The difference between Historians and Anthropologists is that Historians focus mainly on written records, and Anthropologists focus mainly on other physical evidence. In this way an Anthropologist can study times before writing, and groups which did not write, or whose writings were destroyed. These people turn up in History only as "Barbarians."

If you're reading this, then you probably live in a world where literacy is nearly universal. It is easy to forget that it was not always so. The earliest scribes must have been regarded as magicians of a sort. They had trained at great expense in knowledge that ordinary people, and even kings, priests, and generals, did not have. They were in their time what computer experts were in the 60's and 70's: privy to important knowledge only they understood, and either ignored or mythologized by the rest.

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For most of the rest of "History," literacy was a mark of leisure, and therefore of noble status. The vast majority of the population was not literate. In those days I am told there was a saying "It takes 40 men with their feet on the ground to support one with his head in the air." Written records leave us with a grim picture of the peasantry, as filthy, ignorant, dangerous, suitable for little besides the life they lead. But of course that is how the privileged view those who do the work that supports their wealth. Thus do crackers view brothers; thus do hornets (and their emulators) view our sundry earth neighbors parked around the Pacific. Etc. etc. etc. You just can't get good help these days, can you?
text corrected by Search Friendly.tm

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2 28 99
Learned today that the US Gummint made "Lucy" illegal in 1966. That's the year I was born, the year of the Fire Horse. Momentarily I fantasize that I and others of my generation were sent by the gods to rectify this gross error...
I also think that "Lucy" itself may have been sent by the gods as a kind of emergency program-patch for our species: a network update-and-reboot command from "outside the box," triggered by nuclear weapons.
text corrected by Search Friendly.tm

On another tangent, "Living with the Bomb" is a phrase I hear often in connection with the 1950's. I guess that nuclear annihilation was the ultimate nightmare of that epoch. In my own epoch, it's been something a little different. It's like "Living with Napalm." Or living with this:

3 Images & the Protest Movement.

My ultimate nightmare, I guess, is that Viet Nam and Watergate happened, and there was no revolution. After 4000 years of "history" our founding mothers and fathers offer us democracy as a real possibility, and we as a people throw it away in favor of big macs and Seinfeld re runs. Their nightmare was that someone might take away what they saw as their freedom. Mine is that we are giving away our freedom and don't even care.

I am not talking about some government conspiracy thing, either. It is not the government that makes people work 60 hr weeks to the detriment of their health. When I ask people why they work so hard, they usually say it is because they are in debt. It is fashionable to believe that slavery existed throughout human history, but that now, suddenly, it no longer exists at all. I would say that slavery has changed its form, but the fact remains that a great
many people literally do not own their own time,
or their own ideas. There are no whips to threaten today's slaves into going about their appointed rounds. Instead there is the whip of poverty, of homelessness. We don't need conspiracies to enslave us; we will do it to ourselves. Does something deep inside cry out in revulsion? No problem. We don't need government mind control; we will buy our own prozac, whatever it takes to allow us to "work more effectively." If that means numbing our hearts, we will still do it.

The first step to making ourselves truly free is to realize that we already are.
 

"We will kill the old red rooster when she comes."
 
 

March 1 and the winds of March are here... right on time. The air carries
the smell and color of Spring. Trees swell with sap, working the tension
till they spew pollen in their annual three-month orgasm. Wet and bulbous
low clouds cruise across the sky, while higher up stratus sheets are torn to
look like fish skin. Sun bursts through holes making changing dapples of
light that skitter across the mountains. People laugh and don't know why.
Rutting seasons of various little critters begins about now, and the
craziness that goes with it. Birds of prey sense the change, alert and
waiting for the first sex crazed mouse of Spring.

I only just discovered that when your writing is indexed by search engines, any passing reference to anything is liable to turn up in a search. On a big search engine this is not a big deal, since I would end up as number 9000 or something, but the acmecity search engine only searches the acmecity sites. So if you can't find something in this journal that you remember seeing, check the acmecity search engine. It's possible, if what you are looking for is an occasion where I really stuck my foot in my mouth, that I may have edited it out later, when I came to my senses.

Momentarily I fantasize about the long-term impact of this search-engine phenomenon on my writing style and the writing styles of others. You can't bury anything in text. You can't assume "anyone who reads this will probably have read the rest of it, and so take it in context." No. Instead you have to assume that the single line where I use a nasty word will turn up on a search for that word, quoted completely out of context with my name on it and everything. .... So the trick would be to veil anything I have to say that might offend someone (and have me tossed out of acmecity...) in metaphor and innuendo, specifically to avoid any hot-button words....
....Which burns me because I do like to reach occasionally into the bag of verboten words and pull out a zinger, just to underline semantically the point being made. [if that sounds like bs, it is. I do it for drama, pure and simple.]

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3-3-99
Could not afford to let the day of those digits pass unmarked. Earlier today it was clear and warm, and then there was thunder, and then wind, and now something very like snow is coming from the sky.
And the wind shakes the house. Tyvek is rattling. This is the strongest wind I've had since we put the siding on. (see December, 1998.)
Mind grows groggy, and sight grows weak. must rest.

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3-11-99
I have acquired a digital camera, and soon there will be pictures on the site. I need to practice with the camera and learn its characteristics.
Work proceeds apace. Stress management modules are starting to get warm, but nowhere near overloaded just yet.
Snow is on the ground, but melting. Melting snow seems to saturate the ground better than rain. Still, there is not as much wetness as I have come to expect from a "typical" Winter.
The promise of Spring is on hold.
Could see the waning sickle moon from my bed before dawn this morning.
The sun is just now clearing the ridge, and a warm yellow light greets the tree trunks, giving a slight blue caste to the snow, still in shadow. When the sun hits the snow, the light will explode in a brilliance that makes you cover your eyes.

3-11-99 8:00 pm
The first kitten of the year was just born at the foot of my bed to Venus, the three-colored Mama cat of the Katwood Trevia Line. The first kitten appears also to be a three-color, orange, black, and white like her Mama. (Male cats have two colors at most.)
Venus was one of the original Mamas, one of the first three non-fixed cats at Arcadia. The other original Mama was Luna, a bitchy tempered black Siamese Manx of the Katwood Rowena line. The original Daddy cat was Finn, a tabby with green eyes descended from Saunders Bros. barn cats, ("Live to Mouse; Mouse to Live.")
Finn lost a fight with something and is no longer with us. The current Alpha Male cat is Val, son of Venus and Finn. He looks just like Finn, except his hair is longer and his eyes are bigger and greener.

Mama Venus

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