on street art in NYC

I am yesterday come direct from New York City (NYC), that fair, Mid-Atlantic island-metropolis. Being a purveyor of street art, and a person who collects images of these most fleeting slivers of mankind's dazzlingly bountiful imagination, posting them occasionally at urbanartuploads.blogspot.com, it is my rote to explore a city's avoided and trash-strewn places, taking pictures of any graffiti I find living there. Having collected street art in Berlin, Los Angeles, Amsteram, Philadelphia, Long Beach, San Diego, Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Tampa, Boston, and, most recently, in New York, I have amassed an internal sense-knowledge-base of the many different and various trends, techniques, and habits that graffiti writers tend to exhibit; ergo, I believe I can gain a rapid understanding of a city's predominant trends-in-vandalism from seeing but a small portion of the overall milieu.

Perhaps I was in the wrong areas (Hunter's Point, Long Island City, and Manhattan), or perhaps I was on the wrong streets (primarily down Broadway from 42nd to Battery Park, and near the World Trade Center), but most images (except for those examples that will be uploaded to urbanartuploads.tumblr.com in about three months, due to backlog) that I managed to capture were obtained from only a handful of areas around town, including near Canal Street, on the Lower East Side, and in the East and West Villages; the rest of Manhattan was either swept clean of its no-charge-to-the-consumer open-air-art-galleries or the police forces of certain areas are so adept at patrolling and desecrating the works of art that street artists labor to apply there that these clever vandals know well enough to stay away.

Compared, moreover, to the cities mentioned above, Manhattan's street artists seem to prefer primarily self-adhesive name badges sold by one of the major office-supply chain stores, upon which they write – in nearly illegible, seemingly gang-or-crew-specific script – their own names, identifying numbers, or the name of the group or home area. (Such stickers were seen primarily in parts of NYC with little to no other graffiti, as opposed to graffiti-rich areas, which exhibited such profusion of street art that the aforementioned stickers became all but invisible against the colorful and riotous backdrop of other works). Whereas in, say, Los Angeles, one finds curious and strange examples of graffiti adorning otherwise-blank surfaces in nearly every part of the city, whether in the financial district, in the heart of Hollywood, or in the sleepier parts of Koreatown, graffiti in New York tends to be applied to almost any available surface – adorned or blank, private or public – that happens to be in arm's reach of the sidewalk. Whereas in most other cities graffiti-writers generally apply their works of art to the backs of street-signs, to public utility-boxes, or to hatches and those metal doors that cover access panels – mostly avoiding stuccoed or painted surfaces – in NYC, vandals appear to not give a fuck about what they spray over with their pressurized paints, which pisses off the city's property owners.

Persons looking for high-quality street art in New York City will do well to avoid the shiny and the well-swept areas, preferring rather the grimier and less-well-kept areas, which will exhibit such bountiful and beautiful examples of graffiti as one might expect from a world-class city such as the Big Apple. Just remember to stoop slow, to revel in the filth, and to keep your head on a swivel, because the NYPD is alert, and it is everywhere.

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on public worship

Why do people go to churches in order to pray to their god? Why has congregating with one another in groups become the baseline method, the normal state of affairs for Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, Mormons, animists, and wiccans? I am merely a lay person, and an ignorant, worthless whorphan at that; therefore, I can only present here my own poorly-conceived thoughts, offering them up freely upon this, the altar of public opinion.

I believe that churches are a stubborn hold-over from earlier times during which the great majority of people could not read. During, say, the European Middle Ages, the individual had to physically enter a church in order to hear such words as he thought were his god's teachings, words which his under-educated and stunted mind accepted, without question, as Fact. Since our governments have forced their citizens to become educated to a certain standard, and since the literacy rate in most western industrialized nations (WINs) sits at nearly 100%, we should no longer need these bastions of foul old organized religion, as we can now all read our Bibles and our Korans and our Bhagavad-Gitas by ourselves, and in the privacy of our own homes.

Among the primary factors contributing to the survival of churches and other places of worship is the fact that these communities act as meeting-places at which different people can share resources with one another without going through the hassle of trawling for useful acquaintances among the general population; it is assumed that anyone who manages to stay within the church without pissing off too many people and who is witnessed to perform the community's shared rites and rituals is a trustworthy and generally good chap upon whom one can rely to accompany the kids alive on the biannual canoing trip. Another reason is that these communities are self-perpetuating, with new parents retreating to the bosom of Mother Church as soon as they hear their child's first screams, just as their parents did when they were born; having suddenly tiny people around – the sanctity of whose souls are, for some reason, in doubt – seems to drive both man and woman back into the clutches of organized religion, where they and their children become ensnared, so that when the children become adults and have kids of their own, they return to tug on the apron-strings of corpulent, silken-shirted charlatans who profess to know more about freely-accessible books than other people do.

I find it curious that people feel the need to worship in public, where they will be spoken to by the holy man and quietly shunned by their fellow parishioners if they do not perform their group's rites and rituals according to its rigid standards. It seems to me to be a very petty thing indeed, putting on expensive clothes in order to perambulate in the midst of other well-dressed people, everyone bowing and scraping and singing and tapping themselves on the head and torso in rigid adherence to a highly-ritualized ceremony meant to bring people, in some mysterious fashion, closer to the god that they think created them. If there were a god such as YHWH, the Christians' foul deity, an omnipotent, omniscient being that felt spited if it were not prayed to enough times or in the correct fashion, I think that that god would be able to discern whether its supplicants were performing correct rites in the correct way without them having to all get together and sing and wail and moan at each other in fancy, multi-million-dollar places of worship. In my opinion, it is by far preferable to pray in the privacy of one's own home, so that any mistakes one makes will not be seen as failures-to- adhere-to-policy, but, rather, as the steps that any fallible and self-aware creature must take on the path towards its own betterment and enlightenment.

In America, churches are built and refurbished and re-roofed regularly, financed by supposedly good people whose cash donations should instead be used to improve the lives of chronically poverty-stricken, perpetually hungry persons livingin the Third World; then again, however, I am little more than a spoiled, worthless whorphan – what the deuce do I know?

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hydration matters

Oh, the importance of hydration – it cannot be understated! Whether bicycling, gardening, shredding, meditating, or bolting from the cops, the healthy and happy individual knows to hydrate well, and often. In cases of extreme sweating – such as when the clothes are soaked with the body's own moisture or when one is engaged in a prolonged physical activity – the body should be re-hydrated aggressively, and without delay.

Electrolyte tablets work well in such instances, supplying at a cost of roughly 50-cents-each such minerals and complex carbohydrates that the body tends to lose when sweating. It pays to spend a half-dollar on these easily-portable pills that maintain a balanced body-chemistry; dehydrated persons are more irritable than their hydrated counterparts, they tire more quickly, they quit tasks more readily, and they bitch and moan, bumming everyone else out. Less accurate hydration methods – such as making a nice salt or sugar lick in the cup of one's hand – when coupled with the ingestion of a few cups of cool, clear water, will effect hydration, but often at the risk of over-consumption of tasty mounds of unwashed, raw cane sugar, which can lead to weight-gain.

The supreme wet, that one drink which trumps all others, is the fluid of the green coconut. (Please drink only 100% pure green coconut milk, since anything less will be contaminated with refined sugars and plain water.) The primary drawback to green coconut milk is its decreased portability compared to the electrolyte tablet, the second being the relatively high cost of marketing and transporting it to persons living outside of the topics, its natural habitat. Overall, however, this fluid is truly a nectar of the gods, a supreme ally in one's struggle for personal greatness and physical fitness. If neither the electrolyte tablet nor green coconut water is available, hydrate with plain H2O until such time as the piss runs light-yellow or clear, and eat a balanced meal of vegetables, some form of pasta or rice, and protein such as that found in sardines. Dehydration is a serious condition that affects both the mind and the body in serious and debilitating ways, so learn to read your body's warning signs, moistening it regularly.

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on breaking routine

This piece is short, and my waistline has grown, due to a broken routine. My mind, cloudy, my spirit, weak, hope diminished, future looking bleak, all due to having abandoned the healthy mode of operation I have been following for months now. The cause for the break in routine was being asked to watch a neighbor's dog for a few days, sleeping over at their house and being told to eat as much of their food as I saw fit to eat. Being away from my own abode and thrust into a place packed full with food and possessing of a cable television hookup, I ate a lot of said food and watched far more TV than I had any right to watch.

Slowly, I shall work my way back into the rhythm of things, adopting once again a regular work schedule, a regular writing schedule, and a regular eating schedule, bringing my spirit back into a healthy alignment and returning to that point where I felt in control of my life, and happy. Moderation, humility, mercy – all of the important things in life simply seem to vanish when I go elsewhere, when I allow the discipline to slip, when I stop tending such tiny internal shoots of love as that have of late been pushing through the thick layers of my alcoholism, spiritual neglect, and apparent self-loathing. To routine I shall soon return, friends – perhaps after this nap. Mahalo.

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on losing a single vote

I shall not vote during this presidential election cycle. Normally, in the past, I made sure to cast my ballot one way or the other, even if I resided in a state in which, due to my being in the clear political minority, my vote did not count. (Why are there instances in which votes do not count, and why are there only two parties to represent the political interests of over one hundred and fifty millions of individual voters? America's system of representative politics is strange, corrupted, and unjust, indeed.)

Being in a battleground state (Pennsylvania), and living as I do in a predominantly politically and socially conservative area (York County), I know that I should vote this November, but our sitting president, Mr. Barack Obama, has lost my support, and his opponent – a fabulously-rich 1%er named Mitt Romney – embodies so many of the things that I see as wrong with this nation that I would sooner put out my own eyes with a melon-baller than cast a ballot in his favor. Up until recently, Mr. Obama had my support, but he signed NDAA 1540 into law, a defense bill which allows the government of the United States of America in instances of martial law to imprison her own citizens indefinitely, and without trial. (To be fair, NDAA 1540 was ratified unanimously by both the House and Senate, thus implicating all sitting Congresspersons and Senators in this, their most recent crime against Liberty.)

The Constitution of the United States of America contains provisions designed specifically to guard us – the people – against just such tyrannical overreaches. In the first Amendment, the Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law respecting[…] the right of the people[…] to petition the Government for a redress of grievances," and in its fifth Amendment the document states that, “No person shall be[…] deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” NDAA 1540 makes it so that the American citizen is viewed as a criminal, as a worthless lout, as no better than those dirty Taliban fellows we have spent so much time, blood, and treasure trying to kill over the last ten years; it rescinds the citizen's right to redress grievances; and while federal, state, and local governments have violated the fifth Amendment for decades now by enforcing blanket restrictions on the liberty of the people to smoke or snort or shoot any such drugs they should wish to consume, NDAA 1540 deprives them of their liberty for nothing more than speaking out, or, merely, for being outside of their homes at the wrong time.

This defense bill sounds the death-knell for our country's 224-year-long experiment in individual freedom, granting our government such fantastic power as to make it the most clear and present danger to the rights of mankind that the world has ever seen. Welcome to the police-state, ladies and gentlemen, and get ready for a good, hard rear-ending, because I have the feeling that our leaders in the White House and Congress are only beginning to flex such increasingly awesome might as we have allowed them to give themselves lately. Fellow Children of Liberty, weep with me in shame as we bask in the afterglow of our nation's abject failure, kneeling as we do among the shredded gowns of our goddesses Liberty, and Justice. This November, I shall choose not one of these two evils but none of them, preferring rather to sacrifice my sacred franchise upon the forgotten altar of silent disobedience, since neither of these men is worthy of the post of President. America delenda est.

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on individual ownership

Bicycling everywhere I go in this little town gives me certain glimpses into the private lives of the people living here that simply cannot be obtained by driving around in a car. For one, I approach people nearly silently, with only the occasional creaking gear or rattling chain to betray my presence, allowing me to observe them candidly until I am all but upon them (or at least until their peripheral vision picks up my whirling feet). Secondly, whereas when driving in a car one is prone to choose the most direct and well-paved path to get to one's destination so as to maintain a good fuel economy and to spend as little time as possible stuck in traffic, when riding a bicycle I take a variety of routes paved and unpaved, direct and circuitous, back-alley and broad-way, as I see fit and as my schedule allows.

By avoiding the beaten and asphalted paths, and by keeping my head on a swivel and looking into everyone's yards, I have made a number of judgments and come to a number of conclusions. The first of all these unbearably smug and better-than-though-art observations is that people living in close proximity to one another own items in such redundancy as to nearly boggle the mind. No matter how large or small a person's yard should be, it will be cut using a full-sized, gas-powered lawn mower. No matter how few obstructions and other solid objects that cannot simply be mowed over, they will be trimmed using a gasoline-powered weed-whip or edge-trimmer. Every yard – even the postage-stamp-sized ones – will have a shed of sorts for storing gardening tools; every home-owner – even the ones with more time than money on their hands – will rush outside and pay good money to have machines to do such work as they could easily do themselves at the cost of some sweat and a few minutes of precious television-watching time. Oh, if communities but had a central storage-and-loan shed for tools, a type of tool lending-library, a place where persons not interested in always buying such things as they might need to keep their property up to code could go and borrow a pair of hedge trimmers or a ladder. Imagine the volume of extra cash that would be floating around! Imagine the richness such a facility would bring to communities across America, people coming out of their homes and mingling with one another on a regular basis while queuing for tools, discussing methods of lawn-care and sharing freely of hard-won secrets, second-hand tips, and local advice.

The second observation I should like to make is that far too few people seem to be growing victory gardens, accepting rather the luxury of being able to buy their food at grocery-stores as some sort of Eternal Truth and wasting their time sitting around in air-conditioned houses eating cheesy-poofs and watching reruns on TV instead of mucking about in gardens where they might – oh cruel and terrible thought – stumble into conversation with a neighbor or passer-by. Square miles of good growing space sit wasted on grass; endless expanses of fertile soil stand planted with little more, perhaps, than a handful of ornamental flowers. Sew grain, not just grasses! Plant food, not just flowers!

Dear friends, I am coming to see the widespread use of television as the root-of-all-evil in America, that one main factor that has sent this once-fine land into a tailspin of societal and communal decline, that one primary thing without which ours would be a better, stronger, and more closely-knit nation. Without TV, people would not be constantly told to Buy More Shit, and without TV, they might get off their fat fucking asses and go outside for a nice, healthy walk now and again. Woe is unto us, sisters and brothers, fellow Lovers Of Liberty, we who reject the tenets of conspicuous consumerism, we who seek to be self-sufficient and self-reliant; our siblings have stumbled down the path of convenience and leisure, seduced into personal debt by the candy-sweet promise of touch-screen-equipped tablets and one-click-ordering, lost in a land of false and hollow hope, ensnared in the web of ubiquitous advertising, bled dry of honor and self-respect. Which way leads back out again, friends? To whom do we turn for salvation? The answer, in short, is that we must turn now to ourselves, setting such good and positive examples as might show our fellow Americans that there are other methods besides their ruinous ways. Mahalo, friends, and keep fighting.

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on holding grudges

Since moving to this small, blue-collar town and making friends with such few open-minded people as here live, I have had the good fortune of making the acquaintance of someone who holds grudges. I say Making The Acquaintance Of instead of Befriend because, just yesterday, this individual chose to respond to my pointing out, in jest, a typo he had made on a popular social-networking-site by compounding this slight jab on top of all of the other confrontations we have had in the last six months and letting the cauldron of hatred that seems to burn within his chest boil over.

It all started about six months ago, when he and I and a few others would go out for friendly disc-golf matches and he began to curse out any other person who made a good throw while also being verbally self-abusive every time he threw poorly, which accounted perhaps for 85% of his attempts. After a couple of afternoons of getting told to go fuck myself and that I was a bastard and a fucking asshole for having thrown a circular piece of plastic through the air in such a was as to have it land close to an upright, basket-equipped metal pole, I told this man – let us call him Wilson – that his negativity was poisoning the group's fun, leading to an overall dampening of of the collective mood, and would he not please keep his anger and resentment to himself and not keep cursing at everybody all the time? Wilson, who claims to be a follower of the One Love mentality espoused by such musicians as Bob Marley, instantly went on the defensive, causing everyone so much grief for the next few days that the others in our disc-golfing group and I decided it best not to invite him to our friendly matches anymore, given his proclivity to whine, moan, and belly-ache every time someone did well or he did not.

The second major confrontation between this worthless whorphan and Mr. Wilson came about two months ago, when, after he had been telling a story to me and a number of other people during a weekend bout of drinking, I cautioned him to wear sunblock if he should happen to be out in the sun for the amount of time he had claimed to be in his story. Being from Western Africa and having relatively dark skin, Wilson became once again defensive, immediately and with great passion calling into doubt my knowledge of What It Means To Be Black (whatever that means), even asking me if I, in my life, had ever been black, or if I had ever seen the masses of his fellow Africans all out perambulating in the sun lacking hats or long-sleeved shirts, in far more words telling me that I did not know what the fuck it was I was talking about. Never backing down from my position, I pointed out to Wilson that, since he is a human being and since all human skin can suffer skin cancer if exposed too long to solar radiation, he would do well to protect his skin from the sun so as to lead a long and healthy life, whereupon he began to curse me and to call me many bad names, puffing up his chest and treating me with much disdain for a number of weeks after that.

Having pondered my actions and deciding it best for me to keep my dumb fucking mouth shut, I have done just that, staying quiet and not seeking fault with the man, letting him espouse whatever strange and nonsensical views he, a grown adult, should wish to espouse. Sensing that Wilson seemed to be doing the same – generally ignoring me and not spending too much time in my presence – and seeing that we had sat together amiably during a get-together on the 4th of July, I figured that, just as I had done, he had laid aside any past grievances and gotten over any latent animosity toward this corn-fed white boy. In response, however, to a jab, a pointing out of a word he had misspelled on-line, that word being “the,” he launched into a litany of hatred against me, saying to an intermediary that I would get what I deserved for being so know-it-all and smarmy toward him, and that this my latest latest slight was simply too much, one of too many twigs thrown atop the teetering stack of hate-sticks he seems to have been carrying around with him since that one fateful day of disc-golfing.

While I do not fear the man physically, I have come to fear the human ego in general, and to keep a sharp eye out for a bruised ego, which is prone to extraordinary violence, to stabbing persons in the back and letting the air out of their bicycle tires. In the wake of Wilson un-friending of me on Facebook over the weekend, I could perhaps try to arrange a sit-down with him, a having-it-out session during which he might be able to call me all the names he wants to and, perhaps by letting go of his hatred and allowing it to flow from himself mightily, to dislodge some of the sand that has become trapped in his vagina; I might as well do nothing, however, since I cannot in any way control how Wilson reacts to my words or presence. He is a big boy, and he has the power to decide for himself when to be angry and when to be contented, when to fill his being with hatred, and when to let One Love infect every ounce of his soul. Three cheers for keeping quiet! Mahalo.

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on false compassion

On Tuesday night, the dog came back from the veterinarian's office, with droopy eyes and a ridiculously large cone around her neck. For the fourth time in less than two weeks, the poor beast – a two-hundred pound English mastiff – had undergone surgery to have her tail shortened, or, better said, to have the open mess of flesh and bone sewn back shut after she had chewed out the sutures. Why, you must be asking yourself, was she allowed to even get her mouth anywhere close to the freshly-closed wound? The answer, dear friends, is because of false compassion.

Her primary owner – a housewife in her forties with children of high-school age – had left the large, hurting bitch unsupervised on a number of occasions without properly restricting her ability to access the source of her pain. The woman had said repeatedly that she felt sorry because the dog had trouble getting around the house, bumping into things constantly with her plastic cone of shameful ridicule. Given her puffy eyes and despondent mood, oh, wouldn't it be nice to lift her suffering a bit by removing said shameful device and letting her lounge around, outside, by herself, next to her favorite tree. This woman's actions, of course, only added to the dog's suffering; her compassion proved false, harmful to her pet's well-being, dangerous, even, to its very life. The mastiff came within inches of death; had her owner not decided to spend another one-and-a-half thousand dollars to get the tail sewn back shut for the fourth time, the big bitch would have either been put down and cremated or taken into a nearby field, shot, and buried.

False compassion is similar to such false economy as is very often practiced by today's emotion-driven Americans, we who have been told to go with whatever our hearts tell us and that we can always buy whatever we want to buy in order to placate our slightest impulsive craving at our local convenience store, which is sure to open even at this time of night. Rather than practicing a bit of self-denial and self-control, we bash around and do what we think our gut is telling us to do rather than having a nice quiet sit and thinking about things for a while before acting. It was no better at the emergency room for pets, where I witnessed dozens of people fork over thousands of dollars for teeth cleaning, to buy a chemotherapy session for a fucking cat, and to try and save the life of a fourteen-year-old blind dog that was in its death throes, its body rigid and locked in seizure.

This is a touchy subject, one regarding which, I find while writing this article, I am in a sort of inner turmoil. At which point does one allow a giant dog into one's house, a dog recently rescued, a dog that shits and pisses on the floor every night for weeks, a dog that whacks her tail against the walls so badly when her new mistress returns from even the most brief trip outside that she develops a festering open wound that sprays droplets of blood with every wag? At which point does the damage caused to inter-human relationships by all the urine and blood and feces covering the inside of one's home compel one to give the dog away, to install a fenced-in kennel in the back yard, or to put the dog down quickly and quietly? The answers to these questions are hard to come by, but one question – whether to leave on the cone of shame or to let the dog waltz around a bit without it – has an easy answer: to reduce the bitch's overall suffering, one must leave the damn thing on, no matter her crocodile tears or pitiable whimpering.

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on the TX board of education

Truth is under siege in this nation, dear friend, and it is being attacked by such loathsome persons as the conservative members of the Texas board of education. Just this week I was reading about the actions of these dangerous individuals, and of their attempt to keep nearly 5 millions of school-children in the dark about one of the most important figures in the history of our American republic, Thomas Jefferson. I did not attend the sittings at which these religious fanatics attempted to spread their hatred, and, thus, I did not personally witness their evil ways, but anyone who tries to keep from the eyes of our young people information about the man who wrote our most important of documents, the Declaration of Independence, should be stripped of his or her power and pilloried.

The actions of these confused, sad little people were likely taken to obscure from view some of Jefferson's other writings, such as his version of the Christian bible, one from which he removed any mention of such foolish nonsense as virgin births, talking snakes, burning and talking bushes, and people flying magically up to or down from the heavens, keeping however the core of its teaching intact, that being the Golden Rule, which states that you should do unto others as you would have done unto yourself. (Christianity is but one of many religions that teaches the Golden Rule, since nearly every other major world religion builds upon this exact same teaching, among them Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, and Pastafarianism.) Things would not be nearly so bad if the Texans kept things to themselves and taught their children whatever lunacy they decided were best (such as their lionization of McCarthyism and their efforts to replace mentions of democracy and freedom with the word republic), but many other boards of education in our Union follow the Texans' lead, buying such textbooks as they design, preferring to let the Lone Star folks go through the hassle of deciding what should and should not be taught instead of doing their own fucking jobs and figuring things out for themselves. Of course, it is not the Texans' fault that other boards of education copy their efforts, but these their most recent offenses against the standards of historical preservation and common sense highlight the recent efforts by the more fanatical religious organizations in this land to hijack our founding documents and to try and justify their religious zealotry and their plans to overthrow our secular government on grounds that ours was somehow founded as a Christian nation.

In the words of George Washington and John Adams, writing as they did to those present at the signing of the Treaty of Tripoli, words ratified unanimously by the contemporary Congress: “the Government of the United States was not, in any sense, founded upon the Christian religion.” There we have it, plain as day, simple and unequivocal, that the persons who risked Life, Liberty, and sacred Honor to found this nation did not do so in order to create upon these lands some sort of shining New Jerusalem where everyone would pray at the alter of a white-skinned, straight-haired Jesus. (If he existed at all, Jesus of Nazareth, an Aramaic-speaking Jew, would have stood under five-foot six-inches tall, having a light-brown complexion and nearly black, wiry hair). How do we stop these religious fanatics and their war against everything that America stands for, and how do we protect our history from those who would seek to destroy it, from people such as the conservatives who sit on the Texas state board of education? We start, dear reader, by critically analyzing everything we see and hear, by keeping the head on a swivel, and by fighting the threat of theocracy wherever it should arise. Stay frosty, and mahalo.

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one small thing

It was but one small thing, one simple step not taken, that caused the big battery to drain. It started with d-cell batteries, themselves a few decades old, that I was trying to charge for the first time in their lives, so as to use them in a lamp, for reading; the d-cells, even after sitting in the charger for nine hours, had not retained any charge, providing not even trace illumination. Conceding defeat, I had dutifully unplugged the charger from the extension cord that runs to the 750-watt inverter in the basement, which is connected via alligator clamps to the big battery, a 12 volt deep-cycle marine type.

The reason that the marine deep-cycle exhibited a diminished charge compared to if it had simply sat there not providing power to anything was that I had forgotten to turn off the inverter when done using it; therefore, the little green LED light that burns when the inverter is turned on had slowly whittled away at the big battery's charge, over twelve hours chewing up a couple of amperes. One small thing overlooked, one simple step not taken, had impacted demonstrably, using up less electricity than I had originally feared, however, for after turning off the DC-to-AC inverter, the big battery's charge jumped back up almost all the way back to where it would have been had I not been such a fool. Had it not been for the post-booze haze which moved in Saturday morning and hung on tenaciously all day, I might have remembered to depress that one small button, thus saving myself a bit of consternation, but, ah well, the past cannot be changed, while the future is pregnant with smarter decisions, better made. Huzzah.

And so, I shall hazard to declare, it goes with many things in life – the small and easily-overlooked, if they are indeed viewed as small, if indeed they are overlooked, quickly turn into things of tremendous import, wreaking havoc if allowed to grow from tiny saplings into towering trees. It is for me, then, to remember to attend to the small beginnings of things, and to stay with them, patiently, until they have reached their natural end. In this fashion, then, I might actually make something of this pathetic life of mine. Mahalo.

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LA - panorama

from the Hollywood hills to the Griffith observatory - gorgeous

woodwork

people ask me what I do out here - besides writing, I do this

on hoarding

For many years – nay, for the entire time I knew him – I considered my father to be a hoarder of goods, not necessarily clinically-obsessive, but more along the lines of a pack-rat. Born in New York City in 1934, his childhood was likely shaped by the shortages and scarcity that so greatly plagued America while she was fighting the German and Japanese Empires; he learned from an early age the need to pick up and store all items of even the slightest utilitarian or financial value, that eleven dimes had to be squeezed out of every dollar, and that such things as could be, would be reused, reworked, and recycled.

And so it was throughout my childhood that I grew up in a household in which broken things were often jury-rigged until they once again worked, in which random nuts and loose bolts were stored in plastic containers just in case they might be needed someday, in which all options were exhausted before one fired up the car and drove to the hardware store. And, so, I am not surprised when I catch myself retrieving stray things-of-worth from busy roadways, waiting for traffic to subside before dashing out to retrieve a somewhat rusty pair of wire-snips or a ½-inch metal hose clamp, items that I refurbish, reuse, or store away.

Until recently, I did not however act in this fashion, preferring the now-standard path that many Americans seem to take of throwing out most everything – even items in perfectly good working condition – certain that, tomorrow, when they actually do need them, they will have enough money to buy brand-new, Chinese-made replacement items (which, especially with specialty items, may be available only when the shop opens in the morning). Until my eyes were re-opened recently to the enormous value of such things as with which my deceased father filled this dacha's basement and out-buildings, I too thought of those things as trash, as superfluous goods, as six decades worth of proof that hoarding was a bad thing. Now, however, after mowing this property's acres with a muscle-powered, cast-iron push-mower, and after spending the last eight months moving my body through space-time on a bicycle (and, incidentally, after hewing more closely to the teachings of Lao Tzu), I find that my estimation of what I once thought of as clutter has changed dramatically.

For example, the pile of old magazines that has sat on a shelf in the barn for the last twenty years turned out to be a few dozen, successive copies of Organic Gardening magazine; since starting to read them, my appreciation for and knowledge of Nature-friendly, low-impact methods for growing edible and pretty things has grown substantially, much as have the crops in my gardens. Also, the various medium-scale farming and landscaping devices that have been hanging around collecting dust all these years turned out to be exactly the types of things one would need to turn this property's best south-facing slope into a productive field, whereupon might grow fuel to run engines, fibers to clothe bodies, and food to fill stomachs. Furthermore, the bamboo that has grown here in abundance after my dad shoved a single shoot of it into the ground in the late 1970s is a plant whose utility knows few bounds; add to these blessings the many fruit and firewood trees that have been allowed to grow as tall as they wanted to grow, and this oddly-shaped little chunk of land fast resembles a perfect place for self-sufficient living. Perfect, that is, for an able-bodied yet otherwise worthless individual looking to make use of piles of heaped-up clutter, such as myself. So, if there is any moral lesson to this article, it is that viewing things from within different frames of mind can often reveal their hidden, secret worth. So open those peepers, elasticize the mind, and keep that head on a swivel. Mahalo.

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declaring independence from...

This year, my proud fellow Americans, our goal is to turn ourselves into persons who live without want for things, who accept all adverse situations as gifts from the Universe, and who have learned to conquer such needs and desires as so often tend to hijack our lives. Among such negative influences as are working upon our lives are materialism as exhibited by our constant tendency to go shopping; sloth as exhibited by our insistence on driving cars everywhere we go; avarice as exhibited by the fact that money has become our One True god, the only thing for which we strive each and every day; dependence as exhibited by our nearly universal refusal to grow or raise our own foodstuffs; ignorance as exhibited by our watching of only one television channel or reading of only one newspaper or blog, which causes our minds to narrow and calcify; foolhardiness as exhibited by our having bought into the convenience culture and its tendency to trick us into thinking that life is or should be somehow easy, and that we deserve to be constantly treating ourselves to nice things; and stupidity as exhibited by our lack of proper flag etiquette, especially on such days upon which we seek to honor and celebrate the founding of our nation by displaying the flag for which it stands, under nothing but Liberty and Justice for all.

The negative realities listed above can be surmounted and counter-acted by ceasing to purchase anything but basic necessities (until such time as such necessities can be made at home or bartered for), by moving one's body around on foot or bicycle, by cultivating one's own person spiritual and emotional worth rather than grubbing after external worth such as cash, by making our communities and households food-independent, by getting our news from sources different from one another and unrelated, by making our own entertainment instead of watching television, by buying back out of the hollow culture of convenience, and by treating the flag of the United States of America as it should be treated, as if it were a human member of the family. To live in the manner that we live today is to go about our daily lives as dumb beasts tied to the yoke of distant corporate overlords, circumstances nearly identical to those of Americans living in the 18th century who toiled under the yoke of distant societal overlords. It appears that we in America have come full circle, changing from sheep to eagles, from eagles to swine, from swine to wolves, and from wolves back into sheep, soiling ourselves mightily along the way. There is another path, oh fellow patriots, a path, however, that does not involve merely stockpiling firearms, lying around watching TV, eating processed foods high in fat and sugar, and living under a perpetual Fear Of The Unknown.

Please, dear reader, cherished friend, declare independence from avaricious self-interest and small-minded laziness by throwing off the last, clinging vestiges of foul consumption-oriented capitalism; free your mind, excite your soul, and become a new Guard for our future Security, today.

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on nature's nightly light-show

During these muggy days of summer, when the sun has set and the bats have emerged to hunt, thousands of bioluminescent insects put on a fascinating and free light-show. I do not really see it unless I stand for a while in the bowl of the valley and let my eyes adjust to the darkness; then, however, I realize that nearly every available surface – from the low grasses to the tops of the highest trees – has been taken over by lightning bugs.

Granted, the bugs do not produce the lung-thumping boom of fireworks, their lights are less bright than, say, roman candles, and they generate hardly any unnecessary light or air pollution, but for all of their apparent shortcomings these tiny insects, when occupying a stand of trees in sufficient number, are far more impressive than even the most magnificent and expensive Fourth of July fireworks display. The show they put on is so dazzling, so mesmerizing, that I must often force myself out of my trance-like state and continue on to the small tent by the creek in which I sleep most hot nights. To my knowledge, there is no rhyme or reason to these insects' flashings, no clear-cut code as far as I have been able to see, only thousands of randomly-timed pinpricks of white light winking on and off in the dark and shadowy gloom of the trees in which they sit. Concert-goers in a blacked-out sports stadium will all try to take a picture of the headlining band when it finally mounts the stage; the efforts of these little bugs have a similar visual effect, but to my knowledge their luminescent signaling is a means to the end of getting laid, while a concert-goer's flashings are little more than proof of his foolish exuberance and having forgotten to properly adjust his camera.

So, this week during which we Americans celebrate the date upon which our nation issued the most important document in the history of mankind, don't waste your money on Chinese-made fireworks – wait until it is dark and then go stare at a tree.

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