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This was really the first time I started thinking about the shirt as anything more than something for shock value. Once you get past that initial shock though, the shirt raises more questions than it answers. What is our society? Who are we? The shirt is deceptive in that way. At first is seems like banal, simplistic view of anarchy, "fuck capitalism" or the like. But it's not. The shirt isn't picking out some part that's wrong, it's saying fuck *everything*. Everything? Everything.

This is not the political anarchy of historical figures like Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker, Alexander Berkman, Hannah Arendt or other names your probably white, probably bearded professor put on a syllabus. Most of them said *fuck what's wrong*[^1]. 

The shirt feels closer the anarchy you find in writers like Henry David Thoreau, Edward Abbey or Leo Tolstoy, anarchists more interested in the sum of our existence than individual parts of it.

Despite the shirt, I've never really thought of myself an anarchist. When I was younger I had a lot of what I think is best called rage about the fucked nature of our society. Every young person capable of thinking for themselves has felt something similar. Seeking to understand or perhaps validate this unidentifiable sense of rage at the perceived injustice of the world is what led me to Thoreau and Tolstoy and then later Goldman, Focker and the rest. 

Even now I'm not sure why anarchist thinking appealed to me more than any other. I suppose it was an anecdote to the hierarchical, highly stratified society I grew up in. The idea of creating institutions that worked so well people actually wanted to be part of them was so novel it grabbed me. 

There was also the "fuck our society" aspect of anarchy. The aspect that just wanted to, as P.O.S sings, "break glass/Not hold a damn sign." If you really believe you can change a system from inside it you fail to understand the meaning of the word "system." And anarchy offers a very direct release from that ridiculous idea. Books like the Monkey Wrench Gang or a slim black volume named the Anarchists Cookbook that I discovered on the shelves of Barnes and Noble in Fashion Island, Newport Beach[^2], didn't ramble on about lawsuits and elections, they drank beer and blew things up. 

It would be impossible to explain to anyone who never experienced the pre-internet age how revelatory The Anarchists Cookbook especially was for me. It had real plans for brewing bombs, bathtub napalm and dozens of other ideas that struck even my testosterone addled, rage-filled teenage brain as incredibly bad ideas. But it was there. Actually really existed.

Between those thin black, almost self-published covers, were not words about protesting or campaigning, but something much rawer, something driven by emotion rather than logic, the anarchy of pure destruction. This is the anarchy no one in our fucked society wants to talk about, the anarchy of nature, of the anarchy of gods like Shiva, tk or tk.

Protest is the safe game. It might rock the boat, but it isn't going to sink it. Destructive anarchy is out to sink the boat, often for no other reason than to see what happens. It has no agenda and that makes it terrifying to anyone in power. Because in the world of power things without aims become terrifying because they are incomprehensible. They do not play by the rules of the power game.  

I never made a single thing from the recipes in the Anarchists Cookbook.
I wouldn't regret pouring sugar in earthmover gas tanks, if indeed I did any such thing, but I wouldn't do it again. 

I've found that most of the time destruction is not the precursor to rebirth in our society, but anther tool to wield in the same boring old quest for personal personal power. We want to wield destruction not yield to it. We seek destruction because it gives us power over others. And that's the opposite of anarchy.

Destruction is only one part of the story anyway. Destruction is a single point on a continuously turning wheel of death and rebirth. The wheel of karma in some religions, the alchemy wheel of creation in others. Even Shiva, tk and tk understand that they are but a part of the cycle. 

And we don't even have Shiva or tk or tk in our fucked society. We don't have a wheel of karma or creation. We don't even have a female god. And there is no rebirth without a female god. In our fucked society all you get is destruction, the rebirth never happens. Even the rage against that loss, the inability to have rebirth gets trapped and cycles back on itself until it explodes in violence. 

I was clearing out my closet in preparation for our trip and ran across the shirt again. I put it on for a bit. At first it felt starchy, a bit too tight in the shoulders. But I kept it on for a while and eventually it seemed to soften up a bit. One of us had to relax into the other. Perhaps both.



Without the rebirth, destruction is nothing more than an ineffectual gesture. This, I think, is near the core of why the shirt wants to fuck our society. Or at least this became the core for me -- when nothing can grow out of destruction but more destruction, destruction ceases to serve any healthy purpose. 


It's not that I have any more respect for laws, nor is it that I have any less desire to stop rampant destruction of the environment, it's that I no longer want to wield destruction as a kind of power over anything. To me anarchism is finally a rejection of power, a rejection of any attempt to wield power over others. 

Curiously the original author of the anarchists Cookbook seems to have gone a similar journey. In one of his many pleas for publishers to let the book go out of print, he says:

>The book, in many respects, was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in ... The central idea to the book was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I no longer agree with this.


It works something like this: rage propels you to action, action turns out to be ineffectual, which leads to more rage, which leads to more action, which turns out to be ineffectual, which lead to more rage and so on until the larger society steps in to deal with the problem.The only way to stop this cycle is to realize that you're trapped in a whirlpool of your own making, missing the larger ocean entirely.

Somewhere in the midst of writing this piece I started thinking about anarchism again though. 




Magical anarchy is to anarchy what magical realism is to realism. It's anarchy of the senses; anarchy that defies logic in pursuit of something more. It's the anarchy of travel and empathy, the anarchy of completely unzipping your head, the anarchy of gift economies, sex and psychotropic chemicals. The anarchy of finding yourself alive, existing for a time on the most beautiful planet in the known universe.

The default mode of being in magical anarchy is empathy. Everything is unknowable as a direct experience, but you have your own history and the remarkable power to listen. These two tools allow you to construct a limited and very poor imitation of the experience of others and can help form tiny bridges between their soul and yours. It's an incomplete and sometimes nearly impossible thing, but it's what we have and we do what we can with what we have.


Magical anarchy if founded on the belief that our individual experience of the world is profoundly narrow and the full dimensions of what's permissible and possible are unknowable. Given this limitation, when in doubt the safest assumption is the positive assumption. Which to say nothing is ever an "or", but an "and".

For example, what any other creature on earth is thinking is unknowable, but they are thinking. All of them. The animals may not have thoughts we would understand or even recognize as thoughts, but they are thinking. It's taken 200 years, but science can even prove that they're thinking. Given that, it's probably safe to extend the same idea to the plants. Perhaps even the rocks. Perhaps the planet itself. The safe assumption would be to assume that your inability to experience the planet as a whole as "thinking" is a limitation of your observational systems, rather than proof that the planet is not thinking.



This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you how I figured all this out and how you can too. But I don't know. I know the psychotropic compounds found in some plants helped. I believe that those compounds are here for exactly that purpose, but I don't know that they will help everyone.

[^1]: The one exception is Goldman, who did seem to believe that almost everything was indeed wrong, and needed to be burned to the ground. But there was ultimately something tamed about most of the political anarchists of the early twentieth century -- like they were trying to tone things down to gain a seat at the table rather than acting on what they often wrote.

[^2]: Fascist Island as we called it.

[^3]: Even this is one level removed from the world though, the only reason we even see destruction and rebirth as negative and positive is because we're very attached to our current reality.

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But of course the Anarchist's Cookbook is ultimately only half of the story. It's about destruction (for the most part). That wouldn't necessarily be bad, except that in our fucked society we don't seek destruction. Destruction is the first stage of regrowth. We never seek that. We give it lip service, but that's not what we like about destruction.


An often overlooked part of the Anarchists Cookbook is that it's not just bomb recipes and bathtub napalm. 

The book's take on destruction is more general that that and includes recipes for brewing LSD and tk for more personal, though potentially no less violent, destruction of the ego. This would end up being the far more personally useful form of destruction, breaking down the ego to discover the fragile and temporary nature of that construct and how to escape it for longer and longer periods of time.


---

Beauty is subjective though. Maybe you don't see the beauty in the Travco, maybe you see a petroleum guzzling ecological disaster on wheels, air conditioning or no. Fair enough, though I would strongly suggest looking into one's own energy before passing judgment on another[^2].

[^2]: You can calculate your rough carbon footprint over at tk, though do consider the backstory -- the average house [weighs 500,000 pounds](http://old.seattletimes.com/html/asktheexpert/2002122968_homehay19.html), much of it wood that had to be clear cut and hauled around. I don't know the footprint of building a Travco, but I do know it only weighs about 5000 pounds. Then there's a coal we don't have to burn to generate electricity... Check out Bob's rather lengthy post on this topic over at [CheapRVLiving.com](http://www.cheaprvliving.com/blog/proof-that-off-grid-vandwelling-is-greener-than-housedwelling/).

I don't know precisely how to articulate it, but I can say this,

Partly through tangible things, like research on Travco design, parts, engines, maintenance and so on, but just as much through intangible things like simple wonder at the way objects maintain their existence across time.





and in the case of the 8 track I don't really understand it -- but I understand what it's like. 



Digital devices actively discourage this with threats of voiding your warranty, or, in the case of Apple and other, making it deliberately difficult to disassemble thanks to bizarre screws and fasteners that require expensive, specialized tools.

Pre-digital things tend to be the opposite, often encouraging you to descstruct them by providing detaild schematic (early Apple computers did this as well). 



This means that the value over time of digital devices is necessarily always falling unless you maintain your device in near mint condition. Mechanical devices on the other hand are purely market driven -- if something proved over time to be a reliable, useful device there's probably a market out there for it. Even if it's an antiquated 8-track player.



At perhaps the simplest level remembering is reconstructing the past in the present. 

There is something terrible about time. Something truly horrifying about time lapse photography, imagine your life displayed in a time lapse film. I'm sure someone over at Flickr is doing it right now. One picture a day every day, same background, same arms length pose, put them together and slap them in a movie and you'd have the first film that might truly qualify as frightening.





At some length my friend and I stopped collecting minutes and said goodbye. I wandered over to my truck and poked my fingers in a puddle to see if it was gasoline. It wasn't which was even more puzzling. Eventually I discovered that there was in fact gas leaking, as it turned out the fuel line had ruptured and the gas was slowly leaking out and running in a thin rivult through the stones and into the grass.

After switching to the empty auxillary tank and deciding that that was problem for tomorrow I spent a little longer staring up at the sky in some vain attempt to spot the comet asldkfj, which is passing by at the moment.









We're usually trying to escape time. It's a constant reminder of its own scarcity. No one wants that. 

The trick we use to ignore its passage on the average day is that it moves just slow enough that we don't notice it except in large chunks. Yesterday is largely indistinguishable from today, last week not that different than this one, months even blur sometimes, it's not until we get to years that we start to think of big changes, real differences, but by then time appears fairly abstract.

Maybe time is not part of memory. Time is the space between memories, it lives in the shadows, runs down between and fills the cracks. When we pick up the 8 track or step into the ancient stone cottage or start up the classic RV the value of the experience 


[^2]: A purely accidental revelation: "A young researcher for Corning Glass named Dale Kleist was trying to weld together two glass blocks to make a vacuum-tight seal when a jet of compressed air inadvertently hit a stream of molten glass. The resulting spray of fine glass fibers turned out to be what researchers had been trying to make for years." [Source](http://www.goodoldboat.com/reader_services/articles/birthoffiberglass.php)



Most people ask this the way you might ask what someone does for a living, as a conversation starter. Or ender, depending.

Some people genuinely what to know though, which always catches me off guard. There's the answer everyone expects: you can drive here from Athens in 7 hours. But according the guestbook at the house where we stay some people that bike down here from Atlanta. That takes a few days. You could also take the river, I'd guess that would have you looking at a couple weeks. 

We drive, but we have three kids. It takes more like 10 hours. If you don't rush it. And there's no need to rush it. We're traveling after all, which I take to mean, more or less, wandering aimlessly, or close to aimlessly, and slowly.

Not to sound like a fortune cookie, but there's nowhere to go really. No matter how fast you go you'll still end up right here. 

On one hand the idea of "here" has become a kind of testimony to how western culture can turn eastern philosophy into meaningless platitudes. On the other hand I think there's also a profound truth there about the nature of existence.



There are a thousand forking paths of connection between you and I and we can choose any of them to get to each other. Birds might be one. The sea might be another. There are so many paths, so many thread to follow it's impossible to even concieve of them all, let alone follow them in any detail, with any passion. 


"I have also learned that if I let myself pursue a subject in travel, it helps inform me about the other subjects of travel.  When I began traveling fourteen years ago, I spent a lot of time alone in the desert, and being in my mid-twenties, I knew very little about the world.  But by wandering alone, some things started to interest me: what is that cactus?  What kind of beetle is that?  " http://www.notesfromtheroad.com/dryworld/bahia-palace_06.html  "The subjects chose me over time, but in each case, the subject that you pursue to discover in travel informs you of bigger themes in travel.  An example is watching the birds here above the Marrakech cityscape.  People who identify birds while they travel are often surprised that the habit causes them to soak in much bigger themes about the world: watching birds inadvertently educates the birding traveler on subjects like geography, habitat and ecology, and in a way that is much more profound than studying the same subjects in textbooks.  By watching birds while traveling, I have learned that the habit of visually scanning horizons, skies, trees and cliff ledges, I have come to literally see differently; almost as if I have created a heightened sense of the three-dimensions of my surroundings.  In this way, birding has made me more aware of urban spaces.  If I have started to gain an interest in urban architecture, I have to say the birds did it."


I don't want to make my daughters do anything, I just want to point them toward things and let them pick up the threads that interest them, pull on them, see where they lead. That's how I see parenting, not unlike being a travel guide, you point in the directions you know, maybe they go that way, maybe they choose another.