climate story: part 1

I was first explicitly taught about our environmental impact in 1991. Dates and years tend to be a blur but I can pinpoint this to the Double Vision skatedeck. My computer class partner and I made a sweet pixel art picture of one them in 6th grade. In that same class, we participated in a project to collect data on acid rain and share our results using telecommunications. In a public school in a maddeningly inept city in the middle of the bible belt, we learned that rain was gathering acid in the air that got there by pollution and bathed the world in such fun stuff. We even used computers and the internet to talk to someone far away. There were protests and campaigns for the ozone layer and smog. Every picture of L.A had that dystopian sky. Enough real movement to happen to see some changes as well as the protracted emigration of manufacturing to nations without pollution and labor laws lead to much cleaner skies. The hole in the ozone began to close!
The first war with Saddam came along but the essential difference is that one had an end. There was a small measure of hope. We weren't at war. There was no boogey man.
I gravitated toward studying environmental science and ecology. The structure of the intertidal zone is a world as worth exploring as the great forests. Academia and science were in strong agreement that people were causing global changes. We could see it happen in the great fisheries of the Grand Banks. Basques had been fishing there for 500 years. History is cool.
The environmental signs were pretty clear, we needed to modify the structural elements of the global system or a lot more and lot worse shit was going to happen. The scale of impact was far to great to understand and any reasonably logical person could see that there were exponentially more variables we had yet to even thing of considering. No avenue of research on our efforts to poison the world yielded positive returns unless we had either never touched it or were actively trying to minimize our impact. This is key for anyone just now jumping into this discussion. We can't save the environment just as we can't fix a cut. We react and allow our body to heal itself, as the planet would have if we had acted then. This is not a tragedy of the commons because it falls far more squarely on the global profiteers.
September 11th, 2001. I was a senior in college and should have been preparing to be a productive piece of the world. We know what happened but it is the response that has ripped our soul from itself and made earlier climate predictions woefully short. We have not stopped being at war and now I teach kids who were born after 2001 and are headed off to the same endless fight. Some accounts place the United States military as the largest polluter in the world. It is definitely in the business of actively destroying it. It does not have to be but that is a different tale.  We are now rounding the curve in the hockey stick cure of global systemic change and it is going to be a strong reminder of how terribly awesome our god is. Kali Ma may be a more apt representation. I have no reason to believe we will create the change we need to avoid this suffering or it would have already happened.
We were duped into letting it happen by profiteers and the leaches that have gained sickening wealth along the way. They take our money to build jails for kids, what's poisoning a river to increase profit?
Something will be done and it will be too late.


Hey!
Some pictures we have.

As for those who deny any of the science, watch as we live through an endless demonstration of energy's movement to balance.
Consider the billionaire class. They know all of this and are surely planning for a different future. They believe that they can protect themselves and their wealth and come off their arks with even greater influence. They stand to recreate the world in their image.
The drums of battle are striking anew. We can not worry about snail darters and beef management when we have a new enemy to consider. We can not afford to do much about it either because we have to buy more bombs. There are and will be some magnificent efforts to redirect climate change.

what is the ultimate point. time for us to plan for that future.....This is a chronic pain and a disease we created and watched. It's not hopeless, the climate is going to change and our response is the everything. The best solution is an all hands on deck change to less waste. You could get a beautiful hope behind an intentionally orchestratred migration of humanity to better formed societies. This will not be false for everyone, what structures do we make the grandest changes in and those require a focus on things far beyond any individual could imagine.
None of this do we have control of. It is hard enough to do so in our ownselves, much last past our doorways. The only changes we can inact are nearest at hand. On the climate level, that is enough to drive the engine but it just can not be that easy. Here's the thing, the best way to having a secure and meaningful life whether the world burns up or not is through much stronger communities that can be self suffecient but also operate as nodes for an even greater societal construct. We, as individuals, can not afford the stress and nonsense to constantly bog down the need for some to prevent progress for it comes at the restructuring of their system. Our votes and living habits should do that lifting for us. As we turn and work to make our community  healthier, stronger, and more sustainable then we force the market towards us.
This is not easy for those of us plenty able to and far more difficult for those who can not afford nearly so much...

Another tape job.

At night between the cries
of late summer forest glory
Cicadas amass the sound
is home but now
he feels the words
shrapnel to his being.
Said with intention to hurt, an end
for which they excelled.
His heart lay before him, once more
battered and amiss he found the tape he carried in his bag
wrapped it with too much practice, gathered it up and continued.



A poem in progress!
Poetry is so hard for me to access either reading or writing it. I am improving slowly but the sensory impact of it is rather difficult for me to pull together but I can't help but view it as the finest of all the literary arts. It's interesting that poetry is also most children's entry into the language. The rythem imprints rather well.
The world is still on fire and there is an idiot at the wheel. How did we get to this point is insanity. Does it matter… I had a story of a visit from one of those prankster gods. It was not long ago. You never know when it may happen but something will clue you in down the road. The presence of a person you have never known and never really see again is familiar to all but difficult to say beyond stranger but these individuals are something more.

Finding energy.

You know what, that's the story for me.

She wasn't there and then she was. Sitting at the left end of the bar. Details are foggy for time and all manner of reasons but she was wearing a blue (maybe violet) short sleeved sweater top that gave enough of a glimpse, bright blonde crinkley hair, and a presence that I wanted to be near.
Paul must have noticed so he started talking to her and she moved down next to him and we all talked and drank beer and at some point he switched seats with her so she would be closer to me and I knew as we sat there and the sun came up outside that I had met someone who accepted me for who I am and I didn't see any way that there was most anyone else like her on the planet.
Time got short and we had to leave, as we discussed how high and bright the sun was for it was midmorning, I got her number and I, despite the huge fear involved, called her. We had some fantastic times that summer and nothing then or now seems realer to me than who she is or what she means to me.  

---This all used to be in the front of the above part, that I like. 

There has been a lot or not a lot going on, guess it depends what side of the water you see the duck from.

I have found that I need to express myself in all manner of ways all of the time. Pretty much figured that but people think the cool dude I am around means I am at peace. That person is very likely not. It is a shell, everyone has them. I hid my emotions and their motivations and stuffed those away except for the ones I thought people liked. Doing so is very silly but we start out with ignorance and then get heavily influenced by stupidity as we somehow grow and survive. Writing is a place for expression that I super way underutilize. I don't have access to big equipment to make cool shit all of the time, I can always write, express, create. Even the last part is a stick in my logical mud. It's far easier for me to tell stories that actually happened. I am no good at creating the world that fiction lives in. I'll keep trying and get something a little right out of stubbornness but they are enormously difficult for me but I feel like the easier task of documenting my thoughts, experience, and perceptions then it is cheap. I waste a lot of time reading mostly pointless writing and the wandering musings of folks who talk about pick and roll defense. It's a little relaxing in this madhouse we live in. There is a point and I cant get to it through natural progression so I will jump there.

I've been doing a lot of self examination and my role with who I am and who I care about. My family is my everything and that's a given for anyone who knows me. My job is very important to me. Part of what I was realizing this summer that I place so much energy and care into my family and teaching and neglected myself. It takes a long time to get past the recklessness of being me. A big part of taking care of myself is expressing myself. Well, I failed at doing so in a decent way for so long that it came out all over but one thing I tried to do was show or tell people that they are loved and special, at least to me. This is important. We are all stuck within our bodies navigating a world unique in its own particular way from everyone else; when someone is appreciated, he or she doesn't feel alone. If that is for a positive and good reason, then he or she feels better his/her impact on the world. We need all of the love and genuine caring we have to see us through the shitstorm we are in. Hate will never die, at best it will smolder in a cesspool mixed through all other things. It will carry on and we will either get caught in its violent fits or suffocated by the planet adjusting for our greed.

I can't get around to the point...all this is going on and I was thinking about my wife, which I do all of the time, and started writing down the story of how we met. It was a nice strong start with a good flow and I decided it would be good to finish and make really good with some editing. I don't keep anything in one spot but everything goes in its spot. I have three different journaling programs on this computer and a different on my phone and various notebooks, folded pieces of paper, car manuals, etcetera. Can't find this really good start to the most important love I know and the mother of my son. Guess I will start anew and perhaps stumble on what there was before.

The Flip Side

The Flip Side.

Redmond Wallace

Kyle called me up a few weeks back. It was neither expected or a massive surprise. He rolled through one's life like that.

"Hey dude, I got this fucking out there plan and I'm gonna need you to help out on somethings if it all goes to shit." He said between exhaling a cigarette, an unmistakable sound of stressed, hurried, and timed breathing. I hadn't talked to him three years and at the time, he would call up drunk and ramble about all manner of minutiae. Sometimes it made sense. He sounded dried up, there was a purpose in his voice when he wasn't drinking.

"Sure, I think. What's up?" I was making breakfast and somewhere between drunk and hungover from hanging with a neighbor getting back from his 3rd deployment. I felt like I was in a barrel, all impulses coming in were muted and irritating.

"Talking ain't an option. I'm gonna send you a time and place. Thanks. This could be the change." You can’t hear when phones hang up anymore. It just sounds like the other person isn’t talking.

"Who knows?" I scribbled on a piece of paper. It was the only viable response. I would think about it periodically like when I was the ratty work bathroom with a flickering light. It served its purpose and we all shared in the lameness of the thing. It had no ventilation and half of us ate government food and the rest subsided on coffee. Sometimes it's a good reminder that everyone's shit stinks. As I would balance on the toilet and once I adjusted to the smell and the spacing I wondered about not work stuff for that is a moment to get away. "What could he be doing?”

    Kyle made a single piston pogo stick when he was 10. Each bounce jacked up the compression so the next one was higher. That led to my first broken bone. When he was 17, he hid on a barge down to the gulf and then hopped onto a container ship and ended up fishing in the South Pacific. I would get calls sporadically throughout his travels. He came back with a botanist wife from Istanbul, they had a pretty daughter. Loved his girl more than anything but didn't know how to be a stable, functioning pillar of a household. He would do various seasonal gig work to send a bunch of cash, strange presents, and long tales of intrigue for his daughter.

    I was curious and a bit worried and so was relieved when Veyonce was at my classroom door with a message from the front, she had hair, new, full of color, and jewelry. I made my way through the various halls of the school house to the office with a near constant level of decent temperature control, working lights, and ventilation. They always make the entry pleasant.
    Ms. Wilmer handed me an envelope. A younger afropunk lady made sure I got it and then walked out, hopped on her bike and road off. It's odd to see bike messengers here.
    "What is it, Mr. Davies?" She asked.
    "I have no idea." I lied as I saw the label addressed to me. It had Kyle's swirling doodles around my typed name. Well, it was only a partial lie.  I took the box to my room. It was a rare moment when students weren't there. There was more than enough tape to make it seem worried about. I finally got through the tape and opened the damn thing. A paper airplane, a 20 dollar bill, a carton of Camel Lights and an old friendship bracelet fell out. I hadn't smoked in 3 years, oh well. I could give them away to the immigrants dropped off at the bus station from the border, they could use a smoke. There was writing in the plane, it looked like colored pencil.
    "A teenaged cocaine dream. Bright and spastic with a need for more we force ourselves to be whatever it damned well feels right to. The future is a belief in ourselves and the past is just a part of the present we are in. 7:42...5/1...1554 Nettlesome..come around back…
It's the thought, if one were such in a machine's processing. Miles to go but I need sleep."

    My wife was supposed to be taking the kids to campout party so I would be free of obligations.  I failed to make a contingency as one should do with weird friends. I was busy enough with life and work to just store the time someplace in my memory and then tend to whatever task was most pressing. At hand time came and I almost forgot. "Hit the clutch, hit the gear, hit the gas, and I'm gone," the line bounced through as I wound through a hidden area beyond overgrown. It was a morning's walk from my door but seemed a world away. There was a popup camper in the driveway of an older craftsman bungalow in some state of repair.  Kyle had been busy on gardens and paths around the house. A recycled brick trail lined with lush elephant ears twisted to the open back door.  A few trash piles marked the way, Kyle had been all over. The inside of the house had been stripped down to studs, big old windows let in good light, except from the street side that he blocked off with heavy shades.   The kitchen was a office-lab with monitors, notepads, and cords leading in all directions.  Copper air and Kyle's lifeless body on the floor. That was a shock. Three quick steps over cables and a bottle of water. He had yet to cool down but was otherwise deanimated. This situation was unprecedented, clearly, but also unsurprising. He wanted me here for a reason.  When you find a dead body, I suggest you either do something immediately or take some time to figure out what the hell you are going to do. Growing older has taught me to do the latter better.
    I sat down on a work stool he made from a milk crate and drift wood years ago and made my way through his confounding script in his most complete looking notebook adorned with skateboarding stickers.  "It's a duality we always see in all things. Ones and zeroes but more than that, energy/matter :: time/space :: art/ruled order :: free will/machine-god. Balance is what we tend to look for but we probably vibrate in some chaotic harmony around balance. What happens when you go too far? Can you reach an extreme or maybe it's like a chemical buffer and once you get past that it's beyond? What chaos would it cause?
           Chips
            Tin foil, T.P, dogfood , coffee, booze
-It seems he got sidetracked.-
Space is the location of matter and time is the flow of energy, what happens if we cause a stop? If all things are coordinated by time and space, like a Cartesian axis of some sort, what part of time if there if you hold your space coordinate? Is each point new or is there a timeline we can access at the unmoving location.  It's a fucking crazy idea but might as well try it."
    He went on to document the process of building the thing. With way too many trips to the interesting and useful stores in town, he managed to cobble a headset together that captured energy location and processed it to identify his precise spot in space. The device had to be unique to the individual.

All this time, movement had been a distraction and I had finally realized it was a recording of us on a monitor above the sink. I found the recorder and went back to a part where he looked to be getting ready to do his thing.     "With that known, it should be feasible to not move." Kyle put on the VR suit and after a few minutes, he flickers like static and then back in insanity of what happened.
    "That was weird.  No control, I just showed up. Damn, I'm thirsty."
He gets up forgetting all of the cords and they rip out of the machine, jerks to a water sitting on his table. Huge gulps and he spits it on out. "What the fuck is this shit? Pain, so much pain…must talk. Back in time, kid in store, looked like corner but with dignity. Got to see and feel it all again, that smell of walking in to grandmother's house. Mom’s dank washroom but at full. All beyond intensity. Had to escape and...can't breathe.”

He rests for a few minutes. “Ever have dejavu? It’s like I showed up to that point and I felt it because I had been in that space before. The now me could vibe just enough with then to experience it all again. No control but what a trip to go back to where you were. Fuck it, guess it’s off to things that haven’t happened. This is gonna hurt.”
    A missed image in the film.  Between a searing, gurgle cough, his body collapses, life immediately gone.

An note expanded from earlier on privilege.

Many white people are confronted and confused by the idea because while we may have not been willingly active parts, we have benefited. Funny enough, most of these benefits are things people feel justly deserved. I should be rewarded for my work. I will be treated like a person. Banks will give me a loan. The cops approach and treat me as a neighborhood officer. I have clean water. I can breathe.

There is no harm in realizing this privilege. The problem comes when you don't believe everyone is worthy of it. It's not that complicated. We stand for what we believe is best for us and that is for all people. Recall what the hell that is and it's raising our children well. Not my child and your child but our children. We wish for them to have peace and the ability to have a meaningful life. We are human so we'll fuck a bunch of stuff up along the way but if we look toward a principled understanding that we are all we got. Either science is wrong and we are a deified creation wholly unique, or science is right and we ain't found much and seen almost to the beginning of the universe. This includes the world around us. We know we are capable of doing it.

Here's some pictures because I like them and following the news makes me sad and upset.
That's a growing dude holding a funky thing I made for my neighbor whose dog died and she was really sad.
The next picture is something I'm proud of. These dudes built this sweet table. I helped. The third thing is a video of the river.

Reminding ourselves of the best in people

      This is mostly true to the best of my exhausted memory. I spent so much of my life storing useless information in my head I forgot about the moments that are what it is. I'll update or edit it later but if I let it sit here it will fester and never get done.

       The interns were always a way to place a time or age for me. My memory of those early years has been a blob for as long as I can recall. Who knows, maybe I'm hiding some trauma or maybe that's the way I am. I know it can't be awful because I always felt so much love around. That could be the way people shielded me.
     There are two intern Seans. Sean K. is a super rad dude who makes some meticulously cool stuff. I would say he's a bit nuts but that's true for all of us. The Museum is a screwed like Wonderland that way. And the other Sean. I forget his last name and I have only fleeting memories of him. Cooper talked about almost kicking his ass and he was intense.
     A supremely crucial fact to the Metal Museum and known to everyone who has ever been through that space is the space. There is no finer view of the universe's glory than the sweep of the Mississippi River and the profoundly fecund Arkansas Delta across the way. As you stand at the top of the high bluff, the river stretches a half mile across, you can look to the North and nearby are three old truss bridges carrying the world through the distribution capital. At night, you can see cargo plans lined up for hours on end. Massive rafts of barges power around the river. The bridges are over a hundred feet off of the water. From a distance, the river seems to amble along but once you are on it that it has all of the force and turbulent dynamics to always remind you that it goes where it goes.
Periodically, people would jump off a bridge to commit suicide. A poetic exit.
     Crazy Sean grew up jumping off of bridges in Philadelphia and whatnot. He timed his jump with a rock but just messed up somewhere. Instead of hitting the water in the nice pencil, he broke the base of his back. Crazy Sean was also young blacksmith strong so he managed to swim/float enough with just his upper body for a boat to be able to pick him up a few miles downstream. I heard the story but didn't see him again until years later for a reunion show. It was a big deal for him for he had to travel some hard times to make it through.
     That weekend, there was a music and culture festival put on by the Center for Southern Folklore. The Museum had a booth there and so we had all the passes we needed. There was all kinds of great music and tasty fried food and people enjoying being human. Good times. My dad handed me some cash and said to make sure Sean had fun and headed off to do some work. I was in high school, I think. We wandered around, he was all over the place in his wheelchair and just grooving along having the grandest of times. I am very unsure with responsibility but we got some beer, he gave me one. He said later he figured he was supposed to be watching me but who knows.  He had a bunch of beer and I just took my sweet time with one. The music was great was we wandered around Main Street. Little Milton came on and a party broke out in the middle of a big party. Everyone was dancing and grooving and no one more than Sean. He popped and spun his wheel chair around and up and down in a uniquely beautiful shimmy to the music. Everyone smiled at the dude in the wheel chair just making us jealous he could move like that. It was a blast and then he flipped his chair on the side, unlocked a wheel and tossed it toward a pretty blonde lady. Promptly, people looked and a big dude with thick arms and skinny legs walked over puffing up about his woman, itching to get in a fight. Sean taunted him back and I got really nervous.  He wad big and I was a really shy, weird, with the worst skin teenager. The dude looked down at Sean and got really confused. I had to have gotten the wheel back and then we found a cab. It was the prudent idea.
     "I like doing that shit to people, like what the hell am I going to do, paralyzed in wheelchair with no wheel." He told me as I moved his pillow to the cab seat.