before I put it back on the shelf...

It's somehow appropriate for the weather - finish a book about the desert, and 6 inches of snow fall on Michigan. Just finished reading Edward Abbey's book Desert Solitaire. Abbey is controversial all by himself. In wilderness preservation radicalism, he's the arche-, proto- and stereotype. He maintained unflinching views of what wilderness is and should be, and wasn't hesitant to say what he meant. And while his politics developed over the years to be even more controversial, this book stays more or less in the desert.

Some of it flits by in graceful imagery "I was still young myself, or thought I was, enjoying good health, not quite to the beginning of the middle of the journey," and some of it becomes clunky, overstated, and absurd "Civilization is mutual aid and self-defense; culture is the judge, the lawbook and the forces of Law and Ordure; Civilization is uprising and insurrection, revolution; culture is the war of state against state..."

But before I start sounding like an armchair book-jacket copy writer - some of the things that caught my attention or got me nodding.

On Wilderness and Parks, Accessibility, and Roads

"What about children? What about the aged and infirm? Frankly, we need to waste little sympathy on these two pressure groups. Children too small to ride bicycles and too heavy to be borne on their parent's backs need only wait a few years... The aged merit even less sympathy: after all they had the opportunity to see the country when it was still relatively unspoiled... "

"A man on foot, on horseback, or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles. Those who are familiar with both modes of travel know from experience that this is true; the rest have only to make the experiment to discover the same truth for themselves."

On Population and Water (particularly in the West and California):

"Water, water, water... There is no shortage of water in the desert, but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, or water to sand, insuring that wide, free , open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities... There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be."

On Population:

"It will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. This is true. Unless a way is found to stabilize the nation's population, the parks cannot be saved. Or anything else worth a damn."

In a section about the Navajo, he makes a point applicable to broader populations

"In the long run, their economic difficulties can only be solved when and if out society as a whole is willing to make an honest effort to eliminate poverty. By honest effort, as opposed to the current dishonest effort with it's emphasis on phoney social services which benefit no one but the professional social workers, I mean a direct confrontation with the two actual basic causes of poverty: (1) too many children and... (2) too little money... Social justice in this country means social surgery - carving some of the fat off the wide bottom of the American middle class."

It's something I keep coming back to over and over. Overpopulation. Why are we humans consuming ever more and more energy? Creating more and more garbage? There's this competition to out-breed other religions (the real motivation behind Roman Catholic bans on condoms, etc.), out-breed other cultures, out-breed other nations. We're guilty of the shortsighted inconsiderate greed of believing that we are right and everyone else is wrong. Whether it's neighbors, cities, nations, or entire cultures. We might see the effect and want for a better world, but we need to act our beliefs and not just give it lip service. Not succumb to the gleeful Fuck Yeahs of the Biggest Lawnmower On The Block, or Shiniest Granite Countertops, or Little League MVP. And where does that all come from? Conformance to an image of an ideal our parents or grandparents were sold while they weren't watching. We need to not be afraid to be who we are - who we were before we let someone else convince us to be ashamed of ourselves for not being like them. Whether that's buying a Toyota Prius, or breeding buckets of children.

And lastly, while I'm an amateur careerist navel-gazer, some observations are refreshingly familiar

".. my theory is that solipsism, like other absurdities of the professional philosopher, is a product of too much time wasted in library stacks between the covers of a book, in smoke-filled coffeehouses and conversation-clogged seminars. To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealists all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he's a liar. His logic may be airtight but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic."

Dominic Wilcox

Some good pieces I like, but can't remember how I found... check out Switch, War Bowl ... heck, Ivy Shelf would be pretty easy to do at home.

alternatives in time for the holidays

From Sabrina Abbott, via McSweeney's: alternatives to "... and they lived happily ever after."

And they barely tolerated each other.

And they stayed together because of the kids.

And their contempt for one another occasionally spilled over at family gatherings, prompting moments of uncomfortable silence.

And they expressed their unhappiness through passive-aggressive toilet-seat positioning.

on what planet?

Spats are back. Apparently. According to some. A tip o' the helmet to BikeSnobNYC for not only the continuing chuckles at the expense of hipster-diculousness, but the timely fashion news.

Some years ago in a store I saw spats on some basketball shoes, but I thought it might have just been a momentary blip in the Footlocker Fashion. Apparently they made their way into football too.

Sheesh. When the High School marching band uniform had spats included, I sure wish I had scammed me a pair. I'd be stylin' now. Fo' sho'.

just because

I can't remember where I saw this, but it seemed pithy enough that I wrote it down... if only now I could remember.

"Congress does not pay attention to the NRA because they are full of wisdom, they pay attention because the NRA is full of money, influence, and trouble."

For some reason, it's the "trouble" part of it that I like. Maybe because I don't have money or influence like the NRA does, but I'm full of trouble. Makes me feel like if I just work a little bit harder at being a prickly curmudgeon I could make Congress pay attention to me.

...alright, maybe I'll need the money and influence first.

because it's there?

Why do we create? I mean, as a species.

I look back to this summer while backpacking out in the desert and the encounter and small talk with the lone German Tourist on the trail. She had a wooden flute with her. It's clear it was her self-defense flute. When crossing paths with strangers far from civilization, apparently having a cudgel (musical or otherwise) at hand gives some comfort. But let's assume that she didn't carry it around solely for self-defense. Assume for the moment that she was hiking in the wilderness without water, food or extra gear. Shorts, T-shirt, sneakers, flute, camera. She wasn't planning on staying overnight.

So she consciously packed her flute. To play it out in the desert. Why? What does that mean to her? She's the only one who will hear her. And she's not the only one . There are visual artists or writers who never exhibit or publish in their lifetime. Their works are found only after their death.

"It's just a part of the human spirit - to create" is too easy an answer. To what end do we do? If we have free will, that conflicts with compulsion by some extra-corporal forces like environmental/evolutionary pressures to create art. If it were some complex form of sub-/pre-/meta- mating ritual performance, the solo artist would be an evolutionary dead end. It would have been eliminated from our genetic repertoire long ago.

It is an act of anthropological vandalism? Make a mark on the world to prove we were here. Not wanting to feel alone in the world. For some taggers, spray paint on a boxcar that travels across the country takes them to places they never otherwise would go. For some breeders, their children are the "me I never was".

On the desert trail, rock cairns mark trails, but when you come across an alcove filled with them, it's not just marking the path. It's a statement. The first cairn marked a path. The second one wasn't redundant - is said "Kilroy was here". After the 20th or 30th, maybe it becomes a competition. Creation as a competitive act?




Or is it just boredom? Too simple there, too. Sure, in boredom, idle tapping can become a rhythm, a beat, a song. Doodles become an image. But the intentional, planned, staged effort of sculpture or performance? That's not boredom. Boredom with the addition of a competitive streak, evolved beyond its source or origins, maybe.

I don't get it... I usually get off things like that

No surprising admission here - I use Wikipedia. I use it, you use it, he/she/it uses it, we use it, they use it, they use it. In the nature of giving back to the community, I figured I'd do a little work for them, and along the way, maybe learn something new. Particularly, I wanted to have an excuse to learn/use Inkscape. (I gushed over GIMP, but it isn't a tool for vector graphics manipulation. Which I have occasion to do. And Inkscape is, like GIMP, pretty good at it. Again... full-featured, open source/free, multi-platform, etc.) To kill two birds with one stone, I'll learn a bit about Inkscape, do something with what I learned, then learn a little about Wikipedia contributions and then do something with what I learned.

Along the way creating/uploading derivative work I want to be sure I'm attributing properly and editing/linking cleanly in Wikipedia, and thus I find myself in a morass of legalese and wikitext/links that baffle my normally tenaciously inquisitive mind. (I mean, we're talking about a bloke (me) who willingly spent hours digging through web pages and on the phone to figure out exactly how to know whether you're standing on federally/publically-owned land, or if you're on Billy-Joe-Jim-Bob's little patch of privately-owned meth lab heaven.)

Most of the time my overanalysis nit-picking engine kicks in and I can't be disengaged without a pry bar. But the Wikicheese just is too much. I took the easy way out. Made a good faith effort, stuck the new image up, think I covered everything and I'm done. Usually figuring out the "right" way to do something, especially when firmly embedded in the morass of bureaucracy, is something I engage in and relish for relishing's sake. What happened to me?

Am I losing my overanalysis fetish? Hopefully it's just a temporary thing. What would my navel do without me to gaze at it?