The Stool

I made a little stool that packs flat and can be assembled with screws. I decided to test it out the same day I finished it and headed out to the Sutton Urban Wilderness, and took a side trail and then a trail off that, coming to a small clearing I had never seen before. 

 

Away from it all.

As this was one of the quickest paths, I was still very close to a busy road, and could hear cars going by at all times while I sat on my assembled stool and sipped my tea. I do not find the sounds of cars beautiful, so I did not practice listening, like I did not to long ago at the state park which is a 20 minute drive from my house. But I choose to feel comfort, knowing that people were close by (whereas I feel peace when I know they are not), and I practiced my watching and noticing instead.

There were more bird sightings than times I head a jackass with a vehicle that was deliberately too loud, so I will call that a win.

I split the tea into thirds so it would stay warm coming out of my thermos, and that was how I marked the time, leaving at the end of my improvised tea ceremony. The drive back took 4 minutes, though I take a longer route to the park to avoid working against traffic.

Shamans, Poverty, and Kerouac

 There was a time where I thought I was going to write a book with the following thesis: a great deal of mental illnesses are tied to a need that human tribes had for something like 2-4 shamans per 100 people, and that the purpose of a shaman is to break out of traps normies get into since they construct reality on shared opinions and deference to authority. A shaman is off doing their own crazy things and is only listened to during certain rituals, or during a crisis.

But as societies gained mass, fewer and fewer shamans were needed. Monasteries were a place to house the shamanic, but I reckon they tended to be run by normies.

Eventually people had enough mobility (a right very much taken for granted by us moderns) that the shamanic could find nooks and crannies to exist in urban areas. William Blake. The Surrealists. Kerouac and the Beats.

In each of these cases, you have artists living in poverty, paying a real price to be different.

That's what struck me in my reread of "The Dharma Bums": all the poverty. For the most part cheerful, honorable poverty, but still poverty. Hitchhiking, train jumping, sleeping on beaches or even in ditches by the woods, and living in shacks that are behind the main house on a property, with only straw mats as furniture.  

Capitalism has moved on, as have the mediums that are the messages[1]. Now someone shamanic needs to make a product that sells, just like everyone else -- how about in tech? ... If you must make content, then how about a video about after each step of your journey, trying for no later than a week[2] after?  Then your work can "benefit" from all sorts of feedback and analytics. ("Okay, less Buddhism and more on the camping gear... wow, that video were I explained my theory about who really owns the ((media)) really popped, maybe I should just do more vids like that...")

So the shaman becomes a commodity, like everything else. And if it doesn't perform in the market, then it is a failure.

==

[1] I know media is plural, but I think it's time to drop the idea that any part of the public is a pedant, let alone a classics scholar.  

[2] All of the adventures in "The Dharma Bums" occurred before the 1957 publican of "On the Road." It is a little difficult to tell from my cursory research, but I think most, if not all of "Bums" was written before "Road" became a hit.

Notes for Minimum Shop

These are notes that I am saving in case I need to rebuild my shop after say a tornado, or fire, or the like.

The categories of things needed are to 1.) protect the human, and then when it comes to the work itself, 1) remove material, 1.) add or join materials, and 3) bend/distort material.
 

Protect Human
    ear protection
    eye protection
    outdoor location
    mask for extra nasty stuff

Remove
    saw w/ jig
    drill, bits
    measuring
       tape
       square
    clamps
    pry bar
    flat screw-driver (smallest prying)
    sandpaper
         power sander
    Tool sharpening

Add
   glue
        super glue, repairs
        pva.
   brushes
   screws and drivers
   nails and hammers
   tape -- blue tape as temp clamp.  

Distort
    a vice
    pliers

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..