I really could write more often. I hate to repeat myself though. Talking about all the stuff I'm doing. Oh, that's what a blog's for, right. Well, SCRAP: the Regime was great. Mudbone Orchestra's debut went off without a hitch. Thanks Bruce for your fine bucket drumming. My big tile mosaic project is coming along slowly but surely. I'm practicing some songs for the Drizzletown Jubilee show on Feb. 17, plus I just wrote a new song for the next (scheduled) Mudbone Orchestra gig, which will be as part of Puppetganza on April 9 at Nocturnal. We're gonna rock them puppets!
As great as all this is (and all the nice times with so many wonderful Portland friends,) I would really like to hit the road and travel. I'm the restless type. With a day job and debts, it is a challenge. I'll figure it out though, because the alternative is going crazy.
Goodness but time flies. The ice-storm is long gone, suddenly it is 60 degrees. Tomorrow (1/20) is SCRAP: the Regime, the fundraiser for SCRAP that I wrote about awhile back. (7:00 PM at Nocturnal, 18th and E. Burnside.) Oh, it's "inaugaration day" too. Whatever. Bush's second term will come to no good end. I'm predicting that right now. But S.C.R.A.P. is a wonderful organization that I am happy to volunteer for regularly. It facilitates the reuse, reinvention, re-crafting, of used materials into fabulous and creative new things. It's just the smart thing to do! And fun to boot! At SCRAP: the Regime I will be performing several songs, with Bruce Orr ably accompanying me on trumpet and bucket-drum. We go on at 8:00. It'll be a hoot.
Speaking of reuse, I've finally started my big tile-mosaic project on my bathtub-surround, using all tiles (in varied colors) I picked up at SCRAP, the Habitat for Humanity re-sale warehouse, and the Rebuilding Center. Thanks to Debbie for showing me the ropes on tiling and jumpstarting me on this long procrastinated project, and to Melissa for lending me her mortar mixing blade. I think its gonna look great when it is done.
The weather this winter has so far been kind of weird (to me.) It seems like it has been cold a lot, but there's been scarcely a flake of snow (in town) and it seems like it's been wet, but precip is below normal. Let's pray for a blizzard (without the ice storm aftermath of last year's.) My thinking is that if it's gonna be cold and wet, it might as well snow. I know snow is a hassle, whatever, i just have always retained a childish glee about it. And if it does it the way it should, with a nice blanket followed by cold bright sun (rather than endless freezing fog and ice) then everything is *brilliant* and the whole world gleams, and everyone's soul shines forth in lovely incandescence. Which everyone's soul does anyway, when we decide to see it, but still... some kinds of weather wake you up. Like blizzards.
I've been going thru almost 15 years of accumulated stuff. It is rather interesting, a personal archaeology of paintings, journals, etc. Here's another old journal entry, this one from 11/4/98:
"The good freaks will save civilization. Not by "saving civilization" though, just by being themselves and doing what they do. Of course Weimar Germany had lots of good freaks too and they were all outlawed, imprisoned or banished by the bad freaks. I just hope America is diverse enough in makeup that no one faction of bad freaks can sway the whole country to their program. I don't think that will happen to us but who knows? Minnesota just elected Jesse "the Body" Ventura Governor. Now maybe he's okay, I don't know, but at first glance it definitely points to a latent hunger in America for a "strong-man" to rule us. A big man with a booming voice and the simple gut-level appeal that strongman dictators obviously have had in so many countries and societies. Maybe it is our turn. Maybe Jesse "the Body" will run for president in 2000 or 2004. The fact is we really do need a bold and different leader. Not to subvert democracy but lead us to its better fulfillment. A Roosevelt. Someone who can lead and sway, but thru appeal to our better natures, as opposed to say, Hitler, who led very effectively but by calling up and putting to work the basest and most murderous elements in the psyches of Germans."
I've been going thru old journal notebooks of mine from over the years. I am going to start copying some of the (hopefully) more interesting entries into this blog.
Here's one from almost exactly 13 years ago, 1/19/1992. I offer it now not because it is all that original but because it gives a peek to where my ideals lay (and still do.) It is a quasi-utopian prediction of the "future." The interesting thing is that my actual life at the time was a far cry from living out these ideals, but now I feel that more and more I am engaging in the actual real-world process of doing so (as for example entering a co-housing venture.) The funny thing is that some of these things are coming about in my life even though I forgot (at a conscious level) that I had written such things over a decade ago.
"The future will (have to) be a melding of the benign side of modern science/technology with a new pastoralism. The marriage of utilitarianism and romanticism. This has to be, because there are so many people in the world. People have to reclaim what was actually good about the "good ol' days," the sense of place and purpose, the tie to the soil and the seasons. And in reclaiming an older sense of community, people will have to give up the modern idea of individualism. There will be a new tribalism, from the city block level up. There will be a long-term reorientation of societal values and living patterns. People will gradually live the way they've wanted to all along: in community. Co-housing will gradually become the norm. The
city will be a conglomeration of villages/tribes, each with centers of local commerce,
production, art, and music. New "tribal" and regional art styles will arise. Co-households, blocks, neighborhoods will grow a large propportion of food for themselves. Grains and other products will come from traditional farms. Most people won't own cars, but will have access to every mode of transportation, including cars, to get wherever they need. Much more work, including the sort of manufacturing currently done by wage-slave labor overseas (e.g. textiles) will be done at a local level. There will be various forms of local currency, to prevent the export of community prosperity. Many current city streets will be torn up and turned into grand pieces of landscape architecture, intra-urban green-ways.
The future society will be comprised of wholly new cultures which transcend the current barriers/histories of race and ethnicity."
Reading this now I find it amusing how I projected all this into the "future." These things are happening all around and among us, and are more and more real to the extent we optimistically live them out, however challenging the day-to day of it may sometimes be. Granted the world is exploding all around us, but there has never been a better time to enter into reality and feel the soil between our fingers. It's a joy *and* it is the learning of survival skills for the times that are at hand.
New Year's hasn't meant much to me since I was a kid and it was exciting to stay up til midnight. At a certain point I realized the arbritrariness of most human calendars and the numbers we attach to revolutions of the planet around the sun. But still, the planet does do that circling thing, and it makes sense to acknowledge it.
Maybe along with the planet's ongoing revolution we'll have some revolution of our own this year. But remember, the revolution is within. That revolution is well under way, and like the planet's, is continuous. I can feel it.