Come watch the sunset with me here (~Goleta) on Tuesday January 14 from 4-6 pm or so.
Directions
It’s down a steep, precarious staircase at the south end of Anderson Ln (look up Seaview Nursery) If you drive, you may need to park by the bike trail and walk a half mile south on the road. If you bike, come all the way to the top of the staircase passing left of the closed automatic gate. Go straight into a little dirt path, don’t turn right with the road. Also, the tide may be low enough at that time to be able to bike or walk east on the sand from Goleta Beach as well. However there is one rocky outcrop to get around if you go that way.
In the photo the tide is at 2.5 feet. At sunset on January 14, the tide will be at 0. Walk east from the bottom of the staircase (a little past where this picture was taken) and I’ll be there, probably with Andrea.
If you can’t make that, I’m out walking on the beach weekend and holiday mornings 7-9am going west from Coal Oil Point—come visit then.
Photos
Aside from that, here are the photos from the past year—first from a July 20 instagram post:
Hello! Currently at Kennedy Meadows General store. I finished pdf updates from December to June:
https://mega.nz/#!vDhkSAAa!V1AXKPPndaS4-P4ClP51SIC5zjhRULjYdxDWfsb42mg
55mb
and from these last two hikes:
https://mega.nz/#!GS4k3ApR!CGP2wndQZdGVRqWtTLmLWoVLl5gG28CufaIlYH1fgdk
37mb
And here are the photos from then until now:
https://mega.nz/#!eThkwAiI!sMOc17fZ0EyYVXQxv7a8-NbIbD2Nc5FB805YREFIAbQ
34.66 mb
They are of the rest of that hiking trip, Goleta, Tennessee, Goleta, and a 5-night trip to Little Caliente in December.
bit.ly/cplbox may be an easier way to access those PDFs as well as even older ones. Just go to the folder for the year it was created.
A review of last year and thoughts about the next
I used to like to write. I almost felt compelled to write, especially during the beginning of college—every week, exploring events, feelings, discoveries: see experienceart. But eventually I came to feel I was creating mental drama to have things to write about. I may have now gone too far the other way. I’ve spent weeks of my life this past year playing Polytopia and Shattered Pixel Dungeon on my Note 9. I’ve spent weeks fiddling with cryptocurrency, banks, brokerage accounts. I’ve spent not much time at all creating anything. Aside from a few hand-(stylus-)written letters, I’ve written almost nothing.
An issue is whom do I write for. In the past, if I got any meaningful response from someone to what I put on the internet I sort of came to resent the attention. Odd, because, like now, I wanted an audience of some kind. Or I resented the feeling that I had to or should respond to someone’s reaction to what I created. That is probably a good point of departure for analysis. I have friends I enjoy writing to or even need to write to from time to time, but even then there is a sweet spot between no communication and too much.
I suppose one also has to feel one has ideas worth sharing. And one has to be persistent in wanting to share them. But at some point the possibility of success (being a part of the creation of carfree living environments?) did not seem compelling enough, perhaps when I found ways to live fairly happily without a car or job.
I did once seek attention for my ideas and attempt to organize people. But really, where is the pleasure there? The simplest possible answer is that once I have a girlfriend, that is almost exactly enough and all previous striving and organizing was to get me to that point. And now that Andrea has been here off and on for years, that is a kind of ongoing accomplishment and engagement in life. Relationship chess.
And yet what if I had a girlfriend who was as free and able to wander as I am? Andrea is not, though may be again someday, and staying in Goleta is really pretty nice. And wandering can get tiresome. And of course she may not always stay here with me.
What if I were driven by morals, ethics, faith? What if I had some cause I worked for? I did for a while. Recently I found culdesac.com which is building carfree developments in the US. I once supported something called Carfree City USA.
The issue is partly technology. I now have a computer again, a surface go and bluetooth keyboard. Last substack update quite possibly was written using my phone. Another option would be to handwrite this update. (Actually, the surface go battery life was not enough, and now I’m back to using the Note 9 with the Anker bluetooth keyboard from the thrift store.)
Another issue, of course, the main issue, is what am I for?
To some extent, I’m not for anything. I gave up on life/metaphorically died years ago (but occasionally revived when I thought I may have found something greater to organize my life around) and now I just do my best to pass my time as agreeably, if meaninglessly, as possible. Hence hours spent on games. Before the phone I’d just read, which was probably more meaningful, since I discover things when I read.
But personal contentment as a life aim is not entirely without a greater meaning. If that is all everyone did, the world could be improved. Problems arise when people are encouraged to ignore their own contentment in order to achieve some greater good, to serve their country, their god, their company, to be obedient to authority. Yet how do cathedrals get built? What would I build with my time if I had more resources, more secure indoor space, an easy place to practice a violin without being concerned about disturbing others with the noise and them then disturbing me as a result? It is so much easier just to not want very much.
But what about the fact that while I’m often comfortable, many other beings are not? I don’t know. But I don’t seem to be mobilizing to help others, perhaps not sure that I can or that I would enjoy doing so.
So—reduce one’s desires and find meaning in pursuing desires? I guess this is why we meditate in order to align our desires with the divine, with the life force. Perhaps I’ll do more of that.
Unfortunately attempting to live a life without self-discipline as I have been, discipline gets forced on me. A challenge for the year ahead is to eat less, less often, and to eat better. Turns out I can stuff myself and not get very fat, but continual overeating destroys the body in other ways. My liver in particular is not happy.
So this could be the year (as could have been many other years) of learning self discipline in eating. I suppose that is a project I could write about. Whether or not I succeed.
As for becoming more at peace with respect to investments, a goal for 2019, I have to some extent achieved that. The main thing is I can still get by with very little. So I could work a temp job for four weeks a year and have enough money to be content. I haven’t really learned any new tricks with respect to investing except to buy and hold the VTI (or other index) in order to not lose to inflation over the long haul. I may be better at managing risk now than I was when I (on screen) had ten times as much money as I do now that I’ve bungled things down to a more relaxing amount. You may have noticed that the more money you have the more things you consider spending it on. It's a lot more comfortable and simple just to have the same options to consider as always. Willful lack of discipline plus the market and my feeble human psychology and emotions and avoidance of (or skepticism in the lasting value of) hard work are a great recipe for losing the losers game. Let’s see if by the end of next year I still have what I have now.
As I write this, the sky is a brilliant blue, the grass is grass-green—as opposed to straw gold—and someone is running noisy lawncare equipment not more than 100 yards away. This sensation of being under a dentist’s drill or polisher should end at some point soon I hope.
So, why write? I’m empty, directionless, and have achieved a certain level of contentment.
The only remaining achievement (aside from organizing society to ban all cars and noisy lawncare equipment) is to not destroy my health prematurely by overeating.
So there is one goal there you can get behind probably. I swear I think that guy must be weedeating an entire lawn. Next will be the blower.
There are noble personalities. There are people who mobilize other people. There are people other people listen to.
I may not be one of those, at least at this moment. I’m still here though. Life is pretty good.
Maybe see you at the beach next Tuesday!
Oh yes, And I do not ignore the cultural war and physical war. That’s a reason I’m living in no-person’s land relatively speaking. If you haven’t read Christopher Wylie’s _Mindf*ck_ it is a good description of how democracy has been pwned. In short, using data from Facebook and elsewhere, personality profiles are created for individual people, including you. These individuals can be targeted with ads that fit their personalities to achieve a desired aim.
For example, an individual with paranoid and aggressive tendencies (which are known due to their particular Facebook likes correlated to personality types enabled by FB users who fill out personality questionnaires) could be fed information that leads them to mistrust their leadership more than they already did and then recruit them to undermine the organization they are a part of.
In another example, say for a pro-Brexit campaign, a person who scores high on openness could be fed ads that show how Brexit is better for immigrants from Britain’s former colonies than staying in the EU would be, while those voters who fear outsiders will be shown ads about crimes commited by immigrants who would be given asylum in the UK due to Britain's EU membership.
What’s also interesting is that once rage and hate enter the equation targets become increasingly resistant to information that counters their perspective. It’s all fake news and disinformation spread by the opposition and a threat to that person’s identity.
To further elaborate on the story, Cambridge Analytica was able to field test the slogans “build the wall,” “lock her up,” and “drain the swamp” on target populations before Trump was even a presidential candidate.[1]
So the recipe to destroy an organization is to target people by personality, feeding them information they are receptive to that encourages them to demonize some other. You can get your enemy to start fighting among themselves and to cease to be much of a threat.
I’m honestly not sure how and if we’re getting out of this. Christopher Wylie however ends his book on an optimistic note and a description of a path forward. Data collection and social media need to be regulated as there are no meaningful alternatives to the large social media sites for the kind of advertising, organizing, and manipulation being done to influence elections. And, well, check out the book.
Also, perhaps like at least a few other readers, I’m pretty darn sure my own father has bought the alt-right views hook, line, and sinker. And he might say the same about me just the other direction. He was denying human causes of global warming or that it was possible to do anything about it; I think he was comparing Trump’s media difficulties with George Washington’s. Etc. And they live in Tennessee and I have to go visit them there if I want to see my parents. The following New Yorker cartoon comes to mind. I left car-based suburbia long ago, but go back to visit a past I regretted if I go visit them.
But if you look at my pictures from the visit you will see they took me to see a very progressive play about a Tennessee social justice organization. And my dad gave them $20 at the door for their organization (the Highlander Center). Was this some sort of virtue signaling? Give HC $20 and Trump Pac $1000? I can only surmise since I did not ask. I’m sort of the prototypical freeloader black sheep son (exaggeration for dramatic effect), though I don’t get to freeload much unless I visit and then they generally put me to some sort of work. It is nice to go back and have my mom take care of me a bit though of course it should be the other way around at this point.
Now I like to think that if we were a Jewish family, schooled in the talmudic debating tradition, we would argue vigorously about this stuff at the table, when, according to Thich Nhat Hanh, we should be mindfully focused on our food. But instead, perhaps because dad still expresses aggressive anger and mom still expresses exasperation, and perhaps due to biology and personality and habit, we often just sit there in silence unless there’s a fairly inocuous subject. Hey, but at least we eat dinner at a table if my mom is there to make it, which in some people’s books, aside from the male chauvinism of it, is a cultural progression from how I tend to eat now. Occasionally something more contentious comes up. It’s actually probably safer to talk about this stuff than I’m making out—but I’d rather not imagine I'm experiencing his silent simmering discontent, or something. He’s the king there, foiled only by his queen for reasons I may never understand, and I have no desire to dispute or disturb that. He pays taxes and owns land, not me as much. If they lived west of the Mississippi on the other hand I might be tempted to stay for longer—
I can also just go to Kernville for a dose of red state, but honestly that feels much less difficult to me. I have a hunch there are some well-off hippies there, and there are the Tübatulabal and other tribes with their own very welcoming community center. They have great public transit and I don’t need to fly or bicycle for two months to get there. It’s still west of the Mississippi, the mountains have pines, the air is dry, the sky is blue.
For my part, years ago I volunteered at Libertarian Party Headquarters in DC. And if there were as many people contesting the stream-front real estate here as there were in Santa Cruz County one time I visited, maybe I’d be less immigrant-friendly.
So what exactly was the point I was trying to make? I’ve found a place I like and am reluctant to leave and am fortunate I still have parents to visit, however far away physically and culturally. But really, after going there two times in 2019, I feel like waiting until I really get lonely for them and for a break from California to go again. So I may not be there for my mom’s 70th birthday in May and just go in the fall. Though even next fall feels too soon right now. Who knows. It is nice to have parents and as Tim Urban explains, even under the best of circumstances of say four weeks spent in Tennessee each year, I won’t see my parents for many more days at all.
And then when I do go visit, how much time do I actually spend with them rather than off exercising or looking at my phone or something else?
And if spending time with parents is such a wonderful thing, why have I not been motivated to do the work to be in a position to spend time with children of my own or to adopt?
Is my time really better spent writing than playing a game on my phone? Well, I’ll still get to do that plenty when I finish this. Variety of foolishness may be an accomplishment at least. As long as my writing here doesn’t disturb my peace of mind or cause me to feel bad about what I wrote because other people might feel bad. Unless of course some feeling bad is necessary to progress to a better world.
One last note. I’ve also been listening to _Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy_ by Frank McLynn. The Mongols took over a significant portion of the world in a style not unlike what happens in Polytopia: mass genocides and exterminations of those who would not immediately submit. If they decided to destroy a populace, once all the skilled artisans had been found and sent to Mongolia, and the rich people tortured to find their hoards, everyone would be killed, many would be raped, and then the ruins of the city would be watched for two weeks to kill anyone who had managed to hide. Sometimes though they used prisoners on their front lines to absorb arrow fire when attacking the next city.
At any rate, hearing about this wholesale slaughter and destruction and dominance of powerful warriors is some sort of food for thought.
One more last note: to get through the holidays here when some of my usual entertainments are shut down (the campus pool mainly) I get odd movies from the library using the Hoopla app on a cracked iPad mini. One movie was _I Am_ by Tom Shadyac. He made $$ by directing the Ace Ventura movies among others. But had a bicycle crash and had a bad post-concussion syndrome to the point where he was planning to kill himself somehow but decided to make this one last movie.
I didn’t find the movie especially wonderful, but I keep thinking about how he said the movie was about mental illness. And at the end it is revealed that it is about his mental illness, the one he once had in which he had the huge house, the private jet, the cars and so on. And now he lives in a mobile home park near Pepperdine where he teaches and can ride his bike to work. And the post-concussion syndrome went away when he was making the movie.
There were other memorable but odd movies as well, including _Hatchback_ about a woman in LA who lives in a very small car, and _The Great Battle_ by Zo In-Sung, which I watched to get an approximation of the mayhem of Mongol times. _The Man From The Earth_ I like a lot as well (another play my mom took us to see).
Also, I’ve been trying to make new rat traps since there’s a couple coming through here who have been escaping the snap traps. If you are at all interested in trapping, Shawn Woods has made a YouTube career with trapping videos. He even shows you how to cook and eat a wood rat over a camp fire. I like the mojave scissors trap the best. Some of it is a bit sick, since it’s basically become his business to come up with new trap videos—to make money from youtube ads. Currently the NewPipe app on FDroid/GDroid is working for watching and downloading youtube videos at low resolutions to save data and avoid ads.
Speaking of which, Here are other movies I watched over the holidays:
The Act of Killing
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
City of God (Alexandre Rodrigues)
The Man Who Saved the World
Madness in the Method (Jason Mewes)
Tucker & Dale vs Evil
All to some degree about violence. I think it is only Tom Shadyac here who argues that humans are more notable for cooperation than for violent competition—but that is a point also made by Yuval Noah Harari in _Sapiens_ (actually Harari’s point is that we’re able to cooperate in service of abstract concepts often violently).
I definitely appreciate movies that do not have horror and death and violence, but the two above where I seem less disgusted by the violence were City of God and The Great Battle. I’m not sure exactly why. I think because those were about things novel to me (multi-ethnic white-minority society and drug wars and siege tactics), and the violence was sort of artistic as if it were a ballet in the battle movie and as if it were sickly ridiculous yet possibly real in the City of God.
(I’m currently listening to Michael Pollan read his book _Cooked_, and just got through the part about cheese and the erotics of disgust and decay. More food for thought.)
A few of my readers are probably familiar with Derrick Jensen, _The Culture of Make Believe_, the sunrise movement, extinction rebellion, earth first, sea shepherd, Deep Green Resistance, and so on.
So am I blaming personality type on my life of retirement and mediocrity? What would make me want to fight and create rather than just persue a bit of contentment here in the woods on the fringe of a town?
I think things could have been different for me in a world without cars. But I’m living here quite simply because it is easy and comfortable rather than doing something like Bruno Manser who went into the jungles of Borneo to live with the Penan and later to attempt to protect that way of life. (My mom gave me a book partly about Manser to read when I went to visit in the fall: The Last Wild Men of Borneo.)
Ok, well that’s the story here.
You know—Bannon, according to Wylie, (as I remember it) was/is attempting to bring about catastrophe in the US so lives could be romantic and heroic again and unmediated and uncushioned by bureaucracy and central government. I am curious to hear more about this idea. As creepy as I found Jordan Peterson—I think he was getting at the same thing. A sort of apocalypse fetish where at least a few men and women lead heroic lives. But for every Genghis Khan there are 100000+ peasants who shuffle out to get their heads removed even though they could have fought. At the moment I’m one of the peasants I suppose. I really don’t know what Bannon is hoping to accomplish. As for the rest, oligarchy seems a pretty straightforward aim, or some sort of authoritarian patriarchy where people are white, live in suburbs, and drive cars. Also, I think fear grips minds, so people can make money selling it. I’m reflecting back to a Kernville conversation where a watcher of Sean Hannity and volunteer at the local history museum was conviced Obama was a white guy in disguise (actually that was his wife's story) and that democrats were trying to make a world goverment to depopulate the western US to make room for wild animals. And yet my feeble mind goes, “How on earth could someone come to those conclusions?” and starts to wonder, and then later to look up some of what they mentioned to find a source. And I was happy to point out that rewilding is a thing, and to protect or reintroduce large mammals by converting land to wilderness is an objective. And that there has been a dictator who banned car use except by government officials (in Transnistria Lonely Planet write-up maybe).
Shawn Woods makes trapping videos for money, Sean Hannity does the same with conspiracy theories.
Actually it was Glenn Beck and Agenda 21 not Hannity.
The heroes of this moment are probably those working to build up higher levels of human organization and cooperation and government in order to reduce the damage humans are doing to other forms of life and to each other. At the moment I’m just being a bystander. Resting on privilege, living off crumbs left by others. Thinking as little as necessary to maintain comfort.
Is refusing to play ever heroic? Only if one dies or undergoes discomfort in order not to participate in something worse. Being comfortable and not participating (much) in something worse could be considered creative though.
Some excerpts from Walden:
“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.”
“When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced.”
“and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?”
And yet like Jiro dreaming of sushi—to have some grand goal to strive for would be a great thing. You’ve got to believe the goal is worthwhile somehow, and if not achievable at least enjoyable or engaging to attempt to achieve. I now recall goal-free living self-help tips which advocate a sort of compass approach. Just point yourself in a generally promising direction. And if you don’t have worthwhile goals, you’re left where I am, building a life on basic animal motivations and cycles. Getting hungry, getting tired, eating, sleeping. Seeking long periods of mental hypnosis and thoughtless state by fiddling with a phone. Getting bored of town life and overfed, heading for the hills, returning to the comforts and generally mild annoyances of town life. Desiring Andrea, not talking to Andrea because of some slight or disagreement, desiring Andrea again, finding comfort and peace in her company.
What I do is what I do. With minimal thought. And leave it at that.
Until writing this, if this can be considered creative, the most mentally taxing and creative thing I was attempting was to devise a different way to trap woodrats than what I had been doing. It is dark now almost and they are coming out, so I’d better clean up the mess. If I remove all the food they can get there’s really no need to tax myself with cutting short their lives. Earplugs block out most of their rustling and gnawing. If I can keep them hungry enough they are less rambunctious and may eat the slugs off my fava bean plants. By the time the fava beans grow beans the rats would like to eat, the owl may have caught them or I may have. Bobcats are another possibility. . . . I'd better get them in the next three days or soon there will be more.
Man vs self and man vs nature. And man vs society. And man vs Andrea. There could be something to work with here. A contemplative and engaged mind could make something of these elements. I'm thinking Knut Hamsen's Growth of the Soil. Or Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
Until next time,
Colin