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?

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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.