Open Thread - Friday, August 3, 2018
There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars .
- Jack Kerouac -
Twenty-four days, eight thousand miles, nine national parks and more than a dozen high mountain passes, but alas my indulgent adventure has come to an funkin' end.
I did not want to rejoin the reality project, but non-conformance requires dramatic lifestyle modification, and I played along enough to be coopted.
The trip was good, but it reminded me that I am alone and being dragged down by material possessions.
It is time to down size and start a new life.
I arrived home Tuesday evening. I need to collate some thoughts and learn some new tricks before I can post pictures, or tell road stories.
I noticed things are just as funked up as before I checked out.
I think I will stick with all politics is local, and take care of the home front.
Have a great weekend! The thread is OPEN.
Comments
Good morning, Tim ~~~
Happy to hear everything went smoothly on your journey. Journeys provide insight to our lives, as you have discovered in your plan to downsize.
We are blue people in a red community. Living in a rural area, we find our local politics to be with too few choices for any who may have foresight. We find local politicians using the gubmit to do for themselves, while ignoring the big problems.
As for our pols running for governor, we have a Trump lover and a lover of her heinous, so, again, no choice. The dim running for gov has already made clear that Medicare for all is impossible and we can only hope to achieve a $12 minimum wage in four years. She’s an HRC bobble head, sigh.
Well, we’ve finally gotten some nice rain, nothing ferocious like in Albuquerque. A woman I work with suffered hail damage on her car Monday with golf ball sized hail raining down. Glad we escaped that one!
Have a beautiful day and weekend, everyone!
"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11
I was thinking
... my local politics deals with 1/2 acre. I can work on my locale.
NC gerrymandering has the state level rigged, the courts are packed and corporate interests served.
Dreary rainy day in the Piedmont. Hail? I got pelted, with pea size hail, while visiting Mesa Verde.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -
travel helps us to rethink possibilities
It is up to us as individuals to create a satisfying personal world. Thinning down decades of material acquisitions is always liberating. After we travel, we return home viewing our world with new eyes. Perhaps it is time to re-create and chart a new path...or settle in and appreciate what we have...or something in between. Seeing the beauty of the world...its diversity and natural systems...seems a good thing to me. Sounds like your trip was filled with plenty of those experiences.
To combat addiction they recommend going to a different community, because when we see the places where we might have pursued our habits, it makes us want to do so again. Being back in the home where you and Sue spent so much time might be similar. Regardless of that, I think we all better plan a strategy to survive a wilder and wilder climate - swinging from one extreme to the other as discussed in yesterday's OT.
All the best!
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Natural systems
I was riding up US550, near the 416 Fire burn scar, and rode through a brief thunderstorm. I checked into Silverton, and a few hours later there was a flurry of activity because a mud slide closed the road and people were looking for rooms. It was cleared overnight. A massive pile of CO hillside.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -
Stuff
Keeps me here. I need to mostly liquidate my household, reduce my footprint and get out of the house.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -
Trump Achieves New Level of Assholery
Trump wants ACLU to do the work to find/reunite migrant parents/kids after being arrested/separated by Trump “zero-tolerance” policy.
PS G'mornin all.
Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.
It is constant
Being an asshole is Trump. I rode through Grand Staircase Escalante. It is easy to see that the area is extraordinary and should be protected from mineral extraction.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -
The most incredible route
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -
Agree on this route
We have been heading out to Utah in October the past two years and this is one of the routes we always take. Makes me sick to think of this land being ruined for corporate gain.
Life is what you make it, so make it something worthwhile.
This ain't no dress rehearsal!
24
Hanksville to Blanding via Fry Canyon and Glen Canyon Rec. Area too.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -
@NCTim sounds great!
sounds great!
Life is what you make it, so make it something worthwhile.
This ain't no dress rehearsal!
No traffic lights
I think on an average drive where I live I hit about 50 traffic lights, most of them red.
Beware the bullshit factories.
The ones around here
are on wires, rather than poles. No problem with hitting them. It is the other drivers, you need to keep an eye on.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -
Selling off the national parks and monuments land
to the oil/gas drillers is easily my biggest hate pressure point with Trump -- and there are many. Cool video. Thanks.
Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.
I wish there was an asshole of the year award.
Yeah Trump would win a lot but there would be some stiff competition.
Beware the bullshit factories.
@Timmethy2.0 I think you are on to
I think you are on to something
Now that you mention it, it's hard to believe no one has started that award. Could make a whole 3 hour prime time awards show out of it with "Asshole Of The Year" being the biggest prize.
Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.
There could be brackets
That people fill out prior to the show.
Beware the bullshit factories.
G'mornin', Tim,
Home again, draggin' ass after a long road trip-have you cleaned your bike yet? For me, That's when I know I'm back and the trip is over. On a trip of such duration as yours, it's usually about a week before I want to Look at the bike again. Baked by the sun, blasted by the traffic, helmet Skanked by my noggin-when can I do it again?!? Sorry, projection Bro.
Looking forward to photos and details when you can. Don't let the dislocation overwhelm you, worse than jet lag sometimes. Happy you made it back safe, Bruddah!
Ya got to be a Spirit, cain't be no Ghost. . .
Explain Bldg #7. . . still waiting. . .
If you’ve ever wondered whether you would have complied in 1930’s Germany,
Now you know. . .
sign at protest march
Napped
Both Wednesday and Thursday. Mostly unpacked. Laundry is done. Went to the gym. Paid the bills that were in the mail. Made a sausage, garlic and basil marinara. Washing the motorcycle can wait.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -
Morning Tim and OT Folks!
As always, I'll promote my New Logos, and get it out of the way. Terpsichore, Muse of Dance, and she has a lot to say about dancing.
Unfortunately, missed Judo last night due to my ride bailing on me. Nothing against him, he's a great guy, but his diet causes him to be unable to bounce back from exercise as fast as I can. (He's Vegan, and nothing against that, but when I'm doing heavy strength training, which is what Judo is, IMHO, animal protein helps me a LOT. I'm sure Vegan works just as well for some folks, but he's still hurting after 2 days and I'm ready to go, so... YMMV.)
Talking with a lot of my friends. A lot of them are recently discovering that their patreons or other financial stopgaps have been shut down or had payments screwed with recently. The fact that many are Liberal and/or NSFW is of course, probably a HUGE coincidence.
So with that in mind, some music, good wishes, and Cheers for the day!
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msRy4vcSX4k]
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
The system has Orwellian controls built in
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -
Welcome home Tim! Don't recall if we've ever discussed sizing
down, i did it at 48 years-old and went in very different directions bringing me to today which you know about and looking back, these last decades have been good, all-in-all especially in work and new friendships and the peace and climate of the mountains, with one caveat, i didn't calculate having major health problems so early nor having to support Mom financially or simply put, i didn't save enough bucks for retirement.
Really enjoy living simply, but as many, wish i didn't have day-to-day financial stresses.
Having said that, i heartily agree that downsizing makes good sense, as initially it freed me from the middle-age traps managing to live debt free for twenty years; making choices more in line with my wishes than paying the company store.
Again, welcome home and "keep on keeping on," have a great one!
Hola, Tim. Welcome home. We have no possessions, stuff
possesses us. Old Taoist/Buddhist wisdom. The more you got, the less free you are. Something of an underpinning of Keroac's proposed rucksack rebellion. However, that freedom is a strange and tenuous freedom, for it means that you are free to be hungry, thirsty, homeless, ill clothed, freezing cold and blistering hot. A mendicant with a bowl, chopsticks, robe and sandals does a lot better in a moderate climate where such are also few and respected and folks are closer to the land than in maybe downtown Detroit, Atlanta, or San Francisco. As CStMS was saying Wednesday, turf is a necessity for a semi-permanent autonomous zone, which brings one into conflict with that freedom to roll and roam at the drop of a hat. It is perhaps The Dilemma of all dilemmas. Ones preferred solution may also be age related, I dunno.
Politics is local means what? We can all decide to go next Tuesday with trash bags and such and clean up the local park or creek or empty lot and that is cool/ If we all decide to farm that empty lot and shre the output, the owner is sue to shut us down at some point. Worse, we might find the local park we set out to clean full of equipment because Chevron owns the subsurface rights through some perverse twist of the property laws in this sorry assed nation and, if we do? Maybe you can fight city hall, and maybe you can't, but 40 John Does are going to have to work miracles in organizing and fundraising and hell-raising if they hope to take on the big guys.
Random thoughts on a random day - aren't they all. Time to get moving. Good to see ya back and not telecommuting as it were. Have a great day.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Have you seen this awesome mom
...pushing her cart around Target pcking up school supplies.
The whole time she delivers a sotto voce rant about parents who bitch because the teacher asked them to buy extra pencils for the class.
Her speil is a thing of beauty, applicable to all sorts of social failings and bad attitudes so evident in the US these days. And, funny? She cracked me up with her pitch perfect sarcasm. But mostly, I was in awe of her brutally honest stream of consciousness.
Catch a minute or two as she pushes you through the store talking non stop. (You're sitting in the in the shopping cart, legs dangling, and this exasperated mom has you pinned in her sights, telling it like it is.)
Okay then...
I love it! Wonder if we could pull one off like that on global warming... Just sayin'
Stop Climate Change Silence - Start the Conversation
Hot Air Website, Twitter, Facebook
Ha, that's it exactly
A little talking to about global warming by a mom that means business. Maybe a series of public service commercials. Heh. I thought the vodka miniature added a nice touch of gravitas.
imagine...
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
As "irrational exuberance" drives social media
into sustaining and forwarding poorly sourced or trumped-up memes driving we, the people, apart instead of together: Wink, your post is, sadly, very relevant.
I fear this new phenomenon.