My Willingness to Participate in the Matrix is Hanging On by a Thread

There's no inherent rush to drive into town to pay the outstanding balance on the prior tenants' electric bill. According to the customer representative's disembodied voice in my phone, I'm not even legally obligated to do so. I just want the all-caps texts from my landlord to cease. And that is worth $76.68 to accomplish.

But first, an essay.

I'm sitting by my woodstove. I was cold, and tended to the fire to supply more heat. I was hungry, and I ate food. Simple cravings, simple activities, simple satiation. I stretched this morning for the same purpose. Before that I tended to the goats and dogs and was rewarded with a quart of milk - a meager amount as Lani and Fiona dry up for the winter. Less milk, more baby-growing. The goat hide from this week's butcher (thank you for your life, The Gimp) sits tanning in a saline solution by the stove. I stir it occasionally. Last night's dinner was his brother. This summer they ate weeds and fed the earth. Now that winter has fallen, they feed me.

Yet now I'm in a web, getting harsh texts from the landlord, making multiple calls to the faceless electric association, tracking down information from my roommate who is driving somewhere through the abyss of the continent. I don't know what to feel. I'm a monkey, god dammit! What the fuck even is an "electric association"??? In moments I feel the thrill of uncovering a mystery, piecing together who owes what to whom. In other moments I'm anxious, about driving into town, worried the roommates will care about paying a bill that is only partially ours, figuring out a succinct way to communicate to the landlord that both "I got this" and "These notices have nothing to do with me being irresponsible." In other moments I'm self-congratulatory, that I can competently navigate this labyrinth of financial industrial artifice while my whole being dilates with psilocybin.

I've been watching a lot of Alone the past couple weeks. Season 9, now rewatching 6. (I've watched 7 at least three times now but shoutout to 7.) I feel miles away from being able to accomplish what some of the contestants do. But I am inching closer. Rewatching Jordan carve up a moose, I feel a familiarity with the process. Woniya skinning her rabbit and working the fur into a long thread - this doesn't feel like an alien possibility for me, like it might've when I first watched this in 2020, bundled up in my van somewhere along the Oregon coast. I met Woniya at Wintercount last year. I'm tanning a goat hide as we speak.

And yet in some ways I find myself moving back towards the matrix. I just moved into a house with a couple roommates. Yes the woodstove provides heat, but my refrigerator provided breakfast. I've been loving watching Alone. Putting twinkly lights around the house to make it cozy. When the mushrooms hit I reached out to friends with my phone to feel the comfort of companionship. So many things are at arms' length, at the push of a button. But what if they weren't? Like the simple mechanical satiation of tending my woodstove for heat - if I had no phone, would I walk to my neighbors' to strike up a conversation with them? I found a few envelope-shaped pretenses for going over there when I was digging through a pile of mail for an electric bill this morning. I just edited a podcast where the guest was talking about the importance of building those communities. But with only so much social effort to give each day, I'd rather focus on the people I already know.

Again, the possibilities paralyze me. One thing I've learned about myself in the past few years is that for all my competence, I am still quick to feel overwhelmed.

Back to stoking a fire to get heat. The simplicity calms my mind, like I discovered camping did back in the hey-day of the blog. You and your friends do the activity that meets your need - there's nothing else to worry about. In the van trips, things got even simpler. The electricity for my lights, fan, fridge, and devices came from the solar panels I'd put on my roof. My water came from the couple of tanks I filled myself every so often.

The title of this post felt fun to write. And I am looking out the window at my van and thinking how possible it is for me to let out a big "Fuck This" and go back to living minimally on the road. But even then, my food and gas always came from the Matrix. A lot of joy comes from the Matrix. And occasionally the access to healthcare. Why tolerate this anxiety-producing, nature-obliterating system? Lewis Mumford called it "The Magnificent Bribe," and now that that's lodged in my mind I can't think of a better name for it.

Personally I'm looking for the healthiest way to engage with the Matrix. I am carving out more and more of my food supply from outside of it. I try to spend time immersed in unspoiled wilderness everyday. The people who are super plugged-in pay me to take my goat herd to eat their plant matter away. In a way I feel like I am trying to outfox a fox. Foxes are clever, but as a human I should be able to out-clever anything else. That includes a world-spanning monolith of vampiric techno-scaffolding. It's a worthy challenge.

I have a million thoughts flowing off of these, but now I must pay my tribute to this overlord. As long as I use twinkly lights and a refrigerator, I can't be too upset about driving to town to face the Mt. Doom of the electric offices.

Viva La Blog ✊

Allegory

 I finally had a thought that I believed belonged here:

 

I think I had an allegory happen to me today. I wanted to share what the story was:

 

I bought some fancy smoked paprika from a food event with G. When I first tried it I thought,

 

"This is way too smokey. I can't even use it". That's how overwhelming the flavor was on anything.

So I forgot about it and didn't realize I had it until I wanted to put it on smoked fish.

After over a year sitting the flavor had become much weaker, so much so that

 

it didn't have enough flavor to be worth putting on.

I had given up on it for so long I missed out

on tasting the perfect amount of smoke.

The moral being:

dont wait

too long

 

to try something again. It might seem new. 

-

I hope we didn't miss the perfect amount of smoke on the blog.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Old Helensburgh Station

Oi gents! I wish I thought to take a clean audio clip while no one was there, but I’ll try to paint a picture for y’all cause this was the creepiest shit I have experienced in a long time. So I visited the Old Helensburgh Station, a train tunnel built in the 1880’s and abandoned in 1920, when they rearranged the train line. It was thought to be lost under rubble, but excavated in the last 20 years to find a thriving glowworm community. As I approach the entrance of the tunnel, light and visibility fall off about 15ft in and it smells of rusting sulfur. The ground is mush beneath my feet as I follow the mud tracks deeper into the cave. The echoes of my subtle foot sloshing is accented by water drips, what sounds like the occasional scraping of a man’s cane, and a knocking that I still can’t identify. The knock thumps irregularly. And then stops. I turn back for a brighter flashlight.

The damp cave reminds me of a basilisk labyrinth and I’m fairly certain the thick god-knows-how-deep mud pools along the side of the tunnel contain the remains of some poor sap, swallowed by the muck. I’ve never realized what it’s like to walk into a tunnel with no light at the end. I’m so hyper-focused on each footstep that I forget to look up and when I do spin my head to the graffiti-lined brick walls, the movement is so quick, and visibility so narrow, that I scare myself thinking there’s a pale creature living in the crevasses. There’s not - or at least that I can see. The train tracks are replaced by mounds of mud, rubbed smooth by other hikers and I have to zigzag my way across. The knocking is back.

Spots of ethereal turquoise light appear on the ceiling, which you would think is a relief in the darkness, but it somehow makes it worse. It’s like lifeless Christmas lights. No glint. No twinkle. The path eventually becomes more like a gray-brown cistern and I don’t have waterproof boots, so this is as far as I go. I stand and listen for about half an hour. A few travelers ruin the mood, but it was terrifyingly beautiful. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the worms glow and illuminate the tunnel to form a curved dead night sky with the occasional drip landing near my head.

speaking of the fog.

I Worked Through Some Shit, Pt 2: The Fog

We eventually moved on from the ruins. I saw mushrooms growing under an Asian tree. We made our way to the highest point in the garden, then meandered down to the Japanese pines. While everything did look cool, I was too nervous to really appreciate anything. Then we looked in the sky and saw a massive bird. A red-tailed hawk, I was told. The hawk landed on the top of one of the pines, where it was clear just how big it really was. We sprawled on the grass and watched the hawk, at one point recording its squawking and playing it back to try to get its attention. No success. Probably for the best. Then it was time to get moving. We had to get to the fog.

Things started to feel more and more interesting en route to fog. A sign said there were foggy ruins over in an adjacent park, but we decided the walk was too far. Foggy hills for us. We reached a tree that was planted in 1917. Or 1907? I don't remember the year, but I do remember that I started feeling the full-body effects of the tab at this point.

By the time we made it to the fog zone, the fog had just ended. We had hit the 2.75 side of our 1-in-3.75 chance of getting there while fog was happening. No worry. We find a place nearby to sit. I take out the 5-way splitter, we each break out our earbuds, and Rob puts on a playlist. He wanted us to hear a song transition. The first song is classical music, which feels somewhere between beautiful and goofy. The classical music transitions into Every Planet We Reach is Dead. Then it's time for fog.

Brandon wants to be there when the fog starts. Rob and I hang back, as to enter the area whilst fog is already happening. Once Brandon walks off, Rob and I discuss the rising imperitance that we call a Lyft immediately after this fog. Because shit is starting to elevate. Anyways, fog time is here.

A family of children is frolicking through the fog. Rob and I enter, overwhelmed with visual sensation, trying not to lose our shit. There is thick fog rolling through the forest. (Realizing as I write this that it was totally reminiscent of that time we tripped on the broken mountain road.) Anyways, time to play the find-Brandon game.

We find him. We explore the fog. I try fog with music, Animal Collective's live version of Softest Voice. It's hot fire, but I like being out in the world-soundscape more.

The fog is amazing. When it's over, it's time to get the fuck back to a safe base because shit is only getting crazier. We saunter over to the nearby park entrance and Rob orders a Lyft. We wait. At one point my hand just forgets to continue holding the steel water bottle I've been carrying around. It slams onto the concrete. The sound is jarring and startles a man walking by. I defend myself, saying "that's the first time that's happened." We start to almost lose our shit laughing and in the same second I see our Lyft pull up.

I Worked Through Some Shit, Pt 1: Beginnings

The two of us met up with our friend at the end of the line. We crossed the street and wandered down a path brimming with dense green life. Once we reached the tree garden, we veered off the main path, then veered off trail entirely, until we came upon the stone ruins of what was once the foundation of a house. We settled, and waited for all human activity on the trail still in view to pass. When the moment was as good as any, he removed some foil from a pack of gum.

I looked at tab in the foil handed to me. Expecting plain white, I was surprised by the small, intricate art. It was purple and a brownish orange, and was that a triangle with an eye in it? Too anxious to examine for much longer, I cut to the chase and put the tab in my mouth. For better or worse, the deed was done. The die were cast. I was on my way.

Eclipse Follow-Up

I was going through past blog posts to find the coral video that Geologist did the music for in celebration of Animal Collective's new album when I came across an old, offhand post about seeing the eclipse.

Well, (most of) we fucking did it, people. And I recently got around to finally uploading the footage, so without further ado:

Facebook

early christmas post

where i'm at

The Radish Dilemma and Rrrock Facts

Bainbridge Island is pretty much full of old hippies who also have buttloads of money. They care a lot about their trees and don't give a shit about paying $5 a bunch for tiny carrots.

Staying dry by planting lettuce under greenhouse tunnels we built.

By my estimate, we have something like 1200ft of radishes in the ground, which is a bit insane considering that's just one crop out of the 50+ that we grow here. A common radish task is to thin them once they start showing their first true leaves (about an inch tall). In practice, this involves going down rows of plants and murdering them. Tiny ones are plucked out of the soil in favor of the bigger stronger radishes that must be spaced 1-2" apart. Simple. Except sometimes you have a big radish that's just too close to the other guys and now it must join your pile of corpses. It lived better than any other radish and certainly is superior to the scraggly radish left behind several feet ago, but it was born in the wrong place. It was born in the wrong place. Something that it couldn't control and now it must die.

My boss chillin'

In the past couple weeks, I've come to peace with the radishes and cozied into my home for the season. Today, instead of changing into sweats and researching plants in the comfort of my room, I decided to enjoy a bit of the rare evening sun, tidy up our overflowing compost, and map out an outdoor mushroom bed for one of my experiments. A pile of rocks by our fire pit was prime pickings for the border of the bed, but I was worried it was a small pet cemetery or someone's sacred collection of rocks. It turned out to be a communal rock pile. My coworker mentioned that the fire pit always tends to get stacked and re-stacked by its many visitors - something I found terrific and ceremonious.

Anyways, the stones weren't claimed and the pit already had plenty of them, so I started placing the excess in a bucket until I got swept up in mixture of sadness and guilt. These aren't my rocks. These are everyone's rocks. Did I really not just get my own rocks because I'm a lazy piece of shit? Yes. Definitely yes. I decided to replace the rocks after finishing up the border because it felt like the right thing to do. We had joked about harvesting rocks in the field since Washington has such rocky soil, so it felt silly-in-a-good-way to actually be doing that now. I walked down the edge of the garden beds as the sun was setting, putting rocks in my bucket. And as I was adding rocks into the communal pile, I thought, "Oh shit this is what it's all about." Using collected rocks that came from other people to build something new and then adding your own rocks back.

I'm sure there are much more straightforward, less rock-centric and radish-y ways of coming to terms with the good and bad aspects of life, but that's all I got. Toodles.

Dream

Walking through the night in Allston trying to get back home, talked to a shadowy homeless dude along my path, kept walking and ran into cico, talked to him and then the homeless dude caught up. Cico knew him from the greasy-hipster-underbelly of emerson. I'd offered to let John stay the night at my Westland apartment, and he in turn invited this guy to stay. I was apprehensive but knew that if John wanted it to happen then it would probably be fine. We got back and later in my room I found out this dude actually used to be in the hipster cliques at emerson before becoming homeless the year before our last year. I realized I had peripherally known him at some point. What I had not known before was that he was also a long lost member of neutral milk hotel. He had then had an underground-cult-famous solo project with a neutral-milk-hotel-ish name, which I was always unable to remember. There had been a documentary on him. Something had happened to him that had changed everything, and now he'd been living on the cold streets for four years. I was happier to help then, as I was fascinated by his story, but he was still a dirty homeless man and I worried about getting sick from having him sleep in my room.

The next night I was trudging across the crunchy-snow-covered backwoods of Boston with rob and Brandon when we heard a car coming. I thought it might be the dude from last night, or another homeless guy I'd come across, and didn't want to have to deal with him another night, so as the car came into view of us we, or I at least, pretended to be sleeping on the snow.

Then it was raining. We reached the part where we had to scamper down the hill to the city streets. I fretted that I had left my shoes outside in the rain overnight. We approached the bright colorful city lights of Downtown. I went into a convenience store and knew where everything was because I'd worked there a long time ago. But I might've knocked something over, leading to an unwanted conversation with the current stock-boy.

Then I was in the subway, asking someone–was it the neutral milk hotel guy? Or an Asian proxy?–what hard thing had happened in his life. I asked him two easy questions, then I asked him if he'd lost someone close to him. He told me that I had asked a question that he could not answer, and started zooming ahead of me. I could not catch up to tell him that I had too.

Obligartory Golden Moon Post

Response to Jesses Blog

Funny timing, the other night I checked the blog for the first time in months and there were no new posts. Checked again tonight because everything else out on the internet is so fast-paced and frantic and just carries an inherent stress, so this is the perfect introspective thing I wanted to read. Scott, adrian, and I also just spent the night recounting college stories.

I feel where you're coming from. One of the things we talked about was how much we used to laugh, how many just out-of-control overwhelming laughs we had. We used to just get sooo high, it was like a fucking space mission, we literally deemed it a different universe. Looking back there definitely is something garden-of-eden-ish about it. And we definitely all had winters.

But looking at it now, I don't feel so detached from my former self like you describe. Life is more rigid for sure. I haven't been able to get high or even really stay up late since I got my concussion in July, so that's an even bigger reason my life's been not as 'magical' lately. But I also feel more comfortable with myself, and stronger and independent as a person, than I did back in the day. The trifecta of working out, learning how to camp, and dealing with my dads death made me feel like I can deal with a lot of things life might throw at me. (I don't wanna say all or most because who the fuck knows what horrible shit could happen, but I'll say a lot.) So I've grown up, and maybe the rigid, structured nature of how my life is set up right now makes me feel less like I'm floating through a hilarious psychedelic dream than I used to be. But for the moment I'm ok with it.

I've always been interested with the arc of how you change as you get older. And wondered if you ever get stale. Like I look at my favorite artists over time- the Beatles soared through their early twenties, then in the mid-twenties got into their druggy crazy shit, but from then on got kinda boring. And in my mind that was when they "grew up." Like Abbey Road is still great, and the craftsmanship is brilliant, but they weren't capable of reinventing the wheel anymore, or just being on the cutting edge anymore. In my mind the early/mid-twenties Beatles have something in common with our college selves, this aspect of still-figuring-things-out, which makes everything they do a bit more exciting, because it's on the edge of chaos or something. Where as now I'm just repeating the same things over and over. Same job everyday, same house at night, same kind of jokes all the time. Am I stale? Am I boring? If I am at all I think it's mainly because that time is being funneled into a job to pay for a life.

So to get back on track, it makes sense to wonder if who you are now will feel the same let's say 20 years down the road. Like, in our teens we looked back a year and felt different. Has that slowed down at all? I was gonna say it has, but I don't know, I feel like I can still go two years back and say I was different. But is now-me less different from 2-years-ago-me than 4-years-ago-me to 2-years-ago-me? I don't think so, I think I've changed more in the last two years. So the question is, if I changed and now feel like I have shit figured out, does that make me less likely to change in the future? Maybe, but I don't have everything figured out, just more of it....

To wrap this up. Before reminiscing about college, I was at work late and literally had life conversations like this with two other people, so again this timing is weird. But anyways, this woman I work with told me how basically she was married for 24 years before her marriage fell apart in 2015, which forced her to move back here from New Zealand. And she said for a while she brooded over it and cried everyday. But since she started working with us she's been feeling like she's living up to her potential better, working with people she likes for a good cause, and then she was like, "I know this sounds crazy, but looking back at it now, I'm grateful that it happened, because it's given me a second go at life that I didn't expect to have." So, case in point, if things feel stale, and like the magic has gone out, it's not impossible to change that. This isn't totally on the mark of what you're saying, because it's true you can never go back. But you can make forward just as interesting and exciting. I think?

Looking Back

Voices from the past. Moans of pain, contemplation and endless laughter. The over-use of the word "gay":
I read the blog last night.

It had been some time since I paid it a visit. Each time I would read a couple entries, laugh a little at how silly we were and lament the fact that the years of 100+ posts were gone.

This time I felt different. This time, my heart wrenched as I scrolled through the years, past dick jokes and long drawn out sentences meant to confuse for simple friendly delight. My heart wrenched because it felt no equal here. This blog is no longer a mirror, it's a photograph. And the people in it almost unrecognizable. The authors of theses stories are ripe fruit hanging over a lifetime. Swaying joyfully, soaking in the sun with there brothers.

That fruit fell and the harsh sun above drank it's juices and the ground below ate it's soft skins. A winter fell over the bodies and covered the remains with a blanket cold and real.

And when the rains dragged away the brush and the warm wind returned, what emerged was a sapling. Still young, looking up to the same heights it once swung only now with morbid trepidation. With the deep earthly knowledge that this will be my final form. From here till forever some version of this brain, these beliefs and this heart, ever growing heavy, will be life.

I cannot long for my former self, I think I've grown too old for such cheap tricks. And I do not envy the pain I felt five years ago. But with outstretched arms towards the constant Eastern winds of time I feel the all too sober conclusion, that one me has long past and before this life is through so shall another.

Wanna call watching this whole thing the Shepard's Challenge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9VMfdG873E

i just realized every blog post from 2017 starts with i

i carumba ;)

I had a dream

where I had some medical problem where I had to cut my own legs off. The only way to do it was to take a pill that made my legs atrophy right at the hip and then slam a car door on them. I never had the courage to finish the job and woke up before they fell off.

I'm on an unstoppable blog streak

I was listening to some dude's TEDx talk about how social media is bullshit, and while his talk was more bullshit than it needed to be, it effectively made me miss the golden years of the blog. So I'm gonna try to spend more time posting rando shit on here than scrolling through my Facebook. I do kinda want to purge Facebook out of my life, but the goddamn events feature is too convenient. Someday, tho.

Anyways here's a clip of Lawrence Krauss talking about the refined definition of multi-verses, which kinda brings the whole idea closer to reality for me. Some pretty great reaction shots of Joe Rogan in here too. Til next time.

i just went to the mens room and it smelled like fish.

some fucking fish-dicked asshole was probably fucking around with his fucked-up fish dick. heard him breathing in the stall behind me.