Fry’s #116, 702 Miller Valley Road
10.907 gallons
$2.999/gallon
$32.71

Listening does not mean waiting impatiently, while someone else speaks of things that do not concern you: it means sympathetically identifying yourself with the speaker, his background, his desires, his troubles, understanding them as much as possible, and tactfully suggesting outside points of view, not too alien to his own, which may aid him in whatever problem is being uttered.

Matters of interest only to yourself are never proper subjects of more than passing reference.

Whatever your theme, be good humored. If you can sprinkle wit and humor into your conversation, you disarm almost any ill feeling on the part of others in the group. For laughter, it must be remembered, releases our prejudices. — Lloyd Smith

This advice floats on a surface of socialized presence. Slightly pithy, gendered, with a dated language that suggests quaint and formal relations of the past. Where are we now, in the swirling, mediated, media-saturated present? The opportunity for concentrated face-to-face dialogue seems almost as quaint, though along with the quaintness there is an explicit loss, somewhere behind the fractured and discontinuous surface of modern communications.

Could this explicit loss be the source of a growing and extremely deep angst that underlies wide-spread (and expanding) social insecurity? That the implied dis-connect between a world of hyper-socialization and the world we happen to be within and part of gives rise to …

blah blah blah …

Blue Ridge Market, 210 S. Highway 69
9.045 gallons
$2.899/gallon
$26.22

with a truckload of stuff, it’s too complicated to camp extensively. and, in retrospect, not much to say anyway. got to get back in Prescott to get organized for the ensuing departure.

Parker Oil Products, 508 Caifornia Ave.
4.044 gallons
$3.309/gallon
$13.38

AM/PM Minimart
6.139 gallons
$3.669/gallon
$20.13

Circle K
6.315 gallons
$3.569/gallon
$20.20

dislocated, and wind-blown to another place (in the night). retrospecting from a great distance. not a travelog, but a long narrative story in pieces. a different kind of writing, but not too different: carrying some mapping of the movements imposed by life as it is/was. question: would all the fragments, displayed, end up having a meaning? or would they remain fragmented, and infinitely far from the lived life? can the flow that one feels while passing through this immediate temporal region be truly experienced by an Other, or not.

the San Andreas Fault dominates the feel of this place, though it is only a scarp of low hills cut by displaced drainage washes. I didn’t get to a focal point of the flat valley floor, a complicated outcrop with a sizable pictograph/petroglyph wall up near the entrance to the Monument. it has restricted access, and was closed when I came into the valley. but today, head further south to the southern exit from the valley, where the dirt track parallels the fault scarp a hundred meters to the east. the displaced gullies cannot be immediately decoded by their odd shapes — where the topography is shifting north/south 33-to-37 mm per year. ya’ gotta run to keep up!

Follow the fault scarp east-south-east across the Grapevine and down into the Mojave near Victorville, and end up in a very isolated area of the near Mojave — up at altitude, so it’s very cold and very windy, though that’s nothing new in the High Mojave in December. Simply unload the back of the truck enough to curl up and sleep.

Shell, 615 Poso Road
6.036 gallons
$3.699/gallon
$22.33

The argument may be made that a fence, a window, an article of clothing, a wall are — one-and-the-same — as deflectors of the extant natural flow of energies out there. They represent a set of energy deflectors imposed by humans on their environs.

The other issue, tied to this is the production of waste (unusable) heat energy which impinges on a locality after the use of high energy sources which are subsequently rendered into usable and unusable forms of energy with varying efficiency. The primary source of this unusable energy is in the actual production and maintenance of the energy deflector systems: making and installing a fence, fabricating a window (glass being an extremely energy-intensive manufacturing process), building a wall, a building, a dam.

So: two major mechanisms and the second is responsible for the construction of the first. It takes an energy (depletion) to create these barriers which subsequently carry and direct energy flows as prescribed by their particular socially-mandated configurations.

[This all goes back to the hypothesis about virtuality -- where virtuality is (merely) the presence of a situation of attenuation of 'natural' flows (and here, tool-making is a key component). The question of what is 'natural' may be approached from a couple way, but more on that elsewhere.]

And all the way, Coyote laughs.

The day spent in leisurely absorbing the energy of place. The campground is built under the only trees for miles, (eucalyptus, from Australia!) so there is raptor and other bird activity all the time. The owls at night contribute a fantastic dialogue to the silence.

A short hike west to some low hills, down a wash, ends up, with the recent extreme rains, at a cattle pond full to overflowing. As per usual, I do not do a ‘before’ image (note to self — do a before image next time!). The downstream side of the small embankment dam has been undercut to within a meter of the main body of water which is substantial. With a small stick, I scratch a small line across the top of the dam, gradually increasing its size, using the initial slight flow of water to clear the waste from the cut. After twenty minutes of play, there is a sizable gap in the dam along with a flood of water rushing through, further eroding the dam body. Monkey-wrenching? Nah, this is merely a slight acceleration of what is happening ‘naturally’ — the breaching of the dam will occur eventually unless there is maintenance energy applied into the system. It would have likely occurred with the next substantial rains.

I do take an after image, and then head back to camp circuitously. It is after I see Coyote’s paw-print in the rain-damp soil, walking on a trail, that I cross the wash on which the dam is built. I am surprised that the huge rush of water from the breach is just reaching this spot. It is first a trickle which then ramps up to a full-on rushing creek. Fascinating to see the water fill the bed of the wash, pooling in hollows, flowing over small water-falls. I see immediately this is a perfect audio situation to continue documentation of the ‘changing the course of nature’ or ‘changing the course of history’ project that I have undertaken in the last few years. I lope back to camp, grab the recorder, and race back, downstream, to the wash. The flood is proceeding slow enough that I can run further downstream several times to record the ambient audio and make some images of the process.

Then it’s back to camp for dinner.

Sky-worms bugger the clarity of the atmosphere, attenuation the flux of Light reaching the surface. Obviously this is under a major north-south air-route — the only good thing is that the planes are at 10 km altitude, so the sonic disturbance is minimal. The affect on high-altitude haze, however, is profound. Long vision (at the sky and at the landscape) refocuses eyes through these worn diffracting glass into another focal point. Eyesight goes bad with all the reading and writing. The next year will make all that has gone before (go pale in comparison, argh!) as the PhD takes shape. No life, no sight left.

I have not seen another human the entire day with the exception of a well-armed ranger cruising through the campground. A droll chap, probably 30 or so, from the East Coast, a Federal employee, dislocated.

Around sunset, a car pulls in, first they park in the next slot, but then pull out and park across the campground, 50 meters away. There is a couple, they mill around, looking like they are setting up camp, it’s cold, getting colder, sunset. I’m sleeping on the ground. They turn on a radio playing pop mariachi music. It gets louder and louder as time goes by, getting later and later. They are sitting in the front of the car probably drinking, smoking, whatever. At one point well after 2300 I yell over to TURN IT DOWN. That has no effect. I honk my horn, also to no effect. I contemplate going over, but also realize the odds are that the occupants are armed. I instead pack the car up, fuming, and drive to a side-road further south in the valley and find a spot there. Faugh, why would somebody drive all this way — it’s at least 50 miles from the nearest town — to sit in their car and play loud music? Sorry, I don’t get it. [expletives deleted!]

Later, Orion drags his belt and sword from the sludge of Light pollution that sits to the south: Los Angeles, more than 150 km away or so. To the east, light from Taft and Bakersfield. A strong wind arises late in the night, there are no trees where I have moved to. Uncomfortable night after the luxury last night.

If you look for the truth outside yourself,
It gets farther and farther away.
Today walking alone, I meet it everywhere I step.
It is the same as me, yet I am not it.
Only if you understand it in this way
Will you merge with the way things are.
– Tung-Shan

Loss, and the new. Preparing for the forward-fall to engage the conditions that hydrocarbon burning precipitate: back on the road, hydrocarbon flaring, with a slow drive down to Carizzo Plains via the “Petroleum Highway.” Along which are the still-operational fields of California’s early oil boom. Drive by the Kettleman Dome area, a structure that I examined as my first exploration review at Unocal back in 1982. I had to gather all alternative methods data, produce some maps and structural interpretations, and an exploration strategy that correlated seismic and well-log data sets.

Tracking the San Andreas Fault. The knife-through-birthday-cake-icing scar that runs from the here to the there of California. Rupture zone riding. Making images and writing. The usual. Or the unusual. Beginning or Ending.

This after the Solstice lunar eclipse last deep night which hung in a cleared sky slowly transforming eye-socket receivers into Light-cups, catching a burnt sienna flux from every sun-rise-and-set on the limb of the planet, at the moment. Very fine. And gone for this life’s time. On Earth as it is in Heaven.

On this movement, at this time, cars fill Interstate-5 everywhere, all the time. The pavement is uneven and shattered in some places from the heaviness of the truck traffic as well as the bankrupt state of the state of the Union. wads of toilet paper fill the grass at the scenic overlook like albino poppies. Later, I leave the interstate for less travelled roads, much less travelled, I see very few cars at all. But then there are oil pumps and pipes.

Shop & Go, 27574 Bernard Street
6.381 gallons
$3.469/gallon
$22.14

Rotten Robbie #64
10.543 gallons
$3.399/gallon
$35.84
9.2651 kg of carbon

gurls, dogs, and Christmas lights on display. somewhere in California.

Cycling down the river to first the boat house, then downtown and The Green Bench for more work, stopping to photograph the river in the brilliant sunshine and I see a huge cloud rising from the direction of Taranaki. could it be an eruption? I ask a woman walking down the bike trail, but she looks and seems completely indifferent, seemingly not recognizing that it is a smoke, not weather cloud. Weird. Turns out that it is likely just an agricultural burn.

There’s quite some stress around the catering for the symposium as the person who was to do it had a terrible family trauma arise in England. There will be around 50-75 people coming from around New Zealand along with a few foreign presenters, and the food requirements are vegetarian, vegan, lacto-ovo, etc, etc … complex on limited resources …

Turns out that Gregers though, was the cook and manager of that anarchist vegetarian dining room near Bjorn’s house in North Copenhagen — I’d even eaten there a couple times when visiting Bjorn — so between Gregers and Jonah from the local community, along with volunteers, things will come together. It’s a challenge!

Oh yeah, and it’s Gregers’ birthday dinner in the evening. I work on a big fruit salad, and get the opportunity to introduce Freya to pomegranate seeds.

Today is completely packed and busy: cleaning, organizing, and installing the show at the Greenbench for the gallery opening this evening. The title of the show is BURN and the show is obliquely or directly about hydrocarbons — plastics, production, consumption, distribution. Julian had tracked down a collection of oil samples from an early and now spent New Zealand (oil) field nearby (name?). I am surprised, oil — with the tectonic regime here, the foreshore of a plate boundary subduction zone. Ah, maybe the heat flow is actually lower when considering that because the immediate crust is double thickness with the subducting plate, so there is a lower heat gradient from the mantle. Shallow oil, guess I’d never thought of the genesis of such plays.

I use embodied energy to organize and clean the gallery kitchen for the opening, along with having numerous conversations with folks introduced from Julian’s extensive local network. He asks me if I will talk at the opening sharing some anecdotes about working in the oil business. Completely impromptu, though I had a minute to sit with a piece of paper before and write a five- or six-point list of things to remember to talk about. I am not the best story-teller, especially in such a situation, but folks politely listen to a few minutes of my rambling.

Later in the evening, raucous preparations over wine precede delicious dinner back at the house. Definitely some good cooks around!

The question for me becomes — how to keep track of the dialogues, and the warm humans encountered? Julian mentions there is an artist-residency possibility in town. It would be great to hang here for a time. Somehow, it reminds me distantly of Tornio, in Lapland, half-way ’round the world, literally, in the sense of it being a littoral backwater along a river in a small country, but the community here seems quite activated, and the differences between Finns/Lapps and Kiwis/Maori are complex and significant. Similarities do exist — it would be good to have the time to explore. It looks like there will not be any spare time in these 11 days for much autonomous explorations, although this is okay, as the people immediately surrounding Julian and Sophie’s lives provide a rich environment for encounter. And a site for the exchange of inspiration.

Up at 0400 to make the hugely early flight to eNZed. Had to be totally packed for the US as well, as I’ll have only another 20 hours back in Sydney, in transit between Auckland – Sydney – San Francisco.

A new country, a new place to visit. The national memorial service is happening when we land, so I manage to record a minute’s silence in the baggage claim. Some people were oblivious. People are watching the ubiquitous flat-screen teevees rather intently. The cost of extractives, but only the most obvious one.

The jump flight from Auckland down to Whanganui reveals both sides of possible landscapes. Massive clear-cut forestry in the highlands, and intensive farming in the more level areas — both with the attendant geomorphology of erosion features marring the terrain. Much has changed since colonization, surely. Then there are the remaining highland forests which are not yet decodable, having not met them on the ground.

Finally get into Whanganui, Julian picks me up at the airport in their 1988(?) Honda named Buzzy Bee (?) — a vehicle with a history, too bad I’m writing this in far distant retrospect, or elsewise I could relate the story. It was funny. Great to finally meet Julian, and we immediately start up a substantial dialogue as I am dropped into the whirlwind of family life surrounding the community effort aimed at the Greenbench (Gallery space) and the ADA Symposium. I tell him that I am at his service, and that, officially, my workshop starts now. It’s all about energy, presence, be-ing, and raising these topics in whatever contexts that arise in the next ten days.

The evening starts with a rousing performance of Aladdin by the children of the Brunswick School located in the countryside near Whanganui. Julian and Sophie’s three daughters recently started attending the school. This was followed by some photo-ops — meeting more of Julian’s family and other folks in the community — in the playground, as the soft, mild summer twiLight closed in.

brutal day, too late to change it: deciding to go out to the closest bush access — the Blue Mountains National Park up at Katoomba to check it out — bad weather, but this is the only opportunity to go before leaving for New Zealand on Friday. I suppose it is the rough equivalent of hitting Yosemite or so (not near the grandeur of Yosemite, but the proximity and intensity of being a tourist attraction, they get three million folks up here every year). a 90-minute train ride from Sydney Central up the hill to Katoomba Station. decide to fuel-up at a cafe in town first, do some writing, pick up on the vibe. then head south from town on foot to the edge of the main escarpment of resistant Triassic Hawkesbury sandstone that Katoomba sits on. pouring rain by the time I get an hour out. thankfully I have full Goretex on which is useless. so, drenched to the point that it makes no difference.

along the escarpment picking up the energy, not seeing a soul. clouds lower before I leave town, so visibility contracts to 1-200 meters or so. dense, rich, empty, wet. a bit taken aback at the emptiness so close to town, but not in a negative way. I decide to make about an 8-mile loop hike, down the Golden Staircase, and along the base of the escarpment through the muck and rain. hang out in a small cave-overhang for a time, meditating on the dripping sounds, and why I hadn’t been up here before now. I had always been reading adverts about travel to the Blue Mountains with tour companies and the prices were prohibitive (for my budget), more than AUD 100 for a day trip, so I simply eliminated it from my list of possible things to do. now I discover that it costs a AUD 5.50 train ticket, and a mile walk to get into the park boundaries. another 5 miles and I’m in pretty rugged country. dang.

wet. continue the long loop, crossing a landslide area which was quite a chore to get across, especially exposed to the now constant pouring rain. unfortunately no decent photos, though the clouds wreathing the escarpment were dramatic. still no sight of any other humans. but absolutely not used to this wetness, since the long climb in the West Elk Wilderness in 2009. continue along, a bit unsure if I’ve taken on too much of a walk after being rather out of practice. eventually get around to the re-ascent point, meeting a couple just off the funicular rail that descends to a touristic overlook — they are in dress shoes and no rain gear. hmmmm. won’t get far in that! finally slog up the long sets of stairs back up to the top, boots sloshing, and with any luck, no damage to my electronic gear. long, tiring walk back into town where I stop for a glacially-served burger, fortunately it doesn’t impact getting to the train. in exchange for lame service, I leave a substantial wet region at one of their tables. back on the city-bound train, I look down after a time to see a leech writhing on the floor. I then discover two bleeding holes in one ankle. hmmmm. wonder if those critters are dangerous, or are just plain old leeches. I leave a sizable wet spot on the train as well. finally make it home after a 14-hour day, finding my boot and sock soaked in blood. so much for the first (and perhaps last) foray into the Blue Mountains, into the Oz bush.

meander down to Roger and Neil’s place in Marrickville to observe the live Ethernet Orchestra network music collab that Roger is doing as a part of his thesis research. Neil whips up a delicious meal beforehand.

Mari puts up a blog, Greener Grass, from her travel (by ship!) from Finland to the US and around, interviewing Finnish immigrants in New York, Washington (at the Pentagon!), Michigan, and Minnesota…