It rained all day – There has been a stalled front all week from the Texas Panhandle to Ohio. There is flooding all along its shadow. The rivers are all over their banks. I camped out at a Super Eight. When I got back home there was impending flooding there too from the snow melt up river in the Rockies. I had not heard a word about the tornadoes. I don’t listen to the news, I said. It’s one of the joys of camping – the weather is whatever it is - is this case mostly bad. The tornadoes were real bad I had learned after I had returned.
To what indifference people may come, to what profound conviction of having lost the right track forever – Franz Kafka – Blue Notebooks
I’ve decided not to pitch the tent – or rather the weather has decided it for me. I am dehydrated. There is no water as this campsite. I had to go back five miles to the RV campground to get it. It is 7:30 and the temperature is 980 – no wonder I am so lethargic. The wind has been gusting all day and I just feel like shit. I shall sit here and do noting. There is lightening on the horizon. I wake up covered in hailstones. Something had erupted during the night. A friend said that the hailstones reminded her of bubble ice cream (frozen in liquid nitrogen to 45 degrees below zero). They popped when you touched them. I did not try to eat them.
When hedonism is established as a necessity, death and suffering become pure absurdities, intolerable assaults on our rights – Pascal Bruckner
High mountain meadows. It has been proven that beavers will begin constructing a dam at the sound of running water, even if it is a recording of running waters being played to them. They have built two within a hundred yards of by tent (i.e. I pitched my tent near where some beavers had once built two dams, not that they just did – I don’t actually see any beavers nor can I spot their lodges). At night when the wind dies down you can hear the water running. I want to construct a dam. I want to get up and do it right now. I have a very strong urge to do so. My two front teeth are causing me considerable pain. Today the wind died down and the sun came out. You could smell the pines. It is pleasant to sit in high mountain meadows and read. I am here in the Toledo caldera, which is a little older than it’s better known neighbor the Valles. The Toledo erupted 1.6 million years ago. Above its 200 foot layer of tuffa, which forms a golden cliff behind me, is 100 feet of tuffa from the Valles eruption which took place only 350,000 years later. Having worked with geologists and paleontologists I find exspanses of such abstract time manageable. Dealing with ‘bugs’ they had dated the core sample as 3.2 million years old. It was just part of the job. Having worked in a medical school I got used to people talking about the body as if they were lifting the hood of a car. One gets used to the bazar. The most disconcerting concepts become normalized with time. That's way I won’t stay in one place too long, not as long as a million years or so - not anymore. The last volcanic eruption is New Mexico took place 10,000 years ago. Humans no doubt witnessed it, but they left us no record of their thoughts about it. They left us no thoughts about anything - only a bunch of petroglyphs – a lot of pecking at rocks. We are still pecking away at the rocks. The Capulin cone was created 65,000 years ago. No humans, to our knowledge, saw this. The most perfect cinder cone in North America – 1,500 feet to the top – a great view. And that is what being a tourist is all about, isn’t it? I half hoped that a new volcanic vent would open up as I drove up it. I could take pictures of it. That would make the news, wouldn't it? Sure it would - most viewed video on YouTube. Getting the most hits is almost as good as dying with the most toys. But then I remembered that the batteries in my camera were dead. It was one of the things on my to-do list – buy two double A batteries. I had forgot to get them the last time I stopped for provisions. Provisions is just a fancy word for groceries and for some beer and some ice to keep the beer cold. Miners liked to call the flour and beans they hauled up the mountainside and through the desert provisions (I am sure the also packed in some whiskey too – for which they didn’t need any ice and besides they didn’t have plastic coolers to lug it around in). Forty-Niners did not include AA batteries among their provisions either, as far as I am aware.
… Whiskey! the stranger coughed as he spite out trail dust. The bartender plunked down a labeless bottle two thirds filled with a tannishBrokeback Mountain my dear)– no ice, no branch, no coke, no seltzer spritzer. And those swinging half doors – what was that all about? They didn’t keep out the flies and they didn’t keep out the sweet smell of the horse shit in the street which is why everyone wore boots and the ladies lifted their skirts when the had to cross from one side to the other which they did as infrequently as possible.
When it comes to attacking humans, grizzlies are equal-opportunity maulers, attacking without regard to race creed, ethnicity, or marijuana use. Hopkin’s [the plaintiff’s] use of marijuana to kick off a day of working around grizzly bears was ill advised to say the least, and mind-boggling stupid to say the most. However I have been presented with no evidence by which I can conclude that Hoipkin’s marijuana use was the major contributing cause of the grizzly bear’s attack – Judge James Jeremiah Sheus
The Valles Caldera is one of the smaller volcanoes in the supervolcano class – 12 miles in diameter. The Valles collapsed over and buried the Toledo, which in turn probably collapsed over yet older calderas. These and associated volcanic structures lie within the Jemez Volcanic Field which lies above the intersection of the Rio Grande Rift and the Jemez Linement which itself extends from Southeastern Arizona to Western Oklahoma.
Perfection has no tension – nothing to call attention to itself, nothing to resist the senses - make them pause. Perfection is boring. Perfection does not stimulate the imagination. Perfection is an indicator of something which has ceased to exist. Perfection is an indication of the absence of man.
The Capulin Volcanic National Monument is a well-preserved, relatively young, symmetrical cinder cone rising steely from the surrounding grasslands with a rim about a mile in circumference and a crater about 400 feed deep.
Sometimes things happen for no apparent reason, just out of shear random chance. If there’s one concept that we humans have a hard time understanding, it’s randomness – Charles Seife – Proofiness, 2010 p54
Money can best be accumulated when its self-replication becomes play rather than a game – at the point at which it becomes an obsession rather than merely a desire. If you really need it, you can’t have it. It's one of the rules of the game. Time is money, but time is limited and money, evidently, is not. In the end (the end of time) there will be money left over to burn.
No, no, Piscasso said, waste not a minute. Go do what you want to. What you can. Get a lifetime of work into a week. Plan nothing; make – Guy Davenport – Tatlin!, 1974 p23
We have a will to desire
We are a civilization
Of potential desires
Money making is our
Kinetic desire
As Eros was to the Greeks
Money making is to
An American
What pedestry was
To the Greeks
Chaos is very near, its nearness, but avoidance gives… force – Robert Venturi – Learning from Las Vegas, 1988
The dollar sign ‘$’ is derived from the insignia for ‘in hoc signo’ (by this sign) inscribed on Christian crosses
Men spiral upward within their capabilities. A genius has no interest in controlling people with anything so crude as power – Guy Davenport – Tatlin!, 1974 p48
Wisconsin is Republican ‘broke’, but it is not broke. Broke suggest near bankruptcy. We aren’t too broke to do tax breaks for corporations – Mordecai Lee – If you have a budget deficit you’re broke – Scott Walker
The sciences pursue technological rationality on its own terms, untroubled by the need to reflect upon the social effects of the knowledge they produce or manipulate, since such thinking is supposed to take place elsewhere – Bill Readings – The University in Ruins, 1996 p82
Magical thinking - no harm
The celebrity’s touch is a charm
A just-right experience
Can be reclaimed
Remain pristine – kept white
Still in the box
Germ free
As seen on TV
You know Peggy
I haven’t seen it
Stamped on
The bottom of your feet
Hot, just off the presses
I will look it up
Lick it up
Lie in your lap
Crawl back into
The womb
God, its so dank
I’m just
Another snake
The end of history is not the end of the account. The many accounts of this ending are preparing a future in which several variants of the fable of the world will reign ‘again’ – and for the nth time – Vincent Descombes – Modern French Philosophy, 1980 p186
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