i did some reading about batteries a while back, the way i do, getting obsessive and desperate to understand something and concentrating on nothing else for a short while. i do it with verve until i think i have a decent grasp on it, or until something else successfully wrests my attention. usually the second i suppose.

anyway, i wanted to know about car batteries, because i’ve left the lights on in Mobius (my van) and had the battery go dead several times and wondered if there was substantial difference in qualities of batteries. at the same time, i’ve been studying the potential for setting up a photovoltaic solar electricity system for the ex-Loopy Limbo, er aka my house. [exLoopy is the local phone number and Limbo is what being sedentary feels like to me quite often]

so my trawling of internet wisdom resulted in finding a couple of sites done by people like me with a curmudgeonly interest in quality and a desire to share what they learned. one line has stuck with me from one of them, although i can’t remember the domain of the website. this person wrote [something like] “i’m not rich enough to buy cheap batteries.”

since a cheap battery stops working before a good one, they reasoned, it requires more money in the long run to save money in the short term. leaving aside the question of recycling and/or waste created by planned obsolescence and crap quality, to make basic fiscal sense to buy an expensive battery, the expensive one has to last as long as it costs. in other words, if it costs twice as much as the cheap one, it has to last as long as two cheap ones. our battery guru on the web held that the odds were actually better than that with batteries.

so my next battery for Mobius was a deep-cycle one, also known as a marine battery. These are designed to run down [somewhat] and recharge, so i can leave the lights on a little longer without worry.

but this idea of “i’m too poor to buy cheap stuff” has stuck with me. it appeals probably to some genetic norwegian farmer part of my physiology that is just irrationally annoyed by poor-quality workmanship.

lately i’ve started applying it to time. so here is where i am today, and this is why i’m typing random thoughts brought on my battery mavens rather than addressing the gaping hole where Mobius’s windshield once was [’nother story]. competing with my tendency to procrastinate is this epiphany: “i don’t have enough time left to hurry.”

which is to say i’ll make no sense rather than make no noise.

and i’ve been too busy preparing everything else in my life to begin to write that i never could pick up the goddamn pen for the weight of everything patiently lying on top of it. and lying it was. i lied to myself repeatedly about this or that thing being the last item on the toodloo i mean too doom i mean to-do list before this time i swear i’m gonna get going on the project of the explanation for everything that came before. but there never is an end to that damn list. i’m like a child who can’t help picking at the sores on my face in the hopes that i will cure by sheer obsessiveness. but the universe smiles not on the myopically obsessive, only on the diligently focused. and so the wages of my mostly blind obsessiveness and occasional relaxed diligence are that i’m still no closer to writing the effin book on what he did before he became the dad everyone knew him as.

and that’s what i got to got2 get to workin on. i mean, he’s been loitering so long it looks like littering. hanging in the wings like a feather about to fall, waiting for the splash, or bump, or at least a grunt to signal the start of the story. he whispered on the pier that the waves were too slow and the sand too still and i didn’t really notice cause i was thinking about getting back to building the fence in the backyard and getting at least one of these hulking pieces of iron running at least a little like a vehicle before gasoline hits the seven dollar mark. but he was quiet after that and i didn’t even notice him skulking, like smoke in the bar in the morning he floated in the corner of the living room while i worried ludicrously about the mortgage bill and whether this customer or that hated me and thought i was a shyster and how bethany was right all those years ago proclaiming i was destined for low tide. it’s been a hard couple days. he’s been hard on my heels in his silent, gentle, loving and incriminating way. guilt is really the gold band around my present, makin it hard to breathe. i’m a middling man, always at the end of some lost era, always on the cusp of some new regret, inventing remorse codes to signal another surrender. ah and the pressure of each admission of mediocrity begins to wear, like tire treads wear, like roads where it doesn’t matter how long it will be before the repair, the woods and sky will accomodate my impatience and my fears of failure. they’ll tell me i can wander forever around these black and white gardens, never reaching any zenith, and it will still be just an exquisite puzzle, turned on itself, hilarious without a punchline, as big as the memory of an echo, dripping steady like the tub but at least there’s water for a hot bath and my manghost will hone and be ready.

“I have this problem with the use of this word ‘traditional’,” he says, speaking from a St Louis tour stop. “I grew up in a family of traditional singers and musicians, and to me those are just songs. This idea of dividing things into ‘This is traditional and this is not traditional,’ I don’t understand those concepts. I know what other people mean by them, but I don’t accept them myself. There are songs I sing now that I’ve been singing since I was a kid, and I didn’t make any real distinction between them and rock and roll. I mean, I was aware that I hadn’t heard them on the radio, but they were just songs that nobody else sang; they were just our songs, you know?”

“To me, the politics and the music are inseperable,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense to me that any human beings could be singing about what they see, what they experience and what affects their lives and ignore politics - to me that’s ludicrous. Scottish and Irish traditional music always had a large part of itself which would now be regarded as political. Folk music is dangerous stuff.” Gaughan laughs, then catches himself. “In its own way it is dangerous,” he says firmly. “It’s subversive to admit that ordinary working class people have actually got a culture and artistic merit. This flies against the vested interests of those who would have us believe that the poor are poor because they are stupid.”

My friends i have distressing news to report. Here is the dirt from my last reconnaissance at a human gathering.

While i would like to amuse you all with more stories of absurd behavior—like the way they continued to drink liquid from a metal barrel even after it caused erratic behavior and vomiting—i really want to remind you of their pitiable ignorance of anything nonhuman. They seem incapable of accepting information that challenges human centrality on earth. For example, from a nearby tree, i heard this exchange between two of them. I have abbreviated it..

Human Who Stands Mostly On One Foot: I have learned about killer whales. Did you know that they… [describes some behavior that suggests intelligence]

Human Who Looks Down: Really! That is so weird. Yeah did you know that British birds…[describes some behavior that suggests learning]

Human Who Leans When Speaking: Really? That’s interesting. I’ve been also learning about dolphins. They’re the only animals that…[describes behavior that suggests culture]

Human Who Keeps Arms Folded: Yeah. I heard that. I read somewhere that cranes [show compassion.]

We can thank the humans that conduct scientific study for evidence of “humanity” in the natural world.

What should disturb all of you is how deeply ingrained is this prejudice, this attitude of natural human centrality, by which i mean that we can be judged by people like the two i overheard, according to how much we act like people.

We are judged as to our worth, in sometimes strange locally agreed-upon human hierarchies, where for example a roach is less than a bird is less than a cow is less than a known dog. This judgment seems to be based on whether we are useful to them, whether we make humans uncomfortable in any way, and how closely we resemble a human: humans have more trouble with the killing of a cow (with her large brown eyes) than with the killing of many rats.

These standards vary among different human cultures, but there is universal agreement on one thing. They all agree that the human way of consciousness is Consciousness. To humans, life on earth has intelligence, or the understanding of its own existence, only insofar as it can be understood by humans. This stubborn arrogance is pathetic and dangerous.

The way that plants in an area communicate is outside human ability to recognize, therefore it doesn’t count as intelligence or communication. The cultural history of whales is not recorded nor celebrated in any way that humans have yet described, so whales have no history, knowledge or culture. The subtle dance among subterranean microorganisms and the weather is complex beyond human acceptance, and as a result it is either ignored completely, referenced spiritually, as somehow part of “god,” or dissected into components as a method of making it part of human reality.

To humans, if it cannot be described, it is imaginary, and imaginary things are suspect. Honoring the unknown, like honoring death, is not a strong point with people. They prefer fear, with which they have experience. They cultivate fear like fields of corn, and manufacture it like a familiar line of tools.

Humans debate whether learning or culture or compassion exists among other species, but fail to recognize how biased the original question is. In the last few decades, these debates have become more emotionally charged within the human communities as some humans decry widespread destruction of the natural world and the indiscriminate use of animal populations for human consumption.

But human conceptions of language, learning and culture obviously don’t apply to all of us, or to our place in world history. Humans can’t fathom that world history is neither just human nor just some inevitable machine-like “natural” evolution, but encompasses those things and includes the contributions of all life, like the lives of this scrub jay and that mouse family.

Such a conception of how change happens is very logical. But people really only love and apply logic and reason when it allows them to remain comfortable in their humanity and the beastliness of everyone else!

Their present level of obsession with rational thinking– to the exclusion of awareness–has been amply discussed in these councils. I think we all agree that many of the human cultures are at a stage today of split consciousness, in which impressive energy and imagination is directed at continued development of technical tools and “security” while rudimentary needs for balance in their social relations are shunted from the main focus of human activity.

They war, but can barely feed themselves!

Obviously many of them are in a state of confusion, only occasionally at ease with how their needs for food and shelter are met. They all individually work for some future stability, and ignore their current precarious teetering on the brink of cataclysm. They act as if long-term, constant, insecurity were a natural state.

Any other species on the rock devotes a healthy portion of waking activity to food, shelter and play; it is testament to the pitiful state of human cultural evolution that this insanity, a myopic pretense and frenzy at progress and stability, is offered as proof of their superiority!

Even when this pathology is identified, the humans rely on anthropocentrism. I’ve heard debates between humans who are afraid of their own odor, about how there is human responsibility for all manner of painful situations. It seems also they are afraid of themselves.

As you well know, friends, some of the cataclysmic activity lately is a result of earth disruption by human activity and that weird human fetish for burning everything. But what is so pathetically human is that they want to assign blame or achieve dominance in assigning culpability and the accuracy of their predictions, rather than directly address the problems. They complain about pollution but do nothing to stop the industry. They show more allegiance to their cultural norms of good behavior than to the survival of their herd. They accuse one another of inaction.

Perhaps they need to assign responsibility in order to eliminate the individuals who are not helping the herd evolve.

Ah, but then maybe this struggle for dominance is not so uniquely human; it’s just that they make it look so complicated and pointless. And don’t they just take all the fun out of a good fight, with the moral recriminations and the damaging nearly everyone and everything that had nothing to do with it? I’d rather watch two hogs establish hierarchy any afternoon, than witness these long spiritual and detached campaigns of hatred by proxy among humans.

If their definition of culture means allegiance to pain, then i am glad to fail the test.

What i want most to encourage today is our ongoing efforts to instruct humans. This work must be done in a way to challenge their preconceptions. It isn’t enough for them to think that cows are cute and should be spared factory slaughter. They must come to feel uncomfortable with their own idea that a cow is cute. They must be emboldened to ask each other if they are confident about the implications in the construction of a new dam. They must be surprised by our behavior, and sometimes frightened. The humans who fear nature will be open up or die eventually.

They must learn to feel at home with ignorance and express their curiosity in compassionate ways. The testing laboratories, those bastions of pseudo-science and prejudice, will be closed just as their prisons are demolished, not only because they are cruel, but because they don’t work, and there are better ways.

They must allow awareness to spur action, not because they know the truth, but because they want to participate in the making of natural history. They must learn to admire their own strange bodies, their wrinkly genitals, their flesh, their sag and paunch, their sleepiness and anger, their grief and silliness. To accept life. They’ll learn not to take themselves so seriously; they’ll learn to play, and to have fun fighting. And to die like many of us die, not so much afraid as wondering what’s next.

Eventually, i hope, they will learn to live in the natural world, not in a state of suspended insecurity, hoping to survive the next epidemic or war.

Thanks for listening,

RitRitRee,
Local Night-Chirpy
Chua Region
Mound Council

[photo: Brad Will playing guitar.]

A friend wrote:

Brad was equally comfortable doing yoga in Central Park with his raw foodist friends, singing with eco-hippies and activists at an Earth First! campfire out in the wilderness, and moshing along to a punk rock show at one of New York’s City’s scummiest, formerly illegal venues: C-Squat. He was a performer who loved to be up front with an acoustic guitar or a fireball spewing from his mouth. Brad was an anarchist, through and through; he believed in making the world a just place without hierarchy and oppression. His death was as political as the life he lived.

Unrelated, in Chicago this past November 3, Malachi Ritscher set himself ablaze in protest over the war in Iraq. Mainstream press has either ignored the political suicide, or questioned Richter’s mental stability. Perhaps there is a personal history of depression, but it puzzles me that extreme actions on the part of sincere people are automatically attributed to poor judgment. Why not view the boldest acts as being inspired by a momentary flash of absolute clarity?

Brad and Malachi and Cathy, and others , will be missed because they made choices according to their dreams. And that looks to me like the most pragmatic and realistic thing you can do.

I’ve seen the land beyond these borders where the corporations rule
And they spin their lies and they globalize and the working man’s their tool
And the streams are so polluted that their banks are bleak and bare
And the babies all are born deformed and the smog is everywhere
And the workers’ wages dropped thirty percent in just one year
Now the greedy bastards want to bring that situation here

And you called upon me brother and you asked what could I do
And I told the truth dear brother, when I spoke these words to you:
I will stand beside your shoulder when the tear gas fills the sky
And if a national guardsman shoots me down I’ll be lookin’ him in the eye
And if I will wash their pepper from your face and go with you to jail
And if you don’t make it through this fight I swear I’ll tell your tale
And I will stay with you in the prison cell in solidarity
And I will not leave that cursed room ’til you walk out with me
For we the people fight for freedom while the cops just fight for pay
And as long as truth is in our hearts we’re sure to win some day
I will not falter when the iron fist comes out of the velvet glove
I will stand beside you brother and defend this land I love

I’ve heard the tales from conquered islands where the sweatshop barons rule
Recruiting girls from the Asian slums to be the rich man’s tool
And they’re promised lives of luxury in the golden U.S.A.
And then they’re stranded on these islands with their passports stripped away
And their aging fingers toil and bleed year after grueling year
Now the greedy bastard want to bring those same conditions here

And you called upon me sister and you asked what could I do
And I told the truth dear sister, when I spoke these words to you:
“I will stand beside your shoulder when the tear gas fills the sky
And if a national guardsman shoots me down I’ll be lookin’ him in the eye
And if I will wash their pepper from your face and go with you to jail
And if you don’t make it through this fight I swear I’ll tell your tale
And I will stay with you in the prison cell in solidarity
And I will not leave that cursed room ’til you walk out with me
For we the people fight for freedom while the cops just fight for pay
And as long as truth is in our hearts we’re sure to win some day
I will not falter when the iron fist comes out of the velvet glove
I will stand beside you brother and defend this land I love

I’ve walked the tall and misty forests, pulsing vein from ancient time
And they’ll cut the heart out of a mountain to kill the oldest thing alive
Now the rainforest dwellers smell a burning, and the ‘dozers are close behind
Replaced with plantations and cattle, plowing under whatever they find
With the rain comes a raging mudslide, where the land was stripped and cleared
Now those greedy bastards want to bring those same conditions here

I’ve watched the oceans rolling, schools of fish running under the tide
Working fishermen grounding their bodies, starving on a hook and line
While industrial fishers haul in their nets, scoring the deep ocean floor
Dolphin and sea turtle snagged in those nets will ride those waves no more
They rip the heart out of the deep blue sea, their boats increase every year
Now the greedy bastards want to push their bloody products here

And you called upon me brother and you asked what could I do
And I told the truth dear brother, when I spoke these words to you:
I will stand beside your shoulder when the tear gas fills the sky
And if a national guardsman shoots me down I’ll be lookin’ him in the eye
And if I will wash their pepper from your face and go with you to jail
And if you don’t make it through this fight I swear I’ll tell your tale
And I will stay with you in the prison cell in solidarity
And I will not leave that cursed room ’til you walk out with me
For we the people fight for freedom while the cops just fight for pay
And as long as truth is in our hearts we’re sure to win some day
I will not falter when the iron fist comes out of the velvet glove
I will stand beside you brother and defend this land I love
I will not falter when the iron fist comes out of the velvet glove
I will stand beside you brother and defend this land I love

- By Desert Rat and Brad

“CALL ME A FLAMING RADICAL BURNING FOR ATTENTION, BUT MY REAL INTENTION IS TO SPARK A DISCUSSION OF HOW WE CAN PEACEFULLY TRANSFORM OUR WORLD. AMERICA, I OFFER MYSELF TO YOU AS AN ALARM AGAINST ARMAGEDDON AND A TORCH FOR LIBERTY. “

Kathy Change/October 1996

Wikipedia article on Will
seattle pi article about Ritscher
Ritscher’s Statement
Ritscher’s Obit

yep i turned from certain thoughts; i decided i didn’t need to enter that room, or leave here quite yet. i’ve sat and considered considering, contemplated thinking, and wondered about wandering.

i created complex scenes with only a suggestion of a link to reality. i imagined details and assembled them meticulously like someone building a sailing ship in a bottle. they are cinematic masterpieces of what happens to someone who doesn’t wait. like a poorly-rehearsed orchestra on a highway median, uninteresting except for being so distracting. embarassing and mercifully private dramas of grief, disability, violence, prison, castles made of splinters. stress like a nervous rodent handling, gnawing, turning, and chewing every tuft and tidbit. inventing evidence to support my desperate hopes that i am justified in being afraid. it really is scary out there, isn’t it?

praying that what i know to be true is false, standing asleep, that you can’t conquer fear by sitting down in it. fear accepted is hope deferred, not a means to some other golden shore, any more than one can learn to dance by eating.

i wanted ideas to be enough. i wanted to feel the burst of light when the tongue of fire leaps from tinder as a match hits it. lacking patience, i didn’t want to tend to the ambivalent wood. i don’t want to nurture the guttering flame in a drizzle with soggy branches. i’m resisting diligence. where’s the warmth right now? where’s the pretty coals from fire well-made? my hands are shaky, i can’t sit still, and my concentration longs to stretch out with the wisps of smoke on the amber horizon.

“While we like less government, sometimes government has to step in and literally act in the interest of the public health,” he told senators.

John “Mac” Stipanovich, a lobbyist for Trademark Metal Recycling, was explaining why the state of Florida should charge auto manufacturers for the mercury switches they installed in cars up until 2003. He probably didn’t realize how odd his statement sounds; perhaps it encapsulates what might be a common idea these days: your government exists for some inscrutable obscure purpose. So much for of, by and for the people…Part of the problem may be that for some years now a slogan (like “No big government!”) is more powerful than its meaning–or meaninglessness. What really tickles me about his qualifying remarks are the words “sometimes,” and “literally.” Isn’t acting in the public health one of the primary charges of a government, maybe the ONLY one, along with, say, public safety?

“State tries to deal with mercury in some cars”
By LLOYD DUNKELBERGER
Sun Tallahassee Bureau
http://www.gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060415/LOCAL/204150334/1078/living

i didn’t invent this longing, hope or idea–i heard it from various
anarchists, primitivists, anti-work ideologues–let’s work at
something we less inspired by (like building new houses, farming,
paperwork, gathering garbage, digging, plumbing, teaching or studying,
mechanical repairs) but for no more than four hours per day. And then
work at things we are more inspired by (gardening, songcrafting,
building that shelf, learning that language, quilting, tinkering with
the stereo, computer, or vehicle, teaching, farming, studying history) for
another couple hours. It’s not a new idea, it’s as obvious as a dream.
Yesterday i never thought of doing that, it inspires me today, it’s
drudgery tomorrow… still might need doing. Organize the economy like that.

and of course the answer from the studio oddy-ants comes back
always, bah! utopian! the poor will always be with us! or somepin stick
like that. i won’t debunk that here, except to point out that there is
no evidence to support a conviction that any society would crumble if
you and i and everyone else only worked four hours per day, and still
were paid the same. It’s of course this last morsel that will stick in
some throats like a pine cone.

Get paid the same?! the economy would crumble! that’s balderdash, and
was the same argument used by opponents of the eight hour work day
earlier last century.  Hopefully you are already familiar with how we
came by that. It’s a great story, replete with anarchists, company
thugs, police violence, a hanging, and victory for the people. You can
find out more about it from the wonderful wikipedia, for example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_Riot

Studies are showing that workers who work less hours are more
productive, which is of course intuitive, since a happily inspired
person is on who focuses better, makes fewer mistakes, works harder.
The IWW has been arguing for the 4 hour day for a while.

http://www.iww.org/projects/4-Hours

Now i’ve heard of studies of productivity showing that the average
humyn bean at work only does about four hours of real work anyway! I
don’t have a citation, but think anecdotally about how much time at
yer job, if you have the misfortune of being currently employed, you ackcherally
do shpit. Alotta time be spent the a gum-flapping with co-workers,
puttering with shtuff, staring off into space…bosses hate that sort
of thing. I had a boss recently so uptight about productivity on the
job site, i thought to get some assurance that he wasn’t only going to
pay me by the moment, for those moments when i held the hammer in my
hand! whew! As it turned out, assurance from this man would have been
worthless…

My boss was general contractor Chris Pickering from Gainesville
Restoration, a remodeling company he owns that does fire damage, flood
damage repairs. I am glad i no longer work for that contractor. After
working like a dog for him for several months, doing demolition,
framing, painting, etc., he had the ethics to cheat me on my last
paycheck, paying me $80 less than i was owed. He has cheated others as
well, but i can only tell my own story.

How it happened still gets me a little steamy. He called me into his
office at the ass end of a friday afternoon, when i had stopped in to
pick up my paycheck, saying he would no longer pay me $12 an hour. What
does that mean, i said. He began a story about how i didn’t know how
to read a speed square or some like palaver, and so on. His reasons,
logic, and approach set off little itchy red flags like fire-crackers
all over that dismal sheetrock industrial park office.

Well, how much are we talking about, i asked. He said well, what do you
think you are worth? So i told him. There was a long silence, where i
could tell he was trying to decide if it would look more manly to
laugh, or yell. It seemed to me he often reacted to things based on how
they would make him look.  He ended by back-tracking, when i was
intransigent, offering to drop my pay by a dollar. This struck me as
the oddest part of the whole interaction. He would be saving all of $40
on a 40 hour work week (we usually worked less)! It looked more like he
just wanted to see would i go along with it. Or maybe he had guessed
what my reaction would be, as you’ll see.

I said no, i could easily get $12 elsewhere, and that i’d call him
about my last paycheck, as there is often a week’s lag time with
construction contractors who are using leasing companies for payroll.
That whole rig is a topic for another time. Well, i thought about it
all weekend long, and decided that i couldn’t be sure whether it was
pride or self-worth that made me resistant to accepting a pay cut. 
Also, i hate looking for work, more than i hate working. So i decided
to eat crow, and work for $11.

He called me Sunday night, and made some idle conversation. Now, for
some reason, i am sometimes reticent to be direct with authority
figures, like bosses, teachers, cops, judges. Part of my hesitation is
likely learned self-protection, but the lame part of it is just wanting
to avoid the awkwardness of the other person being uncomfortable. So
instead of asking, why did you call me, i told him i had reconsidered,
and so on. And he said, i don’t have anything for you. I lost it a
little and asked him what the hell he was calling me for, and what did
he expect me to do. And the phone went dead! So i called immediately
and left a message saying, i guess we got disconnected, call me back,
here’s my number.

He called me back three hours later. By that time, i had decided it
wasn’t just pride, he was actually jerking me around, and that looking
for work was less painful than feeling like a dog tied to the bumper of
his RV hurtling down the interstate…I didn’t talk to him that night,
or the next day. After calling a couple of friends, within a couple
hours i had several leads on a new job, at the pay i wanted. I began
work Monday morning: i decided that not acting until i felt certain of
my motivations had opened up doors for me.

Now all i needed from Mr. Pickering was my pay check. The next Friday i
called asking when it was okay to pick it up. He put me off a couple
times, saying it wasn’t there but then said come at 4 pm and it would
be, and that he probably wouldn’t be there when i came to get it. He
said that part about not being there more than once. The little red
flags started dancing again, but i told them to get lost, he’s just a
busy man. I called him at 3:30 pm because i was in the neighborhood,
and he sounded flustered, saying yeah i’m here now, and so is your
paycheck but i’ll leave it for you under the mat, cause i have to go
somewhere…

By the time i got there, all the little red flags were making it hard
for me to see the road. The lights were out to his office in the North
Industrial Park, the door was locked. But his truck was there. Weird.
I  checked under the mat, there was my check, and he paid me for all
the hours, but wait, the hourly wage was $10! Chris Pickering basically
stole $2 per hour; he paid me $10 an hour for the week i
had already worked when we had the conversation about my pay.
I had worked that week, and for months before that, for $12 per hour. i
have pay-stubs to prove it, though like most times when a worker gets
ripped off, there’s nobody to show. Florida is a so-called ‘right to
work state,’ which means right to exploit the workers, since in effect
unions don’t offer much protection to most of us. The history of how
that happened will be the subject of another icy’ah blog,
someday…

I called Chris Pickering of Gainesville Restoration immediately at both
the office and his cell and left messages saying what he had done was
illegal, and if it was a mistake that i would appreciate a call back to
fix it. My guts said he was hiding in the office with the lights out.
In any case, he never called me back. I called him again the next week
and he flat out refused to pay me, even refused to give a reason. May
Gainesville Restoration suffer a nightmarishly slow, agonizing failure
ending in financial bankruptcy to equal his moral one.

As a final plea for consideration of short time , here is  an article
on how overwork is killing us…

http://money.guardian.co.uk/work/story/0,1456,1552801,00.html

started uploading material anyway, the travel journals i posted via email bulk from eastern european internet cafe’s along my travels there a couple years ago. i’m trying to keep the content in safe lil boxes so as to be able to backhand the design template barn door after the cow splits, so to speak.

if the Clothes, make demand, then a door every little pocket of nonsense…

also uploaded emergentCD, a collection of mp3s i had for download on the old site. LarsDin.com was bought by some greed-driven url collector– imagine a dog-catcher for domain names. following a search of the company i see they’ve lost several lawsuits, but continue to charge rapacious fees if someone wants to “buy back” a domain name which lapsed. pretty weak ethics in a business plan, capitalizing on human disorganization. oh well, whatever, they can have the dot com(plain no more). the incentive has been there for me to kick whut on this doohicky instead.

been not working the last few days, well, okay weeks. finally this morning i’m breathing easier, and feeling the decompression period is over. work can be like nitrogen getting stored under pressure in your tissues, with a very small, almost imperceptible effect on your body.[ the night rogue gently slipped from my cell.] anytime i stop working, i have to go through this span of time, disentangling myself from work, from guilt about how i should be doing something else right now, something i don’t really want to do, all day long, instead of deciding as i go what inspires me. after, i can enjoy working hard at shit i wanna do.