ONE DAMN THING AFTER ANOTHER

I’m back.  I did not watch the inauguration because I spent the morning on the phone with Tier 3 Apple Support people trying to remove spyware that was not detected by my Malware program.  It was messing with my contacts, even trying to invade bank accounts, blocking people even when they were white listed, and other mischief.  I have to say that all the Apple people were patient, cheerful, and a pleasure to work with.  They were also all female.  

This is a long-standing problem and since I depend on my email to make contacts for writing, it’s a problem that can cost me money and make enemies because people think I’m ignoring them.  We may have gotten the problem licked.  It was installed through 3rivers.net who claimed they knew nothing about it.  Techies there are hired through some agency elsewhere.  I suspect they were bluffed by a rogue.  Maybe they should be bonded, but bank tellers are and that’s who stole my credit card number.

The next prob on the list is fleas.  We’ve still got them.  The systemic flea med that you put between the shoulder blades of the cat made Bunny allergic and now she’s looking pretty moth-eaten plus spending a lot of time chasing itches.  There are 8 cats that come into the house and four of them can’t be caught except with a trap.  A second kind of flea med “Flea Bully” turns out to be laundry soda.  It says,  “Lather the cat thoroughly and rinse well.”  Right.  The third kind is for carpets:  “Sprinkle on, leave four hours, vacuum thoroughly.”  Seems to work.  The other basic recourse is laundry of bedding and clothing — not the cats.  I don’t have a washing machine and the nearest laundromat is thirty miles away.

The one I visited this time was so degenerated that only four tubs worked — I usually use five.  One failed to drain and, alas, it was the one with the heaviest flannel sheets — which I could hardly lift when saturated, much less wring with arthritic hands.  Luckily the profoundly cold weather has broken so the temp was in the low Fifties because a Chinook wind is blowing.  I slung the sopping stuff onto the clothesline where it at least dried out enough to be draped on the furniture for the last stage, merely damp.  Fleas would have drowned.

The next problem (aside from the temps of twenty below zero F) was that the main town water supply, which goes past my house, broke in the usual place, the corner between my block and the Lutheran church.  This happened in the night and drained the contents of our spiffy new watertower for the second time, this time into the streets.  In order to find and mend the break, it is necessary to dig, but the ground must be thawed first, which means blasting it overnight with propane.  In this case, the break was not where they expected it, but upstream and sending water through the ground next to the pipe.  More thawing, more digging, more days.  Water was rerouted around my block, so only my block had to make dry camp.  The mayor opened city hall so people could get water jugs filled there, but I knew nothing about that.  As soon as Corky had water, he filled my two big jugs.  I bought a couple of packs of drinking water, which is always in the stores because some people think Valier water tastes funny.  This is good training for a major disaster, like maybe a huge earthquake triggered by frakking.

As soon as I realized there was no water, I whipped over to the Mom and Pop store to buy water.  But I should not have driven through the standing water in the street.  My pickup went crazy.  Then it seemed okay but went nuts again when I tried to go out to the trash roll-off.  Peter, a kind Hutterite young man, pulled me out of the drifts and into town.  After drying overnight the pickup worked.  The diagnosis is a wet distributor.  The answer is to take the cap of it off, spray everything with WD40, which drives out water, or even use a cloth to dry things.  Yesterday the pickup was running and I took a load of trash out to the roll-off.

In the meantime I was using up stuff from the back of the fridge and dumped a half-cup of old poppyseeds into a bowl of biscuit mix.  Seemed like a success until a poppyseed got stuck under a gum and raised a huge abscess that lasted through all the rest of this stuff but has finally subsided, I think because the seed finally festered out.

Running parallel was war with pharmacies.  The Shelby one in the ShopKO store has a new pharmacist but still has their old policies (controlled by corporation rules and insurance regulations) that one cannot renew a prescription until four days before the old one runs out and the pharmacy cannot keep on hand enough meds to be sure of renewing a prescription completely.  Over and over, they would give me a half-dozen pills to keep me from dying but promised to send the rest by mail.

I got indignant and moved to the Cut Bank Albertson’s pharmacy.  They turned out to be really OSCO and no different except that they never remembered to send the remainder of the pills.  Anyway, there was a three-day weekend and the weather kept me from driving.

So twice in this month I’ve gone for nearly a week without my prescription.  I hadn’t thought about the implications of corporate pharmacies.  There are three county seats about thirty miles from me.  Great Falls, which is a very small city, is the closest major shopping hub on this side of the 49th parallel.  Lethbridge, Alberta, is a little bigger but in Canada.  My passport has expired and I can’t afford renewal.  To get that done I would need to go to Conrad on certain days.

This time I switched my pharmacy account to Conrad.  It is a locally owned business and when one gets prescriptions filled there, a special niche is established in which they keep your meds in amounts that will cover you for the next period out.  They don’t run short, and they WILL mail meds.  They are in “my” county (Pondera Co. — Pend d’Oreille, earring in French).  Since I went to get my meds, that’s the reason I used that wretched laundry.

So yesterday, just as I settled into my re-boot after lunch nap, I got a phone call that seemed to be from some Montana state oversight person checking up on pharmacies.  She wanted to know if my pills were working, if I were taking them regularly, chatchatchat, until I began to smell a rat and asked bluntly who she was working for:  Osco/Albertsons in Cut Bank.  What she really wanted to know was why I left Osco and her intent was to persuade me back.  I gave her an earful and told her I would NEVER use that pharmacy again because I do NOT want deceptive nanny-ladies calling up to quiz me in a way only my doctor should.  I was yelling.

The Apple Support people were in Las Vegas.  All this stuff — indeed, life itself — is pretty much a gamble.  Three cats are sneezing and snoozing, now that the weather is warm enough to release god-knows-what.  I thought Finnegan had died in the night, but he finally roused for breakfast.  Tuxie is throwing up.  Momo, formerly Mimi, can’t be touched but accepted bits of my frozen waffle.  I never had human children.  Good decision.  But there’s really no escape.

GET REAL!

If I were to do my education all over again from grade school on, I would get a list of the books Delancy Place.com draws from and read them all.  

The “mother ship” for this daily automatic email quote, short but pithy, is self-described as follows:  “The Governor’s Woods Foundation is a private, not-for-profit philanthropic organization based in Philadelphia. Our interests and commitments are primarily focused in two areas: cultural development and progressive realism in government policy.”  I suppose it’s a little like the website Aeon, except that it’s specifically American and deals with history of government and culture, including pop culture.

The trouble is that I could NOT read all these books in the Fifties because not only had some of the events not happened yet, but also the point of view had not developed and couldn’t until another decade or so and the Vietnam War had broken up the WWII solid front.  Until war was truly over, we could not afford to give up all the “great men” and triumphalism that was the focus of history — still is out here in the Montana boonies.  The idea is a source of courage.   

“A People's History Of The United States” by Howard Zinn is not generally read or taught here except in the university towns.  Ken Burns’ television histories are well-loved because of the photos, even though it may support a focus on conflict.

Ken Burns

When I was in high school, the subject of history was taught by the coaches because they were really there to coach sports with the goal of winning and had to teach something.  They continued the triumphalism, the mono-focus on only Brit/white history, which was seen as “our” history.  All dates of battles we won and names of people who succeeded.  In Montana a law had to be passed to force the teachers to include Native American history in spite of the many NA people in the state.  White people thought it had nothing to do with them. 

With that as my sympathy, one might think an article by Paul Mason in the Guardian, which also comes to me as email excerpts, would appeal to me, but it does.  The header says, “The problem for poor, white kids is that a part of their culture has been destroyed.”  It hasn’t just been NA kids, though they are not addressed in this article, but most rural white kids have had their culture damaged as well.  Black kids are separated.  Red kids are ignored.  Yellow kids prevail.  ("Yellow" has too many connotations -- let's call them "golden kids.")

Paul Mason

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/04/the-problem-for-poor-white-kids-is-that-a-part-of-their-culture-has-been-destroyed.

Long ago (eighties?)  I attended a conference at the College of Great Falls where Wendell Berry spoke, mourning the loss of the rural relationship to land and family.  At the end when there was time for questions, Darrell Kipp stood up and said, “Ranchers and farmers had better pay close attention to what happens to Indians, because they are tomorrow’s Indians.”  Exactly what he meant is probably what Denise Juneau needs to address in her campaign for the US Senate.  The loss of culture is a poverty.  

Mason was addressing Thatcherism, which is the British version of Reaganism, which I am just figuring out is Neoliberalism, deliberately misnamed for something quite like Oligarchy.  The idea is the same old smug self-congratulation of those who have it made, trying to promote it as due to their natural talents and energy in a laissez-faire environment.  In fact, it has been a matter of withdrawing all the necessary features of the Commons, like infrastructure, of which education is a part.  The bridges, the pipelines, the highways go down, and so do the kids.  Health support, service regulation, investment in public systems, all go down.

In his article Mason was remarking on the failure of poor and working class white kids (esp. boys, I think, though he didn’t say so) to do well in school.  Specifically, he’s reflecting on a study by CentreForum, “An independent, liberal think tank seeking to develop evidence based, long term policy solutions to the problems facing Britain. . .  CentreForum's driving principle is to promote opportunity for all and particularly for those in disadvantaged circumstances.”

At first the kids are okay, but then they begin to fail and drift so that they slide away from school or ordinary jobs or even their families.  Unless they see themselves as part of the winning classes, or at least the honored classes -- which working classes once were when they were pulled into service as the backbone of a working army.  Or when they organized in labor unions and progressive groups.

Montana is not so mixed as England, but here’s how the cards come down for English groups:  “The detailed ethnic breakdown in the report makes for depressing reading. The worst performers are white Irish traveller children, then “white gypsy/Roma” children – both of which school fails by a long chalk. They are followed by mixed-race children with Caribbean backgrounds, then white British. These are the only groups who collectively go backwards in the two years researchers have been crunching the numbers. By contrast, black Caribbean, and white Irish children go forward a bit, and Chinese and [East] Indian children a lot.”  The recent wave of immigrants was evidently not included because this is a study over years.

Mason says,  “It’s 30 years since I taught in the school system – at a high school and then a special unit for behaviourally disruptive teenagers in Leicestershire. So the only relevant first-hand knowledge I can bring to this debate is that the same problems were apparent then. By the late-1980s people from a white, working-class background already knew we had a problem.”. . . “It has nothing to do with being “overtaken” – still less with any reverse discrimination against them.  It is simply that a specific part of their culture has been destroyed. A culture based on work, rising wages, strict unspoken rules against disorder, obligatory collaboration and mutual aid. It all had to go, and the means of destroying it was the long-term unemployment millions of people had to suffer in the 1980s.”  

Valier and the other High-line ag and resource towns are struggling with the same issues now.  In Mason’s words: “To put right the injustice . . . requires us to put aside racist fantasies about “preferential treatment” for ethnic minorities; if their kids are preferentially treated, it is by their parents and their communities – who arm them with narratives and skills for overcoming economic disadvantage.

“If these metrics are right, the present school system is failing to boost social mobility among white working-class kids. But educational reforms alone will barely scratch the surface. We have to find a form of economics that – without nostalgia or racism – allows the working population to define, once again, its own values, its own aspirations, its own story.”

Mason pins his story on a lovely little movie called "Kez" about a boy and a sparrowhawk he trains.  In the cruelest Arab dictatorships not only are racing pigeons -- kept with as much tradition and pride as hawks -- forbidden and killed, but also their owners even if they are boys who had little else.  The world is more bitter and deadly than it used to be.  There was a nasty little story in one of my feeds today about how it was human sacrifice that enabled the shift from hunter-gathering to hierarchical town life.  I'll have to search that further.

Ancient breeds of Bagdad pigeons

http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com

The problem has been to find a counter story.  What counts?  What are the abilities and attitudes that will support growing individuals?   How can they stay in their communities and still make a living — not just a minimum income but enough to support marriage and children?  What are the rural stories as opposed to the bi-coastal television series lives that dominate the media?  Is the answer in the Internet?  Is it in the priorities of the schools?  Can populations like the Rez maintain their identity without leaving the larger world?  How can the mourning for a world now gone finally be completed or at least fortified by a new vision?  Is war the only way to achieve solidarity?  Human sacrifice?

Reading "Delancy Place" quotes every morning gives me perspective that is world-based with an American focus.  It suggests many stories, some of them revisionist, that are NOT pinned to conflict and the need to have heroes.  Maybe that will suggest a story we can share.  

SUNDAY MORNING BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Squibbie

Free associating on the Sunday morning before Christmas, though Christmas has very little to do with it.  An open winter.  This morning is bright, as has been promised for a week without arriving.  The occasional thud of a car door as the Baptists arrive at their church next to me.  Cats were up at 5AM in the dark wanting food, which I should not have provided because now they’ll be up at the same time every day.  It works in the summer.

The Striped Terror rather likes the maternal vibe of Crackers and slips up to bury his nose in her yellow fur, but the old duchess hisses hard to drive him off.  Still, she lets him be close.  And then comes the Dust Bunny, who has a big crush on the Striped Terror though he’s only half as big, and he wraps himself around Stripes in a hug as wide as he can manage.  Until I stick my head out, which freaks him so much he bails over the footboard and crashes to the floor.  He’ll be back.  Meanwhile Squibbie sleeps in dignity under the cat warming light bulb out by the computer.

The Striped Terror restraining the Dust Bunny.  Sorta.

I’ll try Gendlin’s “Focusing” technique, imagining an attic or a threshing floor where one can identify issues and put them aside to clear a space for something important.  It turns out this is actually how the brain works, except it’s impossible to understand without metaphors like floors and crates and boxes.  “The Working Platform” they sometimes call it.  I won’t number the issues I’m pushing aside because then you might consider them “listicles,” and they’re not.  They are true concerns.

A pressing issue is “infrastructure”, both physical like the sewers and power poles and political like the deterioration of prior assumptions and arrangements about reservations and small towns.  Reservations cannot now be as separate as intended when they were so different that they were still adjusting to horses -- very successfully.  But they can’t just be thrown in with everyone else without losing their identity and their rights.  Small towns were once organically generated when there were enough people to need services like stores, schools, churches and police.  But now that the numbers are sinking, we’re in an awkward place.  Put that crate over there.

The transition between “things” that are assumed to be self-contained units, including people, and related to each other mostly by confrontation and domination, have given way to reconsiderations of everything from boundary to core in terms of continuums.  Gender, for instance, has escaped cultural polarizing into “male” vs. “female,” so that now “we” (educated Westerners) see sexuality as fluid, responsive to environment, and self-determined -- with the physicality coming along however possible, even with the help of surgery or molecular intervention (hormones).

Why isn’t this also true with identity in general?  As a culture we’ve always been interested in multiple personalities, not just differences in presentation in order to adapt to a situation, but actual organized “persons” with names and styles, sometimes forming a kind of family in which the stronger protect the weaker and the wicked tease the virtuous.  What if all this theatrical role-inhabiting were seen as variations in a natural spectrum or continuum of “persons” depending on the connectome of identities in the brain, a sliding scale.  It becomes clearer and clearer that identity is not one permanent named entity (ID-entity) but that everyone reassembles their identity all the time, because so much of identity is in relationship to something outside themselves: weather, work, friends, travel, reading, political coups, war, disease, falling in love, inheriting money, having a baby . . .  It’s scary to think of a person having no center -- surely they must have something that corresponds to the “spine” of a character in a play.  But what if they are jellyfish, drifting.  Jelly persons.

I suspect that jelly persons read in search of a spine.  They want arousal (the unification of energy, the focus of attention and purpose, the increase in awareness) and they want enlightenment. (What has been missing?  How do things work? Is there really anything transcendent?)  Life is a streaming event, a process, so we want to get the flow going and according to the research of Csikszentmihalyi that means doing things at one’s limits -- not beyond them, but AT them.  (If you look at his TED talk, notice that he’s a “leatherman.”)  https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow?language=en  

www.darceycroft.com

What happens then is that the true (deep, dark, limbic) mind takes over, the mind that is NOT in words but in interaction with the world: paint, gravity, sound, physical exertion.  The chatter of the word-mind shuts up and the 200-plus kinds of awareness are engaged in unity to do or make something.  Paradoxically, this can be done while writing, but only if the writing is AT your skill limit and your courage to investigate.  None of the struggling writers I see on Medium.com ever talk about the ecstasy of writing.  Sometimes they say it’s therapy.

Now the Striped Terror has recognized that I’m awake for good (as opposed no good) and is out cavorting in the snow with the Dust Bunny.  These cats are clocks: they insist on a daily routine.  They are a safeguard against drift into mental and emotional jelly. 

from "The Best Offer," a recommended movie

Still in bed, half asleep, hypnogogic, I walk through rooms.  They are the rooms of the many films I watch.   Some opulent, some empty, some cozy, some traps.  I reflect on my lack of interest in maintenance.  Dusting, replacing, shaking out, straightening, reshelving.  It makes me feel lazy and disreputable when I’m aware, but the truth is that most of the time I’m not.  I really don’t get too bothered even about a toilet that doesn’t work properly if I can think of a workaround.  (A bucket.)   When company comes, I suddenly see through their eyes and am a little shocked, but then go to defiance.  I’m an artist, see, and I don’t have to accommodate anyone else’s culture.  That’s why I needed a house after years in apartments.  But years in apartments didn’t teach me how to maintain a house.  Hmmmm.

Sharp awareness: the internet is not going to remain the same.  Blogging is not going to remain the same.  Is it really enough to accumulate all these proto-books in 3-ring binders?  Maybe it is.  Maybe books are transient the same way people are.  Maybe that’s a good thing.  But that’s from the point of view of a writer.  From the point of view of a reader, I WANT those books.  I want to know where they are and how to get them.  I’ve learned to look through used books, not new books.  So far I’ve not pushed on to ebooks, whose key seems to be listening while driving.  Hmmmm.

Coffee.  Hot coffee gets me up.  A quick flash of my mother craving hot coffee in her old age.  It never was quite hot enough.  Life . . .  is life ever hot enough? 

IATROGENIC PLUMBING AND INFRASTRUCTURE

I’ve just about reached my limit.  It’s not about writing or anything like that.  It’s about “iatrogenic plumbing”.  Iatrogenic medicine is when the docs, in trying to cure the patient, make him/her worse, maybe even create a new disease.  So I’ve moved the term over to plumbing infrastructure, both in houses and in the streets.  

Yesterday, while I wrote furiously in the next room, a plumber was using the “BIG” roto-rooter to get my main waste drain cleared out.  This was an actual professional plumber from the county seat.  The machine was so big that it was like doing Rubik’s cube to get it into my tiny bathroom, even though I’d moved everything portable out.  The final conclusion was that the pipe was NOT invaded by roots, which is very common in a warm fall like this one, but was probably blocked by collapse of the old line.  This will be the fourth time that this line is dug up and it’s beginning to cost real money.

The first time we dug was when the line sprung a little leak under the sidewalk.  The second time was farther up the line and may have been somehow linked to the first “fix” detaching between the two materials, old and new.  The third time might have been almost any cause, another slow leak.   But this emergency is thought to be a line collapse that’s totally blocking passage of even water.  By the end of today we’ll know more.  In the meantime I have no toilet.  Fortunately, I have a camp version.

We have had two town workers who handled these things.  One of them was hired away for a much better job covering the district.   The other was badly hurt in a trench collapse because the town tried to save money by not buying a “trench box” that fortifies the walls.  They’re expensive, heavy, and awkward, but they save lives.  We have one now.  We’ve had an election in which our competent previous mayor was displaced by a nut case who quit after a week in office.  (He got in by spreading malicious gossip.)  So today the recovering town employee and a Valier citizen who was once on the council, and who runs an excavation and gravel company, will give it a try.  Our new mayor takes office January 1 and we have high hopes.

The county assessor cannot see these things when she does her drive-by estimates.  She assumes foundations and that the interiors are as standard as the houses where she has lived, fully equipped and maintained.  Taxes, sewer and water, electricity, gas, are scaled for parts of the country where the population is much thicker, and so are the Codes.  Many houses in town have for sale signs, but probably many people are just fishing.

By living in a ramshackle old house, I am able at 76 to write all day, hunkered down with my library and internet connection, which is also developing aging and deterioration just like the other infrastructures.  My eyes are my “infra-structure” and they are giving me problems.  Luckily I’ve discovered $20 eyeglasses from China that are better than the $300 ones I’ve always bought from optometrists.

In summary, I may let down my standards for this blog, which were to write at least 1,000 words a day every day.  Not trivia but things that require research and reflection.  I’m still chasing matters that I began reading about in high school, like creativity and what organic really means.  There are many social issues crying out for insight.  I think there are a lot of people out there writing this same way, but no one knows about them and publishing never did pay much attention.  Now they have become blood-suckers. 

My main email is still up.  prairiem at 3rivers.net.  I have a landline but no smart phone, tablet, or cell connection.  It’s a long drive from anywhere.  If you travel this time of year, you must watch the weather closely.  My water line is working, so I can make coffee.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT HACKING

This post is in steps that go from the very specific to the universal.  The subject is the Internet and its degeneration towards paralysis.  This is not about hacking.

Picture a little old lady in her nightie at 4AM composing a message for an English publisher of an article she wrote.  Suddenly her computer is turned off by some outside force.  In a minute there is a message that comes on -- though the computer is off -- in a little label to say that in another minute it can be turned back on.  This is true.  An automated message is sent to Apple.  The heading is “Panic Response” and the rest is code.

LOL mentally pictures a transmission tower destroyed in the nearby forest fire; or the sun’s current outbursts sending a tongue of destruction to all satellites; or WWIII breaking out and Dick Cheney is at the door; or a tsunami.

Later in the morning LOL (me) contacts the techies in Great Falls who have the contract to “support” 3Rivers, my provider.  They are very selective about what they consider “support” and simply give me lots of boiler plate.  There’s a little edge of sarcasm.  “If these people don’t know what they are doing, they should stay off.”  They don't listen to what I say, but have prepared speeches for the most common problems and talk right over the top of me.

I call friends.  Then Google.  The story is that Yosemite OS is wiping the entire hard drives of MacBooks, destroying Wi-Fi, installing hard-to-remove malware, and generally raising hell.  People are scrambling to get rid of Yosemite, which is not easy.  There’s a thing called Mavericks.  Maybe I’d better think about Linux.  IPhoto won't work unless I update, but the update is not available in the US.  IPages won't update but at least it works.  It won't update because of "security reasons."

The only reason I signed up for Yosemite was that my social websites and movie providers claimed they wouldn’t work without it.  Clearly an underground collusion for extortion.  And we worry about China.

_________________

Now picture a little community on the prairie that is dependent on industrial agriculture: that means small grains and alfalfa raised under irrigation from the mountain run-offs with giant ag machines, many chemicals, and a storage and shipping system that reaches around the globe.  The town only supplies amenities for the few hundred people on ranches and so on:  schools, stores, library, gas pumps, a bank branch, churches, one grocery store.  One or two little businesses few of whom know how to run a business online.

Everyone keeps their heads down.  Computers are for kids and men, who only operate spreadsheets and monitor the commodities market.  TV is for vegging out with exhaustion after a hard day.  Few can get up enthusiasm for town council meetings, infrastructure meetings of any kind.   They will not join together to make the town computer-friendly.  If surveyed, they say they want to eliminate dust, potholes and chickens. 

The power infrastructure produces “dirty” electricity and every now and then there’s a “brownout” that destroys some machines -- fridge, computers.  The telephone is old and faulty-- lots of wrong numbers, ringing when no one is on the line, etc. 

Power and telephone are operated by cooperatives but they are not TRUE cooperatives because no one has the time, energy or information needed.  3Rivers contracts out  tech support to a Great Falls organization that serves several outfits.  They have a steady stream of techs because of the Air Force base.

The techs are not likely to be local, though computer adept kids are close to being ready, but with those skills they can travel.  Malmstrom people follow orders.  No questions.  They see MAC on something like the same terms as high school rival athletic teams, sort of a necessary evil.

______________

All the prairie states are corrupt.  All states are corrupt. Places where large territories are privately owned (ranches) or leased from the government (ranches) then the power goes to people who have territory (ranches).  Now the problem is not lots of little people who live out to the edges of their income, but corporations who pretend to be people and bend the laws to suit themselves.  They are quite possibly in Japan. They do not join telephone cooperatives.  They might own their own satellites.  (Sat phones work on ranches a lot better than cell phones because of terrain.)

Prairie states are full of legal and technical artifacts  because there is not enough population to insist on updating and because the young tend to leave rather than reform.  Old folks control many institutions for the same reason.  They lose brain grip but deny it.  In their minds, their health is based on endurance and mental health is based on dominance: so long as they can dominate, they’re okay.  They do not want to give up, nor do they want to go to a doc who might be a youngster or a girl.  Sometimes the doc himself is losing it.

Once people get a foothold on corruption, they know where the bodies are buried and can use threats to reveal to deflect regulation.

No one has ever made a study of the many old ranchers, miners, loners, obstinate hermits who have died with no will or family.  Where does the ownership and money go?  Lawyers know.

________________

On the ground floor, this shuffle is shafting people through something they had come to think of as a pleasure, a communal possession, and a safety device in case of national attack. They are surprised, indignant, but they don’t have any connections or power or understanding of what the problem might be.

___________

The economy has now dumped out a lot of potential tech coders into a world they thought would be better because of their college and grad school degrees.  To keep employed because of their massive student loan burden, they are taking dumb jobs that only SEEM like they pay well because rents and food in the area are so high and because their work is grindingly boring.

But the bait is strike-it-rich (the ‘49ers could have told them) brilliant new ideas that will put them on top.  Instead they mostly think up ornamentation that demands more time and attention from users.

The internet is international, universal.  National boundaries will not hold back the predators, even if they are aimed at the nation.  The internet is one of the humanities, just like the arts.  No boundary can hold the humanities.

Power goes to violence as enforcer when the offense is material and the fruits of most piracies are material goods.  So the punishment is also material goods, maybe human bodies or habitations.  Maybe priceless cultural treasures, not sold but destroyed.

We are discovering that, like the relationship between energy and matter, communication translates to structure.  But how?  Terms? Consequences?  DE-struction or CON-struction?  But that’s way too complex and abstract to help an old woman at 4AM caught in a revolving door of passwords.  And must she check yet again to see whether her IP is blacklisted for spam at someone else’s computer?

________________

Maybe I should rethink everything.  Streaming films means being limited to pop trash.  Putting energy into daily blogs means the long manuscripts are neglected.  Maybe I’m too tied to an old-fashioned system or old-fashioned notions of what writing is about.  Maybe my cloistered life is not protected enough.  Maybe it’s TOO guarded and I’m not getting the big picture.  Or maybe it’s not me at all.

All this is over-reacting to a simple common struggle with the internet?  I don’t think so.  It’s just a symptom of something bigger than me, maybe bigger than all of us.  And it’s growing.  I think of global warming.

Almost immediately I get this comment that couldn't be posted:  . . ." I really liked your piece this morning. I tried to make a comment but I was closed out a couple of different ways, proving the point of your writing!"  He used my email, but it is often blacklisted.  I checked Spam.haus.org.  It was okay, but it doesn't list everything.

BURROWS AND BUILDINGS

Once, sitting on the bus on the way to work in Portland, Oregon, passing by the end of one of the many bridges necessary in a river city, my eye was caught by movement.  In a puff of dust, a bundle was ejected from a hole in the dirt under the concrete where the bridge structure met the ground, then a head followed by the rest of a man, levering himself out of the hole with his elbows.  The bus moved on, so I didn’t see him dust off and maybe understand that the bundle was his backpack.  He had found a burrow in order to be safe.

My job was with the Bureau of Buildings which was responsible for plans examination, site development, and the enforcement of laws about code compliance when building and maintenance after that: wiring, plumbing, and the other infrastructure of a dwelling.   A previous job with Multnomah County had been with Animal Control, which meant responding to complaints and emergencies as a specializing county sheriff.  We saw houses with a foot deep accumulation of dog excrement on the floor.  We visited alcoholics or demented old folks with dozens of semi-feral terrified cats bouncing off the walls like popcorn.  People live how and where they can.

My paternal grandparents raised their children on a Dakota homestead.

Here on the high prairie, wood is hard to come by, so the pioneers built soddies, grass sod cut into bricks and piled up, usually against a bank or natural stone wall so as to only have to build three walls.  Few if any are left.  The government required homesteaders to build a house and live on their claim because the point was to populate the prairies.  Living in a ten or twelve feet square with one door and one window, the occupants were like the lodge-dwelling Indians in that they spent as much or more time outside as inside.  There was always a bench or chair just outside the door.

In our times on other continents there are literal miles of tarped shelters one enters on all fours, or plastic tents, shelters for persons displaced en masse by war or disasters.   Bundled up persons live on urban streets where there are many niches and even sources of heat like a steam exhaust.  One might say that their social structures are a kind of architecture, small groups interacting, developing ties among themselves, trying to create continuity and safety.  In our zeal to create nice houses in suburbia, we forget all this.

And still the pressure of population growth means more housing is needed.  Builders love it.  Young plumbers, electricians, roofers and sheet-rockers hardly know how to relate to old buildings.  Housing development is constantly trying to make deals that yield more profit, like pushing down the code rules or denying access to inspectors.

Every change in the culture means a change in the housing.  Strangely, if you can believe the media, we have two movements going on.  One is for bigger and more grand houses in fabulous hard-to-access places, like the edge of a cliff or on an island, as a way of storing wealth and impressing people.  The houses have such vast rooms that housekeeping demands staff that can handle the kind of machinery banks use on their floors and windows.  These houses discourage human communities and even the people who own them only live in them part of the year.  They are nomads who don’t settle for tents.

At the opposite end is the “tiny house” movement, four walls and a roof, so compact that they can be pushed onto a flatbed truck and moved.  Often owner-built, they can be highly idiosyncratic in terms of materials and the ingenuity of the interior.  They respond to singles or compatible couples with no children.

Recently social workers have discovered that what helps people who have fallen through the social trapdoor the most is simply a place of their own, even if it’s only a hotel room. A place to go in and close the door helps more than food, more than new clothing, education or a job. Stabilizing street people means they can be located for monitored meds (for prevention of epidemics like med-resistant TB as much as a benefit for individuals) and the services can go to them instead of making them come to a clinic.  

I rented this house in Browning, MT., in the early Sixties.

Some American cities are now struggling with human feces on sidewalks.  It was bad enough to step in dog poop.  India is beginning to think about the health toll of open human excretion.  One ancient relief has been pariah dogs who eat garbage and excrement -- recycling.   In modern urban communities whole lives are recycled as people go in and out of prison, crammed cells and dorms.

The newest social worker theory is that people who are located in modest but decent housing have a much better chance of recovering from illness, maintaining a regime that discourages addiction and alcoholism, and generally finding traction for lives.  One would think that would have been obvious from the beginning.  Even people living on the street try to take their households with them and generally will try to return to a familiar sleeping spot, even quarrel with “claim-jumpers.”

Portland is a city that includes some major parks, nearly wilderness with miles of hiking paths.  Forest Park, the biggest, is dotted with “hooches” improvised from found materials and ingeniously camouflaged.  Some have been there for years and, since it is Portland, some have bookshelves complete with books.  There are novels about this.

Darrell Kipp, a Blackfeet inspirational leader who is gone now, used to talk about his early work as a sociologist with tribes in the Canadian north east.  The tribes there remained communal, sharing resources, and one tribe had worked out a collection of housing stock that varied from small houses through those that could accommodate extended families.  The people who lived in them did not own the houses, but were assigned according to their needs.  It wasn’t just a matter of Grandma not needing a big house anymore when her nest emptied, but whether she wanted to live in the big house of a descendent or would rather live in a small house nearby.  This was possible because it was a small tribe that knew each other and had stable shared customs.

Housing is only the physical manifestation of human relationship to each other and their terrain.  We tend to treat people as though they could be bulldozed into efficient geometrical formations and infrastructure as though that were the same everywhere.  The expectation is that the people should be grateful and adapt to what is provided.  They say the swarm of immigrants from Central and South America are being housed in empty Walmarts. As cultures we seem to impose the values of the haves on the have-nots and to make what is supposed to be a benefit for the whole into a racket.

Progress is constantly misunderstood as “bigger and better and more powerful.”  In fact, it means fittingness to the circumstances that will sustain survival.  We tend to want to seize people, number them, put identification on them, make lists in computers, and try to force everyone into some kind of Sim City program.  In short, make them into domestic animals and then use the same kind of force and corraling.  We industrialize these prisons.  We dehumanize the occupants.

At some point people will decide whether they can tolerate exclusion, oppression, and regimentation or whether they find it unbearable.  Then they become unmanageable.   To me, one sign of despair is the constant demand for cheap pleasure, junk food, flashy disposable clothing.  Short term investments with no future.  The people do not expect to live very long.

Plastic lilies of the field do not sustain either individual lives or healthy cultures.  The real lilies of the field grow in muddy ditches, their roots down deep.  They are not Easter white, but rather fiery orange.  We find them messy and eliminate them with our herbicides and ploughs.  No one buys bouquets of field lilies.  No one stops to talk to street people.  We ignore things we want to disappear.  Even kids, but esp. people living on the street, sheltering in burrows.