as hard as you might think. The trick isn't growing the food, it's saving a diversity of seed. Because a diversity of seed is a diversity of feeling. And a diversity of feeling is essential to health and well being.
Neighbors two doors south of me defaulted on their home. There was a crowd of men, mostly young, emptying the house and garage this past weekend. If I met these neighbors, I don't remember. Whoever they are, they didn't just give up the house, they appeared to give up everything. "Look at all that shit," said Sam, a delightful old black man with the slow, gleeful cadence of a movie star, pointing first at the front yard, then a dumpster, "That's the second dumpster we've filled." He was collecting steel. The front yard was stacked with furniture of an age and appearance that wouldn't recommend them to any but the homeless, the remnants of a life gone stale and somewhat sordid. There were about six TVs. By the size of the house, one might deduce that they had a TV in the bathroom, assuming most of the TVs worked. The crowd of thirty mostly young men were having fun, and everybody wore a mask. The topic of dissolution didn't seem to be on their minds, and I didn't bring it up. I didn't know what to say. There was a cheap steel plant rack I thought about asking if I could take. But it wasn't very sturdy, or that attractive, and I didn't want to bring home that energy. I returned home to weed the garden, which is one of my favorite things.
The quack grass is encroaching at every angle. But my soil is in good shape, and in the beds they are easy to pull. In addition to the beetles I pictured last week, I've found many others like them, many in the act of sex, and many of a smaller, iridescent beetle. It is like an orgy of these iridescent beetles, and I admired them until I realized they were defoliating my Frontenac grape vines. Then I crushed everyone I could, with my hands, though there is nothing very pleasant about it. There was a dragonfly stranded in a coffee shop I frequent, I tried to save. I actually felt her mouth open and clamp down on my finger. I let her be.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Garden Tour
News came from Oak Park, Michigan this week that a woman named Julie Bass is being threatened with ninety-three days in jail for planting vegetables in her front yard. Apparently, Oak Park city code stipulates that only "appropriate" vegetation is allowed, which city administrators interpret as only grass, trees, flowers and shrubs; though presumably if she were to grow a wildflower meadow, she would be facing the same problem. Ms Bass has found herself at the center of a national commentary on the issue, which she seems to be able to handle with grace, on her blog, Oak Park Hates Vegetables. No entity less than Time magazine, and the writer Jessica Newman, felt compelled to write a hit piece against her, which Ms Bass detailed quite capably the errors of, in a recent post.
That any government could presume to dictate what you grow in your yard is ridiculous in the extreme; that your government might tell you that you cannot grow food, is some curious bit of tyranny. Sadly, it seems her community is more concerned with enforcing conformity than checking the irrational reach of government. Which, it could be argued, as government is an extension of the people, and the people don't want their neighbors to have veggie's in the front yard, then government is only enforcing the will of the people. To which I reply, if that is the case in this case, then the people have gone insane. If they have not, and they believe their local government in this case is wrong, and they are not stopping this action, then they are cowardly.
It's a case similar to mine, as I have turned my entire yard into a garden. I've written before about the harassment I have received from city bureaucrats; the latest example of which came in the form of a letter informing me that my driveway is a public nuisance. I have not been threatened with jail time for what I'm doing with my yard, unless you count the time I asked what would happen if I moved back into the house they were threatening to condemn, when they were threatening to remove me from it for not having natural gas hooked up. To be fair to my Minneapolis city government, if my yard were in Oak Park, I might be threatened with life imprisonment, or death.
I recently came across a book by Michael Pollan, called Second Nature. In the third chapter, he discusses the lawn and its history in America. The lawn as we currently conceive it originated shortly after the Civil War, when Fredrick Law Olmstead was commissioned to design what was one of America's first suburban developments, outside Chicago. Each house was set back thirty feet from the road, no walls or fences were allowed, and the front lawn was seeded with grass and expected to be cut short. Lawns had precedence in Europe, but only in America were they democratized. As Pollan points out, this lawn aesthetic is a "totalitarian landscape....subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly....nature under cultures boot." Speaking to our puritanical origins, the lawn is "a vehicle of consensus, rather than...an arena for self expression." And, "just as the Puritans would not tolerate any individual who sought to establish his or her own back-channel relationship to the divinity, the members of the suburban utopia do not tolerate the homeowner who establishes a relationship with the land that is not mediated by the group's conventions."
To the horror of some of my neighbors, I am trying to establish in my garden a balance between the wild and the cultivated. I'm inclined to think my plants flourish best if I work with nature rather than against it. It would seem the bugs and the birds agree. I'm searching for that same balance inside myself, and it seems to be working, if my dreams, and my financial prospects are any indication. I suspect it will have to be a perspective Americans at large embrace, if we hope to enter the future of resource constraints with anything resembling grace. Otherwise, I suppose, we can continue down the path that leads to us incarcerating people for growing vegetables, which I suspect leads to a State far more dark than that.
I vote for grace. Which is why I think of my yard as a garden. Here's a tour:
My backyard. A tomato bed in the middle with a bit of blue jade corn; a fingerling potato bed upper left, grape vines on the fence.
The north side of the back yard. Bean and pea trellises made with grape vines. Brassica on the left, more tomatoes on the right. Wildflowers beyond that. I built the trellis in the background; another example, perhaps, as another neighbor has said, of my lowering the neighbor's property values?
The fenced garden. I built the fence. It needs a little love. I'll get to that.
A closer look at the fenced garden. Carrots between Brassica: khol rabi, cabbage, turnips, rutabaga. Peas on a trellis. There's a compost bin covered by grape vines, upper right.
The north side of the fenced garden. In the foreground, radish and arugula going to seed. Strawberries in a horseshoe around two young blueberry. Asparagus in flower beyond that.
The driveway, which is the reason for the latest accusation of my being a public nuisance. This is a planting on two hundred wheelbarrows of dirt I set here. The future orchard. My neighbors never complained when this was an ugly sheet of aging asphalt.
I convinced a tree trimming crew to drop this load of wood chips, which I'm in the process of spreading around the garden. It's all a process, and the garden is evolving, but some of my neighbors don't care. If I was wealthy, I might be able to hire others to do the work. I do it all myself. That I have spent approximately 300 hours working in this garden this spring is impressive to some, lost on others.
The driveway through slender penstemon on the boulevard.
My raspberry patch.
The pond.
Black caps.
I have about 100 tomato plants. I'll harvest about 400 lbs of potatoes. Both are of the nightshade family; this is a bittersweet nightshade next to the pond. If you look close, underneath is a potato plant. I've never planted potato here. A new variety?
I pack the plants in. Romaine lettuce in front of Russian red kale. Cilantro flowering on the lower right. Potato on the left. The romaine were given to me by the neighbor who thinks I'm lowering property values. He wanted some, but I like the way they grew (the ones closest to the left receive more morning sunlight), and I wasn't inclined to tell him they were ready after his most recent tirade.
Bee balm.
The view from the sidewalk.
Hollyhock.
Butterfly weed
Some kind of amanita mushroom, of which there were about fifty popping up in this tomato bed.
Another fungi, growing on a black spruce stump. I have seen upwards of thirty different kinds of fungi growing in this garden this year.
Rattlesnake snap beans.
A very happy bumblebee. Look at those pollen sacks. He is making love to a leadplant, which the early settlers called devil weed, because the cable-like roots foiled the plow.
A potato flower ready for some lovin'.
A cabbage moth couple going at it. Insect porn. My goodness, outlaw such imagery! I hear the puritanical among us screaming.
A female cabbage moth with her yoni aloft, ready and waiting.
Two june bugs, in ecstasy.
And look, another female cabbage moth, on a morning glory leaf, the june bugs in the background.
In swoops a male.
Consummation! (Too bad the steward can't get layed.)
The veiw of my front step. I've let the spiderwort and yarrow be, where they come up in the cracks of the sidewalk. That's a red-osier dogwood on the right of the step. There was an even bigger one on the left side until recently. No wonder some of my neighbors are distraught. My god, the breakdown of civilization!
The north side of the front garden. More potatoes, beans, peppers, etc. That's a dead lilac. I have cardinal vine, moon vine and heavenly blue morning glory climbing it; which I hope will be my version of good ol' red, white and blue.
The south side of the front garden. More tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, amaranth, evening primrose, more potatoes, etc. Fern along the fence. It looks more chaotic in the picture than it does in person; some see only chaos. There is a path. Another neighbor who is moving told me, the only reason her family has considered staying in the neighborhood is my garden.
The view of the pond from the street. I built the screen to keep wayward children out, as the water extends underneath the chain link. Bee balm on both sides, with black caps on the left. Frontenac grape vines climbing everything.
There will be three gallons or more of black caps this year.
Front step progress. I am sensitive to what the neighbors think, and I'm tired of the harassment. It's all a process. And by the way, this year, despite all you've seen, I've spent less than $100 on this garden. For what will prove to be about $3000 worth of veggies.
That any government could presume to dictate what you grow in your yard is ridiculous in the extreme; that your government might tell you that you cannot grow food, is some curious bit of tyranny. Sadly, it seems her community is more concerned with enforcing conformity than checking the irrational reach of government. Which, it could be argued, as government is an extension of the people, and the people don't want their neighbors to have veggie's in the front yard, then government is only enforcing the will of the people. To which I reply, if that is the case in this case, then the people have gone insane. If they have not, and they believe their local government in this case is wrong, and they are not stopping this action, then they are cowardly.
It's a case similar to mine, as I have turned my entire yard into a garden. I've written before about the harassment I have received from city bureaucrats; the latest example of which came in the form of a letter informing me that my driveway is a public nuisance. I have not been threatened with jail time for what I'm doing with my yard, unless you count the time I asked what would happen if I moved back into the house they were threatening to condemn, when they were threatening to remove me from it for not having natural gas hooked up. To be fair to my Minneapolis city government, if my yard were in Oak Park, I might be threatened with life imprisonment, or death.
I recently came across a book by Michael Pollan, called Second Nature. In the third chapter, he discusses the lawn and its history in America. The lawn as we currently conceive it originated shortly after the Civil War, when Fredrick Law Olmstead was commissioned to design what was one of America's first suburban developments, outside Chicago. Each house was set back thirty feet from the road, no walls or fences were allowed, and the front lawn was seeded with grass and expected to be cut short. Lawns had precedence in Europe, but only in America were they democratized. As Pollan points out, this lawn aesthetic is a "totalitarian landscape....subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly....nature under cultures boot." Speaking to our puritanical origins, the lawn is "a vehicle of consensus, rather than...an arena for self expression." And, "just as the Puritans would not tolerate any individual who sought to establish his or her own back-channel relationship to the divinity, the members of the suburban utopia do not tolerate the homeowner who establishes a relationship with the land that is not mediated by the group's conventions."
To the horror of some of my neighbors, I am trying to establish in my garden a balance between the wild and the cultivated. I'm inclined to think my plants flourish best if I work with nature rather than against it. It would seem the bugs and the birds agree. I'm searching for that same balance inside myself, and it seems to be working, if my dreams, and my financial prospects are any indication. I suspect it will have to be a perspective Americans at large embrace, if we hope to enter the future of resource constraints with anything resembling grace. Otherwise, I suppose, we can continue down the path that leads to us incarcerating people for growing vegetables, which I suspect leads to a State far more dark than that.
I vote for grace. Which is why I think of my yard as a garden. Here's a tour:
My backyard. A tomato bed in the middle with a bit of blue jade corn; a fingerling potato bed upper left, grape vines on the fence.
The north side of the back yard. Bean and pea trellises made with grape vines. Brassica on the left, more tomatoes on the right. Wildflowers beyond that. I built the trellis in the background; another example, perhaps, as another neighbor has said, of my lowering the neighbor's property values?
The fenced garden. I built the fence. It needs a little love. I'll get to that.
A closer look at the fenced garden. Carrots between Brassica: khol rabi, cabbage, turnips, rutabaga. Peas on a trellis. There's a compost bin covered by grape vines, upper right.
The north side of the fenced garden. In the foreground, radish and arugula going to seed. Strawberries in a horseshoe around two young blueberry. Asparagus in flower beyond that.
The driveway, which is the reason for the latest accusation of my being a public nuisance. This is a planting on two hundred wheelbarrows of dirt I set here. The future orchard. My neighbors never complained when this was an ugly sheet of aging asphalt.
I convinced a tree trimming crew to drop this load of wood chips, which I'm in the process of spreading around the garden. It's all a process, and the garden is evolving, but some of my neighbors don't care. If I was wealthy, I might be able to hire others to do the work. I do it all myself. That I have spent approximately 300 hours working in this garden this spring is impressive to some, lost on others.
The driveway through slender penstemon on the boulevard.
My raspberry patch.
The pond.
Black caps.
I have about 100 tomato plants. I'll harvest about 400 lbs of potatoes. Both are of the nightshade family; this is a bittersweet nightshade next to the pond. If you look close, underneath is a potato plant. I've never planted potato here. A new variety?
I pack the plants in. Romaine lettuce in front of Russian red kale. Cilantro flowering on the lower right. Potato on the left. The romaine were given to me by the neighbor who thinks I'm lowering property values. He wanted some, but I like the way they grew (the ones closest to the left receive more morning sunlight), and I wasn't inclined to tell him they were ready after his most recent tirade.
Bee balm.
The view from the sidewalk.
Hollyhock.
Butterfly weed
Some kind of amanita mushroom, of which there were about fifty popping up in this tomato bed.
Another fungi, growing on a black spruce stump. I have seen upwards of thirty different kinds of fungi growing in this garden this year.
Rattlesnake snap beans.
A very happy bumblebee. Look at those pollen sacks. He is making love to a leadplant, which the early settlers called devil weed, because the cable-like roots foiled the plow.
A potato flower ready for some lovin'.
A cabbage moth couple going at it. Insect porn. My goodness, outlaw such imagery! I hear the puritanical among us screaming.
A female cabbage moth with her yoni aloft, ready and waiting.
Two june bugs, in ecstasy.
And look, another female cabbage moth, on a morning glory leaf, the june bugs in the background.
In swoops a male.
Consummation! (Too bad the steward can't get layed.)
The veiw of my front step. I've let the spiderwort and yarrow be, where they come up in the cracks of the sidewalk. That's a red-osier dogwood on the right of the step. There was an even bigger one on the left side until recently. No wonder some of my neighbors are distraught. My god, the breakdown of civilization!
The north side of the front garden. More potatoes, beans, peppers, etc. That's a dead lilac. I have cardinal vine, moon vine and heavenly blue morning glory climbing it; which I hope will be my version of good ol' red, white and blue.
The south side of the front garden. More tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, amaranth, evening primrose, more potatoes, etc. Fern along the fence. It looks more chaotic in the picture than it does in person; some see only chaos. There is a path. Another neighbor who is moving told me, the only reason her family has considered staying in the neighborhood is my garden.
The view of the pond from the street. I built the screen to keep wayward children out, as the water extends underneath the chain link. Bee balm on both sides, with black caps on the left. Frontenac grape vines climbing everything.
There will be three gallons or more of black caps this year.
Front step progress. I am sensitive to what the neighbors think, and I'm tired of the harassment. It's all a process. And by the way, this year, despite all you've seen, I've spent less than $100 on this garden. For what will prove to be about $3000 worth of veggies.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Eden
For the record, I do not actually believe the Chem Trail theory. The violence of the second-to-last paragraph of my last post stems not from belief, but from the nature of the theory and its meaning, if it were true. As an existential threat - one threatening to explode at the very foundation of life - it is one of the more plausible I have heard. If it were true, there would be no point to do anything at all but to make it stop. My words are more like a warning, albeit one without much support from any quarter. But you know where I stand.
And my, my, aren't the existential threats piling up. Every day comes more dire word on the fate of humanity. Seven billion people on the planet. Rising food costs. Global climate change. Peak oil. Nanotechnology and the gray goo. The technological singularity. Failing oceans. The proliferation of toxins. Desertification of the equatorial rainforests. Rising ocean levels. Melting glaciers. Mass specie extinction. Shifting poles. The sun, CMEs and the potential for permanent blackout. The draining of aquifers. Hydro-fracturing. The increasing prevalence of food borne illnesses. A new threat of nuclear proliferation and the danger of aging facilities. The failure of Government. Corporate and Financial malfeasance. The increasing ascendancy of an elite. 2012 and the annihilation of almost everything.
Meanwhile here in America, liberals rail at conservatives, conservatives at liberals, each growing ever more extreme, liberals delusional about the virtue of government, conservatives delusional about the virtue of markets. I've been repeating that old yarn about the liberal being the one who thinks he understands what is in your best interest better than you do, and the conservative doesn't give a damn. Really, which ideology is more responsible for more unnecessary death? Which ideology really takes responsibility for much of anything that is currently going wrong in the world? Both perspectives utterly blind to the balance of opposites inherent in universal porcesses.
What if I said the FDA and USDA were actually much the reason for the prevalence of food borne illnesses in America? What if I said the so-called Green Revolution so championed by conservatives and liberals alike, providing massive amounts of cheap corn to third-world countries and poor and illiterate people living under despots, was much responsible for runaway population growth, and what may very well be impending mass starvation? What if I said they were feeding chicken shit to the cows you eat? What if I said there is a dark energy all-pervading in the world, and you will find that most prominent wherever power collects? If you were a demon or a goddess in her dark aspect, and your goal was to destroy the Earth and all its creatures, what would you do? I'd introduce ideas that eliminate any sense of the divine nature of all things, I'd introduce the idea of a God who sanctions violence and domination, and I'd make as many people as I could rich.
Curiously, despite the evident doom, I've come to intuit that things may not be so drear as they seem. I've been railing at the God and Goddess of late, asking what is the point, how can this mess continue, demanding answers. It is not a sustainable mood; nor do I think it impotent. In fact, the synchronicities have been piling up, some profoundly so, even stupifying, pointing to a far more positive future than I ever considered. At least for me and those closest to me. And of course, extrapolating out, I can't see why that can't be the case for all humanity.
We have all the knowledge, tools and wealth available to provide an eden-like life for everyone on Earth, if that's what we wanted to do. Which of course, would require that everyone start taking responsibility for their life, meaning that everyone stop expecting any government to take care of them; and, that everyone would agree that no human should accumulate for themselves what would otherwise provide a beautiful life for hundreds and even hundreds of thousands of people. I said as much in a comment on a recent post on John Michael Greer's eminently informative blog, @ www.thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com. His response was, essentially: if pigs could fly. Which is not a helpful attitude. But he does not believe in a game-changing event, a kind of quintessentially epic Black Swan, to borrow a phrase from Dr. Taleb. Which seems to me imminent.
It would seem civilization is on a crash course toward ecological oblivion. It would seem we are very likely to destroy the biosphere on which all life depends. But could it be instead, that we are running out of fossil fuels just in time to avert disaster; just in time to come to a different understanding of ourselves, and our place on this Earth, in this solar system, in this galaxy, in this universe? And could it be, that this change could be part and parcel of a radical transformation in global consciousness? I certainly think so. But I believe in a divine universe. It's also true that the end of fossil fuels will be the epic disaster we expect, if that is what we expect.
I believe Homo sapien sapien was essentially still an ape until one first sampled a mushroom containing psilocybin, about 40,000 years ago. There, consciousness bloomed. And here we are now. I intuit that we are on the verge of some similarly grand evolutionary leap. I don't know what that will look like, but none of us can. We can only imagine. And the more of us that imagine what that eden would look like, the more likely we are to make it happen.
For ourselves. For the whole of the Earth.
And my, my, aren't the existential threats piling up. Every day comes more dire word on the fate of humanity. Seven billion people on the planet. Rising food costs. Global climate change. Peak oil. Nanotechnology and the gray goo. The technological singularity. Failing oceans. The proliferation of toxins. Desertification of the equatorial rainforests. Rising ocean levels. Melting glaciers. Mass specie extinction. Shifting poles. The sun, CMEs and the potential for permanent blackout. The draining of aquifers. Hydro-fracturing. The increasing prevalence of food borne illnesses. A new threat of nuclear proliferation and the danger of aging facilities. The failure of Government. Corporate and Financial malfeasance. The increasing ascendancy of an elite. 2012 and the annihilation of almost everything.
Meanwhile here in America, liberals rail at conservatives, conservatives at liberals, each growing ever more extreme, liberals delusional about the virtue of government, conservatives delusional about the virtue of markets. I've been repeating that old yarn about the liberal being the one who thinks he understands what is in your best interest better than you do, and the conservative doesn't give a damn. Really, which ideology is more responsible for more unnecessary death? Which ideology really takes responsibility for much of anything that is currently going wrong in the world? Both perspectives utterly blind to the balance of opposites inherent in universal porcesses.
What if I said the FDA and USDA were actually much the reason for the prevalence of food borne illnesses in America? What if I said the so-called Green Revolution so championed by conservatives and liberals alike, providing massive amounts of cheap corn to third-world countries and poor and illiterate people living under despots, was much responsible for runaway population growth, and what may very well be impending mass starvation? What if I said they were feeding chicken shit to the cows you eat? What if I said there is a dark energy all-pervading in the world, and you will find that most prominent wherever power collects? If you were a demon or a goddess in her dark aspect, and your goal was to destroy the Earth and all its creatures, what would you do? I'd introduce ideas that eliminate any sense of the divine nature of all things, I'd introduce the idea of a God who sanctions violence and domination, and I'd make as many people as I could rich.
Curiously, despite the evident doom, I've come to intuit that things may not be so drear as they seem. I've been railing at the God and Goddess of late, asking what is the point, how can this mess continue, demanding answers. It is not a sustainable mood; nor do I think it impotent. In fact, the synchronicities have been piling up, some profoundly so, even stupifying, pointing to a far more positive future than I ever considered. At least for me and those closest to me. And of course, extrapolating out, I can't see why that can't be the case for all humanity.
We have all the knowledge, tools and wealth available to provide an eden-like life for everyone on Earth, if that's what we wanted to do. Which of course, would require that everyone start taking responsibility for their life, meaning that everyone stop expecting any government to take care of them; and, that everyone would agree that no human should accumulate for themselves what would otherwise provide a beautiful life for hundreds and even hundreds of thousands of people. I said as much in a comment on a recent post on John Michael Greer's eminently informative blog, @ www.thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com. His response was, essentially: if pigs could fly. Which is not a helpful attitude. But he does not believe in a game-changing event, a kind of quintessentially epic Black Swan, to borrow a phrase from Dr. Taleb. Which seems to me imminent.
It would seem civilization is on a crash course toward ecological oblivion. It would seem we are very likely to destroy the biosphere on which all life depends. But could it be instead, that we are running out of fossil fuels just in time to avert disaster; just in time to come to a different understanding of ourselves, and our place on this Earth, in this solar system, in this galaxy, in this universe? And could it be, that this change could be part and parcel of a radical transformation in global consciousness? I certainly think so. But I believe in a divine universe. It's also true that the end of fossil fuels will be the epic disaster we expect, if that is what we expect.
I believe Homo sapien sapien was essentially still an ape until one first sampled a mushroom containing psilocybin, about 40,000 years ago. There, consciousness bloomed. And here we are now. I intuit that we are on the verge of some similarly grand evolutionary leap. I don't know what that will look like, but none of us can. We can only imagine. And the more of us that imagine what that eden would look like, the more likely we are to make it happen.
For ourselves. For the whole of the Earth.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Maia and Masyn
I went to work landscaping, for a friend, this past Wednesday. I was in a dark mood, having awakened from a dream in which I was being attacked by some sort of amoral frankenstinian entity, who could not harm me as much as I could not escape his presence and his attempt to somehow envelope me; when I finally escaped his presence long enough to retrieve an ice axe, I opened up his head until he was inert. My mood seemed to bleed into my friend Jamie who picked me up, who is otherwise as happy and peaceful a man as I know. He actually punched the steering wheel when someone on the road deliberately cut in front of us. The day was exceptionally hot, and I sweat out most of the hostility, though by the end of the afternoon I knew I was still very much in need of some Maia and Masyn time.
Maia is my eight year old niece, half Mexican, half Celtic and Germanic, very happy, generous, smart, sometimes witty and a little clumsy yet, though I hope to get outside with her more than I do. I was teasing her the other day when I called her a weirdo, and she said, laughing, "that's because I'm related to you." We went swimming and picked serviceberries and ate ice cream. She hadn't had dinner yet when I bought her the ice cream, but I'm not convinced it's going to be available in the abundance that it is today, all of her life, so I don't worry much about it.
Masyn is five months old, part African, Celtic and Germanic, and likely a smattering of many kinds of ancestors. He is not such an agreeable child as his older sister, suspicious of those he doesn't know, with a need to be held that keeps him from sleeping for long periods. I've had a difficult time getting him to smile. I sat slightly distressed as I watched Maia throw him around like a rag doll, but I quit castigating her when I realized, the little kid could not have been smiling more broadly than he was. Watching them together, I realized what a beautiful life I have, so full of joy, so abundant. So many kind and generous friends, such a beautiful family. Limitless possibilities. It's not so easy to see that, obsessed as I am with the darkness I do see, so all-pervading in the world.
I put his sister to bed though she didn't want to stop talking, she was so happy, and then I hung out with the little guy while I watched the premier of the NBC "Reality Show," Love in the Wild, aka pretty people on parade in the jungle. I thought of the conversation I had recently with the musician Magic Mama, who is taking her children to an intentional community in Costa Rica. There is so much that is interesting, going on in that Central American country, and here are these children of Empire fumbling their way through the jungle, in a dominating and invasive way, oblivious or cynical but driven, no doubt. I thought about the woman who lost, who was about the only person on the show I found interesting; I've spent approximately 18 months of days camping in the Boundary Waters and Quetico Wilderness, mostly alone, and if I had been her partner I can assure you at least, our raft wouldn't have fallen apart. I think we would have ended up in the oasis together, actually, but bald guys with hair on their back don't get invited to the parade for pretty people.
Masyn bounced around on my lap, and ripped my glasses off my face, and sucked on his fingers, and investigated everything within reach. Then he put his forearms over his forehead the way he does when he's tired, and I took him to his crib. He wailed like a banshee as I set him down, but I pulled the semi-rigid, light blanket over his head, and he was silent in about three seconds. I pulled the blanket back, and went back to the TV, to watch the news about our government shutdown in Minnesota, and then Nova: Science Now, and a piece about the growing of diamonds.
Diamond has one of the highest atomic densities of any compound in the Universe. It is excellent in the extreme as a conductor of heat, sound and electricity. If we could grow it, not only would it put an end to the grossly exploitative trade in diamonds, it would replace much of the silicone we use in our gadgets and infrastructure, making our high tech tools of communicating immensely more durable and effective. It could have a profound democratizing effect; though you can be sure some jackasses would endeavor to out-compete each other building the greatest laser ever, in their dumbass and ignorant pursuit of terrestrial domination, destruction and death.
My sister and her partner Troy came home, and we drank mead and Deschutes Mirror Pond, while we argued the validity of the chem-trail theory, which my sister is consumed by. I argued that the plants in my garden are very happy; if there were high concentrations of aluminum, barium and strontium in my soil, they would not be so happy. She conceded that, but made me promise to get a soil sample. I told her I would (I later asked a landscaping friend where I could get one. He said the University of Minnesota, but then added, "which is a government institution.") I told her I had not seen the entire documentary she sent me, and I promised her too, I would watch the whole.
I watched the full video this morning. Basically, again, the thesis of the documentary, "What in the World are they Spraying"* is, that there is a world-wide effort to spray an aerosol containing the three heavy metals mentioned above, in the contrails of jets, ostensibly as a means to slow global warming - and maybe even as population control, and the establishment of one world government.
As I said in the last post, I take a dim view of conspiracy theories generally. I tend to think no one is really in control of anything globally, to the extent conspiracy theorists would have it. But I do know there are many who believe one world governance is the only means to prevent world-wide catastrophe, and many of these see America as standing in the way of such an entity, the U.S. thereby condemning the planet to catastrophe. I also know there are some in our own government who would like to control the weather. I know there are others in industry and government who dream of controlling the world-wide distribution of seeds. I am also aware that science has dis-invested the universe with any meaning, and that, combined with the capitalist motive and the institutional mentality of corporatists and bureaucrats, has left competition and domination as the pre-eminent and only fully sanctioned morality. Watching the video, I came away with the sense that our federal Senators and Representatives are either afraid, or incapable, and likely both. The documentary implies authentically and capably that there is either a vast conspiracy centered in the socialist nations of the European Union, or a conspiracy in which our own government and corporations are complicit. I don't want to believe it, but it is a powerful story.
To put this in perspective, I ordered a plant recently, called Ojos de la Pastora, Eyes of the Shepherdess, also known as Salvia divinorum. In Minnesota, it is illegal to possess the plant, even if my only intention is to nurture it and occasionally partake of the leaves. The hallucinogenic compound the plant contains is active at 3 micro-grams - in solid form smaller than a grain of salt - which partaking of, it is said to deliver one into the presence of some kind of goddess. Apparently, according to this documentary, soil, snow, air and water samples worldwide have been found to contain aluminum in concentrations as high as 600,000 ppb, when the recommended limit in municipal water is something like 2, and there has been no official comment about that from any government anywhere. If the presence of these heavy metals is real, whether it is a conspiracy or not, it is surely madness and must be stopped, because heavy metals in high concentrations are hostile to the living systems on which all life on Earth depends. I'm not allowed to partake of a plant I can grow that has no toxicity, but it is evidently not a problem to toxify the entire biosphere to the great risk of everyone and everything living.
The plant, though the grower said he sent it two Tuesdays ago, has not arrived. There are many possible explanations, including that I have been scammed, or the package came within the purview of a rouge element within the Postal Service, who either kept it or gave it to a government agent. If I am in jail soon, there may be many explanations; though somehow I don't think that will happen unless a great deal more readers read this blog than currently do.
Knowing that, combined with the feeling left after watching this documentary, I feel free to say, if there is such a practice as the deliberate seeding of the biosphere with heavy metals, in effect, and if those participating in that practice do not cease and desist immediately, then there is no punishment that is too severe. And if our federal government is involved, or any corporate or educational institution, then I say, line the streets of the beltway and each campus with the bodies, and leave the bones as long as they exist.
My name is William Hunter Duncan, I am an American, and I was born on the fourth of July. I am in service to my friends, my family, my community, my species and the Earth. I am in service to the God and Goddess. I am a child of the Earth, a child of the Sun, a divine being. And like all life, I am sacred, and not to be so tampered with, without the risk of blowback, that unknown unknown that can prove so terrifying.
*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrJvVAWRe_4&feature=fvst
Maia is my eight year old niece, half Mexican, half Celtic and Germanic, very happy, generous, smart, sometimes witty and a little clumsy yet, though I hope to get outside with her more than I do. I was teasing her the other day when I called her a weirdo, and she said, laughing, "that's because I'm related to you." We went swimming and picked serviceberries and ate ice cream. She hadn't had dinner yet when I bought her the ice cream, but I'm not convinced it's going to be available in the abundance that it is today, all of her life, so I don't worry much about it.
Masyn is five months old, part African, Celtic and Germanic, and likely a smattering of many kinds of ancestors. He is not such an agreeable child as his older sister, suspicious of those he doesn't know, with a need to be held that keeps him from sleeping for long periods. I've had a difficult time getting him to smile. I sat slightly distressed as I watched Maia throw him around like a rag doll, but I quit castigating her when I realized, the little kid could not have been smiling more broadly than he was. Watching them together, I realized what a beautiful life I have, so full of joy, so abundant. So many kind and generous friends, such a beautiful family. Limitless possibilities. It's not so easy to see that, obsessed as I am with the darkness I do see, so all-pervading in the world.
I put his sister to bed though she didn't want to stop talking, she was so happy, and then I hung out with the little guy while I watched the premier of the NBC "Reality Show," Love in the Wild, aka pretty people on parade in the jungle. I thought of the conversation I had recently with the musician Magic Mama, who is taking her children to an intentional community in Costa Rica. There is so much that is interesting, going on in that Central American country, and here are these children of Empire fumbling their way through the jungle, in a dominating and invasive way, oblivious or cynical but driven, no doubt. I thought about the woman who lost, who was about the only person on the show I found interesting; I've spent approximately 18 months of days camping in the Boundary Waters and Quetico Wilderness, mostly alone, and if I had been her partner I can assure you at least, our raft wouldn't have fallen apart. I think we would have ended up in the oasis together, actually, but bald guys with hair on their back don't get invited to the parade for pretty people.
Masyn bounced around on my lap, and ripped my glasses off my face, and sucked on his fingers, and investigated everything within reach. Then he put his forearms over his forehead the way he does when he's tired, and I took him to his crib. He wailed like a banshee as I set him down, but I pulled the semi-rigid, light blanket over his head, and he was silent in about three seconds. I pulled the blanket back, and went back to the TV, to watch the news about our government shutdown in Minnesota, and then Nova: Science Now, and a piece about the growing of diamonds.
Diamond has one of the highest atomic densities of any compound in the Universe. It is excellent in the extreme as a conductor of heat, sound and electricity. If we could grow it, not only would it put an end to the grossly exploitative trade in diamonds, it would replace much of the silicone we use in our gadgets and infrastructure, making our high tech tools of communicating immensely more durable and effective. It could have a profound democratizing effect; though you can be sure some jackasses would endeavor to out-compete each other building the greatest laser ever, in their dumbass and ignorant pursuit of terrestrial domination, destruction and death.
My sister and her partner Troy came home, and we drank mead and Deschutes Mirror Pond, while we argued the validity of the chem-trail theory, which my sister is consumed by. I argued that the plants in my garden are very happy; if there were high concentrations of aluminum, barium and strontium in my soil, they would not be so happy. She conceded that, but made me promise to get a soil sample. I told her I would (I later asked a landscaping friend where I could get one. He said the University of Minnesota, but then added, "which is a government institution.") I told her I had not seen the entire documentary she sent me, and I promised her too, I would watch the whole.
I watched the full video this morning. Basically, again, the thesis of the documentary, "What in the World are they Spraying"* is, that there is a world-wide effort to spray an aerosol containing the three heavy metals mentioned above, in the contrails of jets, ostensibly as a means to slow global warming - and maybe even as population control, and the establishment of one world government.
As I said in the last post, I take a dim view of conspiracy theories generally. I tend to think no one is really in control of anything globally, to the extent conspiracy theorists would have it. But I do know there are many who believe one world governance is the only means to prevent world-wide catastrophe, and many of these see America as standing in the way of such an entity, the U.S. thereby condemning the planet to catastrophe. I also know there are some in our own government who would like to control the weather. I know there are others in industry and government who dream of controlling the world-wide distribution of seeds. I am also aware that science has dis-invested the universe with any meaning, and that, combined with the capitalist motive and the institutional mentality of corporatists and bureaucrats, has left competition and domination as the pre-eminent and only fully sanctioned morality. Watching the video, I came away with the sense that our federal Senators and Representatives are either afraid, or incapable, and likely both. The documentary implies authentically and capably that there is either a vast conspiracy centered in the socialist nations of the European Union, or a conspiracy in which our own government and corporations are complicit. I don't want to believe it, but it is a powerful story.
To put this in perspective, I ordered a plant recently, called Ojos de la Pastora, Eyes of the Shepherdess, also known as Salvia divinorum. In Minnesota, it is illegal to possess the plant, even if my only intention is to nurture it and occasionally partake of the leaves. The hallucinogenic compound the plant contains is active at 3 micro-grams - in solid form smaller than a grain of salt - which partaking of, it is said to deliver one into the presence of some kind of goddess. Apparently, according to this documentary, soil, snow, air and water samples worldwide have been found to contain aluminum in concentrations as high as 600,000 ppb, when the recommended limit in municipal water is something like 2, and there has been no official comment about that from any government anywhere. If the presence of these heavy metals is real, whether it is a conspiracy or not, it is surely madness and must be stopped, because heavy metals in high concentrations are hostile to the living systems on which all life on Earth depends. I'm not allowed to partake of a plant I can grow that has no toxicity, but it is evidently not a problem to toxify the entire biosphere to the great risk of everyone and everything living.
The plant, though the grower said he sent it two Tuesdays ago, has not arrived. There are many possible explanations, including that I have been scammed, or the package came within the purview of a rouge element within the Postal Service, who either kept it or gave it to a government agent. If I am in jail soon, there may be many explanations; though somehow I don't think that will happen unless a great deal more readers read this blog than currently do.
Knowing that, combined with the feeling left after watching this documentary, I feel free to say, if there is such a practice as the deliberate seeding of the biosphere with heavy metals, in effect, and if those participating in that practice do not cease and desist immediately, then there is no punishment that is too severe. And if our federal government is involved, or any corporate or educational institution, then I say, line the streets of the beltway and each campus with the bodies, and leave the bones as long as they exist.
My name is William Hunter Duncan, I am an American, and I was born on the fourth of July. I am in service to my friends, my family, my community, my species and the Earth. I am in service to the God and Goddess. I am a child of the Earth, a child of the Sun, a divine being. And like all life, I am sacred, and not to be so tampered with, without the risk of blowback, that unknown unknown that can prove so terrifying.
*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrJvVAWRe_4&feature=fvst
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Chem Trails
I had the opportunity today to familiarize myself with a house in an outlying, affluent suburb. While it was not the most egregious example of conspicuous consumption, compared to the life I lead it was a revelation of sorts. It was the dream house of the previous owners, Mike Smith and Sara Anderson (not their real names, though equally innocuous), who had the house built on a filled-in wetland, in a cul-de-sac development. They fell out of love and into hatred. There was a pile of garbage out front, about two-thirds of which could easily sell at a thrift store. I pulled out several lawn chairs, a twenty dollar pair of swimming goggles, and some fun Halloween decorations that will work well in the store I'll be managing. One bag was filled with the trophies a young woman won playing basketball.
The house, and the neighborhood, is very much everything that is wrong with America, and why America is doomed. I sometimes think of my house as too big for me, though by current code I could not legally build a house this small; my house would fit in the great room in the basement of that house. Everywhere there, fine woodwork and fancy tile and counter tops, the kind of material we are plundering the world to attain, installed for people who do not know themselves. There was more money in window treatments than I have earned in any one year in this lifetime.
I drank beer while I wandered around, observing the landscaping equal to their names, critiquing the whole product, knowing the vast majority of people in this country - the very vast majority - would say, "What a beautiful house and yard!" The American Dream. I heard the new owners talking about blocking up the wood fireplace. I tried to talk them out of it, saying it might prove useful in a power outage. I didn't say they might some winter feed most of the house into it to stay alive. Perhaps such a big house will prove useful in that regard. Which is not the kind of talk I share with people who have not yet awakened to the impending reality of resource constraints.
I came home and took a nap to sober up. After, I picked wild strawberries on my boulevard, weeded one of the tomato beds and planted some heat loving flowers that were still in small pots. I wandered over to the community garden to check on the condition of the mulberry tree. On a long bike ride this morning I scouted several mulberry. The serviceberries are ripe as well. I scored two glass carboys for five dollars at a garage sale recently, and I'm hoping to make mulberry wine. I might even try that with serviceberries, though I might just dry them.
A neighbor walked by late in the evening, relating that he had called the mayor's office about the city workers who fixed my curb recently, where they had replaced the stop box last fall, which I am still paying $300 a month for on threat of condemnation (it is a hard monthly pill to swallow, as there was never any real evidence anything was wrong with the stop box). There were about two guys working, and about eleven others standing around watching them work, laughing and mocking each other. It looked like fun. I told my neighbor the stories of harassment I have received from the city. His response was, "If you took better care of your yard, perhaps that wouldn't happen to you," and then proceeded to tell me that I was dragging down property values. This particular neighbor has a habit of asking me for help, and then after I help him, he returns the favor by tearing me down. He claims to speak for a contingent of my neighbors, who evidently do not have the courage to confront me themselves. I don't think he has called the city to complain about me, but someone has. Or more than one person, likely.
Dragging down property values? I took this abuse, as I always do from him, because I am not interested in feuding with my neighbors. Yes, my yard is a little wild, but that is much the point. There is intention everywhere in this yard, and I am on much better terms with nearly every plant in it than I am with any but a small number of my neighbors. Dragging down property values? Who was handing out home loans like candy? Who securitized those loans? Who cut twenty million jobs, refuses to create any, even as they enrich themselves? So, I deserve to be a target of the city inspections department because I treat my yard more like an organic farm, than a sterile golf course? All I said was, "The yard is in process. I would appreciate it if you took notice."
My neighbor on the opposite corner has the sort of pristine landscape this other neighbor imagines to be good for property values. He is out there every few days with his bottle of poison. Poison, poison everywhere. My sister recently sent me a video about chem-trails, the notion that a cabal of elite are spraying aluminum-oxide in the contrails of jets, to reflect the sun, in an attempt to lessen the threat of climate change. The very next day I read in the work of Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, that he believes mad cow disease is not likely caused by the official story - feeding carrion to cows - but by heavy use of certain pesticides and high concentrations in some areas of heavy metals, especially aluminum. As to these chem trails, I take a dim view of conspiracy theories generally. But my experience of late with these city bureaucrats has led me to believe, there is no limit to what people will do if they believe they understand better than you do what is in your best interest.
I sometimes wonder if the only thing my culture will know what to do with me, because I partake of the Earth to heal myself and the Earth, is to put me in a cage. I am not a threat to anyone, except perhaps to another's sense of what is true. I keep hearing repeating in my head, 'Do Not Be Afraid. Do Not Be Afraid.' I can't prove that message is true, but I choose to believe it.
The house, and the neighborhood, is very much everything that is wrong with America, and why America is doomed. I sometimes think of my house as too big for me, though by current code I could not legally build a house this small; my house would fit in the great room in the basement of that house. Everywhere there, fine woodwork and fancy tile and counter tops, the kind of material we are plundering the world to attain, installed for people who do not know themselves. There was more money in window treatments than I have earned in any one year in this lifetime.
I drank beer while I wandered around, observing the landscaping equal to their names, critiquing the whole product, knowing the vast majority of people in this country - the very vast majority - would say, "What a beautiful house and yard!" The American Dream. I heard the new owners talking about blocking up the wood fireplace. I tried to talk them out of it, saying it might prove useful in a power outage. I didn't say they might some winter feed most of the house into it to stay alive. Perhaps such a big house will prove useful in that regard. Which is not the kind of talk I share with people who have not yet awakened to the impending reality of resource constraints.
I came home and took a nap to sober up. After, I picked wild strawberries on my boulevard, weeded one of the tomato beds and planted some heat loving flowers that were still in small pots. I wandered over to the community garden to check on the condition of the mulberry tree. On a long bike ride this morning I scouted several mulberry. The serviceberries are ripe as well. I scored two glass carboys for five dollars at a garage sale recently, and I'm hoping to make mulberry wine. I might even try that with serviceberries, though I might just dry them.
A neighbor walked by late in the evening, relating that he had called the mayor's office about the city workers who fixed my curb recently, where they had replaced the stop box last fall, which I am still paying $300 a month for on threat of condemnation (it is a hard monthly pill to swallow, as there was never any real evidence anything was wrong with the stop box). There were about two guys working, and about eleven others standing around watching them work, laughing and mocking each other. It looked like fun. I told my neighbor the stories of harassment I have received from the city. His response was, "If you took better care of your yard, perhaps that wouldn't happen to you," and then proceeded to tell me that I was dragging down property values. This particular neighbor has a habit of asking me for help, and then after I help him, he returns the favor by tearing me down. He claims to speak for a contingent of my neighbors, who evidently do not have the courage to confront me themselves. I don't think he has called the city to complain about me, but someone has. Or more than one person, likely.
Dragging down property values? I took this abuse, as I always do from him, because I am not interested in feuding with my neighbors. Yes, my yard is a little wild, but that is much the point. There is intention everywhere in this yard, and I am on much better terms with nearly every plant in it than I am with any but a small number of my neighbors. Dragging down property values? Who was handing out home loans like candy? Who securitized those loans? Who cut twenty million jobs, refuses to create any, even as they enrich themselves? So, I deserve to be a target of the city inspections department because I treat my yard more like an organic farm, than a sterile golf course? All I said was, "The yard is in process. I would appreciate it if you took notice."
My neighbor on the opposite corner has the sort of pristine landscape this other neighbor imagines to be good for property values. He is out there every few days with his bottle of poison. Poison, poison everywhere. My sister recently sent me a video about chem-trails, the notion that a cabal of elite are spraying aluminum-oxide in the contrails of jets, to reflect the sun, in an attempt to lessen the threat of climate change. The very next day I read in the work of Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, that he believes mad cow disease is not likely caused by the official story - feeding carrion to cows - but by heavy use of certain pesticides and high concentrations in some areas of heavy metals, especially aluminum. As to these chem trails, I take a dim view of conspiracy theories generally. But my experience of late with these city bureaucrats has led me to believe, there is no limit to what people will do if they believe they understand better than you do what is in your best interest.
I sometimes wonder if the only thing my culture will know what to do with me, because I partake of the Earth to heal myself and the Earth, is to put me in a cage. I am not a threat to anyone, except perhaps to another's sense of what is true. I keep hearing repeating in my head, 'Do Not Be Afraid. Do Not Be Afraid.' I can't prove that message is true, but I choose to believe it.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Inspections
I spent most of this Saturday working with a new friend, together sanding his hardwood floor. It went very well. When we were done, he brought the sanding equipment to my house. I just spent the last five hours prepping the white oak hardwood floor in my sunroom, and the bathroom, to sand tomorrow. A week ago I pulled the (plain ugly) tan carpet off the sunroom floor to reveal the hardwoods; tonight, I pulled the (plain ugly) tan tile, from the front entry (part of the sunroom) and the bathroom floor.
Not long after I moved into this house I re-finished the maple hardwoods in the bedroom, living room and the dining room. That is, after removing the tan carpet, the carpet pad, the tan laminate, and the ancient carpet under that (asbestos embedded linoleum tile as the third layer in the dining room, which once had been the kitchen.) Prior to me buying it, this house was a flip house, common in the housing boom, the owners buying the house, adding a few thousand dollars in adjustments and then asking a few ten-thousand above the purchase price. I knew that, when buying it, and talked them down, though not nearly enough. The owners before that just piled flooring on top of flooring, presumably because it was too much effort to remove the old layer and dispose of it. Why anyone would cover hardwoods with synthetic crap in the first place, is intimately related to the toxic nature of everything, everywhere today. Last I heard, we are manufacturing 80,000 chemicals in America, of which our precious protectors in Government regulate about nine.
In the bathroom and the front entry, they tiled directly on top of the hardwoods. Five years later, most of the tiles were popping up. No professional did that. They likely hired a professional to carpet the hardwoods in the sun room. A professional? I spent not less than three hours pulling staples out of the white oak. Every time I thought I was done, I found twenty-eight more. I think I'm done now, but there are probably twenty-eight more. 'Get a real skill,' I kept thinking, about the idiot who put those staples in. 'I'm just doing my job, paying for my kid,' I heard in my head. 'That's admirable', I replied, 'Now go get a real skill.' There is nothing about a house I can't build or remodel, but I won't lay carpet, unless it's a responsible carpet tile from a company that is conscious about it's true impact in this world (I don't know what's going on with Interface Global at this point, but they were once a rare as rare can be model of corporate responsibility). There is hardly a more toxic example of environmental indifference, than the making of hum-drum, take-it-for-granted carpet.
I can sand my hardwoods without asking permission from my government, but I can't gut the bathroom. Too bad, it's already in process. The sink, toilet and floor tile are gone. I'm going to remove the ridiculous jacuzzi tub the flippers put in, the only virtue of which is, it's deep. I don't know what I'm going to do with it, maybe bury it under a downspout and make a raingarden. The pump however might prove useful, when I start experimenting with in-floor, solar radiant heating. As for what I'll do without a toilet or a functioning shower? I lived off-the-grid in this house all last summer. I'll figure it out.
I didn't ask permission from my city government to gut my bathroom, because I only have the sanding equipment until Sunday evening, and I needed to get under the toilet and vanity to get to all the tile. It turns out, however, I can't sand the floor in the bathroom, because the maple is missing around the toilet. The reader might be thinking, why would he want to have hardwoods in the bathroom, anyway? Well, let me tell you, hardwoods with about six or eight coats of polyurethane is infinitely better than tile on top of hardwoods, which is a recipe for mold. I didn't ask permission for what I've done, also because I can't afford permits; and I know what I'm doing, and I don't need a bureaucrat to hassle me about everything I do, every step of the way. Whatever I do, it will be infinitely more appropriate than anything the flippers did, and quite a bit more than I would be required to do under code. Which relates to the inherent flaw in the inspections process.
I am a man of integrity. I am not going to do anything to this house, or any other house, that would compromise the integrity of it. Why then do we suppose that inspectors, with likely little common sense or actual building experience, and hardly a shred of discretion, to be flexible depending on the particular circumstance, are necessary to protect whom? There wasn't any inspector overseeing what went on in the flipping of this house, because the people who did this work lacked integrity and weren't about to involve anyone in the process but the people they bought the material from. The only time inspectors are involved, you can be sure the homeowner or the contractor has integrity, or, if they don't, they are simply afraid of the government. Most contractors these days know what is up to code and what is not. Most contractors are going to meet code or exceed it, whether the project is inspected or not. Codes are a minimum standard designed by inspectors to protect the job security of inspectors. Codes provide tyrannical like powers to supposed public servants, while preventing real innovation, and requiring a far greater expense in material and labor, often with less actual building integrity as the end result. You don't see many old houses collapsing, though built before anyone conceived of inspections. The stories of collapsing houses built after the inspections regime was established, are legion. As to the real cost, when I was contracting officially, I told my clients, if you want to involve city inspectors, expect the process to take a third as long and cost about 25% more. One hundred percent opted to skip inspections. I have never had a call back to repair anything that would have required inspections.
"Inspections are necessary to protect houses and homeowners from unscrupulous contractors," someone somewhere is thinking. Well, if a homeowner doesn't have sense enough to hire a man of integrity, then he probably shouldn't be remodeling his house. That, or he should do his homework to find a man of integrity. They exist (though it takes one to know one, and having the integrity to know integrity takes more work than just asking around). As to the moral superiority of government inspectors? That is a mythology that has been ruinous for America, which we can serve our country and community well, to divest ourselves of. I've known plenty of contractors who were not good men; plenty of others who are. There are honest inspectors, but I've met only one, of the few dozen I've had to deal with. Petty tyrants, and intransigent acolytes of the gods of calcified and inflexible understanding, mostly. That, or just plain useless. I'm recalling a job site, and a plumbing inspector we waited three weeks for, a delay which neither we nor the homeowner could afford. He showed up at ten a.m. randomly one day, so drunk we could smell him before he was halfway up the stairs he could hardly climb. Once at the top of the stairs, without being able to see anything he was there to inspect, he did a 360, said, "looks good", and stumbled back down the stairs, smiling like a sacrosanct mad man. Approved. Moving on.
It's hard to talk about these things without sounding like a Tea Party crank. The Tea Party loves to talk about integrity, personal responsibility, self-reliance, ya-da ya-da ya. In practice, however, these devotees of the free-market prefer a highly regulated world, with special concessions for the big dogs. As if corporations are the pinnacle of virtue, and not the dark-force entities they in fact are. If you can find a Tea Partier with a sense of responsibility toward the biosphere, and thus all people and all living things, I'll show you a few thousand who think natural-gas hydro-fracturing is a grand old American ideal. Rape the land as equivalent to apple pie. But I'm beginning to wander off-topic.
I haven't yet called JV, the city inspector who is targeting me about my driveway. In a way, I'm avoiding it, because really I just want to be left alone, as if that problem is simply going to go away. The more I put it off, however, the more the idea grows, that a crew of oblivious city employees are going to show up with a front-end loader and a dump truck, and cart my garden away, just doing their job on orders from above. Which is probably just me conflating this woman with the evil she represents. I'm resolved to call her Monday, and initiate who knows what.
As for gutting the bathroom, and the sanding of floors, that's me investing in this house, and this community, living in this space as opposed to simply camping in it, temporarily. Healing this house as I'm healing the land, with an eye on actually one day inviting an actual woman to share this space with me, which for me is sort of like, just about the most radical thing I can conceive of. I actually have a particular woman in mind, a true warrior woman valkyrie, though that idea, having not actually met her yet, is like almost all of my ideas, which begin as radical delusion, outside the pale of what is socially mainstream, which prove either to be delusion, or a curious bit of genius.
I hope you don't mind me interjecting a bit of the personal, but off-the-grid as I conceive it is more than just mechanical; and the only saving grace I can imagine is to cloak myself in the truth of my existence, as I live it. Which is why I so despise thinking tied irrevocably to code and regulation, which is stagnation and ego-inflation for those who otherwise fear themselves - in this universe that is vastly more mysterious than any of us can suppose.
Not long after I moved into this house I re-finished the maple hardwoods in the bedroom, living room and the dining room. That is, after removing the tan carpet, the carpet pad, the tan laminate, and the ancient carpet under that (asbestos embedded linoleum tile as the third layer in the dining room, which once had been the kitchen.) Prior to me buying it, this house was a flip house, common in the housing boom, the owners buying the house, adding a few thousand dollars in adjustments and then asking a few ten-thousand above the purchase price. I knew that, when buying it, and talked them down, though not nearly enough. The owners before that just piled flooring on top of flooring, presumably because it was too much effort to remove the old layer and dispose of it. Why anyone would cover hardwoods with synthetic crap in the first place, is intimately related to the toxic nature of everything, everywhere today. Last I heard, we are manufacturing 80,000 chemicals in America, of which our precious protectors in Government regulate about nine.
In the bathroom and the front entry, they tiled directly on top of the hardwoods. Five years later, most of the tiles were popping up. No professional did that. They likely hired a professional to carpet the hardwoods in the sun room. A professional? I spent not less than three hours pulling staples out of the white oak. Every time I thought I was done, I found twenty-eight more. I think I'm done now, but there are probably twenty-eight more. 'Get a real skill,' I kept thinking, about the idiot who put those staples in. 'I'm just doing my job, paying for my kid,' I heard in my head. 'That's admirable', I replied, 'Now go get a real skill.' There is nothing about a house I can't build or remodel, but I won't lay carpet, unless it's a responsible carpet tile from a company that is conscious about it's true impact in this world (I don't know what's going on with Interface Global at this point, but they were once a rare as rare can be model of corporate responsibility). There is hardly a more toxic example of environmental indifference, than the making of hum-drum, take-it-for-granted carpet.
I can sand my hardwoods without asking permission from my government, but I can't gut the bathroom. Too bad, it's already in process. The sink, toilet and floor tile are gone. I'm going to remove the ridiculous jacuzzi tub the flippers put in, the only virtue of which is, it's deep. I don't know what I'm going to do with it, maybe bury it under a downspout and make a raingarden. The pump however might prove useful, when I start experimenting with in-floor, solar radiant heating. As for what I'll do without a toilet or a functioning shower? I lived off-the-grid in this house all last summer. I'll figure it out.
I didn't ask permission from my city government to gut my bathroom, because I only have the sanding equipment until Sunday evening, and I needed to get under the toilet and vanity to get to all the tile. It turns out, however, I can't sand the floor in the bathroom, because the maple is missing around the toilet. The reader might be thinking, why would he want to have hardwoods in the bathroom, anyway? Well, let me tell you, hardwoods with about six or eight coats of polyurethane is infinitely better than tile on top of hardwoods, which is a recipe for mold. I didn't ask permission for what I've done, also because I can't afford permits; and I know what I'm doing, and I don't need a bureaucrat to hassle me about everything I do, every step of the way. Whatever I do, it will be infinitely more appropriate than anything the flippers did, and quite a bit more than I would be required to do under code. Which relates to the inherent flaw in the inspections process.
I am a man of integrity. I am not going to do anything to this house, or any other house, that would compromise the integrity of it. Why then do we suppose that inspectors, with likely little common sense or actual building experience, and hardly a shred of discretion, to be flexible depending on the particular circumstance, are necessary to protect whom? There wasn't any inspector overseeing what went on in the flipping of this house, because the people who did this work lacked integrity and weren't about to involve anyone in the process but the people they bought the material from. The only time inspectors are involved, you can be sure the homeowner or the contractor has integrity, or, if they don't, they are simply afraid of the government. Most contractors these days know what is up to code and what is not. Most contractors are going to meet code or exceed it, whether the project is inspected or not. Codes are a minimum standard designed by inspectors to protect the job security of inspectors. Codes provide tyrannical like powers to supposed public servants, while preventing real innovation, and requiring a far greater expense in material and labor, often with less actual building integrity as the end result. You don't see many old houses collapsing, though built before anyone conceived of inspections. The stories of collapsing houses built after the inspections regime was established, are legion. As to the real cost, when I was contracting officially, I told my clients, if you want to involve city inspectors, expect the process to take a third as long and cost about 25% more. One hundred percent opted to skip inspections. I have never had a call back to repair anything that would have required inspections.
"Inspections are necessary to protect houses and homeowners from unscrupulous contractors," someone somewhere is thinking. Well, if a homeowner doesn't have sense enough to hire a man of integrity, then he probably shouldn't be remodeling his house. That, or he should do his homework to find a man of integrity. They exist (though it takes one to know one, and having the integrity to know integrity takes more work than just asking around). As to the moral superiority of government inspectors? That is a mythology that has been ruinous for America, which we can serve our country and community well, to divest ourselves of. I've known plenty of contractors who were not good men; plenty of others who are. There are honest inspectors, but I've met only one, of the few dozen I've had to deal with. Petty tyrants, and intransigent acolytes of the gods of calcified and inflexible understanding, mostly. That, or just plain useless. I'm recalling a job site, and a plumbing inspector we waited three weeks for, a delay which neither we nor the homeowner could afford. He showed up at ten a.m. randomly one day, so drunk we could smell him before he was halfway up the stairs he could hardly climb. Once at the top of the stairs, without being able to see anything he was there to inspect, he did a 360, said, "looks good", and stumbled back down the stairs, smiling like a sacrosanct mad man. Approved. Moving on.
It's hard to talk about these things without sounding like a Tea Party crank. The Tea Party loves to talk about integrity, personal responsibility, self-reliance, ya-da ya-da ya. In practice, however, these devotees of the free-market prefer a highly regulated world, with special concessions for the big dogs. As if corporations are the pinnacle of virtue, and not the dark-force entities they in fact are. If you can find a Tea Partier with a sense of responsibility toward the biosphere, and thus all people and all living things, I'll show you a few thousand who think natural-gas hydro-fracturing is a grand old American ideal. Rape the land as equivalent to apple pie. But I'm beginning to wander off-topic.
I haven't yet called JV, the city inspector who is targeting me about my driveway. In a way, I'm avoiding it, because really I just want to be left alone, as if that problem is simply going to go away. The more I put it off, however, the more the idea grows, that a crew of oblivious city employees are going to show up with a front-end loader and a dump truck, and cart my garden away, just doing their job on orders from above. Which is probably just me conflating this woman with the evil she represents. I'm resolved to call her Monday, and initiate who knows what.
As for gutting the bathroom, and the sanding of floors, that's me investing in this house, and this community, living in this space as opposed to simply camping in it, temporarily. Healing this house as I'm healing the land, with an eye on actually one day inviting an actual woman to share this space with me, which for me is sort of like, just about the most radical thing I can conceive of. I actually have a particular woman in mind, a true warrior woman valkyrie, though that idea, having not actually met her yet, is like almost all of my ideas, which begin as radical delusion, outside the pale of what is socially mainstream, which prove either to be delusion, or a curious bit of genius.
I hope you don't mind me interjecting a bit of the personal, but off-the-grid as I conceive it is more than just mechanical; and the only saving grace I can imagine is to cloak myself in the truth of my existence, as I live it. Which is why I so despise thinking tied irrevocably to code and regulation, which is stagnation and ego-inflation for those who otherwise fear themselves - in this universe that is vastly more mysterious than any of us can suppose.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Second Thoughts
I'm back.
It turned out, that without this blog, I felt lost, and somewhat helpless. There is power in the truth. And with another looming battle with city bureaucrats, because I tore up part of my driveway to plant a garden, a part of my driveway I have never used and would not need even if I owned a vehicle, I feel called to write about that too. That, and the words of support I have received from readers, slight in number but broad in kindness and sincerity, compels me to rekindle the fire that lead me to start writing here. There was a time when I thought I would maintain a blog until the Internet goes down forever. I'm thinking like that again. I hope the reader will forgive my spell of self-pity, a weakness I am not at all immune to. Nine thousand post views in one year is, I have come to recognize, infinitely greater than none. Thank you for your support.
Continuing, I will revisit the driveway situation. Since I moved into this house in 2006 I have dreamt of fruit trees where the driveway is. I finally gave myself permission this year to begin that process, tearing up much of the fossil fuel-derived asphalt, while leaving more than enough driveway to allow motor-vehicle access to the garage. In the process of preparing the garden beds throughout the yard, I moved approximately 200 wheelbarrows of soil to the driveway, layering leaves, then soil, then leaves, and so on, building soil. I planted vegetables and flowers and nitrogen fixers. The city inspector promptly sent me a letter, that I was only allowed asphalt, concrete or pavers, and I had to be in compliance with the order by June 12, or I would be charged $100 for each subsequent inspection, with the threat of criminal and civil penalties.
I called the inspector twice. He did not respond. I called the inspections office, and was put in touch with his supervisor. This man seemed reasonable. He said he would have the inspector take a picture, and if I still had a driveway, there wouldn't be a problem. I called him back several days later. He had nothing to say about my driveway, instead bringing up the extension the city gave me, after I challenged them about their attempt to condemn my house because I'm not using natural gas, a battle in which he played no part. He informed me that the decision was no longer his, that I would have to speak with JV, the very same woman who told me that people like me need to apply for assistance from Centerpoint Energy, and that if I didn't pursue that and hook the gas back up, she would condemn my house and have me removed from it by the police.
Ms JV had been chastened by the City Attorneys office, for her clear indifference to that pesky Fourth Amendment, that part in our Constitution about unreasonable search and seizure. I may be wrong, but I'm assuming she is planning to take vengeance upon me - as soon as she is done kicking people out of their houses in North Minneapolis, in the aftermath of the tornado that tore through that poorest of Minneapolis neighborhoods. All in the name of health and safety, of course, just like it says on their written orders of violation, right after the part where they accuse you of being a criminal, for violating whatever code they have deemed appropriate. Any rational discussion about what is in fact appropriate, being out of the question. Though their orders all say too, that if you have any questions at all, feel free to call, and they will be sure to address them. To tell you either that they have no answer for you, or that the only thing that matters is what the bureaucrat decides what matters, even if that thing is entirely contrary to anything even resembling the truth.
If you think I overstate it, I encourage you to pick up a copy of Joel Salatin's book, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal. The Salatin Family Farm, also known as Polyface Farm, was profiled in Michael Pollan's outstanding book The Omnivores Dillema. Polyface Farm is a model of what all farms should be. Reading his book, my problem with the Minneapolis City office of pharonic inspectors seems quaint. His experience makes it clear that truth is not a thing the typical bureaucrat is after. Power, yes. Cruelty, indeed. Truth? Irrelevant. Knowing that he has gone through much worse, however, does not lessen the frustration I feel that there are petty tyrants conspiring to harm this American.
Home of the free? The truth is irrelevant and even contrary to the aims of the bureaucrat, because the application of the truth would often mean the bureaucrat would be out of a job. There may be a place for the city inspections office, maybe, but coming after me isn't anything but the generating of revenue, and the petty application of arbitrary power. I'm not doing anybody any harm, except perhaps myself, and that isn't any of the city government's god-damned business. I tend to think of the typical tea partier as a twit and a crank, who would rail against the overreach of government, while more than happy to support the petty and arbitrary use of government power against anyone who isn't a conservative Christian - but I certainly won't mind at all if my government shuts down, indefinitely. Maybe that's what it's going to take for us to start taking responsibility for our community, rather than handing tyrannical powers to government rule makers, who inevitably abuse it? We're on the verge of that, a government shutdown, here in Minnesota. But somehow, I think, the politicos are going to come together and save themselves, and the bureaucracies our taxes and fees and penalties and confiscated property maintain.
I was supposed to call Ms JV, Monday. I didn't. Tuesday, I'm contemplating taking the light rail to that retail vortex, Mall of America, and Best Buy, to see if I can return that ridiculous digital camera that broke down after 500 pics, and maybe see about equipment for recording phone conversations. That sort of thing has never been my style, but I don't see many ways to protect myself at this point, from ravenous code enforcers with sadistic tendencies. That might actually prove to be fun, if I can afford it. I'm not sure I can afford not to do it.
Yeah, it feels great to be blogging again. Thanks for reading.
It turned out, that without this blog, I felt lost, and somewhat helpless. There is power in the truth. And with another looming battle with city bureaucrats, because I tore up part of my driveway to plant a garden, a part of my driveway I have never used and would not need even if I owned a vehicle, I feel called to write about that too. That, and the words of support I have received from readers, slight in number but broad in kindness and sincerity, compels me to rekindle the fire that lead me to start writing here. There was a time when I thought I would maintain a blog until the Internet goes down forever. I'm thinking like that again. I hope the reader will forgive my spell of self-pity, a weakness I am not at all immune to. Nine thousand post views in one year is, I have come to recognize, infinitely greater than none. Thank you for your support.
Continuing, I will revisit the driveway situation. Since I moved into this house in 2006 I have dreamt of fruit trees where the driveway is. I finally gave myself permission this year to begin that process, tearing up much of the fossil fuel-derived asphalt, while leaving more than enough driveway to allow motor-vehicle access to the garage. In the process of preparing the garden beds throughout the yard, I moved approximately 200 wheelbarrows of soil to the driveway, layering leaves, then soil, then leaves, and so on, building soil. I planted vegetables and flowers and nitrogen fixers. The city inspector promptly sent me a letter, that I was only allowed asphalt, concrete or pavers, and I had to be in compliance with the order by June 12, or I would be charged $100 for each subsequent inspection, with the threat of criminal and civil penalties.
I called the inspector twice. He did not respond. I called the inspections office, and was put in touch with his supervisor. This man seemed reasonable. He said he would have the inspector take a picture, and if I still had a driveway, there wouldn't be a problem. I called him back several days later. He had nothing to say about my driveway, instead bringing up the extension the city gave me, after I challenged them about their attempt to condemn my house because I'm not using natural gas, a battle in which he played no part. He informed me that the decision was no longer his, that I would have to speak with JV, the very same woman who told me that people like me need to apply for assistance from Centerpoint Energy, and that if I didn't pursue that and hook the gas back up, she would condemn my house and have me removed from it by the police.
Ms JV had been chastened by the City Attorneys office, for her clear indifference to that pesky Fourth Amendment, that part in our Constitution about unreasonable search and seizure. I may be wrong, but I'm assuming she is planning to take vengeance upon me - as soon as she is done kicking people out of their houses in North Minneapolis, in the aftermath of the tornado that tore through that poorest of Minneapolis neighborhoods. All in the name of health and safety, of course, just like it says on their written orders of violation, right after the part where they accuse you of being a criminal, for violating whatever code they have deemed appropriate. Any rational discussion about what is in fact appropriate, being out of the question. Though their orders all say too, that if you have any questions at all, feel free to call, and they will be sure to address them. To tell you either that they have no answer for you, or that the only thing that matters is what the bureaucrat decides what matters, even if that thing is entirely contrary to anything even resembling the truth.
If you think I overstate it, I encourage you to pick up a copy of Joel Salatin's book, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal. The Salatin Family Farm, also known as Polyface Farm, was profiled in Michael Pollan's outstanding book The Omnivores Dillema. Polyface Farm is a model of what all farms should be. Reading his book, my problem with the Minneapolis City office of pharonic inspectors seems quaint. His experience makes it clear that truth is not a thing the typical bureaucrat is after. Power, yes. Cruelty, indeed. Truth? Irrelevant. Knowing that he has gone through much worse, however, does not lessen the frustration I feel that there are petty tyrants conspiring to harm this American.
Home of the free? The truth is irrelevant and even contrary to the aims of the bureaucrat, because the application of the truth would often mean the bureaucrat would be out of a job. There may be a place for the city inspections office, maybe, but coming after me isn't anything but the generating of revenue, and the petty application of arbitrary power. I'm not doing anybody any harm, except perhaps myself, and that isn't any of the city government's god-damned business. I tend to think of the typical tea partier as a twit and a crank, who would rail against the overreach of government, while more than happy to support the petty and arbitrary use of government power against anyone who isn't a conservative Christian - but I certainly won't mind at all if my government shuts down, indefinitely. Maybe that's what it's going to take for us to start taking responsibility for our community, rather than handing tyrannical powers to government rule makers, who inevitably abuse it? We're on the verge of that, a government shutdown, here in Minnesota. But somehow, I think, the politicos are going to come together and save themselves, and the bureaucracies our taxes and fees and penalties and confiscated property maintain.
I was supposed to call Ms JV, Monday. I didn't. Tuesday, I'm contemplating taking the light rail to that retail vortex, Mall of America, and Best Buy, to see if I can return that ridiculous digital camera that broke down after 500 pics, and maybe see about equipment for recording phone conversations. That sort of thing has never been my style, but I don't see many ways to protect myself at this point, from ravenous code enforcers with sadistic tendencies. That might actually prove to be fun, if I can afford it. I'm not sure I can afford not to do it.
Yeah, it feels great to be blogging again. Thanks for reading.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Reflections
It was 102 and 103 degrees here in Minneapolis, Monday and Tuesday respectively. It was about 50 degrees Thursday morning. The culture is so screwed up we've gone and given nature a bi-polar disorder. People were complaining about the heat, but I remember clearly the seven consecutive weeks this winter, when the temperature never climbed above freezing. Wednesday was gorgeous, and evidently a Mexican gray wolf at the Minnesota Zoo thought so too, escaping his confines through a hole in the fence, and then leaping another fence, eight feet tall. If you happen to be near an eight foot wall, the height of most interior residential walls, imagine a gray wolf leaping over it, keeping in mind that this particular gray wolf lived its entire life in a cage. How much do you suppose this wolf wanted to be free? The zoo said the breach in the fence was caused by an unusually heavy snow load. I know the last snow in the Twin Cities finally melted on Wednesday, but that was once a small mountain on the Midway Stadium parking lot, piled there by the city of St Paul. Few seem to be asking the obvious question: you guys don't check your fences? They shot and killed the wolf. Better to die the way he did, than to die old, in a cage.
For long-time readers: the city went and ripped out every one of the Regent serviceberry shrubs I wrote about last July. To replace them, it appears, with long rows of identical variegated ornamental grasses, like the typically sterile, homogenized retail/commercial landscaping in a seventh-tier suburban parking lot.
I was in a dark place when I published the last post. The negredo of the alchemists, the fertile shit of birth and regeneration. There is nothing attractive or pleasant about it, though from the alchemical perspective, it is necessary, and the true creative source out of which all gold originates. This came back to me as I was sitting on the patio at the Birchwood Cafe in the Seward neighborhood, one afternoon last Saturday. There were two women sitting at a table near me, a crone, and a young, beautiful West African, speaking French. I was hostile to the world, but the weather was mild, I was softened by the mixed cultivar and wild flowers on the boulevard, so I sat there with my coffee, closed my eyes and drifted into the cadence of their conversation - though I do not understand the language. The West African seemed to key with my attention, and became more and more animated, joyous in her expression, and my spirit was in turn lifted.
The Goddess has been good to me in many ways. I have come to see women as manifestations of the Goddess; of course, to say so, that would mean that men are manifestations of the God - and each of us manifestations of both, by degrees. That's not easy for me, as I'm inclined to think God doesn't have much credibility at this point, so much that is ugly having been done, is being done, in His name, with such great success. Still, I have come to see the friction or interaction between these opposites, the feminine and the masculine, as the engine of creation. Out of unity, harmony flows. Starting with oneself.
I had been asking, of myself, of the Goddess, what is the point? Why am I here, in this house, on this land, without the means to pay for it? What really am I doing? In the summer of 2008 I called out to the Goddess, offering myself up in service. Shortly after, I met Val Kyrie. That fall, I walked away from this house, and my life here, to be with her and her kids. Since, I wrote a book, I have educated myself about the economy, about plants, about the soil, about the nature of existence, I have returned to this house where I wrote another book. I continue to educate myself. That no one understands what I am doing or why I do what I do, has been a great distress to me. What is the point of any of it, any of the advances I have made in my interior life, in my body, if the world is indifferent, if there is so little return on this investment, beyond my own satisfaction, that what I am doing I know to be true to myself?
I've been feeling the shamanic call. I am desperate, in fact, to test what I have been hearing about psychedelics. The doors of my perception are in dire need of cleansing. I planted the olilioqui, but only three of the 36 seeds I planted germinated. I would like to try three grams of mushrooms, but I don't have the means right now. There are no known psychedelics native to Minnesota, and I don't have the kind of friends who have access to the black market, and I don't really want the plants or the shrooms if I don't know where they came from. My attitude is, if I can grow it, then I should be able to consume it. My government says I can't, making it fundamentally illegitimate. Being fundamentally illegitimate, however, has never stopped any government from oppressing, not least this one. So what am I to do?
I've been spending my evenings listening to Terence Mckenna on youtube*. He has become like a mentor to me. I have never heard any man speak so eloquently, so intelligently, so gently and so profoundly, about the human experience. Like many, I thought I was alone in my thinking until I heard Terence speak. That he is likely unintelligible to most has little to do with Terence. I found a recording of a woman asking him about heavenly blue morning glory. The seeds were his first psychedelic experience (though don't go out, buy them and consume them, as they apparently make you nauseous, and many seed companies soak them in poison.) I've grown those! I'm growing a lot more now.
Then I learned reed canary grass, Phalaris arundinaceae, is a source of Dimethyltryptamine, DMT, also known as the spirit molecule. Reed canary grass is one of those noxious invasives that has come to dominate the landscape, which is ironic if the word about DMT is true. That would make Minnesota something like the promised land. I sang to it as I clipped the leaves on the shore of Minnehaha Creek. I found a juicer at Savers for $3.77. The first round, the juicer bounced around until one of the latches broke. The second round, the second latch broke, the top flew off onto the floor, plant fibers were flung around the kitchen, and the cutting apparatus spun through the air, landing in a cast iron pan at about 100 rpm/second. The juice is drying in the oven at 170 degrees.
I was working this afternoon, mudding sheetrock at a jobsite when I decided to call my father. He was not well, having just gone through a difficult surgery. Twice now, people have come to him, asking about me. Evidently, because they saw me on tv, a local news station having interviewed me about the city trying to condemn this house - which he is currently paying for. Ominously, he told me not to do anything else to bring him any more trouble than he already has.
Though he was referring to the house and yard, I started thinking about my books, and this blog. I haven't shown anyone the second book, and I'm not sure I'm going to. I write as much with the sword, as I do for healing. I have tried to be honest. I have tried to be clear. I have tried to be entertaining, and courageous. I have endeavored above all not to take myself too seriously (not always with success, I think). I had conceived of this blog as a means to help others navigate these difficult times. Most of the response has been positive, which I am immensely grateful for. That said, my friend Chad asked me recently how many page views there have been. I said 9,000. He asked, "A day?" "Since I started." "That's nothing," was his honest if not entirely accurate reply.
I meant to bring healing to the world, and I have, by healing myself. I had thought to share that. I had imagined the books I've been writing as a trilogy, as a kind of guide, not as a path, but as a challenge, as a means to help the reader give him or herself permission to follow what he or she knows to be true to him or herself. I had thought to use the proceeds to re-build this house as a model of what is possible off-the-grid. It is also true, that any success would likely meet with equal or greater force by dominators and righteous oppressors. I am not afraid. But there is little support in this world for radical anarchist gorilla gardening shamanic alchemical hermeticists in service to the Goddess. And any trouble I encounter, though it come from the blind and the cruel, will be seen by my father as a betrayal on my part - and it has never been my intention to harm him. I have wanted to write a book since I was a child. I have written two; I am thinking of them now as a sacrifice unto God. As to the Goddess, she will remain, I suspect, as she has always been toward me, mostly indifferent.
I will continue to heal. To heal the land, to heal this house, and those I come in contact with, who are open to it. I will continue on the shamanic path, in service to the Goddess. I will continue to work to take this house off the grid. But I think I will do so now, quietly. This blog has been fun; I'm going to miss it. Thank you for reading. Blessings to you, and those close to you,
William Hunter Duncan
* I leave you with this from Mckenna. This is as clear a delineation of what I am and believe, and who we are, as I have heard from anyone. Timothy Leary introduces him. You are welcome to skip the Q&A, though there's gold there too, especially at the very end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMPamVaTjJE
aka Terence Mckenna: Unfolding the Stone
For long-time readers: the city went and ripped out every one of the Regent serviceberry shrubs I wrote about last July. To replace them, it appears, with long rows of identical variegated ornamental grasses, like the typically sterile, homogenized retail/commercial landscaping in a seventh-tier suburban parking lot.
I was in a dark place when I published the last post. The negredo of the alchemists, the fertile shit of birth and regeneration. There is nothing attractive or pleasant about it, though from the alchemical perspective, it is necessary, and the true creative source out of which all gold originates. This came back to me as I was sitting on the patio at the Birchwood Cafe in the Seward neighborhood, one afternoon last Saturday. There were two women sitting at a table near me, a crone, and a young, beautiful West African, speaking French. I was hostile to the world, but the weather was mild, I was softened by the mixed cultivar and wild flowers on the boulevard, so I sat there with my coffee, closed my eyes and drifted into the cadence of their conversation - though I do not understand the language. The West African seemed to key with my attention, and became more and more animated, joyous in her expression, and my spirit was in turn lifted.
The Goddess has been good to me in many ways. I have come to see women as manifestations of the Goddess; of course, to say so, that would mean that men are manifestations of the God - and each of us manifestations of both, by degrees. That's not easy for me, as I'm inclined to think God doesn't have much credibility at this point, so much that is ugly having been done, is being done, in His name, with such great success. Still, I have come to see the friction or interaction between these opposites, the feminine and the masculine, as the engine of creation. Out of unity, harmony flows. Starting with oneself.
I had been asking, of myself, of the Goddess, what is the point? Why am I here, in this house, on this land, without the means to pay for it? What really am I doing? In the summer of 2008 I called out to the Goddess, offering myself up in service. Shortly after, I met Val Kyrie. That fall, I walked away from this house, and my life here, to be with her and her kids. Since, I wrote a book, I have educated myself about the economy, about plants, about the soil, about the nature of existence, I have returned to this house where I wrote another book. I continue to educate myself. That no one understands what I am doing or why I do what I do, has been a great distress to me. What is the point of any of it, any of the advances I have made in my interior life, in my body, if the world is indifferent, if there is so little return on this investment, beyond my own satisfaction, that what I am doing I know to be true to myself?
I've been feeling the shamanic call. I am desperate, in fact, to test what I have been hearing about psychedelics. The doors of my perception are in dire need of cleansing. I planted the olilioqui, but only three of the 36 seeds I planted germinated. I would like to try three grams of mushrooms, but I don't have the means right now. There are no known psychedelics native to Minnesota, and I don't have the kind of friends who have access to the black market, and I don't really want the plants or the shrooms if I don't know where they came from. My attitude is, if I can grow it, then I should be able to consume it. My government says I can't, making it fundamentally illegitimate. Being fundamentally illegitimate, however, has never stopped any government from oppressing, not least this one. So what am I to do?
I've been spending my evenings listening to Terence Mckenna on youtube*. He has become like a mentor to me. I have never heard any man speak so eloquently, so intelligently, so gently and so profoundly, about the human experience. Like many, I thought I was alone in my thinking until I heard Terence speak. That he is likely unintelligible to most has little to do with Terence. I found a recording of a woman asking him about heavenly blue morning glory. The seeds were his first psychedelic experience (though don't go out, buy them and consume them, as they apparently make you nauseous, and many seed companies soak them in poison.) I've grown those! I'm growing a lot more now.
Then I learned reed canary grass, Phalaris arundinaceae, is a source of Dimethyltryptamine, DMT, also known as the spirit molecule. Reed canary grass is one of those noxious invasives that has come to dominate the landscape, which is ironic if the word about DMT is true. That would make Minnesota something like the promised land. I sang to it as I clipped the leaves on the shore of Minnehaha Creek. I found a juicer at Savers for $3.77. The first round, the juicer bounced around until one of the latches broke. The second round, the second latch broke, the top flew off onto the floor, plant fibers were flung around the kitchen, and the cutting apparatus spun through the air, landing in a cast iron pan at about 100 rpm/second. The juice is drying in the oven at 170 degrees.
I was working this afternoon, mudding sheetrock at a jobsite when I decided to call my father. He was not well, having just gone through a difficult surgery. Twice now, people have come to him, asking about me. Evidently, because they saw me on tv, a local news station having interviewed me about the city trying to condemn this house - which he is currently paying for. Ominously, he told me not to do anything else to bring him any more trouble than he already has.
Though he was referring to the house and yard, I started thinking about my books, and this blog. I haven't shown anyone the second book, and I'm not sure I'm going to. I write as much with the sword, as I do for healing. I have tried to be honest. I have tried to be clear. I have tried to be entertaining, and courageous. I have endeavored above all not to take myself too seriously (not always with success, I think). I had conceived of this blog as a means to help others navigate these difficult times. Most of the response has been positive, which I am immensely grateful for. That said, my friend Chad asked me recently how many page views there have been. I said 9,000. He asked, "A day?" "Since I started." "That's nothing," was his honest if not entirely accurate reply.
I meant to bring healing to the world, and I have, by healing myself. I had thought to share that. I had imagined the books I've been writing as a trilogy, as a kind of guide, not as a path, but as a challenge, as a means to help the reader give him or herself permission to follow what he or she knows to be true to him or herself. I had thought to use the proceeds to re-build this house as a model of what is possible off-the-grid. It is also true, that any success would likely meet with equal or greater force by dominators and righteous oppressors. I am not afraid. But there is little support in this world for radical anarchist gorilla gardening shamanic alchemical hermeticists in service to the Goddess. And any trouble I encounter, though it come from the blind and the cruel, will be seen by my father as a betrayal on my part - and it has never been my intention to harm him. I have wanted to write a book since I was a child. I have written two; I am thinking of them now as a sacrifice unto God. As to the Goddess, she will remain, I suspect, as she has always been toward me, mostly indifferent.
I will continue to heal. To heal the land, to heal this house, and those I come in contact with, who are open to it. I will continue on the shamanic path, in service to the Goddess. I will continue to work to take this house off the grid. But I think I will do so now, quietly. This blog has been fun; I'm going to miss it. Thank you for reading. Blessings to you, and those close to you,
William Hunter Duncan
* I leave you with this from Mckenna. This is as clear a delineation of what I am and believe, and who we are, as I have heard from anyone. Timothy Leary introduces him. You are welcome to skip the Q&A, though there's gold there too, especially at the very end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMPamVaTjJE
aka Terence Mckenna: Unfolding the Stone
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Q: How Honest Do I Want to Be?
Wednesday morning I finished the planting. There will be more planting, expanding of the gardens, and infrastructure to build, but the bulk of the planting is done. As a capstone, I planted datura seed in four different places, in the wildflower bed along the north fence, and on the sliding hill next to the sun room and the pond. The packet says 21-42 days before germination, so I don't necessarily expect to see mature plants this year, if any; and even if I do, I don't expect to experiment with the plant for its psychoactive gifts, as datura is not a plant to be trifled with. One should expect to have a great many plant allies, and at least two faithful human guides, to be asking help from the spirit of datura.
I've also planted 36 Ololiuqui seeds, Turbina corymbosa, a vine with psychoactive gifts, and about two thousand Nicotiana sylvestris and Nicotiana rustica, two South American tobacco plants sacred to shaman. None are showing any signs of germinating, but about a dozen little sprouts of sylvestris in two single-serving yogurt cups, and compared to most of the other plants around them, these seem reluctant. While I consider cannabis to be an ally, three of the last four times I've smoked a cigarette, sober or drunk, American Spirit or chemically sodden Phillip Morris, I've vomited. When you begin to think of some plants as potential allies, you find that they are likely to test you, and that is not likely to be pleasant. And if they give, they seem to give most to those who are honest, which is a thing that can't be faked to a plant.
There is also a perfectly rational explanation, why all my seedlings are struggling, not just the shamanic plants but the vegetables also. Right now, the surface of my garden beds is an inhospitable place. Even the uber-prolific Chenopodium species, the red* and the green Lambs Quarter, are having a hard time getting started, though outside the beds they're doing fine; I'm eating more of that than anything else in my yard right now. The soil is carbon rich, and hummus and nitrogen deficient. I've planted red clover, which I'll cut periodically to help alleviate the nitrogen deficiency, but even they are having a hard time in these harsh conditions. It was only last year that it was sod, in most places. The top inch dries out quick (I probably should have spread what compost I had, even though it wasn't ready). It's also been a cool and gray month, on the whole.
Which has lead to a peculiar state of mind for me, as I found myself raging around the house looking for a glove that turned out to have been resting on the back step for who knows how long; perhaps the blooming golden alexander emerging from a crack at the base of the steps, the most attractive in my yard, knows? There is chaos in my life, though considerable order and a greater balance, progress, and yet it is difficult for me sometimes to remember, what is the point? I feel like I'm doing what I feel called to do. I'm writing books. I maintain a blog. I garden. But I'm alone as I've always been, and my house is still a mess, and there's no money to do the things I know I can do to the house - and no one fucking cares, I hear myself repeating.
Am I depressed? That's not the word for what I am. A curious idea, the sane asking the insane what it means to be Homo sapien sapien on planet Earth. At least five billion people on this planet not having any idea what that really means; and the other two billion aren't the ones excelling in this current hyper-active state of epic super-madness. Here's a great idea: increase demand until you've exhausted supply globally, while covering most of the planet with armament, and pollute everything in sight. That we are not helping each other prepare for resource constraints is not the craziest thing there ever was, but it's surely one of the saddest.
After finding the glove where it's long been, I stood for a long time listening to the radio. Manufacturing, slowing. Housing, slowing. Hiring, slowing. Bleak. The weather is still cool, everything preferring warm weather struggling, but there's heat on the way. There's also flooding, mid-Missouri river in the Dakotas, after the southern Mississippi river States already flooded so badly, well downstream. E-coli. Higher food prices. Energy shortages in China, forecast through the summer. The Minneapolis housing market is considered by some to be the worst in the nation.
But then a recording of Tim Flannery at the Commonwealth Club, speaking a Gaian tongue, reminding us that there are thousands of species living on us, in us, that we can not live without, that we require to be healthy; that the true state of existence is not competition, but co-existence. That we as a species have become like a super-organism, that we could act if we awaken to our role in the biosphere, like a consciousness for the Earth, a "true global intelligence."
The glove I so raged about was for a bike ride, a gathering-scouting trip, and possibly the gathering of mullein and nettles - Mullein for the smoke, nettles for dried greens, for tea and soup or stew - though I'm sure I can pick nettles without a glove, without getting stung, much. And then, as I walked out of the house ready to ride, I locked myself out without my keys. I checked all my pockets and then the pack, and then the windows which I'm generally good about latching - though I found one window unlatched, behind a locked storm window.
Trying to laugh at myself but not really being able to, I went scouting; but the Minnesota river as it passed through Fort Snelling State Park, still flooding, smelled bad, and there was a foul red affluent flowing out of a culvert into Snelling Lake, from the airport. I would have liked to continue on, to the National Wildlife Refuge, but the way is blocked by airport land, and more culverts; which in the spring, drain millions of gallons of plane de-icer, that has been contained in anaerobic holding ponds all winter, which smells like eggs and onions in a cooler in the garage in the summer. Though the woods, I do have to say looked lovely, a perfectly uncrowded spring balance of order and chaos, and I saw several species I'll be returning to for seed, for the boulevard under the maple.
On National Park land where the Bureau of Mines used to be, at Coldwater spring, I saw an exuberant crowd of inner-city kids, having fun planting wildflowers and grasses, with a ranger wearing a big stiff ranger hat, right in the little cul-de-sac where last spring I planted a female and male Cannabis sativa. Someone removed the female and her root ball shortly after, and I never went back for the male. Though because my government finds it convenient to infringe on my sovereign rights as a human being, and I can't grow my own at home, which I am both skilled enough and naturally inclined to do, I've been smoking lately the flowers of the three males I planted on a ledge overlooking the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers last spring, in St Paul.
I got home and used a knife and a scissors to unscrew the storm window covering the window that wasn't latched. I climbed through the open window onto the desk I used this winter to write much of my second book, the desk now piled with office clutter. And there were my keys, on the desk in front of my face. I must have set them there while I stood listening to the radio. It is hard to imagine how long that window latch has been open. I don't often open that window. Nor do I generally set the keys on that desk.
Sam Harris finds that we are only matter, but he nor anyone has any explanation really for the mystery of consciousness. What was going on in me that caused me to set those keys there in front of the only window that was unlatched and then lock myself out, at a time when I am deeply engaged in a bleak outlook for our species, and a bleak outlook for myself, and a bleak desire to divest myself of any and all responsibility to anything?
I biked across the city then, to meet with the partners, to go over what we've ordered for merchandise for the Halloween store. The three of us are considerably more organized than the two of them were, at this time last year. I reminded them about electrical shortages in China. Delivery sooner rather than later.
Thursday morning I woke to an erotic dream about Val Kyrie, the woman I once left this house for. To say it was a pleasant dream would not be accurate at all. The image of her was as close to a goddess as I have seen in any dream any time recently, an image in the dark aspect, full of mockery. It was unusual, not only for the character of the dream, but for the fact that my erotic dreams come about as often as some comets. I realized then that it was the anniversary of my return to this house, from my time with Val Kyrie and her family. I looked out the window, and saw the first spring sight of my favorite blue flag iris.
A year later, and there is more order in my life, and in some ways I am stronger than I have ever been. But there is also abundant chaos. There is very little money. I have not published a book. My father is still paying the mortgage on this house and while there is potential work, nothing is certain. And there is little guidance. I am left to interpret signs, to find meaning where I can, how I can. It is a curious life, this. A mystery.
* The Chenopodium spc. that is red was billed by the seed company as a traditional Hopi spinach. It is basically a burgundy Lamb's Quarter, of which there are now about a hundred-thousand little burgundy seedlings scattered around the yard. They are actually quite attractive, and Lamb's Quarter is one of the most healthy and tasty greens available, so I'm letting them be, mostly.
I've also planted 36 Ololiuqui seeds, Turbina corymbosa, a vine with psychoactive gifts, and about two thousand Nicotiana sylvestris and Nicotiana rustica, two South American tobacco plants sacred to shaman. None are showing any signs of germinating, but about a dozen little sprouts of sylvestris in two single-serving yogurt cups, and compared to most of the other plants around them, these seem reluctant. While I consider cannabis to be an ally, three of the last four times I've smoked a cigarette, sober or drunk, American Spirit or chemically sodden Phillip Morris, I've vomited. When you begin to think of some plants as potential allies, you find that they are likely to test you, and that is not likely to be pleasant. And if they give, they seem to give most to those who are honest, which is a thing that can't be faked to a plant.
There is also a perfectly rational explanation, why all my seedlings are struggling, not just the shamanic plants but the vegetables also. Right now, the surface of my garden beds is an inhospitable place. Even the uber-prolific Chenopodium species, the red* and the green Lambs Quarter, are having a hard time getting started, though outside the beds they're doing fine; I'm eating more of that than anything else in my yard right now. The soil is carbon rich, and hummus and nitrogen deficient. I've planted red clover, which I'll cut periodically to help alleviate the nitrogen deficiency, but even they are having a hard time in these harsh conditions. It was only last year that it was sod, in most places. The top inch dries out quick (I probably should have spread what compost I had, even though it wasn't ready). It's also been a cool and gray month, on the whole.
Which has lead to a peculiar state of mind for me, as I found myself raging around the house looking for a glove that turned out to have been resting on the back step for who knows how long; perhaps the blooming golden alexander emerging from a crack at the base of the steps, the most attractive in my yard, knows? There is chaos in my life, though considerable order and a greater balance, progress, and yet it is difficult for me sometimes to remember, what is the point? I feel like I'm doing what I feel called to do. I'm writing books. I maintain a blog. I garden. But I'm alone as I've always been, and my house is still a mess, and there's no money to do the things I know I can do to the house - and no one fucking cares, I hear myself repeating.
Am I depressed? That's not the word for what I am. A curious idea, the sane asking the insane what it means to be Homo sapien sapien on planet Earth. At least five billion people on this planet not having any idea what that really means; and the other two billion aren't the ones excelling in this current hyper-active state of epic super-madness. Here's a great idea: increase demand until you've exhausted supply globally, while covering most of the planet with armament, and pollute everything in sight. That we are not helping each other prepare for resource constraints is not the craziest thing there ever was, but it's surely one of the saddest.
After finding the glove where it's long been, I stood for a long time listening to the radio. Manufacturing, slowing. Housing, slowing. Hiring, slowing. Bleak. The weather is still cool, everything preferring warm weather struggling, but there's heat on the way. There's also flooding, mid-Missouri river in the Dakotas, after the southern Mississippi river States already flooded so badly, well downstream. E-coli. Higher food prices. Energy shortages in China, forecast through the summer. The Minneapolis housing market is considered by some to be the worst in the nation.
But then a recording of Tim Flannery at the Commonwealth Club, speaking a Gaian tongue, reminding us that there are thousands of species living on us, in us, that we can not live without, that we require to be healthy; that the true state of existence is not competition, but co-existence. That we as a species have become like a super-organism, that we could act if we awaken to our role in the biosphere, like a consciousness for the Earth, a "true global intelligence."
The glove I so raged about was for a bike ride, a gathering-scouting trip, and possibly the gathering of mullein and nettles - Mullein for the smoke, nettles for dried greens, for tea and soup or stew - though I'm sure I can pick nettles without a glove, without getting stung, much. And then, as I walked out of the house ready to ride, I locked myself out without my keys. I checked all my pockets and then the pack, and then the windows which I'm generally good about latching - though I found one window unlatched, behind a locked storm window.
Trying to laugh at myself but not really being able to, I went scouting; but the Minnesota river as it passed through Fort Snelling State Park, still flooding, smelled bad, and there was a foul red affluent flowing out of a culvert into Snelling Lake, from the airport. I would have liked to continue on, to the National Wildlife Refuge, but the way is blocked by airport land, and more culverts; which in the spring, drain millions of gallons of plane de-icer, that has been contained in anaerobic holding ponds all winter, which smells like eggs and onions in a cooler in the garage in the summer. Though the woods, I do have to say looked lovely, a perfectly uncrowded spring balance of order and chaos, and I saw several species I'll be returning to for seed, for the boulevard under the maple.
On National Park land where the Bureau of Mines used to be, at Coldwater spring, I saw an exuberant crowd of inner-city kids, having fun planting wildflowers and grasses, with a ranger wearing a big stiff ranger hat, right in the little cul-de-sac where last spring I planted a female and male Cannabis sativa. Someone removed the female and her root ball shortly after, and I never went back for the male. Though because my government finds it convenient to infringe on my sovereign rights as a human being, and I can't grow my own at home, which I am both skilled enough and naturally inclined to do, I've been smoking lately the flowers of the three males I planted on a ledge overlooking the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers last spring, in St Paul.
I got home and used a knife and a scissors to unscrew the storm window covering the window that wasn't latched. I climbed through the open window onto the desk I used this winter to write much of my second book, the desk now piled with office clutter. And there were my keys, on the desk in front of my face. I must have set them there while I stood listening to the radio. It is hard to imagine how long that window latch has been open. I don't often open that window. Nor do I generally set the keys on that desk.
Sam Harris finds that we are only matter, but he nor anyone has any explanation really for the mystery of consciousness. What was going on in me that caused me to set those keys there in front of the only window that was unlatched and then lock myself out, at a time when I am deeply engaged in a bleak outlook for our species, and a bleak outlook for myself, and a bleak desire to divest myself of any and all responsibility to anything?
I biked across the city then, to meet with the partners, to go over what we've ordered for merchandise for the Halloween store. The three of us are considerably more organized than the two of them were, at this time last year. I reminded them about electrical shortages in China. Delivery sooner rather than later.
Thursday morning I woke to an erotic dream about Val Kyrie, the woman I once left this house for. To say it was a pleasant dream would not be accurate at all. The image of her was as close to a goddess as I have seen in any dream any time recently, an image in the dark aspect, full of mockery. It was unusual, not only for the character of the dream, but for the fact that my erotic dreams come about as often as some comets. I realized then that it was the anniversary of my return to this house, from my time with Val Kyrie and her family. I looked out the window, and saw the first spring sight of my favorite blue flag iris.
A year later, and there is more order in my life, and in some ways I am stronger than I have ever been. But there is also abundant chaos. There is very little money. I have not published a book. My father is still paying the mortgage on this house and while there is potential work, nothing is certain. And there is little guidance. I am left to interpret signs, to find meaning where I can, how I can. It is a curious life, this. A mystery.
* The Chenopodium spc. that is red was billed by the seed company as a traditional Hopi spinach. It is basically a burgundy Lamb's Quarter, of which there are now about a hundred-thousand little burgundy seedlings scattered around the yard. They are actually quite attractive, and Lamb's Quarter is one of the most healthy and tasty greens available, so I'm letting them be, mostly.
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