Celebrated Imbolg alone yesterday, in May Pole circle. Blessed Tools by Lada & Leszi (link to Slavic Magick )
Moved some rocks around on path to Spring. It was a beautiful day.

Life goes on

2-2-99
Quote for the day.
I used to write so others might understand my genius after I die. But now it's just the opposite: I write so that I myself might understand my stupidity while I'm still alive.

2-3-99
Slavery has been abolished as a legal practice in most of the world, and that's a good thing. In the Ancient World, military conquerors would return to their home city-state leading lines of bound captives. These slaves were considered the spoils of war no less than treasure looted from an enemy. Most of them were women and children, since full-grown men were considered too dangerous. Thorstein Veblen, the 19th Century American economist / philosopher / sociologist, theorized that slave women taken captive from neighboring tribes were the very first form of individual private property held by humans. Early human warriors went forth to rape and pillage and bring back slaves. The bravest warriors naturally got the finest slaves. In a primitive community, Veblen and many others assume, everything of value was either commonly owned or it was sacred, which is another kind of common ownership.
I picture the very first band of warriors returning for the first time with the first slaves to a primitive community of humans with no concept of private property, nor of caste. Of course, these slaves cannot be accepted into the community as equals. After all, they are strangers, and they have reasons to be enraged at the tribe with which they live. Let us bear in mind that the conquering tribe are all the same blood. They are relatives. They are inbred. They have all known each other all their lives. These first slaves may have been the first "strangers" this community has ever seen. What is the solution? A special status must be invented, consciously or otherwise, for these people. Collectively, the slaves will be given a low status, lower than children. Individually, each slave would be associated strongly with the particular warrior whose trophy she or he was......
.................The First Wife.

(That would mean that marriage is not a form of possession, but rather possession is a form of marriage...)

[yeah yeah yeah....whatever]

And I rattle on in Netscape Composer even as I go online to upload...

2 4 99
Just got home from work. Gonna go out in the windstorm and roll around some. Lately, I've been working in nerd clothes, and had to worry about dirt on clothes for the first time in many years. I hate having to live in fear of brushing against something dirty. I really hate it. Makes my fur bristle and my shoulders swell.
Luv a good storm. Luv it. Luv it. Luv it.

Yesterday I got the new Deed in the mail. I am now the sole owner of the 25 acres that comprise Arcadia (in the physical plane.) My ex wife's name is no longer on the paper as co-owner.
Thanks, Denise.
I never would have moved here if you had not insisted on it, and I owe you for that, because I love living here. I owe you for leaving, too, since I think we're both better off this way.
Peace, Freedom, Strength, & Joy to you in your new life.
Blessed Be!

Beorn

2 5 99
Today is Friday... or else I'm going to have a real rude awakening when I get to work.

*Homesteader's Trick*
People pay big money for soapstone wood stoves. They cost 2-4 times as much as an all steel stove of similar appearance. In this area, they used to quarry black/grey soapstone, which is a wonderful craft material, since you can carve it with a belt sander, a dremmel tool, a file, and some sand paper. But soapstone is also a heat sink. It takes it a long time to heat up, and then a long time to cool down. Best of all, it was used for decades as a patio stone, so when you find soapstone, it's usually cut into slabs 1" to 3" thick.
So I have about 50lbs of soapstone on top of my stove. The stove stays hot for several hours after the fire is out. (No more getting up at 2 am to build another fire so's it's not FREEZING in the morning.)

Not all homesteaders luck out and live near a source of soapstone, but the principles remain: add mass to your wood stove, and you will be warmer. Try blue stone slabs, (the current patio rock du jour,) fire bricks, whatever has mass and does not burn. If your stove does not have a inner lining of fire bricks, then make one. (Dan & Datura learned this trick after they'd had their unlined stove for a number of years.)

A slab of soapstone added on top of a kerosene heater helps, too. It changes the quality of the heat in a way I can't explain... (only on the kind of heater that's hot on top...)

2 6 99
Radio says Bronx Police put 41 bullets into an unarmed man last night.
Where are the monuments to those killed by the police?
There are none, except the memorials spray painted in certain alleys in our major cities. They aren't in the Michelin Guide.

You can't blame the police. They are "doing their job." And their job is to keep the population under control which is not rich . Their job is to use as much force and guile as is necessary to keep the underlings from getting uppity.

In the Uncle Remus stories, there is dread toward people called "pater-rollers." This was slave-speak for "patrollers," white bullies hired to patrol the plantation at night and make sure the slaves stayed in their homes. In effect, they enforced the curfew.

Most white southerners see the police in the same light as their ancestors saw the pater-rollers in: at worst an evil necessary for "orderly" society. (Order means everybody knows who they have to kiss up to, and they do it. That's what's behind this "civility" thing too: the great grand children of plantation owners are not getting the respect they think they are due form the great grand children of slaves and share croppers.) Police brutality is brushed off with a shrug and a wink, since the whites know it will never happen to them....

Most white southerners are far more worried about what will happen if the brutality ever ends than if it does not: without the police to crack the heads of the uppity, southern whites might be thrust into a world where everyone is free and equal, and where they will have to pay the price for the evils that built their cherished "way of life."

Slavery is still with us. Nowadays it's the Mexicans. Rather than send slave catchers into Africa, always an expensive and dangerous operation, they strong-arm the Mexican government into signing NAFTA, and then torpedo the Mexican economy. The Peso crashes, and PRESTO! A whole nation of slaves. Instead of hiring "pater-rollers" to catch slaves trying to escape, they hire the grandchildren of "pater-rollers" to catch the slaves trying to get IN. Illegal Mexican workers have no rights at all. If their employers steal their money, they have no recourse to the law. Even the legal ones have to live in fear of deportation: no rich white american is going to shed a tear because a legal Mexican got deported by "mistake." Of course the "mistake" may well be asking his boss for the money he promised.
On the other hand, without the Mexicans, we'd have to pay what food really costs in a free market... and it would be a lot more. So it's not that a few greedy rich people are keeping the US anchored firmly in traditional values (read: 19th Century values.) It's more as though virtually all of us would take a serious hit on our lifestyles if the people who did the work to grow our food were paid what we would consider a living wage.

[I'm not making this up. I've worked on a modern day plantation.]

2-6-99
Dan & Datura canceled at the last minute.... sorely missed.
Bob Marley plays as I cyber-veg.

2-7-99
Rain and cold. King Hussein of Jordan is dead. New king Abdulla. Says he will do as his father did... but Caligula said the same.
Hussein was a real force for common sense and stability over there. Even the uncertainty generated by a change-over of power is potentially destabilizing to the region, and that even if the new king is as good as the old... which is unlikely, since by all accounts the old one was a real class act.

2-9-99
New Color. This is gonna put me to sleep. Let's see. Doesn't that just have that saccharine corporate picnic announcement feel? Well, Hell. It's an MS font, which means it probably came with Windows (the software virus that makes my computer run at half its proper speed) which means others probably have it too. So it will show up. I learned a lesson with the surreal media barrage thing last month when I used the cool magickal alphabet fonts I'd picked up somewhere to intersperse another level of comment into the piece. The thought was that those tiny red messages would show up as cool-looking but unintelligible gibberish... unless you clicked on "edit page" under "file" in the Netscape 4.0 browser and then used the "tools" to look at the actual HTML code, where you'd see my witty comments in plain English... Silly Me! Everybody saw them in plain English because nobody else has those fonts.
Sooner or later, I'm going to have to list all my fonts and provide a link somewhere to get them... or else find out how to set up a downloads page in this site...
Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Next Web Page project will be to find out how to do that. The downloads page, I mean. The free font archives I've visited take forever to load, and forever again to find what you want.

well, we'll see about that.

2-9-99
late nite.
This is the tail end of the only 9th day in February 1999. There will not be another February 9th until after the millennium. It will still be the 20th century, mathematically, until 2001. But in people's minds, this is gonna be the Big One. Jerusalem is already experiencing an increase in what is called "Jerusalem Syndrome," a blanket term for symptoms ranging from acute religious mania to terminal psychosis acquired in conjunction with proximity to the Holy Land. (remembering all those past lives as a crusader, no doubt. heh heh) And the pilgrims who do not become visibly mentally ill burn their passports and move into fleabag hotels. When they leave Jerusalem, they believe it will be to fly away with Jesus. These people have money to last, at most, till the millennium. Some of them have family, who might pay to get them home and get them some post-apocal-interuptus therapy. But some of them have no family that will claim them or help them, no one who likes them or wants them nearby. What will those people be doing a year from now... in February after the new year?

Thus passeth 2-9-99
Now it's a 10.
I remember on the fire crew at Starwood as we were about to try to lift the first log, Jason saying
"Welcome to Malkuth."
Better Rest. It Don't Bode Well for the Morrow.

2-10-99
font Monotype.com
I fought a fire today. My upwind neighbor here on the mountain was burning some brush (he said, and some rubber tires nobody mentioned) and it got away from him. It came across the slope beside the creek that had been somewhat cleared to run cattle on (!) I came home early from work, since the Fates were looking out for me, and saw the smoke when I was still two miles away on the road. I picked up speed all the way home and heaved a sigh of relief when I saw my house was still here. I went on up the road to where the fire was. There was the neighbor, waving at me to stop and help. I stopped and beat at the fire with his shovel in my work clothes (nerd clothes.)
I cannot describe the sound, the crackling as mountain laurels burn, or the whoosh of a small pine going up.
I lost my Rain Dance cap somewhere up there at this point. When we were pretty sure the fire would not reach the trailer up there, I came home to change clothes and call the fire dept again, just to make sure. I called the number of the local volunteer fire dept. The lady at the other end DID NOT KNOW whether any response had been made to a fire up on Thrashers Creek, recommended I call another number, which turned out to be the sheriff's dept. Yes, they had sent a truck from town, and another one from Piney River. They'd be here any minute.
When I got back to the fire, an area the size of three football fields had burned. It was sort of under control, then, contained by farm roads and burning itself out. I went along the edge closest to my property, beating out the fire in the dead grass and leaves with a shovel, down the hill, 50 yds to the creek.
That was when the fire dept showed up. And didn't seem in a hurry to do much. I came home, though. The fire guys are volunteers... (This county can pay a cop $40k per annum to "hang out" at the high school for the PR of it, getting the kids used to police presence, but it can't pay a single fire fighter. That says something about the priorities here.)

Had a good bonding moment with some of the neighbors.

This is what I mean about Pagan Homesteading and "Real Drama."

2-11-99 font Garamond
Counter reads 199. Dayum! I might be getting stage fright. So many people looking at my work. I hope I don't disappoint them. Working in computers has not done wonders for my imagination or the time I have to write about the critters and the trees. Most of my emotional energy is going to prop up the guy I work for... Why not? I've propped up worse people for less of a pay off...

Judy Muller just did a radio bit about 50 something So Cal women doing "Croning" ceremonies. She claims the derivation of Crone has to do with carrion. Said she thought "conscious aging" was a good idea, but did not like the word "crone." Said she normally works for ABC or NBC, but was only slumming at NPR today (she didn't really say that.)
Mentioned the Maiden, Mother, and Crone, but only said "Witch" as one of her negative synonyms for crone.

Gotta wonder... does she really have a clue, but can't mention it because she might alienate her audience? (Margo Adler got away with it, though...) Or does she not have even the remotest clue what she's talking about?

I suppose it might be appropriate to write a letter to NPR, but then, I don't know if I really WANT my religion connected with what rich trendies in So Cal are on about lately. What do I wish she had said? I don't know.

The Goddess I know Moves in Dreams, and handles her own P.R.. Here's hoping she visits this Judy Muller person, and gives her the clue she needs.

Later, after work...font Tahoma... been tweeking the page, trying to weed out those "special" links to the white acme city Page That Is Not A Page. Know what the trouble was? My old site changed all the file suffixes to read .htm and THIS space requires everything to end with .html or it won't work. So I had to go through and re-name all these files when I moved the site here. But the links still all said .htm (the ones that worked on the old site, anyway....) And the Acme Coyote Smart(tm) Technology can't figure out that if you are asking for file.htm, then you MIGHT mean file.html.... But what can ya say. At least nothing has blown up lately. Knock on wood.

2-12-99
Wind yowls outside. I'm watching "Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me ." S'ok. Got Tim Leary as a guy who sells new identities to people in trouble. I don't really like any of the characters.
Wind is rocking the house.
The music is the best thing about this film. King Missile, Pixies, Violent Femmes. That's My Era. Sad to think I'd ever have an Era.
It's also a cool touch how the chick's car diesels when she shuts it off. You never see that in films.
And then the poisoning scene, ala The Heathers.
This is starting to get good. I was thinking earlier that the only way I was going to start finding this movie funny was if something really awful happened to at least a few of these characters. And then it did.
More Violent Femmes.
I have a feeling it's going to end soon... and that would be bad. I mean, "evil bitch gets killed, hero gets spindly teen aged vegetarian sister" just isn't enough.
OK There's more. Very Stressed Out People.
And more Pixies for the closing theme. Pixies cover a multitude of sins.
Serious wind.
I'm not scared the house will go over: I've dealt with hurricanes when the house was being held up mainly by sheer force of habit. The worry is that the tulip poplar in the back yard will get blown over, and smash the house from above.

2-13-99
Saturday.font Monotype.com. Watched another movie last night, "Stoned Age." I don't recommend it.
It appears that the Senate is going to leave Uncle Bill in office.
I hope I never have to hear Hyde's weedling little voice again. He tries so hard to seem like he has a shred of decency still hanging there, somewhere, amid all the strings tied to him by the Interests he Serves. Clinton is honest: he's a liar but he's so obvious about it that nobody is fooled except those who want to be. Hyde, on the other hand, led a cynical vendetta to subvert democracy and turn the US into a one-party nation... and still tries to seem like a "decent guy."
Aldoph Hitler said "Always tell big lies." The big lie lately has been that someone in the GOP is concerned about the "rule of law." "Rule of Law" from the party of North, Reagan, Meese, McCarthy, Gingrich, Nixon, and David Duke? Get Real. Hitler was right. Small lies became "high crimes" to many Americans, and the Big Lie became "the Truth."

She'll be coming around the mountain when she comes.
She'll be driving six white horses when she comes.
We will all go out to meet her when she comes.
We will kill the old red rooster when she comes.
We will all have chicken and dumplings when she comes.

(Read the Illuminatus!)

Later on... Venus in retrograde. What can ya say? It's going to be a rough St. Valentine's day for a lot of people. That New Moon is just a few days away, like a bathtub drain, sucking the dirt and scum of love gone wrong down and away. It will be a fresh start... a fresh start on a rocky shore, perhaps, but a fresh start nonetheless.

Must go outside.

1-15-99
Monday. Tomorrow is a new moon and a solar eclipse they will see in Australia... in a month without a full moon. I guess this is about as dark a dark moon as they get.
Life is good.
Been editing out some of my invective. There are some things that are more fun to say than they are to have said, and things I wouldn't want to have to explain unless I already had a good head of steam going.
Later.
The actual time of the New Moon is around 2:00 am tonight, so I celebrated the New Moon and the passing from the Year of the Tiger to the Year of the Rabbit or Hare in the Chinese Zodiac.
The stars were out and it wasn't too cold. I wondered, if the Sun represents conscious awareness, and the Moon represents unconscious awareness, then what state does it represent when you know that both of them are on the other side of the planet? I figured it's "the Universe that's left when I'm not there."
Time for a new file.

Main ||| Mt. Olympus ||| Datura ||| Journal ||| Pagan Homesteading |||
||| Poems ||| Links ||| MORE Links ||| Declaration