too hard to blog from billy's

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And I'm ending up having to stay another day, endure another beesabohl game... but this is life. Please let me know what's been happening, and I hope to be able to catch up by tomorrow night.....


XOXOXOX

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love, 99
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i missed the trillium

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But I did not miss the beading of the bead lilies. I am a forest creature. An ocean/forest creature. A redwood forest creature. The wildflowers here are more beautiful than anything we've tamed for our gardens. The sublime scent of trillium, so subtle you must be determined not to miss it, is probably the rarest aroma in the enlightened perfumer's store. It levitates whatever can smell it. The bead lilies are always near the trillium here. I wonder if the scent of the trillium blues the beads on the lilies. I wonder if I could just run naked deep into the forest and never come back out.

Heh... THIS seems to have been done by some guy who started his camera about a half a mile from my house and then turned it on in a few spots in the first half hour drive south from there. He missed ALL the giants. What a putz.

Here's a half-hour playlist on redwoods....

I'm not kidding about the wildflowers either. Look here or here or here to see just some of them. And in both the spring and in the fall the headlands erupt with gillions more. Blow your mind. Blow. Your. Mind.

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i've decided it will be some wine

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I think I might want to write something here pretty soon. It feels like it. So if yer looking on the feed, you might wanna check back later... or not....

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Beside having the food poisoning of the apocalypse for my first few days back home... home home... not where I live anymore... I was forced by duty to my very elderly former landlord to go out to the property upon which my little piece of bliss can still be found... amid the rubble of a drunken slob and the pot gardens of a wayward grandchild... and a piece of shit new "cabin/mansion" for which the fuckers dropped a bunch of gorgeous redwoods and paved over the most flourishing trillium bed in the whole county. It's too long a story, a family as dysfunctional as mine for absolute sure, but the heartache of looking at that paradise in bad decline is unspeakable.

I knew it would be.

People are such pigs. I know they are transcendentally beautiful too, but I'm one of the only ones who knows that, and so pig, pig, pig, pig, pig is waaaaaay too often all in evidence. I think of the wood ducks I'm certain have fled. I think of the mountain lion who has had to busy himself a little further afield. The fraidy-cat bear who is probably pouting off some three miles away where there are at least some fruit trees and berries growing in from the last way too heavy "select cut" on the Hawthorne timberlands. Some scumbuckets who don't want to feed their horses have moved them into the pasture where the bobcat sooo patiently waited for the gophers. Who knows if the heron still perches on the snag while waiting for things to settle down enough to go back to fishing in my pond or gophering with the bobcat. Paradise besmirched.

And a sociopath heir who moved her mother right out of her own house, trying to stake out her primacy on the property the whole family owns. She doesn't know it yet, but she has just forced the sale of her dreams, of all our dreams, of all our hearts' home.

Big deal. The whole Gulf of Mexico is a bowl of toxic sludge.

What's the diff how many degrees we die by? We die. Nothing remains.

At the other end of that wreckage, at the start of my old two-mile driveway, sits the carefully manicured home of my dear friends Lar and Richard. They're married. Husband and husband. This wine I'm drinking is a gift from Richard, whose favorite wine is Kenwood's Zinfandel. It's damn good. I usually only go for cabernet. And this is pretty young, but tastes fantastic after it's had enough breathing time. I didn't get to hug him very hard because his back is out, but I squeezed Lar until I'm sure he nearly passed out. Lar and I used to meet in the woods for little picnics and looooong talks, sitting on a stump, his dogs tap dancing to go off after something, until the sun was very low on the other side of the trees almost plopped into the Pacific.

I have been agonizing about all the dying trees out here. Scaring me. Scaring me. Scaring me. Hurting my heart. But at least I realized this afternoon it's all the fir and not the redwood. When yer vision isn't so great and they're all mixed-in in so many places, it's hard to tell them apart. This is huge, but thank the buddhas of the ten directions it's not the redwoods.

I don't want to see that. I don't think I can stand seeing that.

It might've been the thinking I was seeing that that nearly killed me.

WHAT IF IT WASN'T FOOD THAT POISONED ME!

What if it was only my dying heart's home?

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whoa, am i ever glad i listened to this!

[click image — Sheesh, I put the wrong Max link in here! Fixed now. Sooooorry... senior succession of moments....]

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As you probably know, Max Keiser does a bunch of different shows on tv, internet and radio, and most of them are with Stacy Herbert. There is rarely a time when any random click on any of their stuff doesn't yield up at least ONE really good bit that you shouldn't have missed, but in this case, near the end, came something out of Max's mouth that was just transcendentally amazingly improbably excitingly blessedly supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

You will recall I recently begged you to listen to Derrick Jensen again. Well Max just got finished stating that it isn't going to be the wars, or the economy that does us in. He said, clear as a bell, a few times, IT WILL BE OUR ECOLOGY.

The guy's such a hotshot, I bet it won't be more than a day or two before he realizes it will be the whole world's ecology... though mostly because of us... well... wait... wasichu.

HE EVEN MENTIONED THE INDIANS WARNING AND WARNING AND WARNING ABOUT THIS.

Does that rock, or whut?

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Aaaaaagh! I know perfectly well that he spells it K-E-I-S-E-R, but go ahead and spell it "Kaiser" about 90% of the time anyway! WTF? Computers turn yer brains into mush! The tubes make it exponentially worse because yer whalin' on it, tryin' to communicate, hair on fire, the whole way. So you do obnoxious shit like this, without even noticing it! Colombia turned into "Columbia" somewhere in here, my brain, over the last couple years too. I used to have the laser eye for proofing. NOT. ANYMORE.

I punished myself by going back through my blog to try to find every time I'd spelled it "Kaiser" and correct that egregious error. Whut? Do I need to start sprinkling crack into my coffee? I put the completely wrong link in here, while all excited and bouncing up and down, and did not realize my error until hours later, AND adding a thank you comment on the wrong thread at his blog. I have to drive for six or so hours in a day or two or three. WILL. I. MAKE. IT?

And, dammit, I know a lot of people are reading this blog, and you COULD pipe up about this sort of thing, you know! You don't even have to uncloak, to officially stop lurking, in order to just anonymously blurt something about mistakes like that, you know. You could just write, "99, you senile old twit, you spelled Max's name wrong AGAIN. love, lurker" and I would be so pleased, so grateful, so toadally happy to overlook your bad manners....

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WAKE UP!!!

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OMG, OMG, OMG! Stand up.

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way past time for a nice cleansing cry

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I had a really good dream this "morning". I dreamed of agonizing stuff, of 86 coming back and a stultifying number of really awful floozies coming back with him, telling me in no uncertain terms that no matter what they were also in his life. It was really heavy. I just stood there as a sort of parade poured into a kaleidoscope of this action played out in front of me. At length, I pulled 86 from this crowd of awful moving into my life and told him gently but firmly that I didn't want him with me if the rest of this stuff was part of the bargain.

Immediately as I told him that the general atmosphere and attitude of everyone in this jumble turned intensely happy, intensely loving, where only a moment before it had been the very portrait of fundamentally awful.

I had so wanted this day to bloom into something sparklingly positive on that account, but, here, I think the cry is the most appropriate to our coördinates in space/time.

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chemical ali lives!

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Right here in the home of the brave and land of the free....

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we can only hope it dumps it on washington dc

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A huge water spout was formed by a thunderstorm in the Gulf and it was filmed from the position on the map here.

THIS IS NOT A NATURAL DISASTER.

THIS WAS DONE BY FASCISM ALONE.

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i think i see another big broadway hit on the horizon

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You loved the people who brought you healthcare reform, and so I'm sure will simply adore their work on energy and climate. Start marking your ballots for best performances and best screenplay.

Democrats, Obama willing to scale back energy and climate change bill
By DARREN SAMUELSOHN | 6/29/10

Key Senate Democrats offered, during a White House meeting with President Barack Obama and skeptical Republicans on Tuesday, to scale back their ambitious plans to cap greenhouse gases across multiple sectors of the economy.

Sens. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman told reporters after the 90-minute West Wing meeting that Obama held firm in his calls for a price on greenhouse gases. But they said the president acknowledged that he could agree to a more limited climate and energy bill than any the senators had previously drafted.

“We believe we have compromised significantly, and we’re prepared to compromise further,” Kerry said.

"The president was very clear about putting a price on carbon" and curbing greenhouse gases, he added.

Lieberman said a couple of Republicans in the meeting promised to keep talking about the prospect of a less-ambitious climate program that includes a price on carbon, though he wouldn't name names.

Kerry and Lieberman released a climate bill last month that capped greenhouse gases emitted by power plants, transportation and trade-sensitive manufacturers.

Reaction to their bill has been lukewarm, and the duo said they would keep talking to senators on both sides of the aisle during the coming weeks to try to find a deal that could win 60 Senate votes.

Asked whether a power plant-specific bill was in the cards, Kerry replied, “There are any number of varieties. That could be one of them."

Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman confirmed on Monday that he's drafting legislation to cap greenhouse gases just from power plants.

Republican Sens. Lamar Alexander, Susan Collins, Judd Gregg, Richard Lugar, Lisa Murkowski, Olympia Snowe and George Voinovich also attended the White House meeting, but left with a very different message than their Democratic counterparts.

“We’ve got to take a national energy tax off the table in the middle of a recession,” said Alexander, chairman of the Senate GOP Conference.

Gregg, who previously has backed emission limits just on power plants, urged Democratic leaders to focus solely on an energy bill that includes incentives for renewables, but no price on carbon emissions. "Our goal should be reducing our dependence on oil from people don't like us,” he said.

Obama’s meeting with the senators, including Majority Leader Harry Reid, ran overtime. It was originally scheduled to last less than an hour.

The White House press office also abruptly canceled a brief pool spray during which TV cameras and reporters were to be shuttled in for remarks by the president. White House officials said the cancellation was because of "scheduling considerations."

A White House statement released after the meeting acknowledged tensions in the room.

"The president told the senators that he still believes the best way for us to transition to a clean energy economy is with a bill that makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses by putting a price on pollution – because when companies pollute, they should be responsible for the costs to the environment and their contribution to climate change. Not all of the senators agreed with this approach, and the president welcomed other approaches and ideas that would take real steps to reduce our dependence on oil, create jobs, strengthen our national security and reduce the pollution in our atmosphere."

Obama indicated he saw "a strong foundation and consensus on some key policies.

"There was agreement on the sense of urgency required to move forward with legislation and the president is confident that we will be able to get something done this year," the White House added.

I'm getting this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that Alex Jones' maniacal raving about the NWO wasichu planning to make us all carbon tax slaves in their relentless drive to rule the world might be a little closer to the truth than most of us dared fear. I mean, whut's this about everything being negotiable accept the price on carbon? That is about the same as saying, Yes! Write up a few thousand pages of NO energy or climate improvement measures whatsoever, but don't fuck with the carbon tax.

Do you think I should start staking money on these things?

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home

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It is as though one could have an image from before the common era, an image of Lao Tzu. It's as though you could capture true manhood in one frame for everyone to see. This is an image of advancement that makes the boyz at the LHC look like monkeys playing with kazoos. Big men from everywhere might be felled by a glance at him, and that might set us free. Think of the priests and scholars and leaders across the globe in all ten times, and tell me how many you count who can come up to this that is shown here some one-hundred-and-sixty-plus years later. Or do you not see?

Unlike digital cameras that keep your right on the right of the image, daguerreotypes and other photographs show your left on the right side of the image. This is a salient bit for certain people to know when viewing images online and this image in particular. A person's left eye in a still image says much more than even the thousand words pictures obviate. It's the mark of the true human. So this guy is not only a real man, a man far advanced from the biggest men around today, but he's also a true human. I speak of him in the present tense because he's not dead.

I think I've managed to come down on one side of the theft-of-the-soul debacle. Maybe some bodhisattvas would deem it necessary to keep their images from the public during their walking around lifetimes, but not keep them forever from public view, because those who can see could be freed by the sight. So, from the early 1840s onward, you can expect to find hints in images. All clowns are avid about having their picture taken, and all vain people are extremely particular about it, but there is a rare human whose image is capable of yanking you out of delusion and setting you on the path to reality.

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I find I cannot let go of communing with this face in the past few days and I don't even know if I ever will. I want a tapestry of it. I might use this as you might use a sculpture of the Buddha or a crucifix, but probably not unless pressed by stupidity so hard I have to stave it off like the vampire it is.

I'm still speechless in the thought of the heedlessness and arrogance of wasichu, the million entreaties from truth to be seen, to be realized, to become the stamp of transcendence for all humanity, the jailbreak for all living things. We are today as benighted as those who sought to forge the United States out of Shangri-La, only just capable of exponentially more harm, and displaying this capability now across the globe, to include spanning even your mindscape—which is far larger than just this planet—and perpetually less consequential than a pea.

Do gaze upon this indian every chance you get.

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Not a trace of meekness. Not a wisp of ferocity. Not the suggestion of fear. Not a whiff of aggression. Not an atom of absence. Not even an echo of personality. Not even the smoke of desire. No question. No answer. Addressing only the tao. Speaking of his dignity is an assault on it. I will you be shrunk smaller than a speck and shot through yourself into infinity here.

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now that i've caught up on my bumping-into-walls thing

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Trish and I watched "Home" last night and I could feel the hysteria rising from my inner cosmos when they were getting to the permafrost part. Even though I'd already seen it twice, I was wanting them to show bubbling methane, show people lighting the burning methane bubbles in arctic lakes, instead of being so "no one knows" about it. I was wanting them to somehow have edited in the part where fashion models burst through the screen and their faces dissolve into methane bubble flames so we'd get the picture about what supposedly no one knows. We know methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO₂. So how unknowing can we be?

Anyway, the visit messed with my already outrageous sleep disorder thing and I had to have me some REM sleep after Trish started for home. I dreamed her daughter and her friend were arguing with her in the other room about throwing a party, that I was working on my computer at her house and they were in the other room and raising their voices about this and also almost arguing over who I was there to visit. Somehow, mystically, I'd been upgraded to cool old bat from my twenty-year firm position next to her mother and father as just plain unbearably old and embarrassingly—HUMILIATINGLY— strange.

I could hardly believe my ears and popped my head out to look at the scene. Trish was nowhere to be seen, but her daughter was holding a baby and her friend was there next to her, vying for baby cuddling time. Outrageous as this scenario is to even contemplate from the innocence of one's sleep, both girls beamed at me as though I were a hero and I recoiled, going back to my pressingly busy whatever on the computer. Some young men, but not young enough men, were there to take the girls to this party in contention and one of them stopped me to speak admiringly to me, but I just went back to my machine. These young people thought I rocked because I believed in the same revolution they did. I got it about the plutocratic perfidy and the methane bubbles. I guess I validated their righteous anger. There was all kinds of turmoil out there, and there started to be lots of turmoil on my computer, where every page was switching to some pink—I hate pink— spam page and all my efforts to reboot were only bringing up this pink page in windows all over the place.

I was both lethally alarmed and transcendentally serene about this, and the strange psychic pitch of the tussle between mother and daughter was still going on in the other room. Briefly we cut to me being using some nonexistent neighbor's internet connection and him coming home and finding me at it but ignoring me. Then we slide to some little used stairwell space where there was a mound of very wildly colored, glitzy material pillows, semi-stuffed and semi-heaped behind the banister and I'm griping to some invisible girl about what in the world does her mother need to buy all this crap all the time for as I'm settling back to my computer work, to make the unspeakable Mac virus or malware or whatever go away, but it was involving some physical moves probably not actually involved in this work in real life. My body was trying to make these moves and very, very alarmingly could not because, well, because it was actually tangled up in my comforter in bed and all attempts to push back from my machine in my desk chair were failing abysmally.

So this ended up ending my nap in a fairly heart-thumping manner just after I saw the not young enough men going off to the party with the girls....
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And, having done a lot of tromping in the forest and on the beach and by the lily fields and through the timber barons' graveyard in the last couple days, my sinuses are so swollen that it's effortful to suck in enough air and my legs are a little on the wibbly side from more mileage than they usually do, so bed just keeps being my main interest today. And I keep replaying "Home" in the background to help drown out my wrath over stuff like this... and this....

I think I'm going to pack it all the way in spectacularly early-for-me, and see how it goes tomorrow.
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watch home with me instead of obummer

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dreaming of my dear friend

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I was back at my real home, the one where I no longer live, and it was really taken over by wealthy people instead of just starting to tend too heavily in that direction. Peggy hadn't let it daunt her. She was still whipping up great desserts and foisting them upon her neighbors in any of the multifarious serving dishes she has for such things. I was briefly with her, after not seeing her in three years, and marveling about how healthy and bright and rejuvenated she was looking. Glowing. I was very, very pleased by this and she was just chattering happily as though I'd never gone away.

Then, I don't know if I was making the rounds of the neighborhood to collect the serving dishes back for her or just to note all the places they were currently residing, but one of them was broken. It looked a lot like an oversized martini glass and the stem had snapped. I'd gone into the house/spa of a very, very chic middle-aged woman to tell her that a very large amount of cash had accumulated in the ditch of her Japanese rock garden landscaping out front... kind of like maybe the drain had clogged and it was backing up, but I'd had the feeling people were just dropping it there as donations to something, or like people throw pennies in a wishing well. She was tsking over Peggy's broken serving dish in her hands, looking vexed about how to set it down in that condition, and not bothered at all that this huge amount of cash was accumulating in the drainage for her front yard... barely registering that she had heard me.

In fact, she wasn't exhibiting any real feeling for the damage to Peggy's property, or for the possible loss of, or clog of, all that cash out there, unattended, and pretty much interacted with me as though I were a robot programmed to interrupt her with useless bits of information.

even when you can't see them they hold you

[click image for my Carlos... you just can't see his snakeskin boots....]

I don't mind driving through the redwoods in the dark. The moment you enter into the big trees, your skin feels the love. The air becomes both pregnant with transcendence and hollow with the cosmos. You still feel your headache, but it ceases to bother you. The muscles fairly twitching with stress stop twitching and the stress has gone nowhere, but you can't find it. You cannot know! You cannot know! They speak. They make you want to die for everything to live. They are the Zen masters of the ten times, the tenth time. No one on earth knows they are mine.

just leave it to the sociopaths....

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About half of U.S. mortgages seen underwater by 2011
Wed, Aug 5, 2009, 5:12pm, EDT
By Al Yoon

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The percentage of U.S. homeowners who owe more than their house is worth will nearly double to 48 percent in 2011 from 26 percent at the end of March, portending another blow to the housing market, Deutsche Bank said on Wednesday.

Home price declines will have their biggest impact on prime "conforming" loans that meet underwriting and size guidelines of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bank said in a report. Prime conforming loans make up two-thirds of mortgages, and are typically less risky because of stringent requirements.

"We project the next phase of the housing decline will have a far greater impact on prime borrowers," Deutsche analysts Karen Weaver and Ying Shen said in the report.

Of prime conforming loans, 41 percent will be "underwater" by the first quarter of 2011, up from 16 percent at the end of the first quarter 2009, it said. Forty-six percent of prime jumbo loans will be larger than their properties' value, up from 29 percent, it said.

"The impact of this is significant given that these markets have the largest share of the total mortgage market outstanding," the analysts said. Prime jumbo loans make up 13 percent of the total market.

Deutsche's dire assessment comes amid a bolt of evidence in recent months that point to stabilization in the U.S. housing market after three years of price drops. This week, the National Association of Realtors said pending home sales rose for a fifth straight month in June. A widely watched index released in July showed home prices in May rose for the first time since 2006.

Covering 100 U.S. metropolitan areas, Deutsche Bank in June forecast home prices would fall 14 percent through the first quarter of 2011, for a total drop of 41.7 percent.

The drop in home prices is fueling a vicious cycle of foreclosures as it eliminates homeowner equity and gives borrowers an incentive to walk away from their mortgages. The more severe the negative equity, the more likely are defaults, since many borrowers believe prices will not recover enough.

Homeowners with the riskiest mortgages taken out during the housing boom have seen the greatest erosion in equity, in part because they were "affordability products" originated at the housing peak, Deutsche said. They include subprime loans, of which 69 percent will be underwater in 2011, up from 50 percent in March, Deutsche said,

Of option adjustable-rate mortgages -- which cut payments by allowing principal balances to rise -- 89 percent will be underwater in 2011, up from 77 percent, the report said.

Regions suffering the worst negative equity are areas in California, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Massachusetts and West Virginia. Las Vegas and parts of Florida and California will see 90 percent or more of their loans underwater by 2011, it added.

"For many, the home has morphed from piggy bank to albatross," the analysts said.

No, really.

No, really....

love over gold

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I'm packing up and going home. Will sleep on Old Uncle Dave's couch tonight and be home by this time tomorrow night.

Have to try again when the cosmos aligns for it better.

Treachery and treason: there's always an excuse for it, but when I find the reason, I still can't get used to it.

i can't face it

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The Navy is expanding its war games and training areas down from Washington to the Humboldt/Mendocino County line, and there is this special Warning Area 93-B hanging right there in the ocean a few miles from where I sit. They, of course, have done an Environmental Impact Study that is a thousand pages long, and as obtuse as if it were a FOIA production. Even without the big black blots and migraine-inducing lacunae, it's identical.

You don't understand. I need to soak in ice water. I have been wading through EIRs and like oceans of obfuscatory documents for most of my adult life. The blood flow to my eyeballs is starting to scab up. I don't need to wade anymore! I know what it says! It says, "We want to do this for the good of national security and readiness, and no matter how many whales and otters and fish runs we blow up, poison, or otherwise disable, tough shit." They have very graciously extending the public comment period to 13 April.

Here's my comment:

GO AWAY.

I know what I'm talking about. You can't believe how experienced I am with this.

today should get in the books for weird weather

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It was dark and pouring out when I woke up this "morning", but very shortly became sunny as heck. Since noon it has been alternating between sunny and still, and sunny and HAILING, and sunny and breezy, and intermittent fog banks spotted with a racing cloud or two. The birds take turns twittering and cringing. The flowers are portraits of stubbornness, not ceding anything, not even close to exhibiting the bewilderment I know lurks deeply in their cells. It's as though Alaska were an angry youth who blamed California, unsure whether throwing rocks or spitting or growling or just dropping and pitching a tantrum of ear-splitting proportions would be his best move. So he's doing all of them. And it's cold as heck, between attempts to warm.

for my middle eastern friends

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Don't believe ALL of the awful stuff you see and hear about us.... We're not a hunnert percent awful.

RISE UP, YOU FUCKERS!

Don't let it be stolen.

DON'T STAND FOR IT!