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| -rw-r--r-- | 2018-03-07_island-sun.txt | 33 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | 2018-03-14_green-sea-days.txt | 2 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | escabia-bay.txt | 42 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | fict-book.txt | 11 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | scratch.txt | 4 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | unknown.txt | 17 |
6 files changed, 109 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/2018-03-07_island-sun.txt b/2018-03-07_island-sun.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f41d4ab --- /dev/null +++ b/2018-03-07_island-sun.txt @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +When we were sitting in the bus, sick, in Victorville, where the temperatures were in the twenties at night, nothing sounded quite so good to us as the perfect, sugary, white sand beaches of Gulf Islands National Seashore. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-09_151035_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-1223" class="picwide" /> + +The danger with reminiscing from a long way away is you tend to forget the negative things, but in this case the only downside is the campground, which is little more than a parking lot. I can live with that when the beach looks like this. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-04_135924_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-1213" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-09_143522_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-1222" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-09_143236_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-1221" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-04_152225_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-1214" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-04_152417_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-1215" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-04_152659_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-1216" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-05_113613-1_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-1217" class="picwide" /> + +This time around there were no Blue Angels flying overhead, but we did make a trip across the bay one day to check out the naval aviation museum. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-10_111549-1_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-1226" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-10_111420_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-1225" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-10_104650_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-1224" class="picwide caption" /> + +The kids were into the various Blue Angel planes, but otherwise seemed bored with the place. I thought it was moderately interesting until Corrinne pointed out that all the planes had been sanitized, not a single pin-up, or any nose art at all to be found in the whole place. + +I asked one of the docents about it and he told we it was done to make the place more family-friendly. Because building a monument to the various ways to kill people from the air is totally family-friendly, but sex, the way, if you recall, you actually get families, is not. One of the things I hope foreign guidebooks to our strange land prepare visitors for is that sometimes American logic will make your head explode. + +We beat a haste retreat back across the bay to the beach. + +The last day it suddenly turned quite cold and rained most of the day, but we still managed to get some time in the sand. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-08_162417_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-1218" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-08_162818_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-1220" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-08_162750_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-1219" class="picwide" /> + +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-04_111357-1_fort-pickens.jpg" id="image-1212" class="picwide caption" /> diff --git a/2018-03-14_green-sea-days.txt b/2018-03-14_green-sea-days.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a0dc1f8 --- /dev/null +++ b/2018-03-14_green-sea-days.txt @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ + +Moo Krob Nam Ma Prow diff --git a/escabia-bay.txt b/escabia-bay.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e7bdd97 --- /dev/null +++ b/escabia-bay.txt @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +When we planned out this trip back through the Gulf we made reservations at a bunch of places we knew we wanted to go but wouldn't be able to just show up and find anywhere to camp. In between those places though we left a month to wander around and see what we found. The first stop in our wander was a free campground on East Bay, which is part of Pensacola Bay. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-03_174415_escabia.jpg" id="image-1230" class="picwide" /> + +I've seen more than a few full time RVers complaining on the internet that there's no free camping in Florida or the Gulf Coast in general. I can't decide if I should correct this ignorance or not. I'm going to take the middle ground and say there's plenty of free camping in all along the Gulf Coast you, but you do have to know where to look. We've found great free camping in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida. It's harder to find, that's true, but it's definitely there. And while I'm on the subject, the whole free camping things is not, at least for us, really about being free. That is nice, but what free camping almost always means is fewer people and wilder places, which is the main appeal for us. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-02_160656_escabia.jpg" id="image-1228" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-02_162307_escabia.jpg" id="image-1229" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-01_143849_escabia.jpg" id="image-1227" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-13_133929_escabia.jpg" id="image-1233" class="picwide" /> + +The place we stayed on the shore of East Bay is a small campground at the end of a dusty dirt road made of dried Florida red clay. The rains turned it to mud, but not so bad we couldn't get in and out. Follow the road long enough through the pine flats, bayous and marshes and you'll find a little campground on the bay. There's only 12 sites and a crazy online reservation system that ensure most of them will be unoccupied at any given time (despite being "full" if you look online)[^1]. We stayed a total of 10 nights there in two separate trips and never saw the place full. . + +So there is free camping in Florida, plenty of it in fact, you just have to find it. That said, this place is probably somewhat unique. It's a little slice of wild Florida that doesn't seem like it's changed much since the Choctaw were living here a few hundred years ago. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-13_133709_escabia.jpg" id="image-1232" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-13_135006_escabia.jpg" id="image-1234" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-13_104530_escabia.jpg" id="image-1231" class="picwide caption" /> + +It was nice to get back to something a little wilder. I love the south, and it does have some very wild spots, but they're fewer and further between than the west. East Bay felt wilder than any place we'd been in a long time, probably since Rutherford Beach. + +We first visited the area a week earlier on our way to Fort Pickens. The day we arrived they were doing a controlled burn in the pine flats (our neighbor told me there's a pine around here that only germinates with fire, which could be the reason). The air was filled with smoke and ash rained down on us all afternoon which made the place feel even wilder. That night we had a campfire, but real fire was beyond our camp in the woods. For the most part it was just a steady red glow through the trees, but occasionally a dead palm would suddenly bursting into flame with a great crashing roar. + +When we came back there were no nearby fires. The first couple days we were there it rained off and on most of the day. The cloud cover never broke. Then one afternoon the sun finally came out and the whole campground turned out. I heard the squeak of Vanagon doors and the zipper of tents being thrown open and pretty soon folding chairs were pulled out to the shoreline, shirts came off and we all just sort of sat in silence and enjoyed the sunshine. We do this sort of thing all the time -- just sit and do nothing -- so I think nothing of it until we get to a campground where people are always off seeing the sights, fishing, doing stuff and all the sudden I feel conspicuous in my doing nothingness. I knew I had found my people when I noticed that everyone here was just sitting, doing nothing, staring out at the sea. There was something about the place that seemed to inspire you to just sit and think. Perhaps it was the droop of the Spanish Moss, or the glaring Florida sun, or the dead oaks along the shore, limbs reaching out like gnarled fingers clawing at the sky. Whatever the case, it was an excellent place to simply sit and feel the warmth of the sun. Or have a water fight. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-15_133349_escabia.jpg" id="image-1235" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-17_132753_escabia.jpg" id="image-1237" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-17_134952_escabia.jpg" id="image-1238" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-17_135008_escabia.jpg" id="image-1239" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-17_135039_escabia.jpg" id="image-1240" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-17_135042_escabia.jpg" id="image-1241" class="picwide" /> + +You had to snatch that sun though. The rain was off and on all week. Mornings started off looking like rain, but by 10 it'd be sunny, which would last until around 2PM, at which point clouds would roll in, the wind would kick up and it would feel like a squall was coming, but then nothing ever made it all the way across the bay and by sundown it was clear enough to watch the sunset. + +A couple of mornings a strange warm fog covered the bay and just before dawn the world looked flat, blurred, sea and sky become one and suffused with a blue glow. + +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-17_060509_escabia.jpg" id="image-1236" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2018/2018-03-18_063002_escabia.jpg" id="image-1243" class="picwide" /> + + + +[^1]: While we were there the online system was changed a bit and now you're supposed to call when you arrive or you forfeit your reservations and the site is available to walk ups. This seemed to be only about half implemented and unevenly enforced, but they're trying anyway. diff --git a/fict-book.txt b/fict-book.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ecc6660 --- /dev/null +++ b/fict-book.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +A lone sailor leaving his deindustrial dark age village to voyage into the unknown +A plucky young girl (16-22) overcoming societzal pressures +Mad scientest seeking to appease the gods for his transgressions +Young man leaving behind soceity to pursue a life of knowledge, understanding +Wizened unintentional shaman dispensing knowledgeo +The illegitimate son of the shaman in deindustrial dark age village + +discovers +sails away from +sails away toward + diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..01ddc74 --- /dev/null +++ b/scratch.txt @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ + +having grown up in mid-twentieth century suburbia — and then escaped! — I have a very low tolerance for the kind of boring world that comes from excess conformity and obedience to authorities. As for ways to sort through the abstractions — ah, we’ll be getting to those. + +I wish there was a way to record the texture of a place, the way the crushed gray gravel felt agaist the bottom of your foot, sharp, but rough and not cutting, or reconstruct for you the dryness of the grass between your fingers, thin, smooth, like a miniature brown flute that crumbs as your roll it and is carried off on the wind, or provide a way for you to feel the warm waft of humidity slowly receding through the evening as the sun fades and the temperature drops enough to weeken it, and it is pushed back by the cool salt air rolling in for the night. I can photograph the stars and record the sound of the frogs singing but there is no way to make you feel the texture of a place. to feel a place you must get inside it somehow and when you do, when you've shrunk yourself down into the cracks of it, heard the thin rumor of whispers it says behind our backs, then you know that place, in your own way, with in it. diff --git a/unknown.txt b/unknown.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..cb3d3f5 --- /dev/null +++ b/unknown.txt @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +I mentioned in a recent post that we often spend a good bit of time doing nothing. In that post it's staring out at the bay, but there have been other things we've stared at -- the pine forests of Colorado, the woods of Mount Shasta, the deserts of the southwest, the Sierra Nevada and so on. And naturally we stare at campfires quite a bit too. + +But that whole thing is sort of lie. Staring at nothing isn't actually doing nothing. It just happens to be something our culture doesn't consider valuable and so you and I casually dismiss it as "doing nothing". But the more I started to do it, the more I realized that just sitting, "doing nothing" is actually perhaps the most active thing you can do. + +and observing nature is not nothing. It is in fact everything. + +Which is to say all the things we as a culture don't want to talk about right now. + +You and I find ourselves born into a declining culture. A culture that is what Spengler would call the end of an abstraction phase that will soon start swinging toward + +There's a lot of windbags out there criticizing social media for fostering narcissism, consumer culture, and intellectual bullying, but none of them seems to have any good ideas on how we can counteracting these forces beyond turning off the TV and internet. That works, especially TV, you should throw your TV out the highest window you can find (making sure there's no one below), but the internet has its upsides and I like using it. It's currently the best was I know of to communicate with large numbers of people + +is a bit more complex than that. If you want to still use social media, try first developing humility. One easy way to do that is to create an active practice cultivating humility, for example, pending time in quiet observance of nature. Spend some time realizing that most of life care not at all what humans think, say or do, is helpful in + +seems like it would require an active practice. + +spending time in quiet observance of nature is one practice that helps me. I would be curious as to your opinion of which habits of religion or culture–intentional or not–led to greater humility. |