Day # 271 Cannibalism

It seems to me that the combination of greed and a lack of leadership will end up doing the job that generations of revolutionaries and gadflies could not do, namely, un-make capitalism.

I have to ponder this a bit, but if I am not mistaken, the modern financial structure as I know it is eating itself from the inside out.  It appears to be completely unsustainable and as such should collapse on itself.

The thought has been lurking around in my mind as I move both household and shop to the hinterlands across the water.  Yeah, I've been busy and the blog has suffered.  There will be much more to write about in the coming days.

Day # 263 Grow your revolution.....

While we are about the business of knocking over the last upright bricks in the foundation of post-modern capitalism, another method of striking a blow occurs to me.  How would you like to have some American Gothic sort of fun, maybe meet the neighbors, and in the process strike another blow?  Easey-peasy.

Grow your own.

Well, you can do that too, and it will be striking a blow of a different sort. but what I actually meant was growing your own food.  That's right, grow some food.  Reclaim a little land, Sisters and Brothers, even if you dwell in the confines of the apartment block or the condo.  Bring a bit of the earth back into cultivation. After all, its even an exhortation in the bible somewhere.  Get some pots, fill 'em with dirt and grow some maters on your deck or balcony.  If you want to get crazy, check the web for window gardens and grow some greens in recycled pop bottles.  Dig up a section of that planter strip and grow squash, not grass.

Whatever way you choose to make with the free edibles, you are taking back a little control, even if its one pot at a time.  First, each plant you grow throws a little precious oxygen back into the atmosphere for the collective to breathe.  Second, with any luck you will get a few mouthfuls of real food out of the deal, something that did not come out of a food factory.  And speaking of food factories, growing a bit of your own consumables means that you are consuming  just a bit less of the pre-packaged processed pap that masquerades as modern delectable yumminess these days.

So in a soft and earth-mother sort of way, strike a blow against the food industry and grow a green thing or two.  Make the rooftops sag a bit with fecundity and give the corporate farm owners a few bad dreams.

You can add a back-hand blow as well.  If you can't quite find enough arable to feed the whole family, try to buy as much of your veg from your local farmer's market as you can.  These are the folks that are selling the funny looking maters that aren't all the same and don't come in plastic wrap.

Hey, today it was a one-two punch of green-thumb-fu!!  Rock the green world Boys and Girls.

Day # 262 Knowing

One of the blessings about not soaking up news via the radio or television is that in that silence, there is a merciful reprieve from the frenzy to sell me something.

I believe it is imperative to know, truly, as one know's one's own meaty bits, why broadcasting exists.  Every single time a broadcasting device is turned on, its reason for being is to sell you something.  Soup, soap, hope or an agenda, be assured that the people behind that broadcast are very clearly and methodically trying to sell you a bill of goods.

Examine the very word "broadcast".  One way to interpret this word is to break it down into its component parts: "to cast" and "broadly".  It is a broad net, indeed, that the media empires are casting.  They are hoping that through sensationalism, drama or the undeniable appeal of "Fat People Crying", you will be so compelled to sit, riveted,  to the small screen, that they will be able to insert their message into your brain.  It is that message, for whatever product they are shilling, that is the real exchange.

This is not, friends and neighbors, limited to attempts to get you to purchase a boxy car driven by hamsters, a car that will make you so terminally hip that you will wonder how you lived without it.  No, it is not just products that are poised in the chute, waiting for the next opening in your consumer queue.  There are agendas to be marketed, outlooks and beliefs to be consumed.  Even the esteemed purveyors of culture at PBS and NPR, no matter how much I love them, are in the selling game.  Faux News and CNN are selling the fear.  NPR and PBS are selling the antidote.  But make no mistake, they are both selling.

This frenzy of commerce does not end with products or prevailing attitudes.  Particularly during the newscasts, where the perceived viewing audience is of a certain age, the emphasis is on selling health and robust sex at later and later stages of life.  This medication makes you micturate long and well while that pill will enable you to sit next to a gorgeous partner, each of you in your separate bathtubs.  It is my guess separate bathtubs overlooking a beautiful lake are a powerful sexual allusion but I have to admit the significance of the thing plumb evades me.

When the switch is flipped or the dial is turned, the media springs forth to soothe, to entertain, to enlighten and inform.  Smoke and mirrors, behind which are the inevitable sellers, probing, searching for an opening.  They are fabricating the approach, the con that will bring you to open your wallet or pocketbook without even knowing that you are doing it.  Later you will notice that you simply must have this or that because without it your life is a sere desert.

And flaccid as well.

Day # 257 Strike

I was sitting in one of the two lounge chairs on the tiny patio of my favorite coffee spot when a woman and her daughter stepped up, looking for seats.  The utilitarian thing to do was offer them my seat, along with the empty one, and move to the tables, squeezing in with some other folks.  So that is what I did.  I settled in with my coffee compatriots and began soaking up the caffeine and the conversation.  And the conversation was revolution. 

The first coffee house appeared in London in the 1650’s, as coffee made its way from Turkey northwards across the continent, carried by traders and commerce.  Coffee shops soon became the gathering point for merchants seeking a buzz and news of business, and the citizenry seeking news of the English revolution or the restoration of the monarchy.  Coffee, Cromwell and conversation.  Coffee houses became the engine of revolution, a tradition that continues to this day.

Back at our table, coffees in our hands, I was the oldest of the gathered by a good two decades.  The talk was earnest, driven, and from youthful mouths.  Topics ranged from conspiracies of corporations to the evils of Monsanto. 

When the conversation came around to the financial world and its control of citizens lives, I had to pop in my tuppence worth.  I asked my fellow imbibers if they really wanted to strike a blow against capitalism.  Heads turned and since I had now opened my big yapper I plunged on.

Paraphrased from my feeble memory, my harangue went something like this…..

“I don’t think revolutions are started or won by grand sweeping gestures.  They may have been at one time, but the old model of taking to the streets or barricades to march or picket is just not getting it done.  It worked for awhile in the 1960’s, probably because it took the established powers by surprise.  When they recovered, they learned to co-opt the forces of change and use those forces to sell products.  That is what they have been doing ever since.”

“If you want to strike a blow against capitalism, if you really want to send a spasm down the place that their spines would be if they had them, eliminate all of your debt.  Pay off all of your credit cards.  Drive a car that is paid for.  Better yet, pay cash for it.  Buy serviceable, used, things instead of new crap.  There is an immense power in the hand, or the pocketbook, of the American consumer.  Corporations court us and seduce us.  They depend on us for their livelihoods and their existence.  Banking institutions thrive on public indebtedness.  Strike a blow directly at their control.  Pay off you debt.  Not only does it free you, it gives you control over them, instead of the other way around.”

“Eliminating your consumer debt strikes a blow and frees you at the same time.  Convincing some of your friends and neighbors to do the same strikes a sharper blow and makes your neighborhood a richer place.  Convince a segment of the population to eliminate their consumer debt and you start to unravel the system.  Modern capitalism is based on consumer spending and debt and the dream of an ever increasing cycle of both of these things.  It is impossible to sustain.  So go ahead, pay off your debt, free yourself.  In the process you will also be raining blows on the ill-conceived props that are holding up this house of cards.”

Day # 256 Possessed

One night Frank was on his way home
from work, stopped at the liquor store,
picked up a couple of Mickey's Big Mouth’s.
Drank 'em in the car on his way to the
Shell station; he got a gallon of gas in a can.

Drove home, doused everything in
the house, torched it.
Parked across the street laughing,
watching it burn, all Halloween
orange and chimney red.                    Tom Waits  “Frank’s Wild Years”

If I, like Frank in “Frank’s Wild Years,” have that final break with consumer reality and domestic life and set the whole thing ablaze, there are very few things that I would, following a sudden pang of regret, brave the flames to save.  I would not put the guitars on the pyre to begin with and I can fit them all in my truck, more or less.  Barring that, really, what else is there?

There is one thing that would cause me to risk a good singeing, and that is my pocket knife.  I was given this knife from the hand of Leslie E., my first true love.  (Wherever you are MS E., I still love you!)  The little Old Timer had been her grandfather’s.  It is a small two-blade folding knife with a stag handle and is of the variety known as a gentleman’s pen knife.  I received this petite implement in 1980 and it was at least twenty years old at that time.  I have had it ever since.

While unimpressive as an object, the power stored in this little tool is amazing.  The knife is endowed with the impish spirit of some long-passed Buddhist master.  Why the spirit of some long-departed lama would hang around in my pocket knife is just as much a mystery to me as anyone else, yet this is nonetheless the case.  I know this to be true because the damn thing likes to teach me lessons on the nature of attachment and suffering.

As we are all clear from our Comp-Religion classes, some of the most basic principles of Buddhism are that “Life is suffering” and that “Suffering is caused by attachment (desire).”  Like any other distillation of complex ideas, this one is fraught with simplistic peril, but hey, it’s a blog not a treatise.  Still, the simple idea is that when one becomes attached to something or someone, one is bound to suffer when that thing or person is no longer there.  Because all things are transitory, all things will eventually cease to be and when that happens one’s attachment to that object will cause pain in the object’s absence.

I know, I know, “Thank you Mr. World Religion…the knife?”  Yes, well…

My knife has the most annoying habit of disappearing.  It knows exactly how attached I am to it.  It knows that I prize this one object above all others in my possession.  No other physical object has the emotional power for me that this bit of steel and bone and brass has.  From time to time, whenever the knife feels like I am getting too attached, or to un-mindful or maybe just out of a capricious pursuit of mischief, the knife disappears.  It will stay gone for days, or weeks, or months.  The only way the knife will reappear is when I have given up hope, passed through regret and fruitless searching, and released myself from the attachment.  Suddenly, with an imagined smirk, the knife will appear in a place previously searched a thousand times or in the most unlikely of places that defied even the thought of search.

The most recent example of this has just ended with the joyous reuniting and the renewal of my attachment, which, of course, will only lead to another disappearance.  I never learn.  The knife had been carefully placed in the fob pocket of my leather moto pants, where it lives when I am riding.  When I arrived at the temporary illusion of home, the knife was gone.  Despite patting and searching and rummaging, there was not a sign.  It had, I concluded, fallen out of my pocket on the road and was now gone forever.  Eventually, after walking some of my route searching the gutters, I gave up and purchased a new knife, a beautiful little Bear Brothers made in Jacksonville, Alabama. 

It has been a wet summer here so I have not worn my leathers since that day.  This morning I slipped on my pants and then my boots and felt a lump in the boot.  After checking the boot and finding nothing I checked my pants leg for a bad zipper and felt the tell-tale shape of my little pen knife hiding in the lining of my leather pants.  It had fallen (or burrowed) through a hole in my fob pocket and dropped away into the depths of the lining.  Once hung up in the closet, it had fallen to the hem of the leg and waited there, chuckling to itself, whilst I searched in vain.

O frabjous day!  Callooh! Callay!  Jabberwocks and other creatures that need slaying ought to be aware that I am once more united with my precious vorpal blade and unless they want their heads departed from their shoulders, they had best be on their best behavior.  (My apologies to the late Mr. Carroll)

And I will never be parted from that which possesses me again.  Never, never ever.  

Day # 255 Leaks

What news stories transcend the delivery by media outlets and become word-of-mouth stories?  In recent days, during the immolation of all other things personal, I have had a few interesting leaks to ponder.

The death of the singer Amy Winehouse immediately became, literally, a public discussion.  Within an hour of the discovery of her tragic death, the tweet world had alerted the waiter where I was eating and I quickly overheard the conversations regarding her untimely passing.

Our celebration of the cult of celebrity has led to a fascination with all aspects of the lives of the famous or infamous.  Add to that the terrible irony of some of MS Winehouse's song titles and her frequent public binges and there is certainly something for the paparazzi to sink their bloody teeth into.  Yet without a hungry audience, the paparazzi would drift off into their deserved ignominy.  Our collective hunger for a window on fame creates an engine for information that quickly bypasses the mainstream media.

Even with a complete news blackout, I cannot help but hear about the complete lack of leadership (my interpretation) in Washington, DC, that has led to yet another budget "crisis."  I have to question whether this even qualifies as a news story, for as ineptitude and what Mencken would call "boobery" have become the status quo in the US Capitol, why would it be news?  Partisan brinkmanship and threats to shut down the government's finances have become a routine so devoid of content as to become a definition of demagoguery.

The last and most serious news story that quickly became the talk on the street was the massacre in Norway, an almost unbelievable act of barbarity.  I heard of this within hours of it happening and details continued to be discussed around me, the most telling being America's amazement at the sentencing structure of the Norwegian judicial system.

These were three news stories, as distinct from one another as could be imagined, that could be heard from mouths of the citizenry in the last few days.  I am not sure what conclusions to draw from this so I will just present this in the form of observations.

The list of rants to come, under the loose heading of "Strike a Blow" will start tomorrow.  In the midst of moving and schlepping and "watching it burn, all Halloween orange and chimney red", 
I have let writing and music slip to the wayside.  But no more, no more chants he.    

Day # 240 Exile

While it is not exactly Elba, or Ile du Diable or the Siberian Gulag, the town of Southworth, Washington is not exactly the Great White Way either.  Yet as I begin to sort and pack what will hopefully be the smallest possible amount of personal possessions, I realize that this is where I'm bound.  I will be miles and a ferry boat ride from any major metropolitan area.  Can a good urban creature such as myself survive this ignominious banishment?

I have spent the vast majority of my life, at least the portion that I had control over, living in the midst of several of America's cities.  To be sure, I have dwelt in far-flung hamlets, some even without benefit of traffic lights, but this was mostly in the course of my employment and always on a temporary basis.  I love the forests and mountains and often retreat there, but my heart always answers the smelly call of the city.

I like big cities.  I like the excitement and the smell and the noise and the culture and the bustle of a good city.  I seek out and treasure run-down bookstores, corner cafes, eclectic coffee houses and neighborhoods with foods from all parts of the globe.  I love hearing languages other than my own spoken on the streets of my home city.

When I travel, I often wander the countryside, but it is the cities that I remember.  The frenetic energy of Bangkok, the grit and electricity of punk-era London, the awe-inspiring scope of Mexico City or the foodie nirvana of San Francisco; all of these places pull me back.  I heed the urban call.

Soon I will be living on land that was once an orchard on the wrong side of Puget Sound.  I will be able to walk for miles, literally, in any direction and arrive at:  nothing.  Trees, to be sure and lots of houses here and there, set back from the little roads on their two or five acres or clustered tightly along the shores of Puget Sound wherever the cliffs aren't too steep.  Nothing else.  No cafes, no stores, no coffee kiosks and most certainly no damn noodle shops.

There are things to add to the credit side of the ledger, to be sure.  There are new places to paddle, circumnavigating Blake Island or getting epic and paddling across the shipping lanes to West Seattle.  Yes, that's it!  I can plan my escape by sea, slipping into the waters of the Sound and paddling my sorry ass all the way to the beaches of Lincoln Park.  How I will enjoy the blessings of urbanity while toting my board around I do not know.  At least I'll be close enough to smell it.