degringolade

Mt. Ibuki in Snow
Goyo Hashiguchi

It is kind of sad when "working on mental health" requires so much in the way of pulling back from and attempting to sever the tendrils of others that have wrapped themselves around your life. I begin to get the state of mind of hermits and monks.

I realize that I have been noodling around with this semi-public form of expression for a couple of decades now. The hobby wouldn't be possible without the internet and would be a cheaply-bound book somewhere if the internet didn't exist.

But ever since my typing class in the eighth grade (approx 1968) I have relied on keyboards to do my writing. Oh I took notes in class longhand, but anything turned in got turned in from a typewriter. So this hobby/affectation/habit is more of an offshoot of habit than anything else.

I get more suspicious of the "big players" of the internet every single day. I am just beginning to understand just how insidious their actions regarding browsers and emails are becoming. I am trying to stay out of that rabbit hole by trying to find avenues that minimize corporate monitoring/salesmanship in my day to day activities.

It isn't as easy as you would think. I need to figure out how much of this is real and how much of it is a function of my personal paranoia and how much of it is just my loathing of the mores of the corporate world.

Current Music: Concerto for 2 Mandolins in G major, RV 532 Vivaldi, Antonio

I have been spending my days noodling around with odds and ends of things that just appeal to me right now and have no real meaning in the grand scheme of things.

Oddly enough, it is a minor, minor thing that has been irritating me the most. It is an essential that everyone has to deal with but everyone at best "grits their teeth" and does it. Laundry.

Now, when I was raising two boys and working full time, this was much more of a chore and I needed all the help that I could get. I actually owned a washer and a dryer and didn't give shit one about the cost in energy (active use and imbedded) and the shit I was sending to the treatment plant in the way for dirt and chemical in tide pods. There was just too much to do and I grabbed anything that would get me through the process.

But now I am retired and in a studio. My clothes are predominantly cargo shorts, t-shirts, and sandals. So I am making the transition to hand washing and drying the clothes on a rack on the front porch. Washing solution is a smidge of borax and a smidge of pine sol. Clothes are clean, smell good and cost is minimal. Time used is around 10 minutes twice a week. I have a feeling that they might last longer too, I am very suspicious about dryer lint, it seems it consists of material that probably should be left on the peice of clothing instead of being scraped out of a lint trap.

Current Music: Symphony No. 7 in A, Op. 92 Beethoven, Ludwig van

The Grinder
Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps

One of the oddest things about leaning toward the idea that things are going to shit (read here: entropy) is that one can spend a good deal of time and effort trying to minimize the effects on day-to-day life.

Right in front of my ancient (2017) laptop, sits my music system. While the good times last, I have a little thingy that plays music coming in over the wire from a data center somewhere. It cost me $33.00 to purchase and runs around $7.00 a month for the subscription and truthfully it may be the best sounding of my music. But it does connect to one of the sort of evil middlemen so it will be the first to go should the fewmets hit the fan.

My favorite is the radio that sits next to the semi-evil thingy described in the above paragraph. I have three great radio stations here (probably four, but I hate giving OPB any credit because of their near-rabid adherence to whatever what the furthest left opinion is here in Portland), It is a Tivoli model one and I really think that you can't do any better when you buy a radio. It does depend on the stations here broadcasting, but the chances of that happening are so slim that I think I can discount the idea. This is my daily driver. Classic on All Classical, Jazz on Mount Hood, weirdo music on KBOO.

The last backup is my CD collection (currently held by eldest son) that is ripped onto my hard drive (god bless the linux operation system and whoever wrote the OGG Vorbis music protocol) and played through a bluetooth speaker sitting on top of the Tivoli one. I suppose this is a tie for my favorite because I know everything on the drive but the Tivoli still comes in first place because it plays stuff I don't know.

I suppose that this all comes around to me over-addressing the idea that entropy occurs. But I like backups to backups and along with a full pantry and a decent bookshelf I really have everything I need

Current Music: ‎Suits Are Picking Up the Bill: ‎by Squirrel Nut Zippers

Albert Maignan
L'Insulte aux prisonniers Episode de la croisade contre les Albigeois en 1211

Been pondering of late the condition of the world. Mostly I am coming to believe that everyone, and I do mean everyone to include me, is just "talking their book".

I am coming to the unwelcome conclusion that all men are not created equal. Some of my friends seem to be going through some serious mental gyrations to create a set of mental models that apply across the human experience and establish a right/wrong way of organizing the "blooming, buzzing confusion".(1) I applaud their efforts, but I am at the end of the time I am willing to spend on this process, I have come to the opinion (not fact) that everything related to this kind of thing is opinion and there are no facts that are common to all humans.

That is where the sad problem lies with philosophy or religion or whatever you want to call it when you try to create a model inside your own head for how us hoomanz go about the infrequent bit of irresponsibility that we call thinking and/or perceiving.

Each and every one of us is unique. Oh, granted, there are parallels where we seemingly run on the same track, but trying to say that there is a common thread other than there is the similarity produced a thrown together set of extremely variable DNA strands that follow the orgasm of one or two extremely disparate individuals is a bit too big an assumption for yours truly.

This organization is so arbitrary that I can't really say that it is actually "organization" per se.  People are individuals. The models that they use to look out upon a set of physical events are defined by some level of society and are thus arbitrary.

This is kind of a ramble. I have spent a year reading and thinking about this kind of thing and have decided at the end of that misspent time that the attempt to come up with or at least agree with one of the main threads of argument is that it has been wasted time.

But even coming to that conclusion is a win for me. I think an acknowledgement that I can't/won't/don't understand what the problem is is a clear win.
________________

(1) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/#PrinPsyc

Current Music: Swedish Rhapsody No. 1 (Midsummer Night Vigil): Alfven, Hugo

I suppose that I got kind of lazy lately with the way that I post here on Dreamwidth. I fell into the easy method of posting where I used Google Docs as an editor and then cut and pasted into Dreamwidth to post.

Well buckaroos, I have now decided that Google resides in the same moral space as Microsoft and Apple. They are a means of controlling and charging for your participation in this modern digital world. Supporting such has become anathema to me, so I am trying hard to see just how far I can distance myself from the "borg".

Let's face it though, I will not be able to ever get completely away from the monsters. Dreamwidth doesn't maintain its own servers so I will always be at least one step away from one of the monsters, but Dreamwidth seems to be an adequate buffer and unless I get rich (a most unlikely event) and set up my own server, replete with a dedicated fiber optic line directly into the backbone, the chances of me ever achieving autonomy are nil.

So I am going to get back to my habits of yore. The awkward little post editor that is available here works just fine. It is actually more flexible and friendly than the very constrained crap presented to you by Substack.

I am of the opinion that Dreamwidth is just a bunch of hobbyists who aren't too worried about whoring their writings out. Most of the world of the "digital pages" are somehow of the opinion that the world owes them money to read their writings. Most of the writing on the internet is worth what you are willing to pay for it (nothing).

But I look at my writing and the writing of others here on Dreamwidth are in a sense more like the old days of mail and getting letters from friends and looking for notices on a community bulletin board (when they were actual boards).

But I am just showing my age, and to be honest, I have no problem with that, at least I haven't started muttering under my breath about "those damn kids" yet.

Current Music: Emperor Waltz: Johann Strauss Jr.,

Ghat in Benares
Hiroshi Yoshida

I have run out of decent pictures to share, It took a while, but it looks like it is time to revert to my older process of "borrowing" from "wikiart" and just putting in a URL pointer instead of the upload and link process I used for my own pictures. If on the off-chance I get another picture that I actually like, then I will post that.

I am strangely complacent about the state of the world. Most folks out there find this lack of caring (emotion?) thing mildly offensive. Apparently, among the "good people" an unfailing belief in your current opinion concerning the fate of the world and a certainty of your own opinions is a sign that you are a person of "worth".

Nope, I have spent the last couple of years pulling away from that particular flavor of nonsensical thought. I am of the opinion that my one in eight billion opinion is not that important to the fate of the world. Even my one in three hundred and fifty million opinion concerning the fate of certain political entity here in the western hemisphere is not exactly important either.

The world turns. I am just along for the ride. The number of individuals that might have an effect on the fates is vanishingly small.

Current Music: Menuet Antique: Ravel, Maurice

Impression, sunrise
Claude Monet

I am not in a bad mood at all, I don't think the world is going to come to an end anytime soon.

Overall I am just plugging along with the idea in mind that the world was, is, and will always remain indifferent to what I think should be the nature of the operating system that makes it run.

I have always used the analogy of a high school "kegger" as the template for understanding the nature of America in my lifetime. These are usually held on Friday or Saturday nights and are the way that we roll here in 'Murca. I suppose that we are just figuring out that the party is coming to an end though, and we realize that it is just time to get back home and start another round of work.

I don't see the end of the world, I just see the end of the party. I am just one of the nerds who have noticed that the keg is kicking out a lot of foam and the jocks are getting surly.

Current Music: Symphony No. 5 in B minor (Wq 182, No. 5) Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel

The Millinery Shop

Edgar Degas

Date: c.1855

The last week has been spent helping and providing moral support for folks trying to deal with an aged princess under the spell of dementia. Eighty-eight years old and things are looking increasingly spotty. I can have some distance as it is from a family of which I am only a fringe member, but this is a truly crappy time and place for the folks who have the lead for decision-making. I help as much as I can, and when asked (and only when asked) for opinions I provide them and try to keep my distance otherwise.

The trouble is that the business of taking care of people who are close to or in some cases have exceeded their “pull date” is a crappy and thankless task. I helped out once or twice before and it was a terrible experience each time.

I hope when I go, I want to go quick and even a touch “early” as such things are measured here in ‘Murca.

Current Music: Verdi: Concerto for Portuguese Guitar

I always forget the ratio of bad pictures to good pictures taken by such as your humble correspondent. The picture above is in mute testament to my semi-failure as a photographer.

I suppose that things are much better now with your phone being a camera. Back in the ancient times of film, you would buy a roll of film for around $4.50 (Inflation adjusted = >$25.00). Then you would have to toddle down to a drug store or a tacky little shack in a parking lot somewhere to throw down around $7.00 (around $40.00 today) to get the roll developed.

If that doesn't get your attention, then the real kicker comes into play. For a majority of folks out there, not all that many of the shots were great, most people aren't that good at photography, so it wasn't out of the question to get maybe four or five decent shots out of a roll. It was a serious commitment to get a decent shot for most folks as even crappy pictures were almost two bucks apiece in today's dollars.

So the picture at the top of this piece is a tribute to my majority lack of skill with a camera. I have had comments in the past about my "purty pictures", this is just an open admission that the new technology suits me better as the bad pictures are much cheaper to discard.

Current Music: Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2

Look, I don’t really think that we are out of the woods this year. I tend to think that things are just getting traction and we are in for a long hot summer. But I sure hope that I am wrong. Since I have been wrong more often than I care to consider, I will stick with this hope.

I am getting better at not paying too much attention to the news coming in from the net. I do check a site daily that seems to provide an overview, but I am not really opening up that many articles. There is just too much dissonance out there for me to sort through and even should I decide there is a side of an issue that I can support, the world is structured in such a manner that there really is no avenue where my actions can be in the least effective.

You see, I come from a long line of peasants. Peasants know the truth of the matter, stay low, cheat the lord of the manor as well as you can, don’t volunteer for anything. Just survive and get out the other side of whatever comes.

There is always an oligarchy. There has never been a true democracy nor will there ever be. The long background for this is that getting peasants like me worked up to the point that they feel the need to revolt is a chancy business, both for the peasants and for the oligarchs. If there is one thing that history has taught us peasants is that the folks that were freed from “oppression” too easily become the new oppressors.

So being an older and wiser peasant, I watch the world from a detached viewpoint. My “activism” is writing a less-than-popular diary on an obscure website. I think that we will have a change of frontmen for the oligarchy soon. I think that the twin realities of resource depletion and climate change are starting to gain serious traction.

All we are doing is getting a first glimpse of what it looks like when the slope of decline (M) starts accelerating in a negative direction below the X-axis. It is my sincere hope that the change in slope is as low as possible

Current Music: Courtney Marie Andrews: Two Cold Nights in Buffalo

Since the weather here is hot (yesterday 97) I have been pretty good at putting out water and food for the birds. I am happy to do it, but they really don't seem to be grateful at all.

One crow in particular who I identify with makes me laugh. Big healthy guy(?) who comes by every day and drinks his fill and snatches up the peanuts I put out. The reason I identify with his is that he has a bad leg as well. When he is on the ground walking around, he limps. When he flies, one leg hangs down. Since my right knee has been declared un-fixable, I limp just like he does.

But he is an obnoxious little shit. If I don't have fresh water and peanuts/sunflower seeds out for him in what he considers a timely fashion, he is not at all above perching on the stair railing and bitching until they present themselves.

I will continue to accede to his demands. For the old folks out there who watched pre-"Festus" Gunsmoke back in the day (pre-1964), I have decided to name him (her?) Chester.

Current Music: Carmina Burana: Ergo Sum Abbas

There really is nothing going on in my head lately. I am doing pretty well at standing back from the mass of contradictions that passes for the "news". Not because I am not interested, but because I am sick and tired of trying to "get to the bottom of it". I suppose that most of you are probably feeling the same way.

Hot as all get out here, I am amused by the European news media chirping about how 30℃ is apocalyptic. Even here in coolish Oregon, the thermometer at my place has hit 39℃ twice and I seem to be surviving. I can’t understand why folks can’t get over the idea that there is a right to an environment that suits them. As my mother always told me, “you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit”.

Look, I have survived temperatures of 42℃ while bucking bales of hay during harvest of the second cutting. I survived, I have no intention of doing it again and at my age that temperature may well kill me, but that particular fate is way down from the other conditions that will kill me, so I am not worried.

Buy a fan, get a spray bottle for cold water and keep your beer cold. You will survive.

Current Music: Miles Davis: Summertime

Looking across the Columbia from around Lyle

One of the nicer things about road trips is that it gets you away from the “news”.

I have been looking at my sources of news lately and I am becoming increasingly dissatisfied with what I am seeing. I rely on a couple of folks who seem to have a life even more shallow than mine. News aggregators like naked capitalism are pretty good, but they do become one trick ponies after a while. The “news” presented seems cherry picked to fit a predetermined narrative.

I suppose that is part of the game. They aren’t so much reporting the news as advancing a narrative of events that fits the theoretical model that resides in the brainpan of themselves and their readers.

But what really comes first here? The mindframe of the reader or the business model/mindset of the “news” provider?

Current Music: Fauri: Sicilienne: Laurindo Almeida

I suppose that road trips will stay infrequent. Visiting a nice little ghost town with a nice hotel was a good thing, but long rides in a car wasn't a good thing. It is probably going to take a couple of days to work the kinks out of my back and legs.

Current Music: John Coltrane: Vilia

See you in a couple of days

Current Music: Los Lobos: Bella Maria de mi Alma

Oregon Skies

Trying to restore good habits at my age is tricky. Especially when what I consider to be bad habits are so easy to fall into.

I made the decision to stop buying e-books from those greedy bastards at Amazon due to the simple fact that they don’t let you purchase your book, they sell you a “license” to the right to read the book and appear to be working toward a system where you will only be able to read them on devices approved by them or on a windows application that they control. Simply put, fuck them and the horses they rode in on.

So I am attempting a reversion to my reading habits from the long-ago. I currently have five paper-based books sitting on the table that serves as my desk.

1. Isaac Asimov: Foundation and Empire

2. Mortimer Adler: Aristotle for Everyone

3. Graham Greene: The Quiet American

4. Isaiah Berlin: The Proper Study of Mankind.

5. Samuel P. Huntington: Political Order in Changing Societies

The reading habits I am attempting to revive are based around when I was in school long ago and was taking three or four different courses and had assigned reading in each course (when I first got out of the army and was taking courses in Poli Sci, this was a real deal. I would read a chapter from one course, then take a break and then read a chapter from another course and continue the round until I was caught up.

When I realized that jobs using poli sci are reserved for rich kids from elite schools, I went back, talked my way into grad school, and started taking science courses seriously so the cycling reading had to be dropped because I actually had to understand what I was reading and not just prepare myself to parrot back my better’s opinions. This required long stretches staring at a page, not understanding, then going back to figure out just what I needed that I missed.

So my reading habits are now more complicated. By trying to understand where we are as a society, the best that I can figure, the answers aren’t here on the internet, but probably back in the discarded and ignored warnings of the past. So I am heading (with considerable trepidation) back to an amalgam of prior reading habits. I think that I need to work on the process of melding the lessons learned in the different books by the different perspectives drawn from the different books and create a whole.

But then again, creation of such an amalgam of thought is not what I need to do. I suspect that the ability to have multiple perspectives might well be more important to sanity and understanding that a theory cobbled together from inputs that an inharmonious.

Current Music: Khovanshchina: Dance of the Persian Slaves

Old Shot from Storage

I suppose that I should feel a touch concerned about my scatter-gun approach to my daily activities. But then again, since I am old and retired, I should not be concerned about such trivial things. I get up, some days I do things, some days I don't, I need to get over obsessing such things.

My front stoop/porch is a little bit of a sanctuary for me. The older apartment complex where I live used to have a swimming pool in the long ago, but the owners wised up and buried the damn thing decades ago an now it is a grassy courtyard surrounded by trees and bushes which other people maintain reasonably well. This causes me to ignore the arbitrary goals I have set for myself and instead just sit in my lawn chair (a well-made Cabela's director chair with a very nice attached drink holder) and drink Ice tea in the afternoon or a cold Coors in the evening,

You see, this quandary is just rank silliness on my part. If I feel like it, I will edify myself with meaningful thought and writing which will give me a potentially false impression of accomplishment. I am still coming to grips with "I got no deeds to do, no promises to keep", where there are just days where I just breathe and let things go. An adult lifetime of needs centered around doing something productive are difficult habits to completely purge.

I sometimes forget about the header on this page and all the pages on this little vanity of mine that Denise et al maintain for me for a very good price.

So today is more the diary, and like most diaries, it is not as much for the reader as it is for the writer. I need to remember that while I invite y'all in and have it out here for the world to see, it is mostly for me.

Rainbow at the Homestead

Whole bunch of half written things I don't know what to do with. My desire to complete any of them is not around to bother me. I think that I will just putz around the place today and do inconsequential things

Current Music: Rocks and Flame by Western Centuries

Just found this picture, It is a real thing, when I tried to pick it up afterwards, it crumbled.
Just found the Picture in my google photos. I had forgotten about it

When I was in college a long time ago, whenever I had to buy books,I bought used books. A lot of people will think that this is just because I was cheap. The truth of the matter is that I always went through the stacks of used books to look for the ones that have been marked most extensively.

There were a couple reasons for this, when people used to mark up their books they used to tell you what they thought was important, and I found that the people who spent more time marking up their books got better grades than I did. The fact that they were cheaper was just icing on the cake. And I was cheap, my GI bill didn’t stretch far enough to allow for new books and partying…..I had to make choices.

I have been weaning myself off of e-books except for those on Gutenberg and off-flavor pulp fiction at Baen Books. I suppose that these two repositories well define my reading habits. I read old, meaningful stuff from long ago and utter trash pulp fiction while I enjoy a cocktail and/or an edible. I am not ashamed. But when I want to read a specific book that slides between these two poles, I go to Thriftbooks and buy used.

I just received and started a re-read of Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American” and I am just hitting the parts where the previous owner started marking up the book. I am fairly certain that the former owner was a young person and the book was assigned reading for a college course. What amused me was the notes made and how the current perceptions of right and wrong colored the comments. I was also amused by the tone of moral indignation in the comments.

I suppose that I am of two minds of the post WWII period until 1960. No, I wasn’t quite there, but my early almost-adult memories of politics were centered around the demonization of the actions of the western countries while basking in the quite pleasant and comfortable consequences of those actions. We were rich and quite content with making money and keeping up with the Joneses on the profits from the war. But for some odd reason, the connection between the demonization and the lifestyle never really was mentioned in polite company.

Now that we are well past that time and those particular compromises that were made to enhance our current lifestyles (and this applies to all of us) are safely out of memory, I begin to wonder how the younglings see the period. From what I can tell, the vapid and judgmental tone of the previous owner of Mssr Greene’s work takes no account of the efforts made to craft the consumer culture and the sad chain of events that led us to the corner we are in. But now that the world is getting re-balanced and the last of the colonial powers are being forcefully beaten back, I wonder if the previous reader has trained their thoughts to the consequences of the loss of empire by the European powers and Russia.

I cannot see how we can pull what most people think of as a win out of the mess in the Mideast. I wonder if Russia can manage to pull out of the competitive control area that is the Ukraine (which, like it or not, is an empire-related war), I wonder if China will take up the role of imperial core in a more straightforward way. I am wondering if Iran will be able to edge back control of its hinterland. The outcome of those games will be the deciding factor of how the folks alive here in ‘murca will maintain, grow, or lose their lifestyles.

Wars are never fought for morality, they are fought for money. And the lifestyles that we really aren’t willing to give up are bought with that money and no other.

Current Music: Red Garland / Since I Fell For You

I have been reading about the Thirty Years War lately. I do enjoy the telling of a good yarn by the recent bards. Choosing the good and bad guys based on current morality is always amusing to watch because the purveyors of such nonsense are no different than the inquisitions or the Jesuits or the the completely messed up Hochadel who used the Protestant cause to steal back from the church what the church had stolen from someone else. Just ask the folks who made the error of following Thomas Müntzer how it worked out for them when they decided they didn’t want to be jumped-up slaves. Or to say that Martin Luther’s response to the Bauernkrieg was definitely not in the realm of what the teachings of Christ found acceptable.

What I found amusing was the idea of “put to the question”. In other words, torturing the person being questioned until he gave you the answer you wanted. Now, don’t think for a minute that the inquisition was the only practitioner of this methodology. Hell, we were(are?) waterboarding folks in the not too distant past (granted, a lot of the folks in the first half of the seventeenth century would have considered that practice unnecessarily humane, but that is neither here nor there).

But all of the above is just an aside from the point of this little piece. I am wandering about a tiny apartment here on the urban fringes in Oregon and I have decided that I am going to repurpose the phrase “the question” to my own purposes completely unrelated to the meaning I outlined in the earlier paragraphs.

My question rotates around a question asked by old men on a nearly daily basis.

“What the hell did I do with XXXX?). When trying to find something in a 525 square foot apartment and this question is blurted out, that is a clue either about your continued mental competency or how much shit you still have around you.

Current Music: Stanley Turrentine / Willow Weep For Me

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A Sorta Public Diary and Comment

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