Mr. Smith, A Reconnection Please (pictures)

Today is a bad day. Today is no different than yesterday, nor has anything much changed from a week ago, nothing of significance has transpired to make this day any worse or better than a month ago, but for me today is just really bad. Today more than any before it I would like to stick my head in the sand but I can’t without going to Lacuna Corp first to erase all that I know, or going back 70 years in psychiatric “medicine” to receive a lobotomy thus lacking the ability to think cognitively, so what i really need if for Mr. Smith to reconnect me to the Matrix.

I think somewhere around the my 17th birthday when we were invading a far off country, that we would return to a decade plus a few years later, was when I first became aware of something not being right, something not sitting right between what I was “seeing” and what I feeling. This intuition grew over the following years. During my years at college I noticed the machine’s grasp increase as my loans piled on while I willfully fought institutional education in search of experiential learning.

My “memorial” overlooking Delicate Arch

Over these four years I turned the engineering I was being indoctrinated with on end, by spending summers on the road in the American West growing to love John McPhee’s “Basin & Range[s]“, Edward Abbey’s Slickrock Country & Mark Reisner’s “Cadillac Desert”. I took on western bureaucrats I knew in name only, in their attempts to open Utah’s wilderness to oil shale mining and but one of many attempts to lie the nation into opening ANWR for oil production through letters, phone calls and using my “public debate” courses to expose the bullshit for what they really were.

Souther Utah

I became a vegetarian to protest federal subsidies to western ranchers on public lands, vomiting the first time I went all veggie in Utah’s High Uintas Wilderness where I volunteered, took backpacks to the grocery store prior to “carrying your own cloth bags” became cliche’ to do and was a closet Hayduke in my detest of growth for the sake of growth. “Subvert the dominant paradigm” was not just a bumper sticker analogist to today’s “yellow ribbons”, but a lifestyle I desired and would strive to live for many years against all pressures to constrain me.

My eyes opened to recognize what the world around me really was when at our college “exit interview”, which I expected was to give feedback on how the college’s education prepared me for a life in the real world, was nothing more than a signing festival promising my first born to every bank in the country. I was handed a death sentence equivalent to involuntary manslaughter due to my unintended involvement. I had willingly but ignorantly accepted this conviction every time I signed my Johnnie Hancock to yet another promissory note over the past 4 years, just to receive my piece of paper telling future employers “I had the ability to learn to take orders”.

10 yrs ago, Stevens Arch

The dreams I had to move to the west, work at indentured servitude rates to fight for what I believed in were crushed, reality arrived with an enormous weight upon my shoulders. Luckily, through connections prior to college, I was able to work outdoors in the California foothills to the Sierras with an enormous amount of independence, the irony being the freedom came with a price. The price was rationalizing that which I did not ideologically believe in, promoting the wholesale removal of all trees under the electric lines, to justify the saving of entire forests from destruction by wildfire, fires that can easily be started from those same line. I knew I had achieved what I had rationalized was OK for me to do, when flying from Sacramento to Colorado, I misidentified one of the lines I had cleared of all trees as a road that paralleled the river, not my work work itself, all from 25,000 feet up. To me it was the same sense of accomplishment and awe one has when they hear “The Great Wall” can be seen from space. Although, neither was I in space, nor the wall being able to be seen from space, it was possible for one person to impact the planet, let alone the effects of 6 billion other people.

“Controlled” fire behind house out of control

I battled & clawed to pay off that small fortune of debt by mailing in checks ten times the schedule payment month after month, working this same job all over California from the North Coast to San Diego. Part of that existence was under “normal” living the American Dream false pretenses, others not so much so. Near the middle I lived for 3 months with my brown Lab, Boreal, in my van overlooking Bodega Bay. We waited endlessly to be released from a system-wide project, which I was promoted to due to my amazing ability to “justify” that which I didn’t believe, who’s budget was being cut before it was ever started. This resulted in my needing a “real” living situation, i.e., another employer. Two thousand five hundred miles later after working only 4 days for my new employer in the shithole of the earth, Tri-Cities, Washington, I begged for my job back and “luckily” ended up in San Diego making bank, accelerating my ability to pay my debt.

I had broke the capsule most are willing to accept for 20 years, gasped a huge breath of freedom, and was disconnecting the cables as fast as I could, telling my father who retired October, 1999 after 30 years of work for GM, that I too was retiring after 3 years that same month. From that point forward I was continually on the run, accountable to no body and responsible for only myself, and although I was aware there was in fact a Matrix, I for the most part did not attempt to fight it as it was prior to January of 2001.

Boreal in the base of a Giant Sequoia, Arnold, Ca

My “early retirement” achieved, I embarked on a journey without a destination, leaving the claustrophobia I suffered in San Diego and where my best friend, Boreal, who walked up a hill and into a car losing his young life, left me completely devastated.

I started in the Owens River Gorge for a month of climbing; into Oregon to visit friends and new places, like Smith Rock & a cloudy Crater Lake; up into Washington to see the monstrosity Grand Coulee dam which damned the Columbia River salmon, into Montana to witness a transforming demographic 10 years prior to a John Tester and a potential blue state was thought possible, seeing friends in Missoula & another in Bozeman, who desired not much more than to live in a “Yurt” and achieved it several years ago; down into the beauty of Capital Reef, Utah for a canned ham Thanksgiving’s day dinner and finally to Crested Butte, Colorado for the winter. I lived with a friend from college, whom shared those same beliefs as I, but left college after 1 year to “experience learning” and to this day I believe he is still doing the same amongst squalid conditions but he is happy.

w/ friends in Colorado, orange boat is me

The winter snow piled deep, life was simple. Make a few bucks working in a restaurant, meeting President Jimmy Carter when he was in town and sensing the greatest appreciation from our work when the “Disabled Veterans Winter Olympics” came to the mountain to enjoy the life “we” lived. The pressures on the small mountain dirtbag town started that year, where the mantra of the cancer cell, “growth for the sake of growth” kicked in and the family owned resort was bought out by Club Med. I haven’t been back since, but I know where it has gone, seeing it on “The Hills” where high fucking society people move there with zero appreciation for the place, nor interest in the boundless recreation it provides, simply because they have the money to do so.

W/ the Gang in Colorado, me furthest left

Spring arrived, my van was thawed from under the snow, and an urge arrived to return to some roots I laid down upon arrival in California. A love for river kayaking, one that had been squelched by movement and chasing the dollars to get out of debt. Days past with nothing more required than several hours on the water losing a few cat’s lives in the process, flip-flops on the feet, sun on the shoulders, a cooler as a fridge and a cell phone to a) let the family know I was still alive, & b) more importantly make sure I had people to kayak with. The states flew by as well, traveling from Colorado to Idaho, where one of my cat lives was lost (picture below), into New Mexico, back to California (another cat life lost), east to West Virgina, north to my home state of New York, up into Canada and ultimately into South America, Ecuador & Peru (link to my about page & specifically “The Era of GW Bush Arrives”).

N. Fork Payette River, 17 miles of Class V! That’s me buried in the gnarl!

During all this time, these years that had past, I was without a television and without internet. Any time I considered getting a computer, so that I could be connected to the growing world of the Internet, I recalled back in college having a 286 with 2Mb of ram as a part of our tuition, and all that I would do was spend endless hours & pull all-nighters playing “Civilization” instead of studying. This was of course when I wasn’t in the Adirondack Mountains living what I dreamed about. I knew my personality was addictive and one tracked, whatever I would do, I would throw myself into it fully and without exception.

When I started my business three years ago, I decided to get married about 3 months into the startup, found a nice house to rent from which to be “happy” and operate a business, and to bring it all together, needed to have fucking cable TV to get the Internet that was needed for the work to be successful. I piled commitment, upon commitment onto my shoulders. Whether it was completely willful or a mix of need and want, I could sort through, but it is what it is now…a complete overwhelming of my existence. My marriage suffered because of my business success, while the success of my business suffered due to problems within my marriage. To say they are linked to all the information that continually invades my sponge like brain would be an understatement, while at the same time I would love to blame the TV for everything but can’t knowing I would find out my information elsewhere.

Me taking down a giant pine tree

I find myself now after a year of running my business into the ground by burying my head in the sand of mindless internet games, my accounts equally in the red as they were in the black a year ago, living in a nice house I despise as I can’t do a damn thing to it, yet find it impossible to rationalize the justification for buying a house when I envision a complete meltdown of the US dollar & economy. Everyday, I try to find a little good to pick me up, but the constant influx of more information, more battles with people over Ideological values versus preserving our ability to survive on this planet, more bullshit gossip on the “news” networks and yet one more story of how fucked up things really are, just makes me want to scream! It will do no good however.

I had hope & found some inspiration with Obama being our President, and looked to come out of this mess a couple months ago, yet found this absurd battle between but another of the masses who favors “entitlement” over the reality around them, crushing that budding optimism for a better future. To put hope in one man is probably absurd, and the blogger, Lobotero, constantly reminds me to temper my expectations, but I can’t do so. I just cannot take the injustice, trivial gossip that forms the judgments of so many people in this country, and the fucking denial by so many millions that the fan is on and the bucket of shit is already tipping over in the fan’s direction.

The era of cheap gas in America is over, that was 4 or 5 years ago and it is not returning regardless of where we drill or which country we import our oil from. Those years were what I described above, and regardless of my mental entrapment now, I could not return to those days even if I threw away everything I owned and just went and did it. The world is changing whether we like it or not, we all have changed the world, and for those of you in denial wake the fuck up, because we have set in motion many things that cannot be stopped. The time bomb ticks away, but it is no longer just about defusing one bomb, it is about defusing many where the wiring is completely inaccessible. Some of these bombs will go off and they do not have to do it all at once, but rather they will be slow release, just like the medicines we are prescribed because the doctor can’t take more than 5 minutes to see what is truly wrong with you.

The shit storm is ahead, paddle towards it or run away like it doesn’t exist is each of our own choices. I’d like to attack it head on and try to mitigate it some, but there is a tide of entitlement, arrogance, indoctrination, Ideology, religious conviction & billions of dollars fighting myself and like minded people. This has to end, or we will end. Reality and the planet will trump every belief and every dollar spent to continue the denial.

Fuck, I got to go. Like I said, Mr. Smith just plug me back in…..

[all images minus the last two are my own, please credit or link if you are going to use them]