After the last six months, it's practically taboo to say anything negative about Water from the Sky, however cold, long delayed, and inconvenient it may be...

We are coming out of a Dry Season. This is what it feels like... this right now is what it feels like to pop out of the other end of a Dry Season (...and straight into the Teeth of Winter, but let's not focus on That just now...) But still.... it has been awfully dry, with a high risk of fire, for so long, it's like there's this collective letting-go of a breath. Some unspoken tension is now released, like ears popping at high altitude on heads that only a moment before had believed the world really sounded that way...

A buddy of mine says Clinton is taking the issues and controversies of the sixties on his back like some sort of weird christ figure, whom his enemies will rip apart in a frenzy of righteous indignation, thus putting a generation of Americans off their food.... Like we gave the Republicans enough rope and they proved they were a lynch mob at heart. He thinks Clinton really does represent the New Paradigm.... I guess maybe I'm AFRAID of what it means if Clinton really does represent the New Paradigm. I think he does for progressives (term used broadly) now what Teddy Roosevelt did for the "Progressives" of his "Progressive Era:" co-opt their language, and then stab them in the back. He has sold out civil rights, human rights, and the environmental agenda. I think he has sold out down the river every group that ever supported him, except possibly the Chinese. Think about it. Are Gays and Lesbians better off now or worse off since Uncle Bill decided that the military was the place to fight the battle for Gay rights: right in the very Nerve Center of macho-straight- asshole-dom. Why? He might as well have insisted on Gay rights in college sports, or NASCAR, or the Moose Lodge. Why didn't he do the "policy wonk" thing, as we had been led to expect, by having policies favorable to, say, Gay people, just sort of massaged into the regulation of work places or bank loans or property settlements or some such, all on-the-quiet like? Why instead did he walk right up to the biggest hornet's nest in the barn and stir it up using gay people as the stick? Was he doing gay people a favor? I don't think so. So now it seems as though there's more gay bashing than there was, say, ten years ago (I'll have to get the Research Department ; ) on finding some actual numbers that back up whatever I wanted to say anyway) So violence against actual Gays is pretty high, but we have to weigh that against his support of "hate crime" legislation... which means that when the perpetrators are actually prosecuted, they may be prosecuted "extra" because whoever they beat up or killed was socially different from them, and it will be a big Media Thing, and these people will become focal points for all kinds of hatred and resentment that has nothing whatever to do with their crime, heinous though that crime may have been. Inevitably, from the point of view of a "simple working man," hate crime prosecution starts to look like somebody being punished extra because they did what they did to somebody "special." By comparison, it seems like when I have been a victim of crimes, not only did the police NEVER find the persons responsible for ANY of the incidents, but even if they did catch somebody, then it's unlikely I'd ever rate Special, so the people who wronged me did not do as wrong a thing as if they had wronged someone else in exactly the same way. (Or that's the way it seems.) At the end of the day, it really starts to look like there are these "special" people who somehow deserve extra protection of the law in the name of equality. Now, don't get me wrong. I agree completely with the idea of advancing the rights of all openly odd people of whatever stripe to coexist peacefully where they are able and lawfully where they are not. But I think that hate crime laws are STUPID because I think that the good they do is outweighed by the way it looks to Steven Gaskins' proverbial "Honest Square."

1-2-99
Yep, nothing like a little rant to get the year off right. I could go on, but anyone who is interested can think it through themselves: is there any liberal or progressive cause that has actually benefited in a net way from what Clinton has done? Or is my suspicion correct that he has hurt us as bad as Reagan did.

Went out in the storm for awhile. The wind here... how can I explain it? Well, let's just say that the irregular surface of the mountains makes air do funny things just like it would if, say, water were bounced off of it. It is possible to see and hear a particular wind go by and never actually feel it. Small whirlwinds are not uncommon...
Wind tonight is from the south and south east, where the warm wet air is... ocean air. Sky is bright with the near full moon even through the storm, like a pervasive glow, reflected off the snow on the ground... hardly need to even summon the Witch Light...
Yutzed with the page. Added images-- cool fractals generated with fractint. There is much to be learned from contemplation of fractals. Makes the load up really slow though... Ah well. We'll leave it off the Journal here, leave that plain text.... Who knows? Maybe cached copies of these early early Arcadia Katwood pages will one day be cherished, like original copies of the Principia are cherished... among those like myself who are connoisseurs of their fantasies of social change.

In the Seam of the Storm
Wind howls and ice flies
But still, the air is Warm

In daylight went and saw ice formations on creek: teeth of the ice dragons long ones in rows like daggers under rocks, bulbous molars on tops of rocks. Irregular bulbous ice formation in the Cauldron. Got me thinking about fire and ice in Norse cosmos...

Anniversary. Willow and I moved in to this house on 1-1-96. We were greeted almost immediately with a record-setting winter storm. I cut and hauled fire wood in knee-deep snow. We ate venison, listened to short-wave broadcasts (which gave an eerie apocalyptic caste to the whole thing) stayed high and giggled about what the normals put up with in terror of the exact life style we were embracing...

1-3-99
Heard a radio report about Amish people using cellular telephones. (The Amish are a European derived Christian sect living mainly in Pennsylvania characterized by their rejection of some Twentieth Century technologies, such as automobiles or electricity in the home.) It seems that years ago, the Amish reached a compromise about telephones: they put phones shanties beside the fields which could be used to make calls out only, and only for business. Now they have discovered that cel phones are virtually indispensable in some of the businesses they are in, like construction. So eventually they will have to reach a consensus on cellular telephones too. One of the sound bites from one of the Amish guys really hit me, because I'd been thinking along the same lines, but did not know anyone else felt the same way.

"It's not just what a technology allows you to do. It's the kind of person you become when you use the technology." (or words to that effect.)

This is something Marshall McLuhan goes on about in some pretty far-out detail in _Understanding the Media_ 1964, in which he predicted all of this: the Web, the collapse of time and space, the end of the Typological Age... (Let's don't get Started.)

THE POINT: The Technology You Use Changes You.

So, if living the Magikal life (or whatever) has to do with Active Nurture and Control of Personal Development, then each of us has an obligation to examine the technologies we use in life and the ways they change us. We should look at technologies in our lives as if they were drugs, each with its own effects, some subtle and others less so, and we should try to get clear of the technologies that change us in ways inconsistent with our goals, while emphasizing "techno-symbiosis" where doing so seems to help.

1-4-99
The creek is running a good foot above where it was last Fall-- about where it is normally this time o'year. Water runs over the brow of the Dragon, making it look like he is crying. I washed in the tears of the Dragon.
What are Dragon tears like? Cold.
Ice has melted in the Cauldron and the waterfall that feeds it is running high. Over it leans a small Witch Hazel tree (the Hag that Stirs the Cauldron... an archetype that also refers to the moon, Luna, the Hag that Stirs the Cauldron of the Seas whence life came. Computer modeling has shown that life as we know it is far less likely on planets without a moon like ours to cause regular tides -- to stir the Cauldron.
The full Moon a few days ago was almost directly overhead at midnight, right where the Sun will be come high Summer, when the Moon will follow the path the Sun does now, low in the Southern sky and diving into the ridge.
Wet or ice-covered tree branches look like a gossamer halo around the moon, and it does not really matter what kind of tree you look through, you still get that pearlescent tunnel effect... I figured it has to do with the way the light reflects... I could not explain it without Mr. Whoopee's Three Dimensional Black Board... (Uh gee Tennessee, I don't think we ought to go into a discourse on optics right now, especially since we don't really know anything about it.) Anyway, it works. Check it out. Look for the halo of pearlescence around a gibbous Moon on a Winter night when the small branches are wet or icy.
Mata Syra Zjemlja, or Moist Mother Earth has returned... Leave it to us Poles and Slavs and Russians to deify mud, but hey. Mud has saved our people from invasion more than once. We Don't Knock Mud. I'm still waiting on Datura's Article about compost and the Dark Mother, but this is related. The magic of Earth is to transform death and feces back into vibrant green life. That's what the mud does. (The magic of Fire, by contrast is to take something that used to be alive and turn it to ashes, releasing all at once the potential energy it built up living.)

Creek water is not clear. It's still doing the left-over cleansing work from all the months of drought. But sometimes, like in the first good Fall storm, when the creek rises suddenly raising a whole season's worth of spent pollen off the bottom and washing it down, then the creek gets this red-brown hue that looks downright menstrual. Right now it's a little more greenish than brown. Leaves still wash down singlely. This did not happen the last few years, as there has always been a hurricane in the Fall that washed all of the leaves out of the creek bed. But before the storms, the creek is a delicate tea of the leaves of different kinds of trees, and the trees that live down in the creek bed, with their roots stuck straight out into this tea, they seem to me to regard themselves as a cut above other trees. Once, when a windstorm had blown over one of these "trees on the edge" I tuned in to the other ones for signs of sympathy, but found none. They regarded their fallen comrade as someone who had gotten greedy, had aligned its roots for optimal nutrition instead of optimal stability (all trees have to work this compromise) ... anyway, they seemed to take an attitude that "It can't happen to me, and what if it does?"

The sky is never so blue as in Winter, and even the trees have some color if you tune into it; the pre-buds of different tree species are different colors, and you can see this even at a distance, as subtle dustings of different colors.

1-5-99
Venus is rising.
According to Stardate, Venus will become visible in the night sky tonight, about 1 hour after sunset, low in the south west. She is supposed to rise from that position (if I heard the report right. I have not cross-checked this with anything.) over the next few weeks or months. I think that makes her retrograde, since she's moving west to east, and that could be bad news, but we'll let that go for a minute. I subscribe to a primitive experiential form of astrology, in that I have noticed that the planets actually visible in the sky seem to have influence. When Mars enters the sky, look for ego and bombast to play a role in things. When he leaves the sky, things cool down. When Venus enters the sky, romance starts getting good (or should; I mean, the potential is there...) and when she leaves the sky, its uncanny how many romances seem to just fizzle out. Jupiter's influence seems to be broadly beneficent, though I have not really studied him much. Saturn is the disciplinarian of the lot, far colder and more subtle than Mars. When people say "the devil is in the details," he's the one they are talking about. Saturn is an overdraft notice, and the mathematical precision with which the bank can tell you exactly how broke you really are, exactly how you got there, and exactly what will happen if you don't get this straightened out Right Now. Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto can't really be seen the way the others can, and I think we feel their influences in ways we may not attribute to them. That leaves Mercury, the innermost planet, which can sometimes be seen right near the Sun, carries the fast-moving and fast changing energy of the intellect unencumbered.

1-6-98
"You must be careful what you pretend to be because in the end, you are what you pretend to be."
Kurt Vonnegut in Mother Night
"We tend to become what we pretend to be."
C.S. Lewis

EXCERPTED FROM A LETTER TO A FRIEND.
Been trying to see things as a friend calls it "an octave up" or to me, in "mythic" terms.
Clinton is a sacrificial goat. On him go all the hate and recriminations of the Viet Nam Era. All of the resentment of the elders against the noisy and self-righteous brats of the baby boom generation... [JFK was the first of his generation to go to the presidency too. Was his sacrificial death "necessary" on some mythic level before his generation could be taken seriously as Supreme Head Alpha Male Honcho O' de Whole Shootin' Match material. FDR died in office too. Was he the first of his generation? Wilson? McKinley? The Aztec gods are still with us: go to a bar and dare to question anything that "our boys paid for with blood" and you'll soon be paying with even more blood. {Our emperor does TOO have clothes on, you little bitch, now shut up before we sedate you.} ... Uh, Clinton, yeah. He's got this tar baby quality about him. Attacking him is irresistible to his enemies, and having done so they "end up" with their ugly and vulnerable and smelly parts exposed for all to see. He will suffer, and I predict he may well actually die. He may even end up being the one that "dies and comes back..." Man. That would put a bee in some bonnets!

Concern about hypocrisy, though, I am beginning to see, comes partially from taking things too literally. Most people in the real world do not say anything like what they think is "literally" true. Instead they sing songs to one another, which convey messages like "I'm on your side," or "You are not special enough to be on my side," or "Yep, we sure are better than them." or "I'm sure glad we all got hooked up with the side of Right and Good;" "Yes, you're right: everybody who disagrees with us is a Candidate for Removal by the Higher Power..." and so on. The stuff we talk about, "issues" this and "issues" that is of virtually no relevance. It is simply an excuse for us to go on sounding off at one another with our various signaling devices. It's like a carrier wave. This becomes extremely apparent in romantic situations, where people meet and talk for hours, and those hours become a cherished memory, but neither party can remember more than a sentence or two of what was said. That is because what is said DOES NOT MATTER.

Y2k:
This 2 will pass.
Things will get weird for awhile.
Terrorists will strike.
All who harness the power of mass fear will capitalize on this moment.
The net will crash temporarily.
Banks and markets will shut down temporarily.
Martial law may even be declared temporarily. (Very bad for business, let's hope.)
The president may well be neither Clinton nor Gore. Watch Speaker.
But civilization is a hard habit to break.
Business is business. Even if all of the major currencies collapse, the knowledge of how to do credit banking, and the expectation on the part of rich or formerly rich consumers will remain. They will have something patched together again in no time, and that's in a worst case scenario.
Rest of it's the same. Just because authority collapses does not mean that the habit of looking for an Alpha to obey will disappear. Sheep like people will seek out exploiters willing to tell them whatever they want to hear, so the charismatic and unscrupulous will have followers and resources... just as they do now.

No.
When that 2 passes, things will lighten up a bit, after the Jesus-Gasm-Interuptus that comes when the rapture resolutely fails to happen. (Though we keep praying, "Jesus, take your People Away to that Heaven which is Like Church Only More So, and leave this beautiful Planet to those who care about it and know how to have a good time on it sustainably. Amen.) After the craziness... there may be a different ruling clique, but still the country will look about the same, since it's the American Consumption Orgy that keeps the world economy going. No rich person has any interest in putting a damper on American indulgence... far from it.

I do landscaping, carpentry, rock work. Anybody want a small megalith? Tonnage costs. How much stone do you want? Anybody want a water garden with Arcadian rock, with a kitchen herb garden planted by Dan and Terry and a cook book by Terry of recipes involving the particular herbs in the garden? All it takes is money...
Ask around.

The Next Day.

Shit happens. Really.
Every living thing produces shit of some sort: some sort of concentrated waste excretion, the stuff it emphatically does NOT need in order to go on living. Everything shits, monerans, protists, fungi, plants, animals. Stars die because they drown in the products of their reactions. Idea systems are overturned when the weight of the questions they can't answer overbalances them...
Indeed, Shit Happens.
I hit upon this thought (call it what you will) when I was wrestling with the question, "does Evil exist?"
The concept of Evil, though, is so subjective that the whole question is kinda nonsensical: so there are things in ourselves and the world that are ugly and that we don't like. Should we call them Evil with a capital E and fight tooth and claw to rid reality of these demons and goblins? Looking at it this way, life becomes a Battle of Good against Evil... where everybody fights everybody else each believing himself or herself to be "Good" and all others to be variously "Evil." The Honest and Cherubic Goodnik then is going to condemn as Evil only those his or her Commanding Officer says, or those who break some uniform code of thought or conduct. (In other words, the Honest Goodnik is a hypocritical flaming asshole who cannot think for himself.) What he calls "his morality" is neither his nor is it morality: it is a whip of oppression which is wielded by the priest, the cop, the boss, the politician, the "father figure" generally. It is power: the power to say, "Get back in line, you Evil Doer, before all of us good clean moral types have a spasm of Righteousness and turn you into our next scapegoat." Thus does Evil flow from Good. Thus you get the two-edged "truth" of the christian crucifix: that on the one hand, this Jesus is an example of how to live a godly life, and on the other hand, it's an example of what the church, the state, and even your own friends will do to you if you ever DARE to step out of line. Which message was more clear, do you suppose, to a medieval peasant, sitting in some freezing chapel, listening to droning liturgics in a language he did not understand, with that ever-present poor schnook on a cross staring back at him? The smart peasant learned fast, "never question the guy in the funny hat, or you will end up like the guy on the cross."
So Evil presented numerous difficulties in terms of coming up with a definition that made it a testable question. Soon it was apparent that the answer to the question "Does Evil Exist?" depends entirely on the definition of Evil: Define it one way and it's the very glue that holds civilization together. Define it another and it doesn't REALLY exist at all: e.g. to a rabbit, a coyote is Evil, and to a mouse a cat is Evil; even if an entire race of demonic reptile critters were hunting and preying on humans in the spirit realm (a proposition I do not dismiss out of hand) would they really be Evil in any absolute metaphysical sense? Any more Evil than any other predator, or than Humans are in their roles as hunter, farmer, and slave owner?
Nah. Forget Evil. Too slippery. Shit, though, is tangible and undeniable. It exists all up and down the food chain, and so it's not some sort of "humans only" conceit. And the existence of shit in this way indicates that the Universe or Multiverse is constructed in such a way that everything produces something it must then get way from. To be alive at all is to shit and stink every now and again. There are no exceptions. So whining to the gods about shit or Evil makes as much sense as whining about Time or Gravity or any of the other Basic Parameters of the Known Universe. Evil is not an opponent to be beaten, but a test to be met.

Saturday
The punch line is, everything that's shit to one thing is food to something else. If this holds true in the biological world, then I would expect to find it in the "macrocosm" as well....

Nuff o' That

Spoke with Tamriel last night. It seems the huge Pecan Tree that loomed to the south of the farmhouse at Katwood for at least the last 150 years, and which smote the farmhouse a few years back with a branch of much tonnage, has in fact Fallen Over.
And not only that.
It fell over in such a way that Nothing was damaged. If it had gone over differently in any particular, then it would have hit either the electric lines, the out house, the stable, the farmhouse, the herb garden, or the nursery.
But it missed all of that by scant inches. In fact, before the ice storm, one dead branch of the tree was actually resting on the electric line. As the tree fell, this branch was lifted off the wire, and missed it completely.

It's saddening when a big tree goes down, but less so when it is one that threatens to fall on your house.

My plan is to borrow a high powered chain saw asap and head down there to start cutting it up. Much good firewood, since a lot of it was dead.

So Katwood has a back yard now, as soon as we clear it out, and this opens the possibility of some sort of solar setup.

The quick plan, to protect the back of the house (where the kitchen is) from the summer sun, is to build an arbor and get some grapes or some other quick vine growing on it.

Have installed a Web Counter.

1 12 99
Well it appears that 1999 has cleared the trees at the end of the runway and is underway. There is no turning back now, as it were, unless we're going to drop it in the swamp.
It's getting so I cannot even listen to the news of the mundane. The fnords come thick and fast, and talking heads babble incoherent nonsense.
Everyone is ignoring the Impeachment proceedings, demographically speaking, except for white people over 40 with money. Of course, as far as they are concerned they ARE America, and everybody else is just fringe.
But what about the rest of us? How can we not be drawn into the Drama of the Century? It's just like O J except all the blood is Iraqi. Nobody knows what the majority of people think because pollsters don't ask follow-up questions on those who say they don't know and don't care (the majority.) Normally these answers are read as ignorance and apathy and not commented on much by news people except as evidence that more people ought to pay more attention to more news (but what do you expect them to say? I mean, the dairy association wants you to drink more milk, too.)
So it's anybody's guess just what's spinning in the minds of most of us, the Unimportant Majority Who Don't Care (UMWDC)tm.
I can only tell you what's going on in mine:
1.) They won't remove Clinton unless they can do Gore too.
2.) People whose names are never on the news make the real decisions, (and it's not us.) Once they figure out what to do next, that's what will happen, and it will be marketed to the public with the usual sticky sweet soap opera drama.
3.) So there's nothing to do now but wait and see... and prepare.

Day before yesterday I saw a strange sight. It was a 20" water snake next to Lada's Spring, where I get my drinking water. What was strange about it was seeing it in January.
All I can figure is that it went into some hole or crevice in the rocks to hibernate back during the drought. Subsequent rain made it uncomfortably damp in there, and on the first day that seemed warm, it went looking for a better place to sleep. It was sunning itself next to the water of the spring when the weather turned and the temperature dropped. It was pretty slow when I found it, as snakes get in the cold, and I was able to get it away from the spring.

Begun work on my End-Times Hypernovel & Surrealist Extravaganza. Will post the first chapter sometime in the next few days.

1-15-99
Rough weather lately. Seems I've been inside a lot. Martin & Ginnie were here, with lurid tales of Pakistani owned crack motels in the Carolina wilderness, then just as suddenly, they split for Kentucky.
Saw "Wild at Heart:" David Lynch does a luv story. It's like "Natural Born Killers" meets "Blue Velvet" with the "Wizard of Oz" as subtext. Good music.
Saw "War of the Buttons." Rival gangs of Irish children fight a "war" in which nobody really gets hurt. Funny and entertaining, mythic, and filled with insight about group dynamics and human conflict.... and great scenery. Maybe a new favorite.

Added Datura's and Daniel's writings last night. Really good stuff. Embarrasses me a little.
Tracked down the transcript of the Earth & Sky radio show that talked about the use of industrial waste (containing heavy metals and other toxins) in making fertilizer. They do this in the name of "recycling." If you are a producer of toxic waste, you can call it toxic waste and pay big bucks to dispose of it, or you can (at least sometimes) call it "industrial by-product" and sell it to a fertilizer company. Apparently, just about all commercial fertilizer has this stuff in it, (since Washington state decided to set standards of acceptable levels for dioxin and a few of the other well known killers, and the industry responded by just not selling their products in Washington. Most of the companies have just written it off.) Peletized limestone, for example, comes from smoke stack scrubbers... And I know I have personally spread hundreds of pounds of that stuff with my bare hands.
Currently, there are no standards as to what the "inert materials" in fertilizers are, except in Washington state, where most kinds of lawn food and other standard consumer fertilizer products are no longer available.
What this means is that we as a culture are systematically spreading toxic waste where we grow food and in the yards where our children play. Check it out. Living On Earth Transcripts look at Dec 25 1998.

Well, it will be a cold day in Hell when the Virginia legislature addresses this problem, since the opposition will turn it into a jobs issue, somehow, and Virginians have shown again and again that they care more about their jobs than about whether their children are being poisoned.

And the national government is far too wrapped up in the "impeachment" pageant to care.

1 19 99
Another very cool set of digits.
"WHEN THE GOING GETS WEIRD, THE WEIRD TURN PRO."
HS Thompson.
So Beorn becomes a computer tech. What do I know about computers? Well, I can bolt in components as well as anybody else. And I can run scandisk. And I can install software, and follow the directions, like anybody else. And I can Learn.

Going for hi surrealism here: listening to NPR coverage of Clinton's State of the Union Address and the Church of the Subgenius Hour of Slack #637b (last one before X Day.)
So there's Nina Totenberg filling time before the Big Moment, and Ivan Stang going on about the X-ists coming in the Pleasure Saucers to Rupture the Subgenii to Planet X. The applause continues: soft pink hands of politicians getting a workout... (NPR would be set up on the Dem side, so their mics would probably pick up more applause than the mics of, say, Pat Robertson's network.

[What follows is the transcript of a "creative merging" of these two audio inputs. All the words below come from one or the other of them, except where followed by "ed." And corrected only for spelling... and some cutting and pasting]

1-27-99
Been working some more on the above for the last hour or so. I'm liking it. I'm proud of it. I think it's worth the effort of reading (hell, I even think it's worth the effort of WRITING it...
Also, I have located the essay I wrote in college about Expert Power, and will key it in when I feel so inclined and have the time.
I've been working full time and on Saturdays too, lately, learning the trade of fixing PC's and coping with the people who own them...

27 is one of my favorite numbers: 3 x 3 x 3 or three cubed.... two digits add up to 9, as with all multiples of 9. It's a happy number, fair a-giggle with music.

The Road to Wellville: super film. Shocking expose' of early history of Kellogg Co against backdrop of 19th century "Health Movement," which seems to have consisted mainly of sexually frustrated rich people. Matthew Broderick, Anthony Hopkins.

12899
Company I've been working for for two weeks was sold today. I could end up working for the new owners, or I could stay with my boss, or it's possible neither one will want me, since I'm only a trainee.
I guess we'll just have to see.
Cards say I'll emerge with a "secure position."
That could be good.
It doesn't really feel like work, since it doesn't hurt to do it.
Or I could end up doing something else.
Who knows?

Applause...
 

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