They Hate Your Freedom

I'm on a reread of "The Dharma Bums."  One thing I am enjoying about it is that it allows me to hang out with some people who also don't fit in here in America.

Now, don't get me wrong, these guys are clearly assholes, and I wouldn't fit in with them either, but they express wonderful things like these lines from Japhy:
 

when I was a little kid in Oregon I didn't feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values..."
 

... now because of faults and sins in that lifetime I was being degraded to a more grievous domain of existence and my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom.

Whether that was something said by Gary Snyder or in part embellished by Kerouac for the Japhy character, I don't know, but  isn't that marvelous?

I have come to understand that it is hard to actually believe in freedom, and it is usually a mask for other values. The most common is prosperity, which is material ease and not being socially humiliated... I remember reading a comment online where someone said the way you can translate the "freedom" a conventional American talks about is "the freedom to exploit," and then contradictions start to make sense. Americans hate your freedom.  

Well, my autistic, literal brain tried at one point to make freedom a value, and I tried to build the capacities for freedom in my students. I remember saying things like "learning to choose is so important that even the wrong choice is better than no choice."

But all you have to do is look at the growth of home owner's associations to realize that Americans don't want freedom.

Silence

I went to the closest state park, about a twenty minute drive from my house, and I found a side trail and a place to sit by the lake. And then I practiced listening.

The spot was far enough out that at times the only human-made noise I heard was a light hum, far off, from I know not what. Over time, there were planes, cars, even a boat, but all of those noises were short-lived... It got quiet enough to hear water lapping against the rocks, birds squawking at each other on an island in the distance, and robins near by, moving through the leaf litter.

I was still long enough, that a little wren came within feet of me, coming to rest on a branch a little higher up than my level, wren's being some of the bravest of the birds.

As I kept practicing my silence, I thought of John Cage and his quest to find ultimate silence. It one day led him to a sealed chamber where it was so quiet that all he could hear was his body's automatic functions, including the whining sound of his neurons firing...

I am glad someone went that far to report it back to me. From that report I get that you cannot be alive and have total silence. But still, it is nice to get away from civilization at the level of my senses today.

Photos and Journies

Since I've had a child photos have become very important to me. I sort them in folders to backup:

Cats
Darcy Adventures
Darcy chill
Misc
Nature

The cats photos have really dropped off, but still work having the cat-egory. When I did my most recent sorting, I made the judgement call that the photos that go into Darcy Adventures are not just ones showing her being adventurous, but also adventures that we are only on because we have her. So, if there is is a beautiful nature photo, but it was taken when we were on one of our trips to another county, then it still goes in Darcy Adventures.  

I highly enjoy the process of sorting the photos. I have a little shell script that I can type 1 through 5 and it sorts the photo that is up in the appropriate category. Should this just be done by some kind of AI sort? I don't think so, as these regular backups give a chance to look at the pictures again.

Though I am a bit embarrassed to have read the source, I am honest enough about where I get my ideas to cite Ayn Rand's Romantic Manifesto stating that art is a selective representation of reality... And I like what I select with these photos to represent reality.  There is exploration, reverence, beauty, love, curiosity and creation. And just as important is what there is *not* in these photos... anxiety, cruelty, or greed.

I did my sorting yesterday while listening to trance music, and the experience of it compelled me to immediately grab Kerouac's book "The Dharma Bums," which I immediately pulled off my shelf, where it had laid dormant for a few years after the only time I had read it, and embark on rereading it.

One moment in particular made me start thinking about the book. I was going through pictures of my great solo adventure, which was walking on a bridge over a river that separated two counties, and one of the photos was of a bit of graffiti that was scrawled somewhere in the middle. At the time, I had thought to myself about when he reached the top of a mountain, Japhy had given out some loud noises ("a beautiful broken yodel... his triumphant mountain-conquering Buddha Mountain Smashing song of joy"), and when Kerouac's stand-in character asked him about it, he replied that "those things aren't made to be heard by the people below ..."
 

Assholes?, sure, but it is beautiful to that there are nooks that you can only get to by going to places so many cannot bother with. I am sure the vast majority of mountaineers would look down on my adventure, but that is very much besides the point.

The point? Something in me is seeking, yearns to see new things. But not tourism, which satisfies everyone in my familiar circles. I seek escape, so I can come back sane enough.

antiX

Installing antiX Linux did everything I wanted it to do for my old de-googled Chromebook (Batman). It was easy to install, all the windows open up in a snappy fashion, and it boots quicker than Mint. And because it is still in the Deb family, I was able to use apt to easily restore my command-line comforts [1].

Also, it has surprised me in a lot of pleasant ways. I love the aesthetic choices; the theme that comes out of the box is beautiful, and icewm rules. It was just so easy to customize with a file simply called keys in the .icewm directory[2]. But the most pleasant surprise was how quick the shutdown is. I have always found long boot up time to being annoying, but I didn't realize how much time in my life I have allowed systemd to waste, when the processes can just be knocked down, end.  

So here is a rite of passage (mind you, not an attempt at gate-keeping): you have achieved "deep Linux" when you have an informed opinion on systemd.

[1] acpi, aspell (which doesn't do me any good without aspell-en), lynx, vitetris, freesweep

[2] So easy to get all of the modifications that I want that I now don't see the benefit in putting on Suckless's DWM and having to recompile each time I want to make a change.. 

The Project so Far

 I have named my fleet of discarded laptops after characters in batman. So far there is Alfred (Mint), Batman (Arch), Catwoman (Mint), Dr. Hugo (Arch), and Etrigan is just sitting with Windows, waiting for another chance at life.

I forgot my password on Batman, one of my chromebooks-turned-ultrabooks, so I decided the easiest way to deal with it would be to just install a new OS. Ha ha.

The USB I have been using to install Arch didn't work -- Python, Traceback, something, something. Fuck it. I'm not a real Arch user; I just use the archinstall script. Next up, I went to my go-to Mint. But man, holy shit, the difference in Mint Xia (version 22.1) versus Una (version 20.3) is massive. It is a full gig bigger, with represents damn near a 50% increase on the size of the ISO. And while that worked really well for the cheapo new computer I recently bought and set up for my mother-in-law[1] Batman absolutely could not take it...

I am not going to stand having to wait for a window to open. I see it as a moral principle that the user should not have to wait for a basic I/O operation. And what makes for a moral principle (versus an opinion) is a willingness to make sacrifices in its defense. And so I feel it is now time for Batman to move to AntiX Linux (or Tiny Core, or Puppy). I am now running into the position where my problems may be caused in no small part by the size of systemd.

Good. Now I have reasons to try to be punk as hell about something. (Uh -- that I can actually do something about).

[1] I did not use the Batman naming convention on her computer, instead naming it "MethodistBook." If I ever take the computer back, I'll wipe the OS and rename it in the Batman convention.

Out East 1

 
I had previously been exposed to what a superstitious shit show Buddhism had been prior to the Victorian period, but I had not investigated the matter very deeply. Today, I listened to the Stuff You Should Know podcast [1] and learned that mindfulness (sati) was not known to common people, instead confined to monasteries. The claim is that the event that led to these practices becoming available to commoners in the area, let alone Westerners was the British take-over of present-day Myanmar. The Buddhists priests were forbidden, and so for Buddhism to survive, it had to move to lay leadership and produce texts... It was some form of these processes that became the first wave of Buddhism to spread through the West, to be read about by figures such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Nietzsche.

The problem is that this was a pre-screened, pre-influenced type of Buddhism, which ignored the rituals, folk ways, and relic worship that Buddhism for somewhere in the high 90 percent of all practitioners for centuries.

I don't know if knowing this earlier would have helped me to avoid going too deep down Eastern thought or not. I would like to think it would have, as it would have shown how much of what I agreed with was false positives.

[1] That podcast is my main intellectual diet right now, as I am burying my head in the sand around politics and the replacement of humanity.

In Offence of Food

 I have been eating a lot of food lately. And by "food," I mean in the sense of Michael Pollan's book "In Defense of Food," where he points out how much of we eat wouldn't be recognizable as food by previous generations, and offers this manta: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

My current diet is informed by experiences, years ago, with the Slow Carb Diet. Six days on, with a cheat day. But instead of no carbs from grains on those days, I am allowing myself one small serving, usually from toast. But, yeah, beans, meat, and vegetables.   

This started because my wife was unhappy with what the standard American diet was doing to her, and it was making her feel. Also, she wasn't liking food costs. So I drew a little chart showing three overlapping circles: cost, health, and variety/novelty. And in that moment I won an argument that is over a decade old, one I had long given up any hope of winning. I feel like my partner in life is finally willing to strike back at the evil nature of consumerism and the American Way.

One bite at a time.