Everyone Needs a Hobby, I Guess.

 For a while I had a YouTube channel called FOM+T (Fat Old Man Plus Tech), which I enjoyed doing and which, after maybe two years, had nearly 400 subscribers.  I had posted a few videos to YouTube over the years randomly,  but I thought it might be interesting to share my thoughts on the contemporary world, a world I think was pretty well described sixty years or more ago by Teilhard de Chardin, Alvin Toffler, and Marshall McLuhan.  So, encouraged by a couple of friends, I bought a cheap tripod to hold my phone and started a new adventure.  What I had to say about the modern world, that the modern world is pretty much the same as it's ever been except that we're on a time line with an exponential curve, and that can be disconcerting, really didn't take too many videos, and I started delving into the popular genre of unboxing and review videos.  Now, I like a good bit of kit,

so it was convenient to have an excuse to buy some of the big and small new things and to share my thoughts and feelings on camera. It was a pretty laid-back channel, with coffee and the occasional cigarette disrupting the seriousness of it all.

Then came my adventure with the virulent virus, and I spent hours lying in bed thinking I was thinking although mostly I was delirious.  When I read my emails or journal entries from those days and nights, I can't recognize what I was writing as English.  But I thought I was re-evaluating the things in my life, and I filled a big box with stuff that no longer served me.  For the most part I was right about those things, although the friend who was taking the stuff to the free store pulled a few things out that she knew I would regret losing, and she was right.  I won't miss the boots that were too small.

One of the things I thought I would quit was my YouTube channel.  After all that time, I still didn't have even a thousand subscribers.  I had made only about $5 with the Amazon Affiliate Program, and I thought that if I quit YouTube I would have more time to read and write and draw or something, to do things that were more 'productive'.  So I deleted the Fat Old Man and his Tech unboxings.

Except, I didn't find the things I did instead to be more productive.  I made a rather desultory blog about some of the folks I have known, a project that is a result of the memories I had while I was under the spell of the virus.  I have drawn a bit more.  About reading, I guess McLuhan was right.  I do still read, but I spend more time watching videos of authors discussing their ideas, a medium in which I can see their faces and hear their thoughts directly.  And, I found that my ponderings as I prepared for a video were some of my most productive times, even if no video resulted.

So, I have forgiven myself for not being a wonderfully serious and productive fat old man and accepted that is alright to make videost that are less than Fellini quality if I enjoy it as a hobby. 

 I have a friend who makes furniture from discarded lumber as a hobby.  His hobby is more useful than mine, I suspect, but his takes up more room, and I live in a tin can.  I like to pretend it's a space pirate ship.  Waking and sleeping delusions get confused in my old mind.  So what?  You're only old once.

Crazy Irish Monks

 

Not all of my peregrinations have been on foot, following the example of St. Chad.  Twenty-one years ago today, someone who now seems like another person in another lifetime naively settled into a 15-foot long skin-on-frame kayak and started what would be a three-year-long exploration of the waters of Northwest Washington.  That person, whose descendant is writing this story, had no idea what he was getting into as he began a journey that would go from Anacortes to Seattle and Olympia and Port Angeles and Neah Bay and parts of the west and south coasts of Vancouver Island and past the submarines to the end of the Hood Canal.

The voyage started innocently enough, as many voyages do, in an armchair with a book.  The book was Tim Severin's The Brendan Voyage, and the earlier version of me was intrigued, to say the least.  I had begun to explore rivers by kayak, inspired by Rat in The Wind in the Willows, which is certainly one of the best books ever written.  I had paddled the Rio Grande and the Chama and a few other rivers in New Mexico, and many rivers in Arkansas, including the entirety, almost (I skipped parts of the impounded lakes and a bit of the lower river where it is contained by levees) of the White River, one of the most sacred rivers I have ever known.  I would almost certainly have had a wonderful life if I had continued to explore those streams.  But the idea of going forth on the salt in a skin-on-frame boat was romantic, and I found online a crazy German-American, Ralph Hoehn, who imported Pouch kayaks.  They are narrower and more manoeuvrable than the more famous Kleppers, and faster. They're not so fast as the 17- 18-foot fibreglass boats that are also very popular, but at 15-feet, Brendan, as I called my soon-faded Pouch, had a hull speed I could maintain, and skin-on-frame boats are also more compliant and less tiring in rough water.  I paddled that little wonder as many as 55 nautical miles a day, and we went through some very rough water together.

Little did I know that what I had thought would be a vacation of a few weeks would lead to years among the firs of the edge of the world.

It would be nine centuries before any other Europeans would cross the Atlantic.  Some say Brendan and his companions were looking for 'the Isle of the Blessed' or even the Garden of Eden, but even though I found several very blessed isles in my imitation of Brendan and it might be argued that I live in a very edenic garden, I prefer the story that he set forth just to see what was there.  There has certainly been a lot to see out here in the corner of the country.

Will I ever go back to Arkansas' rivers?  Well, I don't really expect to, but I ain't dead yet.  If I could find another red boat, a Wilderness Systems Shaman like the one I paddled the White to the Mississippi,  I might be lured to go forth again.  There ain't nothing so good as messin' about in boats.

Searching for lost times.

I don't usually share my journals, but this seemed like a good post for Peregrinations, and I was too lazy to write it up any other way.  So:

I was up past my bedtime last night looking at YouTube Videos of places where I spent my life in the past.  Rivers.  Mountains.  Monasteries.  Many of the videos were made by  idiots, people who made no effort to learn about the places they were videoing, but at least the visuals were good.  Although one video of hiking along the Buffalo River Trail, was kinda pixely and green, I choose a screen catch from it of the waterfall that was for years my favourite rettreat and camping site for my journal, because it kinda shows how such memories work'.  

The best videos were of 'natural' places.  The Buffalo is still green.  The Chama is still brown.  The Edisto is still black.  But Christ in the Desert has been improved beyond   belief. The austerity of the desert has been replaced with garish 'icons'.  But they are not icons, they're bill boards.  I remember being shocked when Philip,  the abbot by the time I got there, and someone who had and has had a very different vision from Aerled's, started using a little Mattel keyboard to set the pitch for the chants.  Lore and I were both appalled.  Now there's an organ.  Everything is much more normal, and there are solar panels everywhere.  Sheep are back, which I find particularly nostalgic.  I can't believe I gave the poncho that Aerled wove for Lore to Cassidy for his baby.  Oh well.  YouTube says Signma males value their friends.

The challenge for me is to make sense of how much I have changed.   The changes pretty much parallel what has happened at Christ in the Desert.  I ordered a tent yesterday.  The temptation is to move back into a tent, with candles for light and maybe just my phone and a solar charger  But then there's my OV-Z.   Where do I draw the line?  Do I need to draw a line?  

The rivers lookedt the same in the twenty minutes or so of YouTube videos,  But iI know from even the short time I spent on them that they are always changing.  I was particular intrigued by one White River video of the upper river, between Boston and Fayetteville, where there has been very little effort of control it.  I hadn't ever seen anyone else on that stretch of the river, which is a meandering  and wild thing.  Lower down, beginning at Lake Sequoia in Fayetteville, we feeble folk have tried to control it at least since the time of steam boats.  Our efforts are often washed away.  Actually, they are always washed away, if we could only see them from a longer time scale.  The Bull Shoals dam, the levele at Augusta,  the lock and dam at Montgomery Point where the sacred White River joins the Mississippi, all these will be washed away. They have no choice.  Time, like an ever -rolling stream, bears all its sons away.

Those structures along the sacred White River may have a consciousness that I don't understand, and they may think they have some choice in how they spend their time. before they join the flood of lost times. I (cue Puck or Zorba) think I do.

Thirty or so years ago, when I spent time at Christ in the Desert Monastery, there was no electricity.  The guest rooms had wood stove and kerosene lamps.  On winter evenings in room 6 of the guest house, I would shiver as I wrote and drew in paper journals. Winter Matins in Nakashima's austere church had only one lamp in a corner.; one of the monks threw another log into the wood stove to mark the hours.  There were no solar-powered electric lights on the cliffs above to compete with rosy-fingered dawn, mirrored on the sandstone. There were no clumsy attempts at iconography on the walls.  It was Christ in the Desert, not Christ in the Glam.

Now I write about those times on a computer, and think about sharing my thoughts about those times on the internet, and I wonder two things:  whether I would really gain anything by trading  my computer for ink and paper in an effort to regain the sort of wildness of a river without levees and dams; and whether the real attraction I find thinking of those times past is that then I still thought I had a long future.  Were I forty-five again, and going to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, it might seem just as magic as it did in 1991.  And were I forty-five again, I might find the changes just as disturbing when I reached seventy-five again.  

I would love, I think, to be able to go back to the Monastery and talk to Father Christian, one of the monks who was there at the founding,  now the abbot, and ask how he feels about the changes, but I  probably won't.  I no longer have a car, and I'm too old  to hitch hike from Santa Fe to north of Abiqui and then to walk the 13 miles along Forest Road 151 to the bell, which I could pull to summon the guest master.

Oh well.   Please, pass me a madeleine.  

I need to be nagged, it seems.

 It is a lovely and soft and warm and sunny April morning and I am having my second cup of coffee after a little walk in the early light.  It's part of my learning to live again in what I call my post-plague life. I, alas, had a very close encounter with the Virulent Virus and I am more or less learning to walk and talk again. Sometimes my eyesight is still a little fuzzy, which may be part of the reason the morning seems soft.

How did I, who lives out here on the edge of nowhere and never sees anybody up close and who hasn't been in a crowd for years, catch the plague?  Well of course the obvious answer is that I breathed in some of the little beasties, and they found my lungs a happy home and soon I was coughing and sore all over my body and had a fever and could hardly move.  But there is I think a more important reason, and that is not so much the availability of the virus as the unavailability of human interaction linked with a general languor brought about by the lock down.

In my 'normal' life I go out into the big world every day, and hang out at coffee shops where I can sit in the window and watch the beautiful people go by while I sip my espresso.  During the lockdown, all I could do was buy a paper cup of not-very-good drip coffee and take it far away from the other people, ugly or beautiful.  In my 'normal' life I ate out a lot.  I'm lazy, so when I remodeled my little tin can nearly four years ago, I just didn't put in a kitchen so I would never have to clean a stove again.  During the lockdown, what food that was available to eat out was over-priced--I mean, the restaurants still have their normal expenses--and in styrofoam containers with plastic forks.  So, gradually, I went out less and less and became lazier and lazier, often just having cold cereal for brekkers instant ramen for dindin.  But for most of the Covidian Captivity, I still got in a bit of exercise every day.  My smart watch, an LG until last January and then and Apple Watch for two months, would nag me into just moving another thirteen minutes and nine seconds to close some wonderful ring for another merit badge.  Annoying, but probably life-saving.  And then I got tired of all things Apple, and I sold the watch.  And no one nagged me to go that extra 267 yards.  And it rained.  And I quit my usual  walking circuit of duck pond and building sites  and probably even worse, I quit riding my bike to buy more Cheerios and ramen, because of the mud, and took the bus.  Which is probably where the virus found my lungss.

So, post-plague, I have a nice bright new nagger, a made-in-China TikWatch something or another.  And it nags me delightfully well.  This morning, no sooner had I finished my first cup of coffee and eaten my Cheerios--Cheerios with bananas and cranberries and cottage cheese and milk--but it told me it was time to move around a bit.  So, I went out into the top of the morning and walked  .45 miles and enjoyed the budding plants along the way.  

I do not intend to host the Virulent Virus or any other inconvenient disease again if I can help it.  And since I am by nature a lazy bum, I will put up with a bit of nagging along the way.

Is good the enemy of the best, or is more the enemy of enough?

 

Please bear with me as I share a very first-world problem.  But since you, my constant readers, almost certainly share in my first world, I hope for some understanding.

My dilemma has its roots in my starting a YouTube channel.  A couple of friends thought I had something to share with the world, so I eagerly agreed.  What I had to share were the insights I had gathered many years ago from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alvin Toffler, and Marshall McLuhan.  Material for maybe five videos, which I more or less made and which quickly gathered me maybe eleven subscribers.  And then I fell into the black hole of unboxing.

I think I started with a video about unboxing the unboxing phenomenon.  And then I actually started unboxing stuff.  I dare not add up how much money I spent (look at it as stimulating the economy, stupid) buying stuff I didn't really need because it would make videos.  I even unboxed books, but of course it was the unboxing of electronics that, over maybe two years, brought me about 350 subscribers.  And a good YouTuber who follows tech has to keep up with all the developments on all the major platforms, right, so soon I had a pile of devices all nicely unboxed and videoed and stacked.

Now I have long been an Android kinda guy.  I guess maybe because I'm old, since it seems that teenagers only buy iPhones, but whatever, I thought I should try the most orthodox of Android experiences and buy a Pixel Phone.  But when I got to the store, I didn't like the way it felt.  What I did enjoy in my hand was a shiny new iPhone, which I bought in projectRed, fighting aids and my own prejudice against all things Apple in one convenient purchase.

So I explored the iPhone, and--more unboxings--all the wonders of the 'Apple ecosystem'.  I must confess I liked something about most of the devices except the MacBook.  It was a pretty little thing, but to someone accustomed to using a Chromebook, Mac OS just seemed a clutttered fuck.  I sold it.  But as time went by, I found myself feeling that the Apple devices were using me rather than my using them, and because all good YouTubers have at least two phones, I bought another Android phone, a nice and inexpensive LG Stylo 6.  Short story short, within a month I had sold all my Apple devices because I really preferred having electronics that work for me instead of my working for them.

And I have loved using the Stylo 6. It's a little slow opening the camera app, but no slower than the time it took to remove the lens cover on the Nikon I had when I was a 'real' photographer.  It has kinda big bezels, but they allow me to get a good grip on the phone without instigating something happening on the screen.  And the LG done gone and gone out of the smart phone business.  I haven't felt so orphaned since Saab got bought by GM.  

Enter the first-world problem of choices.  (One of which I confess remains ditching everything electronic and moving into a cave with one big book and maybe a small bear.)

Unfortunately, caves are relatively hard to find on-line and new electronic wonders are easy, so I was seduced by T-Mobile's offer of LG's ultimate phone, the Velvet, for half-price.  I pushed all the little buttons, and now it's on its way to my little tin can in the woods.  It was like offering an Edesel lover a 1961 Edsel for $1000.

But I am feeling like a traitor to my faithful Stylo 6, which is not nearly so flashy as the Velvet,  nor will it likely be supported for so long, but which has been my faithful friend in sickness and in health and which does everything I  ask it to do and it's paid for.

Which finally, constant reader, brings me to my point, if I have one.  Why is adequate not considered sufficient?  Or, to put it in McLuhan's terms of our devices as extensions of ourselves, why, when I am perfectly adequately extended by my Stylo, which is a bit slow and dated in appearance, but which more or less matches my sitz im leben, want to put on airs with a stylish and flashy Velvet? Or, to put it in Toffler's terms, am I just feeling too much future shock?

It is of course a small thing, this deciding whether to accept delivery of a  new phone or to keep the old wineskin.  But it is, I think, an example of the sorts of decisions that make living in the first world so stressful.  Do any of you constant readers know of a good cave, preferably with air-conditioning and high speed internet?  I have a nice big book.

Back to the Woods

 

For many years I did not vote in elections.  My motto was that it just encourages the sons of bitches.  And, I think that every choice one makes is a vote, often about things of more importance if of less pomp that voting for a president or some other claimant of power.  For most of the past twenty years, I have lived more or less as a hermit in the woods, something of a madman, and concerned with things fringier than politics.  I have occasionally offended someone, mostly by rejecting the gospels of Gene Roddenberry and Christopher Nolan.  Mostly I think people were amused or confused at best.  Presidential candidates seemed to me to be twiddle-dee and twiddle-dum, and I expected that none of them would do anything particularly good, and I could only hope that they wouldn't be too bad.  For politics I had little to no passion.

In 2016, it became more difficult to ignore the commotion, as the two major parties nominated one person disqualified and one unqualified for office, or so it seemed to me.  I public supported Gary Johnson, and even registered and voted.  Living in a firmly 'blue' state, it mattered little for whom I voted, since the outcome was strongly Calvinistic.  I was fascinated by how much vitriol my choice received.  I was told that I was all sorts of things other than a free moral agent, who could make a fool of himself if he wanted to, but only in the prescribed ways.  I was surprised when Donald Trump was elected.  He had seemed like a bizarre cross of Il Duce and Oliver Hardy.  I suppose that what I had been missing was how many other people have as little faith in politics as usual as I have, and the politics of Trump was not usual.  

Slow forward to 2020 and the democrats nominated folks with even less qualities that I admired than they had in 2016, and I made clear why I found that saddening, and admitted that I would vote for Trump., who also had few qualities that I admired, but who had dropped (relatively) few bombs  He was no less a buffoon, but he had not done the horrible things I had been told he would do.  I was still allowed the satire of having a holy water pistol, and I still had my mostly useless Obama Care.  But.

But I was amazed again and again by how people I had known for years began treating me.  They expected me to justify my every statement, claiming I was being mean-spirited or illogical or worse.  I had never thought of saying things like that about them. because they said they were going to vote for Biden.  About some of their conclusions, yes.  Logic is a fascinating method, having nothing to do with truth.  One can proceed quite logically from false premises and arrive at a completely valid but false conclusion.

Slowly what I have come to realize is that many people have replaced the sort of passion once reserved for religious beliefs with political passion.  When there is nothing left to render to God, everything is rendered to Caesar.  Personally, I have never been one to put my trust in horses, and I am still enough of a Christian or whatever to hope with Locke and Jefferson that governments are formed to protect our natural, god-given rights, not to decide which rights we are allowed.   But to be honest, I do pretty much whatever I think is right, without checking with the civil code.  I suspect that most of us actually operate on a day to day basis like that, occasionally speeding or committing some small act of sedition.  

The truth is I just don't have as much concern about politics as many of my friend have, and I don't find my time spent pursuing the nuances of politics rewarding.  In general I think the big advances in human achievements have come more often in spite of the state rather than because of it.  If any of my dear readers think I am wrong and want to prove me wrong, go for it.  But please be advised that I will mostly likely not read their arguments.   I am returning to spending my time pursuing the nuances of quantum physics and sacramental theology and other esoterica, like aged Merlin, although it is unlikely that I will be visited by Nimue.  Perhaps that's a pity.  I will continue to try to be amused by the actions of the state when I can not ignore them, recognizing that many of the Bard's best lines were spoken by a mischievous sprite.  Indeed what fools.

Meanwhile,  I can do perhaps no better than to share Puck's request for forgiveness, being so unwoke as I am:

'If we shadows have offended/ think but this and all is mended/ . . /If you pardon, we will mend./Else the puck a liar call./Give me your hands, if we be friends,/and Robin will restore amends.

Or, it may be that I am not a good fellow at all.  

Seregation is back.

I have been watching two sorts of time travel stories over the past few days.  The first is the second season of The Umbrella Academy, in which our intrepidly diverse family finds itself in the Dallas of 1963.  One of the family, Allison, is a black woman, and she quickly finds herself caught up in the racial division and unrest of the times.  She marries a man who is an organizer in the civil rights movement and takes part in a sit-in at a segregated restaurant.  She works at a racially segregated beauty parlor.  When the rest of her family find her and things get really weird, she finally tells her husband that she has come from the future, and that there really were going to be better times ahead.

The second is the rush to re-segregate as practitioners of right-think act as quickly as possible to segregate themselves from any suspicion that they were ever attracted to any idea except the official story, and to banish the tainted from any opportunity to spread their wrongthink.  (It's kinda like the scene in The Umbrella Academy when the hard-working white male who is doing what he has been taught to think is right by the morality of his fifteen minutes compares the lesbianism of the woman (I'm not supposed to say that actually, as the character to whom he is speaking, Vonya, is played by someone who self-identified as a lesbian in the first season, and since she was then a lesbian playing a lesbian, everyone was happy, but not she self-identifies as a homosexual man and has a male name in the credits.  And I thought what happened in the series was weird.)--anyway, Ray tells Vonya about hoof-and-mouth disease, and how any taint of it must be eradicated before it spreads to the whole herd.

One of the hefers to be killed first, if I may continue to use Ray's analogy, has been Parler.  Parler is (was) a social media platform sworn not to censor its users.  When it first started, I signed up, because I want to avoid living in an echo chamber.  I have 'friends' on Facebook with as diverse a range of ideas as Facebook allow, but I wanted to see what was happening elsewhere.  I didn't always remember to post my cat photos to Parler, but I did make an effort to copy every even vaguely political post I made on Facebook and to paste it on Parler.  In many cases those posts were quite critical of President Trump, for whom my preferred pronoun is 'the fucking moron'.  Such posts often got 'likes', even 'hearts', on Facebook, and sometimes reasonable discussion on Parler.  When, however, I would post something approving of an action of the fucking moron, or critical of President-elect Biden, for whom my preferred pronoun is 'Mr. Potatohead', I was called a variety of rude names by my good loving liberal, come-together friends on Facebook.  If I were to be taken to Room 101 and say that Parler is (was) a hate platform, I would have to say, at least until the rats were let loose, that O'Brian must have been thinking of Facebook.

The racial segregation of the 1950's is quickly being replaced by intellectual segregation.  Mr. Potatohead's cabinet is touted as being very diverse, but it's a diversity of appearances, not a diversity of ideas.  Of course it is not even discussed in anything like those terms by the faithful.  Just as many groups consider people of other races not to be human, the Party denies that anyone who disagrees with them can even be an intellectual.  At least that has been my experience.  After years of being considered an intellectual, I have lately been called just about every kind of stupid because I voiced my opinion that Mr. Potatohead is not worthy candidate for the presidency, and that Harris is even worse.

There is, not surprisingly, no room for nuance. (Cue the case of Brett Weinsten.) I have  made clear my opinions about the fucking moron's failures.  He was not someone I would have chosen for the presidency.  But now I am supposed to shut my mouth and say nothing counter to the wonders of the winter of our discontent made glorious by the rising of the son of Scranton.  

At least during the days of racial segregation there were efforts, at least in mid-nowhere where I grew up, to provide separate but equal accommodations for the race that wasn't quite human enough for common discourse.  So in mid-nowhere, the first ancient school building to be replaced with something modern was Booker T. Washington.  In the new day of intellectual segregation, those who are not quite human are simply denied any platform possible.

What could go wrong? (In The Umbrella Academy, segregated for years from the rest of her family, Vonya destroys the world.)