Friday, May 27th 2022
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It’s 4:20 a.m. exactly. Why am I up? I’m up because I went to bed really early. I did a lot yesterday. I don’t think I did too much but I did a lot and by the end of the day I was done. Maybe it was those fried bread sandwiches that finally did me in. I just wanted to go to bed. I couldn’t think of anything else.
Now I’m not particularly early. I’m greeted by two things. One is the absolute beauty and the splendor of a perfect Dawn. Just a slightest hint of orange on the horizon coming up and chasing away the lightest thinnest blue and a smattering of wet clouds. We’ve been getting some rain for the last few days so the air is pristine and sweet. It is as if the world could not possibly be more innocent and beautiful than right now.
But then the reality of what human beings do in this world gets put back in my face again and again and again. At one moment, admiring the beauty and artistry of sport, of human reflexes and strength demonstrated at the nth degree of what is possible and then this is juxtaposed against the horror and brutality of how evil the species can be. And then we step back and we ask how these things are possible. The answer is money. The answer is always money. Money is all anyone cares about. Money is the only thing that they can put in front of our face to make us move. And if you don’t move for money, well, in certain places they just declare you crazy and in other places, like the one I’m living in, they put you in prison.
I’ve had some interaction lately with someone I’ve known all his life. There’s a possibility that he might help out with some of the web work that needs to be done. I’m not going to say anything bad but life is a bit of a struggle for him. I trust him though.
He tells me that he’s gone back to school to study economics. There you go right there. Practical. Follow the money.
For years here and this town I would ask young people what kind of career path they were planning on. 90% of the time, people would answer economics. Their parents had taught them that this was the Practical answer.
A friend of mine in New York many years ago asked me why I was writing plays for theater. I told him that I was an artist. He told me that an artist plus $1 will buy you a candy bar. Ask anybody with half a brain and they will tell you that there is no money in the arts.
Maybe the problem is that there is no art in money. Maybe that is the greatest problem facing the world right now.
I see a young man, he’s just come of legal age, and he looks forward and he asks himself how he can possibly compete in this world. He doesn’t see any road that leads him to the riches he sees everywhere around him in advertising, in Media or even in the people who have built up their lives. He’s looking at the complete unknown and has zero idea how to go anywhere or even understand what direction he should start in.
Put into this mix an endless stream of violence. Let’s give him violent and abusive caretakers. Let’s put him in front of violent video games. Let’s show him violent movies. And let him listen to the pundits advocating violence and quantifying suffering into economic lines. Let’s tell him that the world is about pain and tell him he needs to reach for the Pinnacle of his endurance and tolerance to compete in a game that is so far over his head he will never get a breath of fresh air. And then, let him know that automatic weapons are for sale or will be put in his hand if he just joins the army and agrees to go kill his fellow man.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.
I look back at this week and this year and last year. I look back at my experiences of dealing with people here. I think back of yesterday when I was really in the mood for a nice day. The world was as peaceful and nice and clean as it is right now and the beauty of nature and the song of birds was all that was around me. Meditation came easily. Reverie almost. Just a moment to allow myself some sweetness. Sweet even peace, sweet as a fresh breath of hair, sweet as a drink of cool clean water.
Then the weed wackers started. The horrible 100 decibel wine of gasoline weed wackers grinding away and killing everything that was alive I take it possibly touch.
I was thinking at the time that I would do a little weeding this year. I take grass out of my garden boxes but also I sharpened one of my hoes and I use it to chop away at the grass growing around the edges of the boxes. It’s the same principle that my neighbors have. I just don’t want too many grass seeds falling into my boxes. Probably, next year we’ll just mulch the crap out of them, but this year I cut back the grass.
The difference is in the tools. I am the motor. I just use a stick with a sharp piece of steel at the end and chop back on the grass to make it go down. I have a sickle if I want to cut down a lot of grass. That was the tool that people used here forever and ever. I don’t think I would care one bit if my neighbors sharpened their sickles and walked out in the field and cut back the grass. I still don’t agree with preventing wild flowers from growing, especially for people who raise bees. But if they worked by hand and used their own muscles, the place would remain clean and pastoral for the effort at least. At least it would be human muscle in this useless human activity. At least there’d be some good health and some heart exercise and some possibility of humanity.
I saw this Steven Kerr short and I thought I would add it. I think I feel his emotion and I understand what he’s saying. It kind of makes us insane or at least you would think that somehow we would take notice of this.
I found this advertisement for an article from the New Yorker:
It talks about gun legislation enacted in Australia. I guess I could do a study about gun laws but maybe it’s already redundant. All I know is that the United States refuses to say no to the gun lobby, they refuse to back off from an economics only point of view, they refuse to allow public outcry to touch the economic process and they refuse to allow anyone else to think otherwise. The United States, coerced and cajoled and bribed into bed with the Russians found a way to send 30 billion dollars in weapons into Ukraine. Russians are shooting missiles at schools in Ukraine. We’re not talking about one guy with automatic weapons, we’re talking about an army of guys with automatic weapons and tanks and missiles slaughtering school children and hospitals and public squares and train stations. And the only answer to the question that appeals to both the United States of America and the president of Ukraine is that the place should be flooded with guns. The only way out of the situation is to bring in more violence and more war and more killing and more misery. More. They want more. Lots and lots more.
What is at stake here more obviously to me than anything is not the pathos of the ukrainians, it’s the economics behind all of this wonderful human activity. All of this destructive human activity creates money and human movement that requires oil and gasoline and money to the weapons manufacturers. War is Big Business. The more miserable the situation, the more money people need, the more guns people need, the more medicines people need, the more transportation people need.
Really, this one moment right here is so nice. The birds are very active here. The Dawn is breaking now, a strip of yellow, very white blood out yellow with a tiny orange core bumping up against a completely gray sky. More rain today. More rain today and more rain tomorrow and maybe even rain on Sunday. 4 days of not worrying about water, 4 days of clean Air, 4 days of peace.
Except that you know, like knowledge, nobody is going to let you enjoy the peace. You know that they’re going to find a way to destroy the peace. Destroying peace makes money and money is the only thing that’s important.
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I took a couple of hours to go around in my garden. Just basically pulling weeds and doing a little hoeing. I wouldn’t say I did anything Earth shaking but I took a look around and everything. We’ve had a lot of rain. Everything is looking alive.
To tell the truth, I wish I had been a little more orderly with the planting or had made a more serious map. If you know what’s in the ground, this really helps when you try to clean things up. If you know you have an open space, you can just get a hoe in there and give everything a little push to keep it clean. If you don’t know what’s going on, there’s a lot of competition.
But as I was out there, I was thinking about what I said earlier about the difference between gardening by hand and gardening with a gasoline powered instrument. This includes cutting wood or cutting away grass that you just don’t want in a particular place.
Sure, I agree that perhaps an electric weed wacker might not be a bad thing to have. Go out there with a long extension cord and just let the rotor bully the grass. But let me tell you something about the engineering behind this. Number one, this instrument is not going to last more than one or two years. If it lasts 5 years, you can throw a party. The point is that this instrument is going to break down and when it does it’s going to be garbage. In addition to this, unless you’re using metal blades, you’re putting plastic lines on your rotor and these things break and leave plastic shreds on your land all the time. If you switch to metal for a more vicious cut, now you have metal wire hanging around in your land.
I’m not even talking about the noise.
So I go out there with a hoe that I have sharpened somewhat and I just rake on the grass I don’t want a little bit and eventually 99% of it goes down. You can go in there with a knife and cut away the stuff you can’t get to. It doesn’t take that long and if you do it, it’s not even really that much effort. You get better at and used to anything you do on a regular basis. And if we’re talking about this, it’s just good exercise.
The hoe is not going to break down. It’s possible that the pole breaks. If it does, perhaps you can use half a handle for a different type of gardening instrument. If this is not possible, it’s firewood and the Ash and rich is the land. The steel for the head will last forever if you take care of it. Even if it doesn’t, it can be melted down or used for a different purpose. Almost zero ecological damage done, better for your health and no pollution whatsoever to the world.
I got a little bit tired and came inside for a minute. I forgot to turn off my computer. I watched some kind of a YouTube before I left this morning and when I got back, the auto play function had somehow got me over to Elon Musk’s interview with Joe Rogan from 3 years ago. Everybody remembers this interview because they smoked weed together. Everybody was afraid of what would happen. Did anything happen? I mean, besides becoming the richest man in the world?
Anyway, the moment that I walked in on had to do with getting out of fossil fuels. You could say that Elon Musk is just selling Teslas or electric cars in general because it is his business. Or maybe there is a damn good reason why he has taken the trouble to invest in electric cars. I went and asked YouTube if they had this particular moment I’m talking about and of course they did. I’m not the only one who notices these things. Here’s the video. But what I’m asking you is whether or not you see what I see and that he is battling emotions while talking about the frightful amount of pollution we put up into the air. We all know that the guy is on the spectrum. You tell me if you could see him crying because I can.
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