Sunbreak

So yeah, it rains up here. But that makes the sun brighter when it shows.

If you were to judge by the historical data or by the little cloud or raindrop icons on TV and internet weather predictions, you'd think it rains all the time. But that's misleading, the data are too coarse by farr. A passing squall, here and gone in under an hour, registers as a rainy day in history. And the icons? Clouds kick in at like 30% chance of precip--since this is not a sun-and-fun tourist destination, I guess nobody feels any pressure to highlight the sunlight.

Maybe dark dank forecasts aim to keep more people from moving here. Maybe it's northern European stoicism or fatalism weaving grey into the cultural tapestry. Maybe it's the need to excel, the American drive to superbole, to be the most of something, even if it's the most crappy weather.

I'm not that much of an optmist, but this seems unnecessecarily gloomy. Many days that will go down in history as rainy are blessed by sunbeams, brightened by sunbreaks. Even the fleeting glimpse of sky and light offers promise, a hint of the stint of long sunny days in summer. The sight of blue sky peeping through a hole in the clouds miles in the distance is enough for me to perk up, I cast a line into that azure puddle and set the hook of memory.  Rain lets up, and a lighter shade of grey lures me into the garden. Sometimes, even without the sun breaking through, the play of light and dark, of thick and thin clouds, of swirls and masses is enough. The allure of the veiled creates warmth. There are a million kinds of rain and cloud here, kaleidoscopic and fractally fascinating.

You'll hear the weather people on TV and radio talk of the chance of sunbreaks. I don't have the data, but I'd bet they do this more often toward the end of winter, when people are worn out. Some people seem perpetually worn out, though, and look at sunbreaks as "sucker holes," sunlit bait drawing the unwise outside just so that the clouds can rush back and dump on them. I, for one, enjoy a good sucker hole, accept it for what it is, and bear it no ill will. I cannot make the sun stay, but I can sure as hell enjoy it while it's here, and reel in a memory.

These recollections are important, for the fact is that there is plenty of in-between time in the winter. Even reminisces of sunbreaks help clear the gloom. Memories of the cloudless 16 hour days of summer offer their own kind of promise, surety that hanging in there for the long run will be rewarded. But knowing that a sunbreak may brighten even a late November day offers more immediate hope.

As I write this, rain drips from the eaves, and as the sun climbs, the dawn comes into sharper focus, the grey wash of sky splits up and strikes off as individual clouds. High ones hanging, and low ones scudding. Lighter patches show up and move on. There will be blue today.

The Paranoia of the Hyperfortunate

Assume, as radiochronologists do, that 1950 is the present, and that all dates before that are so many years BP. By 1950, enough by-products of atomic weapons experimentation had gotten into the air and water to make radiometric dates unreliable (and to spawn Godzilla--Libby and his inner circle are rumored to have chosen 1950 mostly for this very reason, though none ever admitted to it in public). You could argue for 1945, when the US nuked two cities, but nobody funding science in the West wanted to highlight that. Scientists like data that can speak across national and cultural divides, and besides, in a world brought together by two world wars, it was getting embarrassing to express dates in terms of a leader in the Judean nonviolent resistence to Roman occupation. Especially when it sunk in that we had become Rome.

Now the difficulty is with dates after 1950. Following the logic of BP, it should be AP, but that name is taken by a news organization associated with press, which seems so archaic and ill-fitting on the infinite future implied. I won't offer another universal solution, and instead will choose reference points fleeting and provincial, fickle and idiosyncratic.

With that out of the way, now I can gress:

After the dust had settled and the corpses changed from stinking to feeding lush new growth, Americans settled in back at home where most of the few causalties had occurred in factories. They boomed forth offspring, we had a pretty easy time for a generation. People say the 1960s were a time of upheaval, but the fact is that the huge majority kept doing the same boring things they'd been doing.

So they kept going to work and having families and staking out their little claim of American dreamscape. And for a generation or so, a young man entering the workforce could look forward to a lifetime job. A lot of these have become obsolete: corps of clerks fit in a single hard drive now, a salesmen between me and the thing I want to buy is an impediment and cost that will turn me elsewhere, and ultimately (to the dismay of the managers who let all those underlings go) you don't need so many managers for so few workers.

But from 0-25 BJC (Before Jimmy Carter), a lot of these jobs were easy to come by...to the right people. Like people who were white and had a penis. And didn't have an accent, or worship someone besides Jesus, or you-know, act different. Put on your tie and collect your paycheck. Easy as pie.

Fortunately for these guys, European industry was in ruins and unable to compete, the US had inherited the Pacific, and the rest of the world had yet to show much capacity for global business. Our steel and everything made from it shipped world-wide, plastics and electronics metastesized, and some smart socialism (like the Marshall Plan and interstate highway construction) developed ever wider markets intrernationally and at home. The guy selling products that sold themselves (but needed a human to fill out forms in triplicate) could get fat off of commissions and bonuses.

I grew up among these guys' kids, a lot of whom managed to pull off a similar trick, although most have moved from one employer to another, partly because increased efficiencies wrung from automation, outsourcing, mergers and other sources of working class unempoloyment have alchemized into benefits for the bosses. These are the hyperfortunate, those who had good things fall into their laps by virtue of being born.

Like most of the blessed throughout history, these people dwell on the down-side. They have so much to lose, and there are so many people out there who might want to take it. Or, they know they have something, but not as much as their bosses, their alleged betters.

So the riots and anti-war protests and drugiastic mayhem of the years 10-6 BJC may not have ever harkened a fair, peaceful and open-minded social order. But they did manage to scare some people, if only because they were frowned at anymore for saying 'nigger' and nursed nagging fears that their daughter might marry one, or their son might take drugs and not wanna work. At the office, having to hire women and Negroes upset the indelicate balance of the boys' club; plurality and compliance with laws and rules meant to engineer equality finally rendered management real work.

Simultaneously faced with social pressure to talk nice and legal sanction for discriminating (and later, for poisoning the environment), the hyperfortunate felt their fears a-fruiting, saw opportunities for their children begin to be harvested by the melanin-rich, the exotically-accented, the others. And so they blamed hyphenated Americans and insinuated that women who worked were child-haters or dykes. And despite continued interventions by the government on behalf of Business, they took to blaming the government as well.

As that oxymoron "political correctness" took root and blaming minorities and women became taboo (on paper), the hyperfortunate took the gummint route more and more often. From its diesel-rainbowed rutwater the Tea Party emerged. Not evolved, because they don't believe in that, and the movement is patently inhuman and unnatural. The Kochs and Fox and a rash of richers who do not rhyme but have bast amounts of cash at their disposal, concocted its molecular structure from petrochemicals and bile, conjured up a soul from Greed and Gluttony and Covetousness, blessed by voodoo economic priests (yet continued to be labeled "Christian"), and turned it loose in the electorate.

They are greatly aided by the fact that the government's apparent head is a black man with a foreign-sounding name one letter removed from that of our most famous terrorist enemy. Nobody has to say the N-word to get the biggot masses riled up, "Obama" is the perfect stand-in. And so the anti-government rhetoric has ratcheted up from Reagan's folksy assphorisms to fear of black helicopters and love for the Rapture to the widespread belief that the liberals want totalitarian government run by a president who is some sort of foreign agent.

Which is preposterous. The last time our president was a foreign agent, a group of Saudis attacked our financial center, we committed to a costly war in a country that had nothing to do with it, and the remaining parties of the Axis of Evil came away with more power than ever.

One facet of hyperfortunate paranoia is that blaming the truly culpable is not an option. Don't bite the hand that feeds you, or you will be fired. Or maybe next time instead of feeding you that baloney (steaks are but a memory for the old, a legend to the young), it will hand you actual crap. Our woes cannot be the fault of corporations galloping toward next year's bankruptcy to maximize this quarter's profits. Do not blame Exxon or the healthcare industry or Cheney, because you want to be as rich as them one day, and won't want anyone attacking you then. Fight to protect what you aspire to tooth and nail, and someday you may be rewarded.

The fine print confirms that loyal commoners will not be rewarded, but never mind. All that matters is that the tripe pie that remains for the 99% of people who do most of the work and get least of the rewards is not only not infinite, it is shrinking, and even the dumbass who got his job due to his frat or church or other born-white connection can see that. He sure as hell does not want to see someone else bellying up to the table.

Cool Ease



Once were glaciers. There still are, for now, just not this low, not this south. But their tracks reach halfway down from the pole, evidence of past sprawl.

For a long time, "glacial" has meant slow. A glacial pace excruciates and frustrates, witholds fruition until long after you've lost interest. To some it's majestic, stately, an inspiring slow march across ages.

Of course we know that to be bullshit now, and although the concept of glaciers as slow may hang on among english majors and other metaphor junkies, scientists who've studied this kind of earth artistry now know just how fast a glacier can move. In our warmed atmosphere, they can break up quickly, mile after mile of what appeared to be a solid block of ice fracturing, sliding, turning into mush in a single summer. Beneath their stoic mantles, river rush and rage. And in the cores that remain solid (for now), strata of long-fallen snow tell about sudden onsets of ice ages, rapid accumulations, quick thaws.

Here in the northwest, especially in the sere interior, areas bare of towering forests and other rock-swallowing greenery, geology speaks of other glacial speed. Glaciers here once held enormous lakes, icy fastness damming inland seas. As the climate warmed, water sought the weak points, runnning off the top, tunneling through cracks and voids, shimmying beneath, pioneering trickles searching for opening to turn the vast potential energy of the impounded water kinetic and free. Lake Missoula, about 200 miles long and holding something like 500 cubic miles of water, let rip and carved out the canyons we call coulees. Rock formations downstream held back water for a time, but the lake drained in a couple of days, and rock cannot hold up to that forever, a couple hundred square kilometers of it gave way, turning the once broad expanses of the laval plateau into a tracery of coulees grand and miniscule.

The floods happened when people were still a new and naturalizing species in the new world. I can see them, living in a good spot along the river, enjoying the bounty of an unspoiled landscape, and then feeling the earth shake, hearing a roar, and then being wiped out by a wall of water. Throughout the Columbia watershed, the best human habitat was ripped apart. The archaeologist in me weeps not just for the people who were swept away, crushed by boulders, and drowned, but also for the earliest sites, obliterated. (Of course, there must also be some sites, located in a lucky lee or a high bench that only got a blanket of sand and silt, where entire Pleistocene camps must have been buried intact.)

But once the ice sheets ceded the lower latitudes and no ice dams held more potential cataclysms, the coulees remained. Over time, the interior dried out, and the canyons became oases, protecting streams and ponds from wind and sun, collecting mountain snowmelt, thunderstorm runoff, percolating rain of yore. 

Above, scabland lava, sagebrush, fields of glacial till. Deer instead of mastodons, solitary sage grouse instead of sky-darkening flights of fowl.  Beautiful in its way, and far short of desolation, but plenty of dessication to go around. People traversed this country, hunted some, found patches of roots to eat, but it was sunburnt and windswept.

Far better to retreat to the protection of a coulee. Here there was water, and waterfowl, and all the critters who come to drink...and feed the people. Here grew moisture loving plants that could not survive up top: food, medicine, fiber, mats, and so many materials vital to the organic age. Here was escape from the relentless wind, a place where fire can be tamed and live in a hearth and that had more wood to burn in the first place. Here, flood-ripped canyon walls exposed tool rock, flood deposits made easy picking for cooking and sweatlodge rocks. Here, labyrinths well known to locals afforded escape from marauders, ambushes for hunting, secret and secluded spots for communing with the spirits. The great coulees, Grand and Moses and others, became highways as bipeds grew in number and eventually reintroduced horses.

Cool. Ease.

The Fire Inside

This title must already have been used on a bunch of crappy books about sports, self-published memoirs of entrepreneurs, self-help compendiums of snippets wrung form the experience of Winners, and all manner of motivational junk.

My post is about fires, inside. Also about heatilators, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Or maybe not, because I am shiftless, or maybe shiftful. Or just full of shift. In any case, not driven by some internal fire, an unflickering force, or some burning yearning. (Maybe one, but hell if I'm gonna admit to that on the internet.)

Although it's the time of year when my pyromania is confined to the den, I still enjoy a good fire. Right now is nice, the family all tucked in bed, me sitting here with the dog, writing. Me, that is. The dog is no help at all in composition, being more of a sculptor.

Morning fires may be my favorite, though. My 5-year-old has been helping me some this year, placing some of the kindling before the lighting, but for the most part this is another solo domain. If I happened to be motivated enough top bring in more wood the night before, or not motivated enough to brun the evening's supply of wood, there will be enough sitting there under the cantilevered hearth to get going. But more often than not, the first task is fetching wood. On good days that means brisk air under a crisp sky, or even a nice foggy blanket. Other times, it's a dash through the rain.

Then the ritual of turning castoffs into tinder and kindling. I've been working through the yellow pages this year. There was a thing on the news lately about Seattle levying a fee on phonebook publishers, the logic being that they dump these things on every doorstep, and almost all of them end up unused, part of the solid waste stream. Seattle obviously is wanting for pyros. As for the kindling, I've used everything from broken drawers to failed carvings (only actual wood though). This season it has all been the last of the leftover fence boards, sawed and split pieces that were so short or damaged they could not even make a birdhouse floor, snap-crackling cedar, unfailing faggots of flame waiting to be unleashed.

Then the building, setting everything so that a single match of flicked bic can set the tongues a-licking and flames a-rising. Despite being inside, I still set it up like a campfire. I have about the most primitive fireplace possible in a 20th Century house,  with the exception of the heatilator (which I still intend to address later, though I can feel my resolve getting bored and threatening to walk off). So it's a teepee in the corner, usually, cedar and paper with bigger wood erected over it, bigger wood still at the ready. 

Then, flame. Keeping an eye on it, ripping another page from the phonebook if the fire stalls, placing larger pieces where they will catch best. Feeding those hungry tongues with good wood, letting them lick higher, and piling on more. 

I grew up in a house where fires in the fireplace consisted of 3-4 logs, parallel, on a grate. Now that I am in charge, they look more random, and change shape as the conflagration progresses. Lately, I've been into stacking them so they look vaguely (or maybe exactly, for all I know) like Korean characters: black-charred strokes hovering on an orange background. I love that every fire is different, and every moment of each fire unlike the one before.

The new fire roars and cracks. Flames grow higher and whiter with intensity, threatening to climb the chimney. The heat begins to shoulder cold aside. As I add big logs, mixing in hard maple to mate with the flaming fir, I let things subside, and shift my attention from getring things going to building a bed of coals. The big flames having blasted a perimeter of warm air, the task now is to heat up the ton of masonry, which eventually helps heat the whole house.

Along with the heatilator.  Like I've said before, this house has a passive convection system mortared into the fireplace itself, simple and unbreakable, dependent on nothing more than a fire to start pumping air. The state of the art has long since passed this by, what with inserts and fans and pellet-stoves, gas logs, fake electric fires, and all that crap. I know this not only because big box hardware stores have relegated wood grates to some dark corner while new "systems" take front and center, but because of the "stats" feature of this blog.

It turns out that the "Heatilator" post is one of the most viewed. Not so much because there are other aficionados out there, but because there are confused people out there searching for "heatilator air velocity" or "tv over heatilator." That they should end up on a blog with the rantings and ramblings herein is sad for them, and evidence that the web is pretty damn hard up for information on a technology that is not old enough to have developed an antiquarian patina, and not new enough to be a catalogued and well-cached component of the computer age.

But I digress, which is possible when a fire has reached its mature stage. Sizzling slowly, a few logs feeding each other, sustaining a happy glow and an occasional outburst of flame, maple releasing its heat slow and steady: the lifelong love in a warm bed of embers following the passionate flames of the outset. Asking only for the occasional log to keep heating the house. Nothing spectacular, but these long slow burns have more to do with lower utility bills than the big flames.

So I hope that if you were searching for useful information on those holes in yourt fireplace masonry and ended up here instead (the TV will be fine if there is a mantle between it and the outlet vents, by the way, and probably would be otherwise), I hope that this found you sitting by a fire, enjoying the shifting of the flames, the diversion of attention.

But I think you need to go poke those logs to keep the fire breathing, and maybe add another log.

Good night.

Human Tides

People come and people go from faces of the earth. Our kind are increasing here in the maritime northwest as on earth as a whole, sprawl marches along highways, farms are gulped and a hundred plots plotzed out. It seems inexorable (as if I even  know exactly what that means), this primate tide.


But if you go out beyound the sprawl, go into the dark wood and windy mountain and all manner of muddy places our modern feet fear to tread, there are the high water marks of earlier waves of first people and the 600 generations that followed. Nature west of the Cascades swallows whole towns in a generation or two. I've been in places that had a hotel and a bank, a post office, neighborhoods and cemeteries, a good-sized herd of humans at the dawn of the atomic era. But then when all the trees had been cut, it was over. Railways pulled for use elsewhere, materials scavenged, everything else made of wood rots, archaeology gets made. Blackberries and alder thickets make it hard top gain entry anymore, and in less than a human lifetime are succeeded by evergreens that eventually create a blanket of roots over the whole thing.

Humans have ebbed off lands we think are wild now, and our own dominion over earth is bound to falter eventually. The ebb is in effect at Secret Habor, where an entire school campus was demolished almost two years ago. That's the photo here. If you know what you are looking at, you can see slope cuts where the main buildings were, and the backhoe is in a basketball court about at the spot where I found an old pitcher's mound buried in the fill. I think only 3 structures remain, with another 3 cabins on nearby private land.

This human retreat happens to be intentional. The school wanted to move to the mainland for logistic and financial reasons, and the state wanted to manage the island as a natural area. One thing still to come is removal of a dike, which is also in the photo above--its the shoreline at the right. Again, the cognizant eye immediately notices that the seaward face of the dike is eroding. About a horizontal foot is gone since a year ago.

In the 1870s, the first white homesteader diked off part of the estuary and managed to do a little farming. He didn't last too long, though, and in the 1880s along came Shadrach Wooten, who had married into the local tribe and may just have been moving to his wife's family place. Same thing happened with Mr Hansen, and those two families represented the high water mark for a couple of generations. Did they maintain the dike, or let the sea flood back in? I don't know.  By the end of the Depression, none of them lived there anymore, anyway.

After WWII, a Seattleite decided that the harbor could be a haven, and over the last half of the century there was a school for boys. During this time, the dike was reinforced and raised; I found a ruler in the fill, a spray-paint can embedded in a concrete seawall.

There have been other ebbs and flows on Cypress. The capitalist alchemy of tranforming salmon, timber, minerals and even wild rhododendrons into cash came in boom-bust waves crested and fell quickly. A tourism wave was proposed, and although it never really materialized did manage to carve out a few marks on the landscape. Older peoples interested in maintaining populations of strawberries and deer, roots and fruits and wood...their waves oscillated more in time with the seasons, and were less inclined to scour the land bare on their way out.

Enough of the fluff and opinionizing. Let's get back to dirt. This is the profile of a trench, with the water table at something like 125 cm below surface. Down there, you have clay that gets sandier the higher you go, until hitting an organic layer. In some areas, this has a lot of bark, in others there is perfectly preserved grass, and in others it's a finer peat. Could be from logging, a different sea level, ancient human intervention,... Then there's another run of grey clay into sand, and then you get into modern fill.

As you can see, there's a wooden pile, driven into the lower grey, and either very short or cut off at the inception of the uppermost fill. Cypress timber was tough by virtue of low rainfall and serpentine soils, and prized for pilings; several turned up in this trench, and none were creosoted. They are neither ancient nor modern.

I'm really only starting to analyze the sediments, and at some point will have to find funds or a compelling con to get dates and expertise. I'll get back to you when I do. 

On the Radio Now

Lucas is playing a sound quilt on KAOS:

Contemporary pow wow music, a trippy interlude, and up pops what sounds like John Lennon and Dick Cavett talking about Indians, over and then followed by a drum riff... Now a guy talking about native cultural and language loss and preservation.
The airwaves of Olympia oxygenate our local culture. People think that computers and webs can connect freedom lovers, and that the System is vulnerable to leaking into the same net damning data, inspiring even our rulers to be honest and peaceful.

Of course the web ain't that way. Some govbot is at this moment getting antsy at my mention of such things. The internet requires connection, plugging in, and for all the supposed privacy measures, you have to assume that the spies and big brother have better software than the average citizen. Are you connected to the web, or just trapped on it, waiting on the spider?


Radio lives in the air, not just in the stone's throw radius of a wireless hub. You send nothing back; the station just transmits. So yeah, you do not affect the programming of the broadcaster, but nor are they subject to denial of service attacks, viruses, or being kicked off the server. Low power stations can be mobile, off the power grid, and received by people similarly unplugged. Both ends can function without petrochemical infusions if they want, and if we ever get to the point of civil, martial, or natural disturbance on such a scale that the fragile cyber world becomes disconnected, radio is likely to survive. Mad Max's ride, the last of the V-8 Interceptors, had a radio.


The listener can turn the radio on or off. There are no packets telling NSA what she's listening to, and she has in her arm the strength to generate enough power to tune in on crank-it-up machines costing 20 bucks. The airwaves can be breathed in at will.


Democracy requires radio. TV was just about the death of freedom, and computer connectivity's ability to disperse information far and wide is more than offset by its susceptibility to secret monitoring, pinpoint location of users, data mining for phrases and patterns that mark a man as a rebel. Again, I feel Admiral Poindexter's cold gaze on these words.


The airwaves can be jammed, but not form a single location in a West Virginia bunker. Given the security industry's fetishization of technology, I'd venture to guess that they've been bored with radio broadcasts for decades now, and have grown lax in paying attention. The town I live in has pirate stations that don't even bother to hide, low power broadcasters that regularly venture into opinions and news that make the supposed liberal media look grand and old. In many areas of the country, NPR is on the left, but here they are outflanked by KAOS, who are outflanked by Radio Free Olympia, who are probably outflanked by stations I have yet to encounter.


Freedom is on the line, but it is not online. It is in the air.

What was it?

The last few days, lurking at the edge, is a blog about something, but I cannot figure out what. There's a Cypress thing about flows and ebbs of people, but thats not it.

It's that dream you enjoyed, but it slips away before your waking mind can commit it to memory.

Three buts, I'm out.

Cypress Again (Finally)

This third Summer in the NW began to seem familiar, my body more used to the rythms, seasoned enough to feel comfortable just past halfway north to the pole. And as you may recall, I was pretty sure I knew ahead of time that August would find me on Cypress Island.

But government time does not comply with the seasons, and even though they recognize years and do some things annually, they prefer the biennium. So August slipped to Sept., then boat trouble delayed the whole operation to October, maybe Halloween, but still I drifted along in the belief that in the islands, Autumn falls softlier than where I live, and the trip could still play out under that season's rippling sideways sunbeams.

But the calendar fell subject to arcane formulae concerning the availbility of funding, rules rules and more rules, other project timelines, and quite a few other variables of less or more dubious officiality. Government time set the trip for late November, when it would finally be darker and rainier than usual. Specifically, early on the Monday after Turkey Day, which meant a Sunday drive on I-5 with a million other people.

Foreboding didn't really have time to set in, and my hermitty self grinned at the promise of island seclusion. The road was crowded, but not clogged. Everything went well dockside, then a run no more complicated than dodging crabpots in Secret Harbor. The predicted gale held off til late in the day, by which time we were tucked away low in the lee, watching low clouds skudd, but feeling only the greatest gusts. (The return was on a channel glassier and calmer than I'd ever seen it.)

The boat and backhoe pilot stayed over, more fun than hermitage, and remained a few days til the work was done. It's really nice to work with someone you don't know, and find out that they're interesting and can handle themselves in the field.

My part was spending time in trenches through the old ball field, filled in past years and destined to be re-opened to the ocean in future biennia. So I was looking for things in the fill to tell me when they were deposited, and found a pitcher's mound and superball (no earlier than 1970s, based on materials).

To get deeper we had to run a pump, which at times would empty the trench quicker than water at the far end could drain. Other times it just choked on clay or the rodent who'd drowned the first night. In the 40 minutes or so between pump and seepage victories, I walked the muck, troweled clean the walls, drew stratigraphic profiles. Oh, and shoveled saturated muck.

Like all good dirt, this stuff says something. I haven't figured it all out yet, but the sequence of sand, clay, sand, organic, clay, sand, fill tells a tale of a Salish Sea and people. Was that organic layer a natural thing, maybe when glaciers sucked the sea shallower? Or a Salish woman's silverweed marsh garden? Or logging droppings?

Questions to ponder later.

Lithic 1

Sorry if you clicked on this looking for something on stones. I just didn't want to title this entry "Rocky I," even though that's what it is about. After making my near-teen kid watch Planet of the Apes by way of home-schooling her in sarcasm (see "Shallow Space Travel"), I figured a lesson on abject mockery was in order, in particular the iconic moments of Rocky that have sustained comedians for decades now. 

As you may know, Rocky was the story of an exceptionally stupid and no longer very young boxer in Philadelphia who, against all odds, gets a shot at the heavyweight title of the world. (Why stupid? Maybe all the blows to the head, maybe the deadening effects of living in Philly, or maybe he was just a dumbass.) His best friend and mentor is a rubber ball whose cheerful acceptance of being slammed into the spit and velveeta-stained streets of the Philly slums provides the self-proclaimed Italian Stallion with his fighting strategy: take blows to the head until your opponent tires or dislocates something.

The champ that reaches into the City of Brotherly Love (lovingly shot in a palette of soot and carcass hues) and pulls out a smalltime leg-breaker for a sham battle resembles Muhammad Ali in some ways: black and beautiful (sorta), boastful and uppity (the late-70's was an era when white people bemoaned melanin run rampant in their sports world). But it being Hollywood, and a film released in the afterglow of the bicentennial, movie champ Apollo Creed is not a conscientious objector, but loves America so much that he wears red white and blue trunks, albeit in an uppity way. Later Rocky the champ will don similarly patriotic garb before defeating communism in the guise of a hulking nazi poster boy, but that's another tale.

Stallone, who wrote and starred in the movie (there was no director) and reportedly stitched together all the costumes as well, wanted to emphasize the value of individual will and hard work, so a fair amount of the movie focuses on his training, culminating in the flick's second most famous moment: Rocky in the same unwashed sweatsuit he's been wearing for weeks, heavily stained on the ass for some reason, charging up the stairs of the capitol and pumping his arms in the air [Yes, Internerd, I know the capitol's in Harrisburg, but Rocky thought it was the capitol.]

Anyway, Rocky runs, sweats, confides his insecurities to his rubber ball, maybe even abstains from sex, and punches beef carcasses (or, in Philly parlance, beats his meat), sometimes before cameras.

The cameras are there because this unlikely challenger has become a home-town hero. The white population of Philly, still years from their triumphant fire-bombing of black activists, seizes on Rocky as a punch-drunk messiah of sorts, or at least a working class hero (of a looser sort, given his joblessness). 

And on a more intimate scale, Rocky has other supporters. Like plastic fish and turtle toys that he believes are pets, and feeds diligently. There's Paulie, a sloppy and sometimes violent drunk whose ethnicity is never directly mentioned, but who works for a meat company with an Irish name (to be fair, Sly scrawled unflattering stereotypes of Italian-Americans as well). There's the girl who sold him the pet food and is Paulie's sister, because anyone else would have alien and confusing to Rocky's addled mind. In a true Philly romance, he traps her in his filthy apartment, shows her is biceps and armpits, and she falls for him, or at least under him, making love on the floor among the roach-husks and mouse-turds. Finally, there's his manager, a guy who everyone calls Mick (probably not a Swede), but who is clearly a retired Penguin, embittered after being humiliated by Batman, jilted by the Riddler, and robbed blind by the Joker. Mick supports Rocky by yelling at him, which I guess makes him more of a father figure than the rubber ball, and by telling him "Stay away from women, they weaken the legs." (Luckily Rocky had that one brilliant moment and figured out the beef loophole.)

Then the fight itself, lovingly choreographed by, you guessed it, Stallone. Rocky leads off with the usual strategy of standing there and blocking punches with his face, but eventually he and his corner realize that compared to his usual experience with 3-round bouts, a 15 round prize fight is way more: the cut man thinks maybe 10 times more, Rocky says 100, while the Penguin spits in disgust and says "There ain't no such number that big, Rock," then jabs him in the nuts to perk him up for the next round.

Then this nobody lands a solid punch, knocking down the champ. What follows is a boring see-saw of desperation and triumph, hitting and getting hit, blood, spit, drool, and snot. The only real good part is when Rocky cannot see because his eye is swollen, and his manager wants him to quit, but he says "Cut it, Mick!" Oh, the mockery that line has fed. We used that line doing fieldwork all the time,and I suggest you do the same. It need not relate at all to what's happening; thus are the rules of Rocky's utterances.

So does he win? I dunno, maybe the movie does not say, or maybe I just didn't care. I was too caught up in the most famous moment of the movie, when he is done with the fight, and all the world is crowding into the ring, and Rocky keeps howling "Adrian!"

Adrian had been the name of his pet-shop girl, drunk-boy's sister. But that woman was poor, and based on her glasses and clothes was either a time traveler or some religious extremist who dressed as if the 1960s had never happened. The woman who comes to the ring has new clothes, uses rich-girl conditioner, and sees fine with no glasses. Adrienne, maybe, but not the same spinster he'd woo'd and screwed on the kitchen floor. In any case, a few seconds of celluloid killed off those names, maybe forever. Nobody from that point forward wanted to name their kid something that would be bawled loudly by people trying to act retarded. "Aaaa Dreee Uuuunnnnnn!!!"

So did my kid learn anything? Maybe, but probably not. She did stick it out 'til the very end, through 15 rounds of incomprehensible "dialogue," unlikelihoods galore, gore unbridled, Rocky's incontinence, and of course, my dumb comments. For with so little to work with, refined sarcasm is difficult, and mockery grows dull before long, which is why society as chosen two or three scenes to mock as shorthand for the entire movie, and why I went for the richer grounds of POTA first.

BONUS: That was it for the blog entry proper, but I cannot let this pass without mentioning that fact that the movie included among Apollo Creed's entourage none other than Arnold Johnson. Yeah, Putney Swope himself. Same suit, same beard, although the voice lacked the magic Swope. Sadly, I think that his tertiary sidekick role here was one of the biggest things to happen to him since he starred as the revolutionary advertiser a decade earlier, maybe his last movie appearance. He showed up in episodes of The Jeffersons and Sanford and Son, and after exhausting the 'black' shows, appeared in other shows in the only roles available to bearded African Americans: old men and drunks. Although he did appear in several episodes of Hill Street Blues, it was never in a major role, and unlike Rocky he never got a real championship shot. 

Palindromath

Last post concerned one a middle-school daughter. This one stars her little sister, who likes to add things (like, we will wake up early tomorrow and she'll want to play yahtzee).

Some previous week she was just sitting there making me make up addition problems. And eventually I rolled around to twelve plus twelve, which is more than she wants to count to in her head, so she wrote it down, and figured it out. I was proud.

12  + 12 = 24

Only for some reason she wrote each digit backwards. Which made older daughter and I, who as you may recall had been engaged in discussions of Leonardo (who could write in mirror letters, and numbers too I guess, but I ain't gonna check), look at it backwards

42 = 21 + 21

Cool. 42, of course is also the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. What makes a dad prouder than when his girl is good at math and enjoys doing it? Maybe when she generates cool mirrormath...

Rennaissance Man

7th grade history has, just before everyone gets terminally distracted by Christmas, reached the renaissance, leaving behind the medeival times (about which my kid learned that their art was 'incredibly lame").

So she comes home yesterday and asks who the most important renaissance person is. Although it is obviously Hieronymous Bosch, she's not ready for that news, and so I went with Leonardo. She was thrilled with my apparently correct choice, and we agreed that it was because he did so many things. Some people were great artists or poets or scientists, but Leonardo did all that, invented that crazy cool helicopter thingy (I don't give a damn whether it worked, just to come up with that at all is great), did autopsies, and was no slouch at math. skcawkcab etirw dluoc oeL ytfeL, sulp and.

It was a good talk, and later we were telling her mom about it, and how the teacher read my daughter's paragraph to the class as a good explanation of the changes accompanying the emergence of humanism (is there anything that could make an anthropologist dad prouder?!). And told her that we liked DaVinci's diversety of talents.

So mom looks at daughter as says, "Yeah, but he couldn't knit."

And daughter and dad immediately answer, "Yes he could! He invented macrame!"

So yeah, I guess there is something that could make this dad prouder than humanistic academic triumph: well-timed comedic smartassery.

Wild Turkey

So I said maybe I'd write this next, but that turned out to be the penpenultimate post relative to this, which of course most of you will find first. In any case, what follows is my fuzzy recollection of a story I wrote a few years back, based on a harrowing journey and a desire to channel HS Thompson (if not the duller truth):

I was 15 minutes short of Bowling Green when the wild turkey kicked in. Maybe not as scary as a swarm of bats, but a hell of a lot heavier and thus capable of more damage. But I'll get to that.

The first thing is to understand that the wild turkey in question was not the precious brown liquor, it was just a bird. Freakish to be sure, improbable as an H. Bosch creature, like an old whore appearing in a hallucination to augur the coming bad trip. Wattly and despite desparate splashes of blue and red make-up, indisputably a gray-skinned minion of some dark spirit. But I'll get to that, if I have the courage.

Anyway, there was no booze involved, because I was driving alone, and that would have been irresponsible. If memory serves, in those days I was more into the poor man's speedball: tylenol 3 and a fistful of sudafed. Comfortable and relaxed, yet at the same time alert and prone to stomping on the gas whenever my heightened senses told me there was not cop. But I'll get to that, too.

This was a run I'd done before, working on a landscaping peroject in Maryland, taking 301 to avoid the interstate and its arterial flow of trucks, dipshits, retirees on their endless north-south migrations, and of course dangerously wasted individuals. 301 is one of those backroads that dates to that brief halcyon when engineers had successfully pulled out the meanders and straightened the roads, but had not yet discovered the completely soul-less interstate. Now, when the general public is afraid to leave the madding lemming crowd, uncomfortable venturing too far from the corridor of Chevrons and Cracker Barrels, such roads are magical. Long lonely straightaways, and in the Virginia portion of this particular road, it is mostly in-betweens, few stops and towns, and hardly any other cars. Lots of woods, a stripe of sky above and ahead all you need to navigate, the contoured pavement pulling the wheels just where they should go.

In other words, a road that lets you think if you want to, or maybe just to speed like hell.

And here, south of the little town of Bowling Green, there is a great place to do that. You crest one of the ancient folds in the land, and before you is a luxuriously long straightaway, a mile down to Reedy Creek, then a mile back up to the next high point. You can see right away if there is a cop lurking, and this time there was not.

So I hit the gas. Not to get anywhere faster, not to prove anything or compete or even have anything to tell about later. Basically just to get that feeling of acceleration all the way down, then the g-force hitting at the bottom, as I swung through the trough and up the other side.

And then flying. Alone, feeling weightless and silent, watching the stripes shooting by and always missing me. Ethereal.

Ephemerally, as it turned out. On the far side of the approaching creek was a big gobbler, the sight of which knocked me from my high speed reverie. A large bird looking like he wanted to cross in front of me.

I slowed.

He slowed.

He looked like he'd seen me and though better of playing chicken. He stood still, looking at me, blinking stupidly and flashing that ridiculous eye shadow.

With the bird stopped, I stopped stopping, and hit the gas again. "Get past before he changes his mind, what there is of it," I thought.

In my state I could practically see every muscle in those drumsticks flex as he broke into a run, took off, and cracked the windshield. In the final instant I could see those eyes again, but this time there was something else, something behind the vapidity. Sadness, despondency even. And that was the true terror, worse than malevolent bats, a suicide most fowl.

A big bang, and then he was gone, replaced by a big spiderweb of cracks. Fortunately, the glass held together. I pulled over a little ways up the hill, inspecting the damage and foraging for any edible bits. None to be had, not even any trace of the bird, no free meal.

Abyssal Vent

*

In an effort to educate my deprived children--they have no broadcast or cable TV to tell them what's what--I recently introduced them to the 20th Century nature show, complete with the voice of David Attenborough. Regrettably, it was just his voice, no shots of his cavorting about the globe in old-school high tops.

I say 20th Century, although Blue Planet was aired in 2001, and I may as well address that discrepancy before some bored and bitter internerd acts like he noticed it first. To begin with, a year or two off ain't nothing in the scheme of things, and for an archaeologist it's dead-on. Second, the images you see on there are 20th Century, you only watched it later, you moron; editing and all the post production takes time. Third, and really the only important point in the bunch: Blue Planet is a decent nature show, a species that arose and flourished in the last century, but is in grave danger of extinction now.

And even if they make their way to a house or hotel with cable TV, the kids aren't likely to run across a similar beast. In the doddering final quarter of the last millenium, demigods like Attenborough and Page narrated masterpieces of the nature show genre while the rest of civilization fell, finally landing in the ilk of shark week, cryptozoology, and extreme animals. They read scripts laden with actual information founded in science, scripts with the confidence to sit silent while clever editing and sublime photography (itself patient and informed enough to be at the right place at the right time) conspired to tell the tales.

Anyway, we sat there watching the episode on the deep, dwellers in the dark zone. Benthic beasties beyond the reach of the sun, subsisting on the droppings of the well-lit seas above. Browsing the drifts of marine snow, filtering morsels and motes flung down toward them by currents, ambushing and hunting each other. But ultimately, or so we though and were taught through most of the last century, ultimately all life depended on the sun. Critters with no notion of the sun depended on its by-products for life, and when its flame faltered, all would perish.

Wrong.

If you got National Geographic you knew by 1980, if you were a marine biologist you knew earlier (maybe), but the glacial pace of textbook revision in the age of paper made sure that nobody else knew about this fact for many more years: along the great oceanic rift zones occurred some vents spewing hydrogen sulfide that were teeming with life. Polychaete worms, vast mats of bacteria, mussel beds, weird crabs (which is saying a lot),...all of these freaks living off of chemical energy. No sun, no photosynthesis, no herbivores, a food chain completely unlinked from all the others.

Then, a few years later, abyssal surveys in the Gulf of Mexico found "cold seeps," chemicals oozing up through the ocean floor to form lakes, their shores lined with communities of extremophiles, creatures capable of sucking life from methane, which I hope you will pronounce in the Attenboroughian way, "MEE-thane." [And yeah, I said 'lake' and 'methane,' o ignant internerd, because at that depth, the gases stay liquid.]

I have not yet heard how these unique ecosystems, having freed themselves from the vagaries of topside weather and the thousand other risks up there, have coped with the Deepwater Horizon Spill. Just when you've perfected the art of living off one kind of poison, along come a river of something else. Damn, evolution used to be easier before the humans got out of hand.

Anyway, as I am sure you can all see by now, the point of this whole entry is of course this: Life can arise where the sun don't shine, it can live on farts alone. And if sulfurous exhudations and mee-thane are all it takes to support a rich community of creatures, then long after the sun goes cold, life will hang on tenaciously around my own abyssal vent. There is hope beyond that most frightening of ends.

Assuming my supply of beans holds out.

* Oh, and since I don't get down there much myself, I lifted the photo of some extremophiles from:
(2005) Tubeworm May Live Longer by Cycling Its Sulfur Downward. PLoS Biol 3(3): e108. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030108

'Wild' Turkey

There was something on the radio yesterday about turkeys (big surprise), and how the domesticated ones, even those "introduced" to the Americas, descended from species that evolved in the Americas. It being NPR, they noted that southwestern tribes had domesticated the wild birds once upon a time. Not turning turkey lore on its head, but at least it was a nod to native people on a day that fills some of them with ambivalence, others with fear and loathing, and still others with turkey.

But a nod is but a gesture, and in fact the focus dealt more with a common trope: species brought near extension, then rescued by modern wildlife management. Recovered to the point that these birds occur well beyond their supposed ancestral range. Although the main goal of reintroducing wild turkeys was primarily to establish populations of game birds that outweigh the lead shot it took to bring them down, the story was presented as on of environmental success. Yay.

[At least it was not that tired old thing about Benjamin Franklin nominating the gobbler to be the US bird, instead of the imperial icon the eagle. And I cannot expect them to know the story of my uncle, who would step onto his porch each morning and greet the resident flock with a hale and hearty "Senators!"]

What it did not mention was that the wild turkey, even thousands of miles from the pueblos where it lived in domesticated form, was not strictly wild. Native people managed their populations, and having hunted the fowl for millenia, had to have exerted some selective pressure that altered  its evolutionary trajectory. Clearing for gardens (and for that matter, growing corn), shifting from plot to plot, and controlled burning all contributed to good turkey habitat, and the abundance of this bird in 1491 had a lot to do with how how Algonquin and other people lived. Just as the decline had a lot to do with how Anglo people lived.

But enough about that. You clicked on this because of Wild Turkey the drink, the kickin' chicken, the amber river that took Hunter Thompson to his muse. Or maybe because you thought I'd include that gonzo piece about a wild turkey that I've hinted at. Maybe I'll do that next.

Embered

The surfer in a barrel is stoked. The me in my chair is embered.

I sit here in the wee hours, the orange glow of a big log placed hours ago my companion. Not a lick of flame to be seen, not a candlepower of light to see by. Just that warmth, the occasional crackle as wood goes from smooth to alligatory to ash, the smell wafting up memories.

Like the relaxation after revelation, the ember embodies fire without flowery flame. Meanwhile, outside, moonglow on the snow is softened by a high haze (and maybe the low smoke of more fires like mine), delicate despite the full moon. Nothing more falling, just a white blanket reminder of the storm that was.

Maybe time to slip back on the morpheal path, savor the quiet until I drift off and dream. Maybe ride that long left between conscious and not, where dad and slipped-away memories live, where the wild things aren't.

Penpenultimate

I'm not generally a fan of ultimate anything. I distrust claims of superlativity, discounting nearly all as the data insist any reasonable person must. And ultimate in the sense of 'final' means there's nothing left to do but turn out the lights and go home, ultimately a let-down.


Penultimacy is where it's at. Journey not over, but a long trail of memories behind you and the gleam of the promised land lights the horizon. Something savored. Mm-hmm.


Penpenultimacy, before the before, can be a little different. Sometimes this state preplicates penultimacy, sometimes you can draw that feeling out for a long time, basking. Other times it irks, frustratingly far from either an easy retreat or effortless entry. Then there are the times when penpenultimacy plays fore to an especially good penultimacy.


Of course, a significant percentage of the time you know not when something is penpenultimate. Even when there's a formal sequence, the next to the next to to the last thing sits far enough from the end that chaos can intervene: that agenda they handed you at the outset is subject to change without notice. Penpenultimate acts affect ultimate outcomes, though, and a small right move at that stage can make for a more easeful and satisfying conclusion than last act last ditch heroism.

Because any given thing you do may be the penpen-, may be the precursor, may be the action whose reaction slaps you back a couple of moves later, doing good is advised. Penpenultimacy is the loam from which karma grows.

But still, uncertainty. The sequence shifts, or just keeps slipping gears. The penpen reduplicates yet again, and you never move on. I just finished a carving that got stuck in that state for a while. Most of my carvings seem to work like that: I make great progress for a while, subtracting chunks of wood, envisioning an end, but entering a phase where the shavings get smaller, my carving eye becomes oblivious to the obvious next move, my progress toward the final touches meanders. It is a dangerous time, when more than one work has wandered off course, or faltered and fallen into procrastinatory purgatory.

Often enough, though, from those penpenultimate steps and states emerges something that can, with a penultimate nudge, be beautiful, or at least completed.

Vanity

As I suspected, the post in this blog that got the most hits so far has been "Shallow Space Travel," which was about Planet of the Apes. A POTA (devotees cannot be asked to type 'Planet of the Apes' repeatedly, can they?) website found that September entry and posted a link a few days later under "Humorous Review."

My entry was about Heston-baiting and homeschooling my child in sarcasm, but forget that. The thrill of internet fame (more than 70 hits, baby!) is enough for me to throw that all aside and bask in the glory of things like this, which can appear in the first few pages of googling my blog now (thanks to Jeff and Jess, who I will refer to as Jeffus and Jessus once my blog becomes the basis for a new religion, and prophets are needed):

Re: funny POTA review That was pretty damn funny--he nailed it. --- In PotaDG@yahoogroups.com, jessica rotich wrote: > > I really enjoyed that, Jeff. Haw! > > Jess. > > On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 3:32 PM, Jeff K. wrote: > > > > > > > Haw! Haw! > > > > http://mojourner.blogspot.com/2010/09/shallow-space-travel.html > > > > > > >

Dormancy

A decade of tropical living, gardening and bush-whacking through jungle scrub and desert, eroded my memory of dormancy. Arrowroot and olena clung to an ancestral habit of sprouting in spring and retreating in winter, but for the most parts seasons were worn down and subtle: high temps dropped 10 degrees, mangoes had new shoots or flowers or fruit. But the ground never froze and the trees declined to drop all their leaves and retreat for months.

The Puget Sound lowlands have a bit of a blunted seasonality as well, out vast basin of water keeps the summer from getting too hot or the winter too cold, but there's no escaping trhe latitude, a little past the halfway point from equator to pole. Even the warmest winter lacks the light to keep leaves happy, and as you may have heard, the clouds here jealously filter out as much winter sun as possible.

So the trees that invest in something more than miserly needles are forced each autumn to surrender their wealth, dropping leaves to replenish the soil, and letting the sap settle back down to rest before the spring engorgement. Some plants compltely retreat into the ground, ceding the airspace. Some big critters hibernate, while hordes of insects and their arthopodic kin fall back even further into pupae and eggs, all the winter hiding places of the summer swarms.

Humans bury themselves in layers of textiles, avoid the cold rainy outdoors, and maybe withdraw into depressive solitude. (I'm guessing that over the years, I'll post more entries in winter than summer. One day many people may read this blog, but the making of it is a thing I accomplish alone, buried deep in the loam.)

Winter and dormancy always get saddled with the death metaphors, with the pall of loss and sad decay. Their contributions to fecundity lack the photogeneity of spring. Who wants to turn away from the flower in bloom to look at grey decay, at ill-lit muck?

But the frozen exoskeleton and waterlogged leaves fuel the spring growth. The respite from insects and warm weather give the plants a chance to recover and regroup. The cold and wet winnow the unhealthy. And hidden below ground, roots and hyphae may not be so dormant, the infrastructure for the superstructure often advances before and after any action is evident up top.

And not so much here, but in the desert regions there are species that go dormant for more than a season, beyond a year. Baked in mud, buffeted by winds, biding their time and witholding action until the right rain hits and then bursting forth with astonishing vigor from some unimpressive husk.

Seeds may not be dormant as biologists defined it, but an inert capsule that holds in it the germ of an entire organism seems like a special case of the same phenomenon. The joy of gathering seed each fall, knowing that the seed from one plant can birth a whole bed of progeny is one of the things that keeps me gardening and happy. I've seen seeds buried for decades or longer sprout when given the chance, and there are species whose seeds are engineered to outlast the elements in wait of the wet year or the fire that triggers growth.

My garden is about done for this season, and there are plenty of perennials, bulbs and bushes gone dormant. I'll find some excuses over the winter to go out and work--removing a stump or planning new beds, maybe--but in general I'm goign into garden dormancy as well. Other pursuits spring to life: writing and carving, reading and dreaming. At least some of these will prove to be roots that strengthen next years growth.

Heatilator

Do you know what a heatilator is?

I found out when we got this house, and I saw the brickwork cattycorner in the den. Openings beside and above the fireplace form a passive convection heater. Warm, yet cool in a late 70s kind of groove. I dig it.

Of course, our fireplace is the laughing stock of the great Northwest. When we moved in there proved to be a rodent passage into the house through the hulk of hollow tile and mortar holding up the chimney. The damper long gone to install an insert that had been outserted at some point. Inside the masonry of the chimney is a big metal firebox, so the heatilator doesn't become the smokilator. And only a crappy trifold screen.

As is often true, the screen stands now over by the tv. It's a pain in the ass to keep moving it all the time. So when I have an eye on the situation, ready to pounce on the embers that pop out now and then, I don't bother. And don't worry, I put the screen up when I leave the room.

And meanwhile, the heatilator pumps out warm air enough to keep the house warm. The brickface and hearth exudes for hours. The den-fire draws us in to play games and draw, talk, nuzzle up to the internet, tend fire, dry herbs, dance, watch a show, knit, carve,...and become proficient at picking up embers bare-handed.

So, let's review. Doorless, bare-bones fireplace in a damperless chimney pumping CO2 and heat into the atmosphere. On the other hand, it's really easy to keep a fire going that keeps the house warm down into the 30s, and the heatilator is a pretty green thing with no requirement for a gas or electric grid.

The damperless chimney would be a problem, but there's a rain guard over the top opf the chimney that keeps the fire from being doused, and when we don't have a fire there's a piece of foamcore insulation with Hawaiian cloth over it to close out the cold air.

The cloth matches our tropical blue bricks, which were a sick gray-brown. I wanted to work the heatilator vents into a Mayan pyramid scene, but was vetoed.

Besides having arts and crafts style metal and glass screen doors custom made for the opening, I'd like to do an improvement that I could afford. That is, make a mantle. I'd use some of the top vents as mortises for some hefty tenoned brackets that would hold up a massive slab of wood. Blocking those vents would also increase velocity in the hot air being forced out of the remaining vents. Plus, a mantle would give me a place to hang chilis or whatever for drying, stockings for stuffing, and of course a shelf for miscellaneous stuff that will subvert whatever architectural charm may be achieved by the mantle. [If it is a horizontal surface, stuff piles up on it. Without that, archaeology would be less abundant. Also it's equally important corrolary: if it's not a horizontal surface, stuff may roll off of it and into some corner where only an archaeologist will find it.]

The heatilator has a horizontal surface in each vent-niche. I have no idea what has passed through them to the hidden corner of our house, that dead space surrounding the fireplace, but would bet on that to be a hotspot for archaeologists digging up this place. And that, my friends, is enough to come down on the pro-heatilator side, as if I hadn't already made that clear.

Fall Back

I should be writing this a few months from now, and feel compelled to apologize as a member of Procrastinators Local #1111  (pronounced  by membership,"ee-levvendy-levven.")

But sometime last night or this Sunday morning we set clocks back and get a free hour, courtesy of the cosmos' poor compliance with arbitrary human timekeeping schemes.

And fall back asleep.

Or maybe write a bit. Fall back into a comfy chair, heating pad on shoulders sore from yesterday's drive.

Yesterday's drive! Back then, when daylight was saved, and not squandered, I headed to the hills with a bunch of native weavers to learn something about beargrass. It's a native lily used by tribes for weaving. The long skinny leaves are ready-made strips that take dye well, the kind of raw material that will draw people up in the mountains, driving three-and-a-half hours winding through rain, fog, and hunters. And of course in the old days, that would have been days on a horse. And in the older days, days and days on foot. Everything you harvested, you hauled.

Not so today, with nice paved roads (courtesy of American socialism). So it is possible for an elder to go take part in gathering, teach the younger people how it is done, give them skills and knowledge that native people need. Teach them what they need to do to get by in times of hard, and values to remember in times of easy: give them culture to fall back on.

You thought I'd forgotten about the title, didn't you?

So anyway, those same roads also allow people to pull in with some underpaid labor and pull out at the end of the day with a fuckin truck-load of beargrass. Or salal or whatever else they are ripping from the ground and feeding to the global trade machine. Like all roads, these are also corridors for ob-noxious flora, fauna, microbes and what-all that spatter off tires and crawl out of campers. And it's fair to say (I mean, if you believe in science) that this 20th century web of roads and the fumiferous exudations of cars have contributed to the warming climate that especially threatens mountain plants like beargrass.

In the face of all that, what's a plant to do? Fall back til there ain't no more place to fall back into.

Well now I'm getting a little ham-handed with the 'fall back' thing. Or maybe mantra-ish. If you are still reading, you get a vote.

Native people fell and fought back with a tide of settlers and armies that demanded land and would not take peace for an answer. Almost nowhere in  this land does it look like it did when under native management. Depressing.

Of the remaining places hosting life-forms that tribes need to maintain their culture, a large portion are public lands. Of course commercial resource extraction occurs on and under them (with little public benefit, thanks to GOP objections), but at least there is greater than zero potential to avoid environmental disasters and manage public lands for conservation (thanks to ecologically-informed socialism).

And maybe a place recognize that native understanding of the land, of beargrass and all the other things that have been harvested sustainably for millenia, for as long as humans (or any othert big ape) has been present in the Americas, that maybe this highly evolved perspective has special value. That native gathering practices, beyond being a treaty right begrudgingly accomodated, are part of a larger culture that contains the knowledge needed to manage the land to keep providing in times hard and times easy. Not falling back on nostalgia, but looking seven generations ahead.

Splitsville

It is election eve in this country, and even though I listen to radio stations that don't take ads, have no TV, am blind to pop-up ads, and subscribe to nary a news-source (print or e), I am aware of the divisions plaguing our company. I mean country (really, I typoed that accidentally, and decided not to edit). Oops.

Let me indulge in a Moment of Nostalgic Escapism. Two years ago: tears of joy and disbelief upon learning that my southern home-state had voted for Obama, hope in a rare interval of rational leadership, a house undivided, a sense that old chasms might be bridged...

Then, before the new crop could even take root: red-state/blue-state, capitalists/socialists, rich/not-rich (forget about 'poor,' those saps having lost their place at the table decades ago). A fifth of estate drunk and lazy, overly content or contemptuous one, pleased to let the story be of divisions, each represented by a talking head. Journalism replaced by perspective, reportage shoved aside by 'balance.'

And of course, only the two sides. No other viewpoints possible.

In our advanced modern state, in our triumph of superpowerty, we have become what anthropologists of long ago termed a moiety. Maybe that term still exists, and I don't pretend to understand it fully, but a moiety is a society broken into two more or less equal groups. Wolves and crows, whatever it was in the past, now it is conservatives and liberals.

Each half must think itself better. Each must see only its distinguishing characteristics--no matter how small--and seize upon them as deeply significant. They ask themselves litmusical questions: Pro life or pro choice? (No difference, when the chips are down the rich and the religious still terminate, pro self through the teen years at least.) Social or corporate welfare?

Why is this so inescapable? Why must a president lose the house 2 years after his election? Why is the electorate so evenly divided that a few dirty tricks can steal an election? Why do the wolves and crows both serve corporations?

Why can we not see the lesson of Carville and Matalin?

Cynically Yours,
Mojourner

Two Words

Lately I made up a couple of words.

The first flew back in the face of homegrown fundamentalists greeting the globalizing world with inquisitional hatred. A day or so after I thought uip this word, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention came out so strongly against yoga. Yeah, even the stretching kind, devoid of devotion.

The  first word: Talibaptist.

The second bubbled up to the surface as I read a blog about a guy whose ethnicity, or race, or heritage, or linguistic affiliation, or whatever...that something was unclear to the author. It stopped ay short of the slurry "What are you?" and part of the author's goal was to be funny, but the entry seemed to be a case of

The second word: Ambiguotry.

As in, an obsessive need to assign an individual life form to a single class, socio-economic, racial, ethnic,....again, whatever. Not to be confused with "ambiguot," (wait, is that a third word?) an individual whose inability to utter a definitive statement renders them idiotic. As a government employee, I encounter ambiguouts, but not nearly as much as if I had a TV to watch the news, especially the new talk shows and public access coverage of certain municipal meetings.

No, the nounization of ambiguotry is "ambigot." I know, it's inconsistent, but that's English for you.

Somewhere sometime someone will read this and say, "No way, I heard 'talibaptist' back in 2009, you didn't invent it, you lying muther.." Or they might comment "In point of fact, the term your referrring to was coined by..." Or some such quibblement. There are those who think that ideas, words, and things are invented and then diffused. Like every culture who ever built a puramid was visited by Egyptians, and probably aliens as well. I cannot swear that I heard one or both of these words before, but I sure don't remember it. I think I invented them.

Archaeology of Gender

This weekend, digging up yet more lawn to make way for a garlic patch and more blueberry bushes, I ran across some artifacts.



Based on its stratigraphic position just above some concrete from the driveway, it is from construction or early occupation of the house. I know also that the house was built in AD 1979.

Beverage containers are common at both construction sites and habitations from the last quarter of the 20th Century, so the artifact type does not really help determine who may have dropped it. In the Southeast where I grew up, a TAB can is diagnostic of a female presence, but in late-1970s Olympia, who's to say? Maybe there were guys on construction crews who worried about their figures.

However, in the same context I also recovered a pink plastic pin identified by a female of the appropriate age as belonging to plastic/foam hair curlers. By 1979, the Brady Bunch may have made it OK for guys to have perms, but not to wear curlers, especially while working construction.

These finds, along with the conspicuous absence of beer bottle shards, lead me to believe that the original occupation of this house was by women.

[NOTE. I don't really believe that. I just was stoked to find a can of Totally Artificial Beverage. But there are plenty of archaeologists who will make similarly specific interpretations based on even scantier evidence.]