archived california post

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@@ -6,127 +6,121 @@ The energy of chaos is required to change the existing order.
 
 every essay needs a story to hang it on. And an audio/visual podcast of it. 
 
+---
 
 dry leaves whispered, 
 
 the slow exhale of the earth, 
 
-The end of the road in this sense as a way of ending the myth that Americans have been telling themselves for a very long time, despite the reality that it has never been true. America was never been uncharted wilderness. It was wilder to be sure, but it was not uncharted and not uninhabited wilderness. Similarly, the road as an ideal of endless freedom that Kerouac made so famous, if it ever existed, certainly hasn't been the case in my life time.
-
 The long shadows and cold honey sunlight of winter afternoons that begin fade at three, turning to a blue-pink twilight over the lake before darkness descends at five.
 
 The sky engulfed by tides of rippled gloom,
 The sun's scarce rays, approaching frosts --Pushkin
 
-Familiar scenes morphed from green to yellow to red to brown to white.
+The snow is welcome, it bathes the world in white, reflecting and multipying the scant winter light on gray days. The world feels clean, and smooth in the snow in a way that it never does the rest of the year. At least where we are, out in nature. Snow is a mess if you live in a city.
 
+The whole idea of "being present" has always seemed ridiculous to me. What does that even mean? Trying sitting and actually being "present" you can chase this goal for years and in the end what do you have? I have never seen anyone improve their lives much by "being present." In fact I've seen some people derail their lives pretty well chasing that idea by one means or another.
 
 
+doing things for their own sake, rather than as a means to something.
 
 
+Yeah, I mean I don't let them do things I think would be an outright bad
+idea, but those are pretty rare. I try to err on the side of trying
+things and having them not work out than the side of not trying. But
+then, you don't want too many failures without some successes. But what
+I like about what we've done so far is that there's been very little
+"education" that isn't hands on. That's part of the reason we stayed the
+winter, you never know what winter is until you live through it. They
+may not know the name of every tree in the forest, but they have been in
+the forest and know what it's like.
 
-This is the book I might actually one day write: that this land is slowly generating it's own new form of people, culture, and eventually, a new great civilization as Spengler would call it.
 
-When I was in high school I read Oswald Spengler (whose name I ran across while reading Henry Miller), and while I was too young to fully understand everything Spengler talked about one thing jumped out at me: Spengler wrote that specific "great" cultures are bound to specific regions of the world. This struck me as both obvious and underappreciated, but at cultural and individual levels. I am the way I am because I grew up in Southern California and the same was that all Americans are american because they grew up on this soil.
 
-The corollary to this for Spengler is that the big civilizations, no matter how much they spread, never really manage to transplant themselves successfully to other lands. European culture came to America, but fast forward a few decades and America was no longer part of European culture (save a very small group of people living in American metropolises who continue to ape the European culture of their ancestors). Thus the home ground of, to use Spengler's term, Faustian culture is Europe.
 
-The culture of America's home ground is TBD, but one thing that I think is apparent when you trace a thread like the history of American's encounters with the road, and by road let's say, the unknown, is distinctly different than anywhere else, Europe included.
+collilary: everyone worries about their productivity but it's rare I hear anyone talk about what they're producing.
 
-There is something happening to Americans, generation by generation, the land is turning us into something very different than the Europe, Africa, and Asia that our relatives left behind. Something happens to people here that is individual. It happens collectively, to everyone, but it happens differently to everyone, individually.
 
-In a great many Native American cultures this process was well understood and nurtured. In fact the primary religious experience of many of these cultures emphasized this, in which the individual left the culture to go out and meet, in the cliched parlance of white observers, their spirit animal. But it's much deeper than that, this is a religion in which the core relationship is one between the individual and an equally unique and individualized spiritual power. 
 
-I first connected this to Spengler after watching some Ute dancers at a rodeo in Colorado many years ago. There were some organized dance, I even got pulled into one, but most of the time, there was music, a beat of drums, and every person did their own dance. I thought what a contrast that was to something like line dancing or perhaps a European folk dance, both of which are much more oriented around the group, with the individual merging into the group. 
+# Scratch
 
-There was still a group in the Ute dancing, but the individual did not merge into it.
 
-I'm not big on predictions, but I suspect this is the future of culture in America. That this element that the Native Americans knew and worked with is not something they invented, it's something the land gave to them.
 
-The question that will color the next 500 years is how do you make a culture, a collective, that keeps the primacy of the individual at its core? You and I aren't going to figure that out. Neither are our children or grandchildren. It took 1,000 years or more for Faustian culture to come to pass. We here in America are still living in the hinterlands of the Faustian empire as it collapses. We have a long way to go before whatever is coming, comes. But it is interesting to see hints and glimpse of what might come in the world around us.
+## The Good Life
 
-I think that's what I've come to like most about traveling around the United States for so many years, is seeing all the different ways in which people are wrestling with these questions and all the different answers they have come up with. There are as many answers as there are people. 
+I was recently talking with my editor about my decidedly low ambitions at work. Writers often have trajectories. They start at small publications, write that one big story, then move to a larger publication, write that one big story, then move on to a larger publication, and so on. I have never had any interest in that. I've spent my entire writing "career" primarily at Wired. I've been writing for Wired in one form or another since 1999. In all that time Wired has never rejected a pitch[^1], why would I want to write for anyone else?
 
+I don't and never have felt the need to climb any ladders. At least not in a job. 
 
+But then later I was thinking, perhaps I am looking at this whole thing the wrong way. Perhaps I'm not that driven because I've already got everything I ever wanted.
 
+One of the great dangers of life is that we don't know what the good life looks like until it's in the rearview mirror.
 
-I am less comfortable with  than I would need to be to write a book like that. But even beyond that, one thing I learned from living on the road is that there is no 
 
-I also think that those generalizations make you miss an important point -- the individual experience of the road. Who cares what Jack Kerouac found in life? Who cares what tk found? Who cares what I found? You need to find you.
-https://www.ecosophia.net/america-and-russia-tamanous-and-sobornost/
 
-Tamanous—that’s pronounced “tah-MAN-oh-oose,” by the way—is the guardian spirit of the individual, and also his luck and his destiny. 
+[^1]: That's not literally true, but it's close. Sometimes I pitch something that someone else is already doing, and sometimes I pitch something I know they don't want because it's in my contract to do so, but by and large I am fortunately to pretty much unlimited freedom. I mean, they let me write about how we have no oven and cook on waffle irons. 
 
 
 
+## Daily
 
+6:00-6:30 Wake up, cold rinse, body weight workout.
+6:30-7:00 Take the out, watch the sunrise (this time of year anyway), take photos, watch birds (depending on time of year).
+7:00-8:00 Family breakfast (at least 30g protein), hang out of with the kids (who help make breakfast).
+8:00-9:00 Make something. Usually means writing something. Today I wrote this. Yesterday I wrote something for work. The day before I worked on a novel. Sometimes I just write in my journal. There's no pattern to this, though I prefer to write with a pen and paper and avoid the screen. Often, if we're near civilization, I go to the coffee shop for an espresso during this time.
+9:00-10:00 If I can swing it, I keep writing. Depends on work. Sometimes I have administrative things that need to get done in the morning. But the days when I can get two, or even three, hours of writing in in the morning are the best days.
+10:00-12:00 Depending on the day I try to spend this time either doing something with the kids, reading a book, exploring wherever we are, going for a walk. Once a week I have a meeting during this time so that day I just try to get as much work done as I can.
+12:00-1:00 Somewhere in here I eat. I don't generally care much about lunch so I don't eat very much. This is why I try to get 40-50 grams of protein for breakfast, so I don't have to eat much lunch.
+1:00-4:00 Write. 
 
+## Spengler Essay 
 
-We didn't have long to settle into the cabin. A week later the kids and I flew out to California to visit my parents, trading the last of fall for some warmth and extra sunshine. 
 
-It's always strange to return to where you grew up, especially in this case since it has changed so dramatically it's nothing like it was when I grew up. The thing I notice most when I return is the traffic. Not the dead stop, freeway-as-parking-lot traffic, though there is that, but the insane number of cars in general, even when they're all going along without "traffic." So. Many. People.
+This is the book I might actually one day write: that this land is slowly generating it's own new form of people, culture, and eventually, a new great civilization as Spengler would call it.
 
-We've spent the majority of the past eight years in the wilderness and small towns. What we think of as cities -- Pensacola, Kill Devil Hills, Ashland -- most people think of as small towns. When I go to a city like the sprawling metropolis of southern California I am acutely aware of how far behind I have left such places. I feel out of place. Displaced.
 
-Joan Didion, probably California's most famous self-appointed spokesperson (as any self-respecting California spokesperson would be), wrote that "California is a place where the boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we ran out of continent."
+The end of the road in this sense as a way of ending the myth that Americans have been telling themselves for a very long time, despite the reality that it has never been true. America was never been uncharted wilderness. It was wilder to be sure, but it was not uncharted and not uninhabited wilderness. Similarly, the road as an ideal of endless freedom that Kerouac made so famous, if it ever existed, certainly hasn't been the case in my life time.
 
-Perhaps Joan. 
 
-Or perhaps you're overthinking it.
 
-I think of California as an exercise in fluid dynamics, particularly the behavior of cataclysmic outflows from Ice Age glaciers (which probably triggered the Younger Dryas cooling period[^1]). When too much water comes rushing into a canyon, the ice it's carrying gets stuck and forms a temporary dam. If the sidewalls don't give, then the flood water actually reverses course and rushes back the way it came, often with equally devastating effects as the initial rush of water. It is a strange and counter-intuitive thing. You can [watch a small scale example here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbaNY0uCx4s&t=0s).
+When I was in high school I read Oswald Spengler (whose name I ran across while reading Henry Miller), and while I was too young to fully understand everything Spengler talked about one thing jumped out at me: Spengler wrote that specific "great" cultures are bound to specific regions of the world. This struck me as both obvious and underappreciated, but at cultural and individual levels. I am the way I am because I grew up in Southern California and the same was that all Americans are american because they grew up on this soil.
 
-California is the is temporary ice dam on which the entire history of western civilization piled up and then reversed course. California isn't where we ran out of continent. California is where we ran out of civilization and all our ideas were forced back the way they came, which is why, whatever happens in California today, happens everywhere else in the coming weeks, months, and years.
+The corollary to this for Spengler is that the big civilizations, no matter how much they spread, never really manage to transplant themselves successfully to other lands. European culture came to America, but fast forward a few decades and America was no longer part of European culture (save a very small group of people living in American metropolises who continue to ape the European culture of their ancestors). Thus the home ground of, to use Spengler's term, Faustian culture is Europe.
 
-Or at least it did. Until, perhaps now. We shall see.
+The culture of America's home ground is TBD, but one thing that I think is apparent when you trace a thread like the history of American's encounters with the road, and by road let's say, the unknown, is distinctly different than anywhere else, Europe included.
 
-So what is left after all of western civilization recedes? Traffic. 
+There is something happening to Americans, generation by generation, the land is turning us into something very different than the Europe, Africa, and Asia that our relatives left behind. Something happens to people here that is individual. It happens collectively, to everyone, but it happens differently to everyone, individually.
 
+In a great many Native American cultures this process was well understood and nurtured. In fact the primary religious experience of many of these cultures emphasized this, in which the individual left the culture to go out and meet, in the cliched parlance of white observers, their spirit animal. But it's much deeper than that, this is a religion in which the core relationship is one between the individual and an equally unique and individualized spiritual power. 
 
+I first connected this to Spengler after watching some Ute dancers at a rodeo in Colorado many years ago. There were some organized dance, I even got pulled into one, but most of the time, there was music, a beat of drums, and every person did their own dance. I thought what a contrast that was to something like line dancing or perhaps a European folk dance, both of which are much more oriented around the group, with the individual merging into the group. 
 
+There was still a group in the Ute dancing, but the individual did not merge into it.
 
+I'm not big on predictions, but I suspect this is the future of culture in America. That this element that the Native Americans knew and worked with is not something they invented, it's something the land gave to them.
 
+The question that will color the next 500 years is how do you make a culture, a collective, that keeps the primacy of the individual at its core? You and I aren't going to figure that out. Neither are our children or grandchildren. It took 1,000 years or more for Faustian culture to come to pass. We here in America are still living in the hinterlands of the Faustian empire as it collapses. We have a long way to go before whatever is coming, comes. But it is interesting to see hints and glimpse of what might come in the world around us.
 
+I think that's what I've come to like most about traveling around the United States for so many years, is seeing all the different ways in which people are wrestling with these questions and all the different answers they have come up with. There are as many answers as there are people. 
 
 
 
 
+I am less comfortable with  than I would need to be to write a book like that. But even beyond that, one thing I learned from living on the road is that there is no 
 
+I also think that those generalizations make you miss an important point -- the individual experience of the road. Who cares what Jack Kerouac found in life? Who cares what tk found? Who cares what I found? You need to find you.
+https://www.ecosophia.net/america-and-russia-tamanous-and-sobornost/
 
+Tamanous—that’s pronounced “tah-MAN-oh-oose,” by the way—is the guardian spirit of the individual, and also his luck and his destiny. 
 
 
-[^1]: The cataclysmic flood *theory* is just that.
 
 
 
-# Scratch
 
-6:00-6:30 Wake up, cold rinse, body weight workout.
-6:30-7:00 Take the out, watch the sunrise (this time of year anyway), take photos, watch birds (depending on time of year).
-7:00-8:00 Family breakfast (at least 30g protein), hang out of with the kids (who help make breakfast).
-8:00-9:00 Make something. Usually means writing something. Today I wrote this. Yesterday I wrote something for work. The day before I worked on a novel. Sometimes I just write in my journal. There's no pattern to this, though I prefer to write with a pen and paper and avoid the screen. Often, if we're near civilization, I go to the coffee shop for an espresso during this time.
-9:00-10:00 If I can swing it, I keep writing. Depends on work. Sometimes I have administrative things that need to get done in the morning. But the days when I can get two, or even three, hours of writing in in the morning are the best days.
-10:00-12:00 Depending on the day I try to spend this time either doing something with the kids, reading a book, exploring wherever we are, going for a walk. Once a week I have a meeting during this time so that day I just try to get as much work done as I can.
-12:00-1:00 Somewhere in here I eat. I don't generally care much about lunch so I don't eat very much. This is why I try to get 40-50 grams of protein for breakfast, so I don't have to eat much lunch.
-1:00-4:00 Write. 
 
 # Stories to Tell
 
-## The Good Life
-
-I was recently talking with my editor about my decidedly low ambitions at work. Writers often have trajectories. They start at small publications, write that one big story, then move to a larger publication, write that one big story, then move on to a larger publication, and so on. I have never had any interest in that. I've spent my entire writing "career" primarily at Wired. I've been writing for Wired in one form or another since 1999. In all that time Wired has never rejected a pitch[^1], why would I want to write for anyone else?
-
-I don't and never have felt the need to climb any ladders. At least not in a job. 
-
-But then later I was thinking, perhaps I am looking at this whole thing the wrong way. Perhaps I'm not that driven because I've already got everything I ever wanted.
-
-One of the great dangers of life is that we don't know what the good life looks like until it's in the rearview mirror.
-
-
-
-[^1]: That's not literally true, but it's close. Sometimes I pitch something that someone else is already doing, and sometimes I pitch something I know they don't want because it's in my contract to do so, but by and large I am fortunately to pretty much unlimited freedom. I mean, they let me write about how we have no oven and cook on waffle irons. 
-
-
 ## April White
 
 The mild winter of 2023-2024 brought very little snow to Wisconsin. We watched the weather for months waiting for more snow to fall, but it never did. Last year we arrived after Memorial Day and there were still patches of snow in the deep shade of the wood. This year we headed up April 1.