the inevitability of limited vision

The thing I like the most about the west is not something usually listed in travel advertisements such as accommodations and exclusivity.  It is the Cecil B. Demille skies at just about any given moment on any given day.  They appear unusually panoramic in comparison to skies in other geographies, with heightened cloud activity and weather complexities you would see elsewhere only over the open ocean where on the brightest sunny day, running wing on wing, you can study a distant squall off the port bow or rains falling from one cloud bank into another below it.  At this moment, a dark thunder storm is approaching from the southwest while overhead it is clear blue with Old Masters-style Cumulonimbus bordered with watercolor blends of soft Ultramarine graduating to crisp Titanium White.  You would think standing on the coast of say, Florida, you would see the same things, but it isn't so.  The Eastern Coast of this continent, especially in flat Florida, the adventures of Cowboy Clouds Gone Wild does not present itself in Cinerama, being quickly battened down by low lying landscapes: uninterrupted stretches of Mangroves and Sawgrass, beauties in themselves, but nothing like the lost fogs who become trapped in the passes and canyons hugging the California Transmontane as they also do in the Nevada Sheep's Range.  It is the appearance of white wool-like fluff that gathers through the striated peaks and crags that gives that region its name. This phenomena shows up often after rainstorms and on high humidity winter mornings.

What is peculiar about the cities of the western territories is the overkill to sell every man his castle.  In doing so, most homes built after the middle of the last century have high walls dividing them from their neighbors' houses.  Even strip malls employ a sort of semi permanent fencing arrangement utilizing metal posts and barbed wire.  It appears the McMansion development communities, squeezed by the thousands into formerly trash riddled vacant lots, each dwelling erected on individual tiny parcels, as small as the builder can get away with, are especially subject to high walls and ostentatious iron gates.  The walls are made of painted cinder blocks in multitudes of varieties of beige aka sand tones as if tight enclosure of the castle was something natural.  Is it natural to exit the kitchen door and meet with a wall extending to the second story?  These walls dividing homes from one another are typically fourteen or more cinder blocks tall. Even in ungated residential neighborhoods, the homes are walled off from passersby and sidewalks as if the presence of human habitation must be a secret kept far from tourists.  Existing behind walls limits sky viewing in the same way the web is seen on cell phones or news on TV with too many banners and blinking gadgets.  Who are these dickwads anyway,  blocking out our views?  Is anybody home there?  It is difficult to know what they're doing overhead, you can hear a lot of noise, seemingly close, but you don't know what it is.  It brings an air of gnawing mystery to whatever you are doing.  Naturally, it doesn't bother the locals at all.  Have they never lain in the grass with a friend watching clouds?  Actually, there is very little grass and grasses used for energy- intensive landscaping are poisoned.

There's more.  Most of the intrusive alerts and crackling static warnings that I mentioned in the last post are centered around flash floods.  They caution you to stay indoors, go nowhere, lay low until the all clear is given by "your" TV weather forecaster.   Do we have primary care weather-people now?    I have visited this same location off and on throughout the years, mostly seasonal layovers, mostly during this same season when these freak flash floods were definitely not happening, at least not happening to the extent they are this time.  Nature had not yet caught up with what the city planning board had in mind. Certainly, uninhabitable desert regions have always had flash floods since dry grit and creosote making up the floor of western deserts are not porous enough to soak up heavy water flow, in many foothhill regions you will see evidence of man's hand in redirecting the flow for human use.  But here, in the city, what seems to have happened is in the overbuilding, they covered the valley floor with wall to wall cement and asphalt, there is no other place for the water to go except into various dips of road and unfortunate properties cheaply bought and sold in less unpredictable seasons which we know are becoming more rare by the day.   It is exactly in those places flash floods take take their worst toll.  They have aqueducts, but not nearly enough and were never built to reign in the increasing summer overflow which always claimed victims even before superstorms.  This same situation also occurs in the high desert suburbs bordering the Mojave northwest of Los Angeles.  It happens where there are heavily traveled, ground level, high speed multilane asphalt highways bordered on both sides with non-porous ground and subject to increasingly extreme rainfall.  Of course, in the urban planning room, surely there are solutions to eliminate the fallout of flash floods, but the general story goes something like lack of funding, which is not the real story.  The real story is funding has been funneled into the show-off channel, an American Idol of the tallest, most absurd architectural atrocities designed specifically to lure huge convention crowds and international families bored with Disneyland.  Local citizens attempting survival in a state with the nation's highest foreclosure rate are actually a population of servicers to the illusion, working round the clock, racing over the curbs of flash flooded roadways to maintain the playground of a non-local 1% to whom the most important feature and most desirable and memorable adventure is blowing wads of dough at the altars of the Backjack gods.  Whatever weird, inexplicable interactions one may encounter in this city always have a common root.   It may take a lot of standing back and mental synthesis to make it out, but it never fails to arrive at the same vainglorious destination.  It is the same root for every destination mankind has worked over.  It is always all about the money.

In reference to the saying sex and money make the world go round, sex is only included in the partnership as the offspring of money, not the well spring.

I respect your right to debate, indeed there are millions of examples why this just isn't so.  Look at all the wonderful foundations that assist humankind ... the money that is diverted to charity would otherwise be taxable income.  This is how our system operates.  Regardless of who receives the funds, be it government or charitable foundation, the gaping flaw is owned by the earmarks directing the contribution. Do you read me?  So that developers of gated properties, in order to market the concept of One Man's Castle,  an updated version of retirees purchasing unseen sandlots in Arizona, get rollercoaster bangs for their buck as sponsoring members of the razor's edge fraternity, lobby for permissions to build and lobby against building codes they can legally ignore and those lobbies have been very successful, as you can see for yourself, but those lobbies and lobbyists are serving whom?  Not the clueless end-user who has been raked over the coals by the mortgage mills and employment classifieds and their children locked into lifetimes of education debt-servitude.  Not the women who were electrocuted in fire hydrant water spilling over a downed power line while attempting to rescue victims of the car accident that ended up on their sidewalk causing a chain of horrific events in the San Fernando Valley this week. Development is often a give and take business, they must contractually agree to include something for humanity at large such as public access to park benches and shade trees, but only if they are given free reign to short the construction codes.

Enough of that, all of THAT which now appears to be one long, curcuitous, converging zenith of mythical progress.  Much of which we all bear some small measure of guilt for some distantly related participation during the journey, even if that participation was nothing more than checking it out for the sheer curiosity or perhaps just going along for the ride.  The interesting part is how some of us have NOT become enured, none of what I am saying is new to you, I don't have stupid readers, Praise Jah, we keep on looking and keep on finding more interesting wonders daily, nightly and in those thoughtful hours inbetween, to fill our visual field and broaden spiritual development in spite of the many who give up and cave due to lack of encouragement, inspiration or example, life is so much more than what mankind has made of it.  It would be amusing if so many lives were not lost because of intentionally misdirected over-achievement and its coatail disciples.  Amusing in the similarity to standing on the beach watching the foam lap away your sandcastle, wave by wave, ever so gradually diminishing the dams, moats, towers, bridges and walls until there is nothing left but a clean smooth expanse, beautiful and perfect just as it always was.  Amusing as in building with toy blocks which fall and have to be put away in the blocksbox.  It seems it is inevitable, the persuasions of mankind always fall apart.

There is no good to be had from comparisons of your dream of lifestyle from that of childhood memory.  It only makes it worse.  Better for your personal well-being through which your own positive existence adds to the Overall Well Being, we ask what else is out there that can capture our compassion and expand our awareness in the Universal community?

***

Department of extracurricular observations and interpretations:

How long have we been reading Visible Origami?  Maybe forever.  All those years where Visible writes "Everything is under control" somehow entered the perceptive brain differently while reading a recent essay.  We've been under the mis-impression the phrase meant the Divine wouldn't actually take our beloved Earth away from us, that planetary calamity is unholy, extreme and intensifying, but ultimately a passing problem and we would be wise to not take it too seriously because change for the better is guaranteed regardless of Humanity's survival.  However, re-reading the phrase again a few days ago, in a somewhat different context, I realized and perhaps you did too, what he has been saying all along is that the ENTIRE show, journey, lifetime, dream, appearance/s, events, non-events, is controlled.  And as always, he backs it up with the qualifying statement, "for the purposes of demonstration".  This is much clearer now and I agree completely.

we interrupt your enheeeeeeeeee attention for an impor zzzzzzzzzzzzz

"...Looking towards the year 2100, models forecast that pressures on biota will continue to increase. The co-opting of resources and energy use by humans will continue to increase as the global population reaches 9,500,000,000 people (by 2050), and effects will be greatly exacerbated if per capita resource use also increases. Projections for 2100 range from a population low of 6,200,000,000 (requiring a substantial decline in fertility rates) to 10,100,000,000 (requiring continued decline of fertility in countries that still have fertility above replacement level) to 27,000,000,000 (if fertility remains at 2005–2010 levels; this population size is not thought to be supportable .... Rapid climate change shows no signs of slowing. Modelling suggests that for 30% of Earth, the speed at which plant species will have to migrate to keep pace with projected climate change is greater than their dispersal rate when Earth last shifted from a glacial to an interglacial climate ... and that dispersal will be thwarted by highly fragmented landscapes. Climates found at present on 10–48% of the planet are projected to disappear within a century, and climates that contemporary organisms have never experienced are likely to cover 12–39% of Earth... . The mean global temperature by 2070 (or possibly a few decades earlier) will be higher than it has been since the human species evolved. ..."   Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere via Cryptogon

We have no time or interest in playing "I told you so".  We are in deep trouble of the worst kind. Only genuine think tanks, not the political byproducts generating press releases, are talking about the obvious.  We are hearing classic Nero violin compositions while all hell is breaking loose.  Its a switch from the previous position of serious science, that body of experts who dared not speak up or face loss of funding and public ridicule.  How will it be handled now?


It won't be.  For those who gain through others' loss, it doesn't call for action, in spite of the fact all around them the evidence is undeniable, they've had warning, they've experienced the realities first hand, but to take action, to this day, is to lose the vote and be shuffled off to the peanut clinic (or worse).  When disaster strikes, if you can pay attention, those affected make up two distinct types, the type who permanently leaves the region having born witness to the chaos and destruction caused by overloading Nature and those who rally around whichever political celebrity visits the aftermath of same, declaring citizens' heroism and patriotic unity in rebuilding over their loss.  Oh, rebuild by any means, the more the better.  The cameras are on.  In fact, if you happen to look upward while looking at the hopeless tsunamis of debris, the snarl of downed power lines, collapsed interstates, smoke and cinders, drought ravaged croplands and melted plastic, you'll see seven football fields of blimp droning overhead insuring compliance.  You might ask, "Um, compliance with what?"

"... in the optimal case, averting a planetary-scale critical transition demands global cooperation to stem current global-scale anthropogenic forcings ... . This will require reducing world population growth ...and per-capita resource use; rapidly increasing the proportion of the world’s energy budget that is supplied by sources other than fossil fuels while also becoming more efficient in using fossil fuels when they provide THE ONLY OPTION ...  increasing the efficiency of existing means of food production and distribution instead of converting new areas ... or relying on wild species ... to feed people; and enhancing efforts to manage as reservoirs of biodiversity and ecosystem services, both in the terrestrial ...
and marine realms ..."
*caps, mine

Now for those who leave, walking away from everything they ever knew, we might ask where on Earth are they expected to go?  You might recall the people bused away from Katrina often landed in places they'd never been.  We don't know what became of that group other than most of them did not return having nothing to return to, evident by the population drop, that was in any way reminiscent of going home.  Some were bused to stadiums elsewhere and reports of their unfortunate welcome status as intruding unwanteds shortly surfaced.  Some who survived and stayed were assigned (gasp, choke) Fema trailers.  But a larger group has never been heard from at all.  I suggest, to this day they are still wandering, a month here, two or three weeks there, essentially permanently homeless, perhaps dead, perhaps squatting under an interchange toughing it out with veterans of dispossession who long ago made their peace with nowhere to simply be, foraging out of dumpsters, praying to rest undisturbed.  You can't go where you want to go without the funds to get there.  It is the same story with people who walked away from their mortgages, if they couldn't meet the unmeetable expense of The Dream then, how are they doing in their new digs - unemployed with zero credit?  And we hear that multitudes of Haitians are still tenting, sometimes twelve or more related souls crammed under disintegrating tiny tarps designed for short term shelter from the blistering sun and daily tropic downpours.


I don't think many readers actually believe the totality of the darkness we have entered.  Of course, its even more absurd offline.  The general attitude I run into "out there" varies from "What's that?" to outright anger unprocessable information interferes with the blissful state of whomever's rocky little house of cards is showing cracks.  People of all flavors run their personal mental scans over everything they fall into, silently searching for the false element behind the spoken/written word of others.  Be my guest, its the latest rage.  More surprises unfold every day and many more are ripening for your awareness.  I've not seen a more apt description of these times than that of Visible's mention of the film, Memento. While it is difficult to categorize, if you are looking for it, you'd look among neo noir classics such as Blue Velvet, also highly recommended, but be sure to study up on Director, David Lynch before viewing or you might mistake this film for a precursor to Pulp Fiction, as if there were any basis for comparison between Dennis Hopper and John Travolta.  Memento is a remarkably applicable metaphor for 2012, day-by-freaky-day.  I suggest you try to see it if you have not, chances are you are already living it in the timeless, graceless, out of sequence evolution of modern civilization, repeating in reverse your personal movie starring your personal acquaintances,  underscoring all the unsolvable mystery accumulated through lifetimes of radiation exposure, mandatory vaccines, silent plagues and steady diets of pesticides resulting in the disguise of your recollection vs somebody else's bizarre interpretation of current events.  It truly is inexplicable that the incredible fallout could be curbed, the most dire impacts minimized, the dangers ahead clear and certain and yet those who are managing the movement of the muppets continue to freely encourage, profit from and pass egregious legislation guaranteeing maximum damage. The science goes unheeded, bless them, teaching us this important lesson: Just because it is Fact changes nothing.  You might wonder why on God's Earth with an overarching situation so obvious, so bleak, so final, already showing its claws, the Rough Beast here and gnashing, that politicians are the very fruitcake figures who could make the appropriate arrangements to knock it back.  We know they know.  We also know they compromised themselves out of any possibility something could be done, that it is the very nature of tawdry liars, flunkies and thieves to compromise for their personal survival, just how is it they are able to continue unabated AND even deny some of us the vote?  To deny the vote is another goofball trick to make something without value appear to have great value.  Indeed, those who are angrily disqualified from voting are lost in Memento, no short term memory, early conditioning urges them on, its all they know to do lacking any other modus operandi, while recent memory fails them in the present making them completely unable to differentiate between casting their allegiance to kill teams OR to vulture capitalism (another kill team in itself).  The climate change denial dilemma, mutually assured destruction, guarantees all of these things are brought to the forefront because you know it can't go on like this as Nature bears down harder slamming her point home with every new out of season tightening of the screws.  We've passed the tipping point so many times, the phrase "something evil comes this way" has lost its meaning, just like the little boy who cried Wolf, the populations are fully enured.  The most blase among them especially enjoy spouting in your face talking points: "This is just like 1993" or "We had snow in July when I was .... blah, blah, blah".


I would post more frequently, there is a lot happening, however my immediate lifestyle (by no means long term, if there is such a thing as heh, long term anymore) doesn't actually permit much time for composition.  It is very Memento-like in its backups and fast forwards, lacking chronological order.  I remember I came to this environment from somewhere with some baggage, but whatever it was has been buried under the pudge and sludge of the city-experience where everything you heard might or might not be coming soon, is already sealed in place to observe in silent shock and horror and to artfully resist impaction as much as possible in order to avert situational disaster.  Huge populations jammed into outrageously expensive, faux mission-style stucco tenements have resulted in the literal upending of society, where the underbelly of urgent need and craven depravity spills over into broad daylight.  The initial curiosity has of course, vanished, it is what it is making our second important lesson: They-want-it-this-way. When a society knits itself together inside a cacophony of sirens, revving engines, helicopters, wheezing buses, ambulances, alarms, startling dingdong bells, alerts, incessant interruptions, theatrical warnings bursting through every technological amplificaation appliance, nonstop paranoia and inane illegalities, the human voice cannot compete.  The individual has been reduced to a mere numerical sector where invoices and junk advertisements heralding go along to get along are submitted for processing upon receipt. Perhaps it is only a temporary perception problem due to sensory overload?  We wish.  If it were such, how does it end?

Let your mind function freely without abiding anywhere or in anything. Hui-Neng

current conditions: lower lows and scattered highs

The dog and I were coming around a favorite city corner late Tuesday when we noticed an obvious hard luck case on the other side of the street we were just about to cross. You know the type, no shirt, filthy jeans, the mandatory satchel, long dirty yellow hair, I never saw his face, but already knew he'd have vacant glassy eyes and grey, lifeless features.   Simultaneously, a large, noisy immigrant family group was coming toward us from the opposite corner, many kids on bikes and Moms, Dads with strollers, perhaps twenty people in all.  If I wanted to avoid them, with my dog who adores children, I would have to cross over to the hard luck case, now weaving into collapse and so chose to keep walking on the other side as the family drew near.  Bernie, my dog, is in training for city walking and very young children are not only a thrilling distraction, but such a crowd can be unknown possibilities for dangerous encounters, especially where bicycle wheels are involved. It wasn't too long before the group caught up with us and Bernie and I were able to keep to the fringes.  Meanwhile, across the street, the hardlucker was exhibiting some extreme behavior, none of the group, I mean no one at all looked his way.  I was growing more alarmed as it appeared that he was having a breakdown of some sort.  I kept having to look over the heads of the crowd while reigning Bernie in closer to my body.  I saw this guy reach high up the chainlink fence and grab on, then stretch sideways so his head went all the way down fully disappearing into the satchel sitting on the sidewalk. The chainlink, by the way, happens to wrap all the way around a huge, fairly new elementary school.  After about ten minutes, the group was mostly ahead of us, but there had been no change in the hardlucker's pose, head still in satchel, arm achingly twisted above and behind him holding on in a death grip.  It wasn't making sense.  His arm was beautiful, tanned and strong.  I guess I was waiting for the fall which never came because by the time we reached the farthest corner twenty minutes away, his position had not changed.  It was as if he was somehow sculpted in place.  I could not imagine what he was doing.  The entire time he was in my vision, I felt I had to help him.  It was an awful feeling realizing there was nothing I could do but keep moving with this crowd of rollicking strangers . The questions and suppositions we make at such times are telling and alarming, was he armed, perhaps a knife, perhaps diseased and contagious, maybe a killer, rapist, a homeless zombie?  No, I am positive he was none of these absurd suggestions implanted into our suggestive psyche by the paranoiac news media.  But he was a person in trouble, trouble to himself, not to others. A sufferer in need of assistance.  He has remained in the forefront of my mind all night and I bear great guilt for not having helped him.  And while it was taking place, I knew very well the help I could have provided would have been worse than the situation he was already experiencing.


We have now come to the place where any helper agency cannot possibly do the very jobs they were created and funded to do.  What GOOD would it have done to have called 911?  To have the swat team arrive instantly surrounding the block at 7 pm with twenty squad cars in full color blinkies and screaming sirens and their particularly tidy way of grounding the so-called perps... it was, after all an elementary school where this guy absent mindedly chose to fade, help of that sort would have arrived in seconds and done exactly what we hear they do.  Can you imagine being as hopelessly lost and ill as this man appeared and being forced to his knees and shoveled off in plastic cuffs to the strip search, or at the very least dumped at the city shelter only to be told they are already full for the night and he'd better go somewhere else.  Like where? Or maybe a stretcher in the ER for an hour or two and then?  I spent a lot of time today searching for shelters of which there are a small few, but they cater primarily to foreclosure families with children, focusing largely on religious affiliation.  And if he's a vet, well, drug him up and let him go.  This was not the first time and certainly won't be the last time such a sorry scene bursts into our consciousness and therefore I sought sincere alternatives where I could, in good conscience, refer a damaged soul for authentic comfort, follow through and repair.   And yet, nothing I found can be held as bearing authentic aid because the system that has created homelessness is a system that has proven itself entirely ineffective in addressing the ugly side effects it spawns.  And these side effects are glaring, brutal and escalating the demise of innocents everywhere in a million new backwards, self-serving distortions every time you look upon it.


This is why the immigrant family that overtook Bernie and me continued staring straight ahead and laughing as if the singular misery of a sufferer in breakdown was nothing they had not experienced immeasurable times themselves as an unavoidable part of life, that the journeys undertaken to arrive and survive in the promised land where the streets are paved with gold were so incredibly noxious in savagery, shock and horror that they were drained of compassion in the process, compassion for anyone other than the bearers of their own DNA, never to look sideways again.


 I would like you to play at least four of the extraordinary videos at full volume shared on Bho's blog now, Throw down your heart and Oumou Sangare.  While you are there, be sure to spend some time with the magnificent and free at last Oliver, the Bear, as well.  Afterwards, I invite you to come back and tell me, please, what we ARE doing here? Are we just marking time or unwittingly locked into an eternity of simply passing through?


I'm cutting this post short today because visiting revelers with a multitude of large dogs are arriving shortly and time to think on why it really is that we are here will be delayed while I am there and here although comments of course will be allowed my full attention since I am not much of a reveler, notorious for hiding out with the dogs out back or running off in the rockbuggy to find whatever peace of mind is available.