Loaf N Jug, 448 Highway 50 East
7.372 gallons
$3.539/gallon
$26.09

King Soopers #612, 3050 West Northern Avenue
6.821 gallons
$3.529/gallon
$24.07

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis

verily on the road. but many complexities to solve or let spin away. walking in the High Country clears head, but raises certain questions. as does convocation time with good friends. influence comes from all directions with the flows of ambient energy. some are more powerful than others. subtlety is a factor.

First Stop #5504, 805 Grand Avenue
2.589 gallons
$3.599/gallon
$9.32

Everyday #5715, 300 East Pagosa
9.045 gallons
$3.599/gallon
$32.55

Kayeenta Chevron, Junction 160 and 163
4.824 gallons
$3.739/gallon
$18.04

the madness of the road transforms into … peace …

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Circle K #5922, 5650 North Highway 89
6.376 gallons
$3.349/gallon
$21.35

Safeway, 1031 North Highway 89
10.249 gallons
$3.339/gallon
$34.22

usual or unusual translocations arising and coming-to-be, a different state of be-ing is the chief outcome. no base except the network. as usual, complicated questions, multi-plex answers. yee-haw!

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. — Robert Kennedy

From his University of Cape Town, South Africa N.U.S.A.S. “Day of Affirmation” speech. Looks to be an interesting film.

Woody’s #133, 1253 Iron Springs Road
11.125 gallons
$3.329/gallon
$37.04

if creativity cannot be taught, cannot be ‘made’ to happen, how best to approach the assumption that it can be fostered or stimulated within situations?

one answer to this is a consideration of the meta-structure of flows that characterize a particular situation. I have talked about meta-structures elsewhere. to begin with, each instance itself is only ‘separated’ from everything else through a process of abstracted defining. separation is an abstraction, a reduction of the actuality of holistic, immersed, and connected being and presence. so, best not to consider separation, distinction, and particularities. rather, retain a sensibility to all possible flows, or flow in general. easy to say, despite the (English) language being wholly insufficient to deal with such concepts. (Csikszentmihalyi is pretty good at making a natural language argument for flow, though he comes from a completely different direction than me, the conclusions are similar, will explore that when I shuffle through some of the references…)

(more …)

Hitler’s worldview included copious referencing of Nordic creation mythologies (thus his love of Wagner!), and as a consequence of this there developed strong pro-Nazi movements leading up to, through, and most disturbingly, after WWII in all the Nordic/Scandic countries (Scandinavian countries as a group are all the Nordic countries, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, plus Finland). Iceland was no exception to these Nazi sympathies — documented by black-and-white images of uniformed goose-stepping rubes on parade in downtown Reykjavík before the 1940 British occupation, and the refusal of Icelandic authorities to allow African-American soldiers into the country during the later US occupation. These warped sympathies have persisted right up to the present time: a fact that was brought to my attention by a sequence of articles published in Iceland’s main national newspaper, Morgunbladið, back in the early 1990′s when I had recently immigrated to Reykjavík to take up residence with my future ex-wife, an Icelandic psychologist who I had met in Germany a few years previous. The current events in Norway bring all this back to mind, again… (more …)

sorry Amy, damn, “Amy Amy Amy,” “Fuck-me Pumps,” “Me and Mr. Jones,” “Help Yourself.” You left too soon, darlin’! Maybe you and Janice are doing the dozens in a temperate place, both of you all of 27 years on, damn…

Woody’s #133, 1253 Iron Springs Road
10.798 gallons
$3.349/gallon
$36.16

ignoble subservient drudgery or honorable exploitation?

As has already been indicated, the distinction between exploit and drudgery is an invidious distinction between employments. Those employments which are to be classed as exploit are worthy, honourable, noble; other employments, which do not contain this element of exploit, and especially those which imply subservience or submission, are unworthy, debasing, ignoble. The concept of dignity, worth, or honour, as applied either to persons or conduct, is of first-rate consequence in the development of classes and of class distinctions, and it is therefore necessary to say something of its derivation and meaning. — Torsten Veblen

In this moment of history, the values of dignity, honor, worth should be examined closely by all members of the political/economic elite (though they would have small care over such things), for it is clear that the situation of the commoner in Amurikan society is one where these attributes are being more or less quickly stripped from their lives of servitude to financial institutions. There are still choices one might make which are liberating to a limited degree, but the pressures to conform to the demands of that fiscal/market system are overwhelming to most.

Is another pathway possible?

In spite of a natural history that was nothing but a set of drearily moralistic symbols, in the teeth of a theology which, instead of regarding words as the sings of things, treated things and events as the signs of Biblical or Aristotelian words, our ancestors remained relatively sane. And they achieved this feat by periodically escaping from the stifling prison of their bumptiously rationalistic philosophy, their anthropomorphic, authoritarian and non-experimental science, their all too articulate religion, into non-verbal, other than human worlds inhabited by their instincts, by the visionary fauna of their mind’s antipodes and, beyond and yet within all the rest, by the indwelling Spirit.

and

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s. — Aldous Huxley, “Heaven and Hell”

Morning air is diffuse and golden, a Light fog, perhaps from this event some 200 km away or so. Nothing like the Great Sydney Sandstorm of 2009, but nothing to trivialize either. If only humans would realize that the butterfly that made the storm is the self-same one that they startled from rest when ripping by on their ATV last weekend, celebrating hydrocarbon (inter)dependence in the desert.

… snip …

Movement ends up being a critical combination of idiosyncratic prognostication (what unknown lies ahead of me?) along with the repeated familiarity of bland acculturation (MacDonalds). The known and the unknown form a powerful dialectic in all life-trajectories, all movements. It is these two characteristics dominating individual presence in concert that carries us forward. Preparing to engage both change and the unknown relies on the clarity of present awareness, breadth of past experience, and the level of tolerance for existence in interstitial and autonomous zones. The preparations for movement include gathering enough knowledge and gathering enough things to ensure survival. The existence of known factors bolsters the potential for survival: otherwise questions like “where do we get gas?” and “where are we having dinner?” become overwhelming contraventions to even cursory local voyages of discovery. Not to mention “When are we going to get there?” This ranks very high along with “Where are we?” as being among the most problematic questions, raising high levels of existential angst in the Cartesian order. In the post-Cartesian it simply doesn’t matter!

Movement brings encounter. It is as we find our way through life that we meet the people who change us. The character of these encounters forms an armature upon which we build our internal and external social lives. Shared life-time is a profound experience which will never happen again the way it IS happening, so that every second becomes a crux, filled with intention and awareness, or not.

… snip …

Six years on from the 4th of July accident. Realized earlier this year that I will never be able to afford any private health insurance again because of ‘pre-existing conditions’ of which spinal anything is absolutely the biggest red flag for the insurance companies. gah. I hadn’t considered this situation until I was reading my OSHC (Overseas Student Health Coverage) contract in Oz where it said complications arising from any prior spinal or neuro-surgery would not be covered. So, while I have some kind of health care as long as I am a student, if anything happens to my spine, oh well. And thats in a ‘socialist’ country with universal health coverage. In Amurika, well, no chance whatsoever, especially if the ultra-right somehow once again gains control of the system, people like me are simply out of luck, if there is such a thing as being politically out of luck, more like, out of power!