Hurricane Gustav appears to be moving the political process of the late empire. natural systems biting back. ultra-left Fundamentalist Christians will claim that it is the LORD striking the Republicans and their national convention down in the heat of globe toasting climate change.

the gang heads to Roxbury for the Turn of the Century Days (the dot.com bust? nope, the previous century...). old time baseball, music, food, in a mellow atmosphere.

later, Monopoly and a campfire under the stars.

month over and out. blue sky above. short views of the stars. brief perambulations. trip-wires to step over and toxic states of being to avoid. and liberation.

another month, noting whether or not it has passed or seems to pass.

cut down a tree, dead birch, with an only-partly sharp axe. sharpened a bit on a chunk of sandstone. the birch is about sixteen inches in diameter. some serious cardio-upper-body work. with safety in mind (it's a double-bladed axe). and the thoughts of the techno-social system roiling through mind. making small stories which illustrate the relationships.

the primary of which is the counter-balanced movement between autonomy and control; ability to project power and to survive with the available tools, and the avoidance of losing the autonomy of the body to project energies of its own making.

imagine the relationship of the contemporary person to artificial Lighting. Light switches are conveniently located at the door of a room to avoid any need to move in the dark. do we lose the capabilities of seeing in the dark? of augmenting memory-based embodied navigation and balance skills, tactile senses, located hearing. of slow motion, of eyes-wide-open proceeding. heightened muscle coordination? or just suffer an evolutionary set-back when shins hit the frame of the bed.

every technology that aids in our increased powers also decreases our autonomy as we develop a synergistic relationship with the directed flows of energy that the technology comprises.

friendship takes on this form of spending time with folks. in their homes, deep time. what would life be if I was a static node and others were dynamically drifting through the world? motion is relative and stasis is not in the material world, but in the world of flows where stasis is defined by the lack of flows.

finally got back in touch with Anthony. on the other coast. in respite from tribulation.

and from the historical trivia department: yesterday, fifty years ago Alaskan voters in the first Alaska State Primary Election approved the Statehood Enabling Act 40,452 to 8,010. voters also nominated candidates for Governor, Secretary of State, members of Congress and the first State Legislature. I was born the next day. Eisenhower had already signed the Alaska Statehood Act into law in July 1958, though the Territory did not gain official Statehood until 03 January 1959.

We bequeath to you a state that will be glorious in her achievements, a homeland filled with opportunities for living, a land where you can worship and pray, a country where ambitions will be bright and real, an Alaska that will grow with you as you grow. We trust you; you are our future. We ask you to take tomorrow and dream; we know that you will see visions we do not see. We are certain that in capturing today for you, you can plan and build. Take our constitution and study it, work with it in your classrooms, understand its meaning and the facts within it. Help others to love and appreciate it. You are Alaska's children. -- Resolution passed by the members of the Alaska Constitutional Convention

George Orwell Diaries, 70 years after the fact. so it goes. diaries, daily entries posted day-by-day. into the past. parallel to my idea of posting here images from 30 years ago. I haven't made it very well, as I don't have details of presicely when individual images were made. twenty years ago I could handle. maybe I'll try that.

what's a sharp knife for? I like toasted bread, toast, with a variety of toppings including butter. definitely not margarine. butter comes either frozen, chilled, or at room temperature. frozen or chilled it's hard as heck to cut a slice of and especially to spread around most toasts, depending on the bread that is being used. the spreading process can dent, squash, or even shred the toast, seriously degrading the aesthetic experience. I prefer to have chilled butter and an extremely sharp thin-bladed carbon steel knife. (my Opinel serves the role well). this allows the butter to be sliced so thin that spreading is not necessary: multiple thin slices may simply be laid across the surface of the toast. the thin slices will melt quickly, prepping the toast for the next layer of topping and avoiding the problem of un-melted butter chunks getting moved around by, say, the cold tangerine marmalade or thick Nutella which comes next. thin slices of butter have the advantage of getting the butter flavor evenly distributed around the surface of the toast without having to use excessive amounts of the stuff or seriously affecting the structural integrity of the bread. the worst possible scenario is frozen butter, fluffy white bread, and a dull knife -- the bread gets completely crushed, but not after large quantities of butter are smashed into the air cavities. the result is something of a distinctly English culinary experience. I prefer dense German multi-grain breads which can withstand pretty much anything you can throw on them, and provide a robust snack.

a caveat on the sharp knife is that one should not use a ceramic butter dish as that rapidly dulls the knife. it is common, when first attempting to cut thin slices from fridge-hardened butter that the knife slips and smacks the plate rather hard. this will render the knife useless for smooth tomato and vegetable slicing later. a plastic dish it is -- and one that is disposable as in the end, the plastic will be destroyed through the repeated slipping of this trusty blade. a lid from a yogurt container functions well for this purpose.

who designed the butter knife, anyway? the one which was around my parents home was a fat stainless steel affair from the 1960's with not just a dull blade -- actually it was so dull as to defer the designation of blade -- it was about as good for slicing butter as a chopstick. certainly nothing to pass onto for the grand-kids! non-functional. I've seen some older ones, carbon-steel-and-silver affairs which are thin-bladed like regular table knives of the same era -- say, late 1800's.

passing through lives and lives and lives. rowing a small boat across endlessly ending time. with days that finalize in the hands of the clock still hanging on every wall, somewhere. days stop when lidded eye shuts: as with child, seen, becomes imagined invisible to others when the eyes close on the self. but days do not end, even as life does not end. yet. life that runs a long and flowing line, continuous, almost everlasting in duration. each creature giving rise to the next in a long flow of be-ing.

to be the last of your kind is nothing when held to be the last living thing. but since we have no expansive image of what is life -- we cannot measure where it began, nor where, when, it might end -- we stumble onward, every day, into every night. later waking in darkness, seeing points of Light shimmering among human-spilled energies, falling back asleep reassured that something else is still there.

morning brings the same difference. and what is it that we have begun?

hurdles to decent mass transit. it's far easier to drive into New York City than to take the train. The Town of Bedford controls the parking area for the train. to get a day permit one has to show proof-of-residency and the registration of the vehicle to be parked in the 'municipal' parking lot at the train.

are there any bike racks at the station? yes, one for three bikes. sheesh. (the curse of a traveler to be able to critically compare and contrast an extended sequence of different places.)

the US should take a long and hard look at the level of organization that many European states have accomplished to promote the use of bicycles and mass transit as one answer to the over-reliance on / over-consumption of hydrocarbons.

drop by Jessie's place on the upper East Side for a f2f and nice lunch. good to cross paths with a fellow BrainStormer.

and finally get back to PhotoCare to pick up the Nikon. been feeling half-naked without an image-making device. resorting to the phone-camera is never really satisfying.

what to add? observations about the country, the local social scene, the election, the Olympics in the media, the weather, mostly the weather and night sounds. so I make a simple remix of the several days of heavy thunder storms that grumble through the area over-loading gutters and ears and eyes. along with the crickets.

small bits popping into mind: It will be obvious to even the meanest of intelligences that the following holds true ... a phrase that an old professor of mine would use when (sardonically) introducing an exceptionally difficult concept.

more than a month away from any content here, thinking that this is the longest gap. and it only means that life was more abundant outside the screen than within it. many reflections, some images made, some sounds recorded, but no time to get them through the laborious process of appending to this space. it'll be a retrospective effort to add things later: this blogged beast a complicated armature for expression.

water moving, water being moved requires energy. lifting it, as with any other substance, requires energy. falling, it releases that energy; having it flow through pipes requires that there be stored a substantial amount at a higher level or pressure at one end of the pipe than at the other end of the pipe. water flowing is a release of energy. still water is potential energy.

and crickets keep the night alive especially when sleeping on the porch.

Bill gets back home early in the morning from Argentina, and we all head upstate to the ski house which is not really a ski house in the summer, rather a mountain home. farmer's market on the way, flea market later in the afternoon. the sun is hot, but thunder storms rake through repeatedly. got some nice samples of thunder bouncing around the hills. cool at night. would love to spend a few weeks here to get back on track with the writing.

Andrea takes Zander, Luke, and I on a trip to Gilgo Beach on Long Island. recalling the last time around there was about 23 years ago on a long hot lobsterizing day with Randy. beautiful weather today, not too hot, water relatively warm, waves are cross-setting, choppy: typical messy beach break. 2 - 4 foot max. a bag of Doritos mysteriously disappears. seafood dinner at Tobay Beach Park.

but why do they call this Babylon?