Thursday, August 31, 2006

river travelers


howdy,

i forgot to mention that i bumped into some aquatic travelers, traveling on DIY flat boats down the Ohio. what a swell crew. if i weren't about to get a job (cross my fingers) that would feed me, pay my rent and keep me down for only 15 hours a week, definitely would have jumped on and paddled away.

The Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, Ned is visited by the Chicken of Depression. . Gary Larson


i'm back off my anti-depression pills, for a week and a half. i'm definitely feeling it. i'm about to order this zine. maybe i won't, but if i had a dollar fiddy to spare i would.

(from slingshot)
Doris #15 The DIY Anti-Depression Guide
This time around Doris is mostly in comic form. There is advice on (duh) dealing with depression. Ideas range from smashing your TV and herbal remedies to masturbation and coffee.

There is also an article on how o deal with urinary tract infections.

Doris is a well written personal zine. I always enjoy reading it.

$1.00 to:
Cindy
PO Box 1734
Asheville, NC 28802

i need to get outside more, but right now i'm in a big college neighborhood and the kids and their fashions and grindingly normal behavior (almost all of them, i dig just get a complement on my waders), are enough to drive me back inside. that just won't do, specially now that i'm going off the meds. i gotta buck up. there'll alway be something about life i could pick to be miserable on. i need to get out in the woods, get my cell phone back and working so i can connect with my friends, whatever.

ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS.

there, whenever i say that i crack up and feel better. which reminds me, my zine was lost. boo hoo. before i scanned it (SOB sniffle sob).

i wish i could pour my whole story into this, or somewhere. I just want to share it.

Speaking of which, GE, Asmajol and I saw Peaceful Warrior. WONDERFUL, and faithful enough to the amazingly helpful, ecstasy inducing book Way of the Peaceful Warrior. Not that Dan Millman needs props, but KUDOS dude

Saturday, August 26, 2006

geora elm visits cincinnati

i was beginning to seriously doubt the adventure potential for the summer until i landed on werebrock's doorstep. that was wednesday and the adventure has not ceased.

there have been sweaty treks through the city by unconventional routes, story times, plant relocating, dream exploration and telepathy exercising. We have seen murals as well as painted part of our own, we have bussed, walked, ran, biked (sort of) to many corners of the city and beyond (including walking to kentucky today to check out the scene of my pal's childhood, where we were marvelously fed and driven around by his mom, nice). i got to meet the girlfriend, and we hit it off quite nicely. there have been open mic (mis)adventures, brief la paz exploration, animal and apple encounters, and, of course after all the exertion of our cruises, beacoup de napping.

i'm only at the midpoint of my stay and i feel like a blooming tomato!

what will these next days bring on their wingtips??? perhaps i will have a dreamful premonition tonight after more exercises to promote such activity, otherwise i will await with much anticipation for the truth in realtime.

Friday, August 25, 2006

Pioneertown

The beginings to what I have been dreaming of

Permaculture, Ampitheatre, Artisans

Replenishing the land to be flourishing and at the same time attempting to create massive crazy underground shows

The potentials are endless

Baby We are So there!

wtf- Where Are You Now?

o crap, are you serious? that's all i could say when i got emailed an invitation to join the "where are you now?" network. like i'm gonna fucking tell you. i joined anyway, to be polite. won't ever look at it again, i hereby sollemly sware

yup

i'm so tired... but i'm in love. and i have.... so many blessings in my life. i'm incredulous.

i just did my first zine. i'll scan it and put it up. props to hakim baker for posting, i heart you

Monday, August 21, 2006

my newest essay, uncut

IT’S HIGH TIME WE COOPERATE AND GET THIS REVOLUTION ROLLING.
Dedicated to Alan Ginsburg

To recap: circumstances are desperate on all fronts , nevertheless there is animosity amongst freedom-loving people of different persuasions. If deep ecologists, indigenists, permaculturalists, unionists, trans-humanists, and all other stripes of libertarians get each others’ backs instead of biting them, we’ll get more good done. If ever there was time for myopic antagonism, it ran out longer ago than history and myth records. IT’S HIGH TIME WE COOPERATE AND GET THIS REVOLUTION ROLLING.
I remember watching an interview with John Zerzan in which he said something along the lines of “There are two kinds of anarchists in Eugene: the kind that get the anti-civilization critique, and the one that doesn’t.” In the same way, there are people everywhere dividing the world into multiple demographics, with themselves always being in one- “There are two kinds of people: …”, anarchists or not. Ha, see what I mean! And yes, the anti-civ crowd is definitely culpable in this regard. To go back to Johnny Z (for the second and last time), he plugs Jesus Sepulveda’s The Garden of Peculiarities, while Sepulveda is very clear about keeping clear of ideology. Makes me wonder- do some anti-civ folks think they don’t have an ideology? Seems like a lot of us do.
Yeah, I dig a lot of the anti-civ stuff, including the inclination to smash machines, live life wildly with spontaneous bouts of joyous romping, unconstrained by human constructs. I also get the unpopular parts of the analysis, well typified in an essay by Tamarack Song. In “Armageddon Looms” he forecasted a collapse scenario in which most humans die, ‘cept those that have consciously reintegrated themselves, or were born into, a subsistence role in their ecosystems.
The people in the cities would die first. Even the Food Not Bombers and the Bicycle Punks would be doomed- their dumpsters would dry up, the pigeons would all be eaten, and they’d run out of patches for their tires, ‘parently. The Nazi survivalists in their bunkers would die once their supplies ran out.
So when people ask me about my strictly coded beliefs in this area (okay, just a couple friends and my mom have asked) I say, “Yeah, I’m not really a primitivist… not really down with genocide.” Tongue in cheek, but killing off mad people who depend on energy in their current state of life by widely orchestrated industrial sabotage just doesn’t give me a hard on anymore. On the flip side, though, a lot of people, myself included, dig the Spiritual, Physical, Mental exuberantly lived days you lead when you get into nature. Anyone who purports a love of freedom, from the bloodthirsty Shuar of Amazonia’s yesteryear to the people reading this, will let the abo(riginal) kids get their kicks. To the rest of the anarchist community: provided we aren’t fucking with your projects, why take our lifeways to the intellectual chopping board and try to gut us in front of everybody. Maybe there’s something COOL and SATISFYING about going abo, OR WE WOULDN’T BE FUCKING DOING IT? Try it and see. Maybe abo lifeways will surprise. DON’T KNOCK MY HUSTLE.
The 2006 summer issue of Green Anarchy, in its introduction, says something like “Summer is the season to take flight, but not in a Scientific, rational kind of way.” Time for all us fools to listen up, now. Two points: 1) I have had more than one First Nation/Amerindian elder tell me that back in the day, they used fly (like Supergirl) and communicate across great distances- again, using only their… what? Well, I don’t fucking know, I don’t do it on a regular basis, but sure as hell not using any technology. How ‘bout that techies, can you dig it? Point 2) If you’re stiflin’, you’re triflin’. Why should anyone in the “Reclaim. Rewild. Resist.” Movements keep the tinkerers from tinkering? The builders from building? If/When collapse is brought about/happens and centralized governments lose their grip on society, there’ll be even more opportunities for the techies to eat up and live out their fantasies on. I know I want to die in a hang glider crash- or else get eaten by a giant catfish. Maybe a combination of the two?
Late in the essay, I intentionally reveal my purpose: I want cooperation across the rifts between techies, abos and others in these anti-authoritarian movements we’re in.
Apparently surfing in another channel, not actually, how about those permaculture cats? Organic gardening like it’s gonna save the world or something. When I see a parking lot and a lawn, or a huge copper mine in Indonesia that puts out 1/5 of that state’s GNP, I doubt it seriously. But hey, we know it can feed people.
Look at the family Skunk (or was it Laurel?) stayed with in the anarcho-primitivist classic, Fire and Ice. They bought almost nothing, and it was only three or four people on a deforested mountaintop growing rye and eating chickens’ eggs. You still doubt, well check out this video (http://207.21.197.146/per/permaculture.swf) about Geoff Lawton in Jordan. People turned a salty desert in the once and future Fertile Crescent into a food forest in less than a year, using nothing on site in the way of tech besides a frames; plant nurseries; digging implements; and a few pipes for temporary irrigation. Not too shabby. It’s a big skillset you need to pull something like that off- how plants, fungi, animals, astral bodies, soil, and other forces work together over long periods. It’s one of those areas that there is always a lot more to learn, like with tracking or computers or kung fu or the healing arts- but it’s not esoteric, anyone can learn. If enough of the desertified areas of the world were permacultured into food forests, many animals would repopulate every niche- detrivores, pollinators, insectivores, herbivores, & carnivores , not to mention the other beings and forces that science ignores.
Los Llanos is a wet desert of South America. Its soil is toxic, it’s Guahibo tribespeople are newly downtrodden and colonized by government-sponsored settler ranches. More recently it became home to Gaviotas , a community of visionary appropriate technology engineers. They developed revolutionary water pumps that could draw clean water from deep down, using windmills painstakingly brought from the idea to manufacture, tailored to the winds of Los Llanos. The engineers were calorically supported in good part by the onsite organic gardens & fish from nearby rivers. They began working with the Guahibo, in an agreement whereby the Gaviotans collected Guahibo traditional healing practices in exchange for a host of allies in their struggle to maintain decent traditional lifestyles in the midst of a recently enclosed commons. Their fruitful mutual aid between techies and abos is unusual, but it isn’t the only Gaviotan point of interest for this conversation.
Eventually the grants that brought the engineers and their raw materials dried up. Most of them left for other jobs that could pay, and Gaviotas directed its economy in a more orthodox capitalist direction to sustain the ongoing projects (the collaborative hospital, the windmill and solar collector factory, the music classes, etc). Soon after, residents noticed that the pine trees they had sowed as a source of resinous sap, used widely in many industrial processes, had begun inviting jungle out from the riparian corridors & into Los Llanos, where it hadn’t been for eons. The number of species living on the transformed Llanos swelled, its ecosystem became robust and the Guahibo had far more forest to forage from.
IT’S HIGH TIME WE COOPERATE AND GET THIS REVOLUTION ROLLING.

Paw Paw Fest 2006


Hey Yall,

Check out the PawPaw Fest: http://pawpawfest.com/. Paw paws are
tropical tasting fruit, native to our area, that were grown by First
Nation peoples in plantations along the Ohio River for easy eats on
canoe rides.

There will be atal atal throwing workshops at Paw Paw Fest. Atal atals
are some choice hunting weapons for larger game such as deer.

Monday, August 14, 2006

geneology can be kind of cool

yay, my ancestors

ELIZABETH (WOODS) TARBELL (17 Sep 1665–24 Jan 1717) — 8G Grandmother
The family of Thomas and Elizabeth Tarbell was well-known in the history of
early New England. Their children Sarah, John, and Zachariah were kidnapped by
Indians on 20 June 1707 and taken to Canada. It was said that they had been up a
tree picking cherries, and had no time to get down and escape before they were
captured. The daughter Sarah was ransomed by the French and lived with the
Sisters of Congregation of Notre Dame at Lachine, where she was baptised as a
Catholic on 23 July 1708. The two sons, John and Zachariah, became prominent
members of their adoptive tribe, and have many descendants living today among
the Mohawk people of southern Canada and adjacent upper New York, particularly
in the vicinity of Hogansburg, New York, in the community of Akwesasne. See
Green [109–124] for a lengthy account of the history of this family
my gf is out of town. i'm going to electrocute myself, crying on the keyboard like this

so this is why you go to college

i heard wes jackson at the ohio prairie conference this weekend. so besides learning how to plant and what to plant at the fields in La Paz, Wes told us about how... well, damn he said a lot. and he synthesized information form so many disciplines...

basically, he went through history and said that humans have gobbled up most of the terrestrial sources of readilly available carbon to fuel technology and civilization's growth. we've gone through all kinds of animals to get at their oil, for instance; we've cut down a lot of forests for burning as well (the middle east used to be a forest). we've taken coal, oil and now gas. it has sepparated us farther and farther from lifeways dependent on the constantly replenished, though less energetic, sources of life's fuels. ya know, food, air, water, etc. he's worried that once we run out of what we're on now, there won't be too much more readily available carbon to burn. so we need to get our act together and redesign our economy, based on permaculture principles.

he and his crew of post grads are domesticating/rewilding some of our principle food crops- wheat, chickpeas, etc- to become perrenial. then we can plant diverse polycultures of these in the North American Great Plains where industrial, annual agriculture is now. with perrenials, you are adding to the soil's hospitality to life EVERY YEAR, instead of using mad carcinogenic nitrogen fertilizers (which may be why tobacco gives so many people cancer these days http://www.cannabisculture.com/news/tobacco/) and plowing the soil, letting the living flesh of the earth melt away in waterways.

it's a lot to get the head around, and i know i left or missed out on a lot of what he was saying. here's his main website: http://www.landinstitute.org/ peace out

today in history, compliments of "Daily Bleed"

a few important events we may have forgotten

1842 -- US: Seminole Indians forced to Oklahoma after 8-year war. There's Osceola, a fearsome freedom fighting chief. The seminole were natives and escaped slaves who banded together, going South from the soon to be Confedarate states to Florida, where they fought and won most battles in the Everglades. They lost because of the huge numbers and will power of the enemy, eventually got disgusted and threw in the towel.
http://www.sonofthesouth.net/american-indians/seminole.htm

1846 -- US: Henry David Thoreau jailed for tax resistance to the Mexican War, Massachusetts.

1888 -- Black Rain at Cape of Good Hope, "a rain so black as to be described as 'a shower of ink'".
http://www.sacred-texts.com/fort/damned/damn03.htm
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/jholmes20/substory3.htm

1900 -- China: International military expedition occupies Beijing & loot the city, as the "Boxer Rebellion" against foreign intruders is put down. American forces participate "to protect U.S. interests." Indigenists revolting, like what Ward Churchill talks about here http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/view/1333 and the DAAA talk about here http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20060808145439834.
What would have happened if this rebellion succeeded instead of the Maoist one?! OOOOOOOO.... :___ (

1936 -- US: Rainey Bethea hung, the last US public execution. Now the media controls the circus action & neatly hides the horror.
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Ridge/6275/Chapter5.htm

1963 -- US: Broken by McCarthyism, left playwright Clifford Odets dies, Los Angeles.
Daily Bleed Saint, 2004 CLIFFORD ODETS
Almost single-handedly brought Jewish radical theater
to a wide audience, American & world-wide.

Monday, August 07, 2006

chasing buddha


buddha is elusive. on the quest, chasing it's aroma on the wind, i learned a bit of buddha lore and had a grand time stomping about on the beach... but we didn't capture our quarry. how sad. i did learn what ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia) looks like. der's a pic


apologies if i sound incoherent. i've just finished sanding a floor for seven hours, and all that vibrating and pressing down really takes it out of me.











just in the interest of keeping this thing up to date, i'm working on an essay on how and why primitivists, permaculturalists and transhumanists could get along for the advantage of everyone. i'll post it after it's been looked over by the editorz.