by Skald
Well, the stint here in San Francisco has been interesting. There have been good points and bad points.
The initial months were EXTREMELY stressful-- mostly because of money. But lately, I've settled into a comfortable routine. My teaching job is fine. Money is all right, not abundant, but enough to get by. My friends are here. And I'm enjoying the city.
Certainly, this is the only city in America I could live in and tolerate. I love the progressive-liberal political scene. I love the diversity.
But, to be honest, I've missed Asia and all its energy. While I've generally been content in San Francisco, I've never quite connected with the place. Unfortunately, for all its charm, SF is still a part of America. And America, quite frankly, bores me to tears.
I've always known I'd move on, but just wasn't sure where or when.
Well, the where and the when is getting clearer.
An opportunity has arisen. My friend came to SF a few months ago from Thailand. He started selling jewelry here and is doing amazingly well. In fact, his business is booming and he has already saved a lot of money.
He and his girlfriend "Gypsy" have decided to use that money to buy land on an island in Thailand. Wat wants to build a small resort with bungalows. "Gypsy" wants to run a small spa as part of the resort. And here's the interesting part for me-- they want me to run an English school there.
In the past, I've often told them about my idea for a perfect English school-- it would be an "English Resort"-- somewhere near a beach. Students would come from abroad for an educational vacation. We'd teach a few hours of English in the morning. But most of the day would be spent actively learning outdoors. We'd learn about the local flora, fauna, and ecology. We'd go on hikes, boat rides, and snorkeling trips. We'd visit local artists and farmers. All of the learning and communication would take place in English-- but there would be none of the boring textbooks and activities found in normal English schools.
Well, Wat and "Gypsy" like the idea and want to incorporate it into their "resort". Wat will be going to Thailand next February or March to buy the land. At the end of next year, we will all go to the island.. camp and live like Hobopoets... and start building the central lodge and the bungalows.
What makes this even more fun is that another of our Hobopoet clan, "Sky", is also buying land on the same island. His wife is Thai and they likewise want to have some bungalows. "Sky" also wants to open a bar on the beach.
So the Hobopoet clan will be migrating once again-- all of us moving from San Francisco to south Thailand.
Though its still a year or more away... I can already feel the wanderlust growing inside. I can already smell the spices of Thai food. I can already picture the blue-green water.
My time in San Francisco has not been bad... but Thailand is calling us back.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Update on the Project
by Skald
I haven't checked in in quite a while, mostly because my life has been dominated by a pretty boring daily routine. That is set to change sometime next year.. but more on that later.
First, an update on the micropreneur project. Its going slowly, but well. My English teaching website now has 40 paying members. The site is now producing an income of about $100 a month. That's not enough for me to comfortably live on yet, but its something.
Hopefully, that little amount will gradually grow over the course of a few years.
My first hoped for milestone is for the site to make enough to support me in an inexpensive country like Thailand. I can live quite well there for about $4-500 a month. So my little project really doesn't have a lot farther to go.
Thats one of the great things about living a simpler hobopoet life, since your economic desires are reduced, its much easier to succeed as a freelancer or micropreneur. Our break even points and our sustainability points are much lower than most peoples.
I haven't checked in in quite a while, mostly because my life has been dominated by a pretty boring daily routine. That is set to change sometime next year.. but more on that later.
First, an update on the micropreneur project. Its going slowly, but well. My English teaching website now has 40 paying members. The site is now producing an income of about $100 a month. That's not enough for me to comfortably live on yet, but its something.
Hopefully, that little amount will gradually grow over the course of a few years.
My first hoped for milestone is for the site to make enough to support me in an inexpensive country like Thailand. I can live quite well there for about $4-500 a month. So my little project really doesn't have a lot farther to go.
Thats one of the great things about living a simpler hobopoet life, since your economic desires are reduced, its much easier to succeed as a freelancer or micropreneur. Our break even points and our sustainability points are much lower than most peoples.
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Micropreneur
by Skald
The micropreneur (or "hobopreneur ;) project is going decently. I've launched my website and am developing and improving it week by week.
When I launched the site almost a month ago, I opened it for free one month trial memberships. I ended up getting about 50 trial members. Soon they will be deciding whether to stick around or leave. At the moment, I have 7 paying members in addition to the free ones.
The site is called Effortless English. Its designed to help internationals and immigrants learn to communicate in English with native speakers.
True to my Hobopoet principles, I'm also hoping it will undermine the authority-based English school system that dominates in much of the world today. The site is set up as a club and has four core principles:
1. Independent Learning
2. Respect, support and encouragement
3. Equality- everyone a learner and a teacher
4. Hospitality
I envision the site as a hub for a learning community-- a community that will help each other learn, without the authoritarian crap you find in almost every school. I see my role primarily as a content provider-- I create audio articles and text and learning guides (that explain difficult vocabulary). I also schedule occasional discussions on the internet, using Skype.
I'm charging a modest fee- basically enough to cover the time it takes me to create the audio, transcripts, and guides.
The idea is to stay small and intimate-- but to grow enough to end my reliance on employment. That's still a ways off, but its a doable goal.
The important part of any project like this is to get started. Just do something, and then you've got something to work with-- something to tweak, improve, modify, play with. The problem most of us have is that we plan and think and worry too much.
Whether its a big trip, a micropreneur project, or any other dream-- the best way to proceed is to launch it as fast as possible... before doubt has a chance to poison everything. That's why I advocate buying an airplane ticket as soon as possible after deciding on a trip. Make the commitment real.
And so too with the commitment to free yourself from wage slavery. I waited far too long to do this and can't for the life of me figure out why.. other than I was worried I'd fail.
But the beauty of being a micropreneur is that you can't really fail. Regular business people are all about borrowing money and writing business plans and scheming to become ultra rich. But as a micropreneur, you don't need to worry about any of that. No need to borrow any money, or write a plan, or become rich. Instead, just take a small idea, launch it now, and see what happens. If it flops, modify it and try again. Repeat until it becomes successful.
That's essentially the process my friend Wat followed to build his micro jewelry business. And he's been free from wage slavey for years!
The micropreneur (or "hobopreneur ;) project is going decently. I've launched my website and am developing and improving it week by week.
When I launched the site almost a month ago, I opened it for free one month trial memberships. I ended up getting about 50 trial members. Soon they will be deciding whether to stick around or leave. At the moment, I have 7 paying members in addition to the free ones.
The site is called Effortless English. Its designed to help internationals and immigrants learn to communicate in English with native speakers.
True to my Hobopoet principles, I'm also hoping it will undermine the authority-based English school system that dominates in much of the world today. The site is set up as a club and has four core principles:
1. Independent Learning
2. Respect, support and encouragement
3. Equality- everyone a learner and a teacher
4. Hospitality
I envision the site as a hub for a learning community-- a community that will help each other learn, without the authoritarian crap you find in almost every school. I see my role primarily as a content provider-- I create audio articles and text and learning guides (that explain difficult vocabulary). I also schedule occasional discussions on the internet, using Skype.
I'm charging a modest fee- basically enough to cover the time it takes me to create the audio, transcripts, and guides.
The idea is to stay small and intimate-- but to grow enough to end my reliance on employment. That's still a ways off, but its a doable goal.
The important part of any project like this is to get started. Just do something, and then you've got something to work with-- something to tweak, improve, modify, play with. The problem most of us have is that we plan and think and worry too much.
Whether its a big trip, a micropreneur project, or any other dream-- the best way to proceed is to launch it as fast as possible... before doubt has a chance to poison everything. That's why I advocate buying an airplane ticket as soon as possible after deciding on a trip. Make the commitment real.
And so too with the commitment to free yourself from wage slavery. I waited far too long to do this and can't for the life of me figure out why.. other than I was worried I'd fail.
But the beauty of being a micropreneur is that you can't really fail. Regular business people are all about borrowing money and writing business plans and scheming to become ultra rich. But as a micropreneur, you don't need to worry about any of that. No need to borrow any money, or write a plan, or become rich. Instead, just take a small idea, launch it now, and see what happens. If it flops, modify it and try again. Repeat until it becomes successful.
That's essentially the process my friend Wat followed to build his micro jewelry business. And he's been free from wage slavey for years!
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Escape From Wage Slavery
by Skald
The Corporate system that currently dominates the world is set up to make most of us wage slaves. This form of authority and control is usually far worse than the political repression we compain so much about. With the exception of the "Drug War", most of us are repressed far more at our jobs than anywhere else.
Employment (and prior to that, school) is what degrades us, what regulates our lives, what squashes our passions, what sucks out our souls.
Escape from this slave-system has been my overwhelming obsessions for many years.
I've had some success. I've lived in a car, and later, in a van. I've travelled a fair amount abroad. I've had long stints without any work whatsoever... living happy and free.
But always the money runs out, and I go slinking back to an employer-- hand outstretched, dignity in tatters. I'm well and truly sick of that.
I used to think that maximizing the work to free time ratio was the best approach. I hoped to work less and less while having more and more of my own time.
But that's not enough. I don't want partial freedom, I don't want just part of my life-- I want it all.
So what are the options? There are a few.
One can be seen on the sidewalks outside my apartment-- full time homelessness- begging on the streets. Of course, many of those folks did not choose homelessness- and their lives are truly wretched.
Others did choose homelessness, or they chose drug/alcohol addiction which locks them into homelessness. Some appear to get by. There might even be a few that remain fairly clean and healthy. But they live by begging, and that, to my mind, is a horribly wretched way to live-- especially if your mind and body are capable of something else.
Freedom without self-reliance is not very free.
Another choice, perhaps, would be to join some kind of commune. That's never appealed to me either. Such places tend to be filled with new age nuts, social retards, or the outright mentally ill. Plus, these places invariably are rife with rules, regulations, power struggles, and other bullshit. You replace the corporate master for a communal one. No thanks.
After much thought, I think the best answer, given the current circumstances, is Gandhi's. Gandhi envisioned an economy based on "cottage industries". In other words, every household would be its own little "business"-- its own little "industry".
The cottage industry (or freelancer) idea is promising, and the possibilities are endless. A simple example are the people you see at musical festivals and rennaisance fairs. These folks make art, or jewelry, or food... drive around to festivals... and sell it to the people attending. They are small scale, doing what they love, and making a living from it. No bosses. No regulations. And usually, no taxes. Another key distinction-- these people rarely think like corporate businessmen-- they are almost always participants in the festivals as well-- part of the community.
This seems to me a much nobler way of life than either begging or employment. What's more, it offers an economic model of freedom that is doable for most people. You've just got to find your niche, your passion, your bliss--- and go with it. None of these people are going to get rich-- but thats not what they want. Freedom, and an economically sustainable way of life, is what they're after.
So this is the path I've decided to pursue. What's my passion? My bliss? My niche?
For me- its travel, engagement with other cultures, meeting people from other countries, and languages.
And so I've finally developed my cottage industry plan. I am starting a website for English language learners. In the recent past, I was focusing on getting private students and teaching them in my apartment. But this approach had several weaknesses for me:
For one, it could not sustain my nomadic lifestyle. What happens when I leave San Francisco? All those students, and contacts, would vanish. I'd have to start from scratch every time I moved (and I move a lot)!
Second, it was wearing me out. To be economically sustainable, I had to teach a lot of private students. Too many, in fact, for my tastes. Even when I'm doing "work" that I love, I prefer not to do it more than 20 hours a week.
Third, private tutoring imposed a rigid schedule on me. I had to make appointments and keep them. It felt like a time cage.
The website is a much better approach for me. I can manage it from (almost) anywhere in the world. I can move anytime, to anywhere, and still keep my students. I can work on the website at any time of the day or night-- whatever suits my whim or energy level.
Its an ideal solution for me.
Next week, I will launch the "Beta" version of the site.
After that, I'll start checking in at Hobopoet more often. I think this is a genuinely useful experiment in self-reliance, freedom, and nomadism.
I intend to share the challenges, strategies, and triumphs-- with the intention of helping other hobopoets develop their own, individual, sustainable cottage industries-- and live a life free from wage slavery.
The Corporate system that currently dominates the world is set up to make most of us wage slaves. This form of authority and control is usually far worse than the political repression we compain so much about. With the exception of the "Drug War", most of us are repressed far more at our jobs than anywhere else.
Employment (and prior to that, school) is what degrades us, what regulates our lives, what squashes our passions, what sucks out our souls.
Escape from this slave-system has been my overwhelming obsessions for many years.
I've had some success. I've lived in a car, and later, in a van. I've travelled a fair amount abroad. I've had long stints without any work whatsoever... living happy and free.
But always the money runs out, and I go slinking back to an employer-- hand outstretched, dignity in tatters. I'm well and truly sick of that.
I used to think that maximizing the work to free time ratio was the best approach. I hoped to work less and less while having more and more of my own time.
But that's not enough. I don't want partial freedom, I don't want just part of my life-- I want it all.
So what are the options? There are a few.
One can be seen on the sidewalks outside my apartment-- full time homelessness- begging on the streets. Of course, many of those folks did not choose homelessness- and their lives are truly wretched.
Others did choose homelessness, or they chose drug/alcohol addiction which locks them into homelessness. Some appear to get by. There might even be a few that remain fairly clean and healthy. But they live by begging, and that, to my mind, is a horribly wretched way to live-- especially if your mind and body are capable of something else.
Freedom without self-reliance is not very free.
Another choice, perhaps, would be to join some kind of commune. That's never appealed to me either. Such places tend to be filled with new age nuts, social retards, or the outright mentally ill. Plus, these places invariably are rife with rules, regulations, power struggles, and other bullshit. You replace the corporate master for a communal one. No thanks.
After much thought, I think the best answer, given the current circumstances, is Gandhi's. Gandhi envisioned an economy based on "cottage industries". In other words, every household would be its own little "business"-- its own little "industry".
The cottage industry (or freelancer) idea is promising, and the possibilities are endless. A simple example are the people you see at musical festivals and rennaisance fairs. These folks make art, or jewelry, or food... drive around to festivals... and sell it to the people attending. They are small scale, doing what they love, and making a living from it. No bosses. No regulations. And usually, no taxes. Another key distinction-- these people rarely think like corporate businessmen-- they are almost always participants in the festivals as well-- part of the community.
This seems to me a much nobler way of life than either begging or employment. What's more, it offers an economic model of freedom that is doable for most people. You've just got to find your niche, your passion, your bliss--- and go with it. None of these people are going to get rich-- but thats not what they want. Freedom, and an economically sustainable way of life, is what they're after.
So this is the path I've decided to pursue. What's my passion? My bliss? My niche?
For me- its travel, engagement with other cultures, meeting people from other countries, and languages.
And so I've finally developed my cottage industry plan. I am starting a website for English language learners. In the recent past, I was focusing on getting private students and teaching them in my apartment. But this approach had several weaknesses for me:
For one, it could not sustain my nomadic lifestyle. What happens when I leave San Francisco? All those students, and contacts, would vanish. I'd have to start from scratch every time I moved (and I move a lot)!
Second, it was wearing me out. To be economically sustainable, I had to teach a lot of private students. Too many, in fact, for my tastes. Even when I'm doing "work" that I love, I prefer not to do it more than 20 hours a week.
Third, private tutoring imposed a rigid schedule on me. I had to make appointments and keep them. It felt like a time cage.
The website is a much better approach for me. I can manage it from (almost) anywhere in the world. I can move anytime, to anywhere, and still keep my students. I can work on the website at any time of the day or night-- whatever suits my whim or energy level.
Its an ideal solution for me.
Next week, I will launch the "Beta" version of the site.
After that, I'll start checking in at Hobopoet more often. I think this is a genuinely useful experiment in self-reliance, freedom, and nomadism.
I intend to share the challenges, strategies, and triumphs-- with the intention of helping other hobopoets develop their own, individual, sustainable cottage industries-- and live a life free from wage slavery.
Friday, August 25, 2006
Transition Blues
by Skald
Its been a long time, and so, and update:
My quest for economic self-reliance is going quite well. My freelance teaching program is suddenly taking off. I'm having a great time with my students, I'm teaching in the relaxed environment of my own apartment, and I'm making good money.
But I've hit a very difficult transition period. I'm doing so well that I'm now stressed out and overworked-- because I'm still working my job. I feel caught in a Catch-22. At the moment, I don't have enough students to support myself completly as a freelancer. However, I already have too many to fit in with my school teaching job.
I've lived a relaxed hobopoet life for a long time, so all this work is driving me crazy. I almost decided to cut most of my private students in order to return to a relaxed schedule.
But then I thought about my long term goals. I realized that I'd only increase my dependence on jobs by cutting freelance clients. What I need to do is cut the job. To do that, I need to save a "cache" that can see me through a few months of reduced income. I also need to keep adding private students in order to reach the self-sufficient point.
In other words, I've decided that some short term pain-- in the form of FAR too much work-- is the best strategy. But to keep my sanity, I've made a deadline: I will quit my job by the end of the year. Beginnning in 2007, I will be a full time freelancer.
That means no bosses. That means no office. That means 4 hours a day of teaching-- with only students I enjoy working with.. and who likewise enjoy working with me.
It means, FINALLY taking complete responsibility for my life.
Right now I'm stuck in the transition blues. But I see the promised land-- just over the next hill.
Its been a long time, and so, and update:
My quest for economic self-reliance is going quite well. My freelance teaching program is suddenly taking off. I'm having a great time with my students, I'm teaching in the relaxed environment of my own apartment, and I'm making good money.
But I've hit a very difficult transition period. I'm doing so well that I'm now stressed out and overworked-- because I'm still working my job. I feel caught in a Catch-22. At the moment, I don't have enough students to support myself completly as a freelancer. However, I already have too many to fit in with my school teaching job.
I've lived a relaxed hobopoet life for a long time, so all this work is driving me crazy. I almost decided to cut most of my private students in order to return to a relaxed schedule.
But then I thought about my long term goals. I realized that I'd only increase my dependence on jobs by cutting freelance clients. What I need to do is cut the job. To do that, I need to save a "cache" that can see me through a few months of reduced income. I also need to keep adding private students in order to reach the self-sufficient point.
In other words, I've decided that some short term pain-- in the form of FAR too much work-- is the best strategy. But to keep my sanity, I've made a deadline: I will quit my job by the end of the year. Beginnning in 2007, I will be a full time freelancer.
That means no bosses. That means no office. That means 4 hours a day of teaching-- with only students I enjoy working with.. and who likewise enjoy working with me.
It means, FINALLY taking complete responsibility for my life.
Right now I'm stuck in the transition blues. But I see the promised land-- just over the next hill.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Not Sexy
by Skald
One thing I've thought of writing about is my current experiment with building a freelance income. At the moment, I'm engaged in an effort to create my own freelance teaching income. My goal is to totally free myself from bosses, schools, and administrators.
Part of this strategy is to build both a face-to-face clientele and an online one. A solid base of online students would give me a highly flexible income. It would allow me to travel and/or move about the world while maintaining a steady money supply-- independently.
This is where my energies are currently focused. I know, its not terribly sexy. I'm not exploring a new country, or testing the far limits of simple living, or other "at the edge" endeavors.
But this project is very important. However much I enjoyed traveling, I have always had the specter of employment hanging over me. Eventually the money ran out and I was forced, like some sad beggar, to beg for work (ie. "apply for a job"). This has always nagged at me, despite success at reducing the hours and days I needed to be a wage slave.
Economic freedom is vital. It really doesn't matter what form this takes. It might be a standard business (though this is far too anchored for my tastes). It might be a very simple cottage industry, such as fashioning beaded jewelry and selling it at festivals. Ambitious or modest, settled or nomadic, to live free it is absolutely essential to be one's own economic master.
And so, I am currently engaged in the less-than-sexy, but vitally important experiment of building a freelance teaching income.
Since this constitutes the bulk of my current thoughts and experiments, I'll start sharing my ups, downs, strategies, and ideas on this topic here on Hobopoet.
I'll also look forward to future nomadic adventures- which will be independently funded!
One thing I've thought of writing about is my current experiment with building a freelance income. At the moment, I'm engaged in an effort to create my own freelance teaching income. My goal is to totally free myself from bosses, schools, and administrators.
Part of this strategy is to build both a face-to-face clientele and an online one. A solid base of online students would give me a highly flexible income. It would allow me to travel and/or move about the world while maintaining a steady money supply-- independently.
This is where my energies are currently focused. I know, its not terribly sexy. I'm not exploring a new country, or testing the far limits of simple living, or other "at the edge" endeavors.
But this project is very important. However much I enjoyed traveling, I have always had the specter of employment hanging over me. Eventually the money ran out and I was forced, like some sad beggar, to beg for work (ie. "apply for a job"). This has always nagged at me, despite success at reducing the hours and days I needed to be a wage slave.
Economic freedom is vital. It really doesn't matter what form this takes. It might be a standard business (though this is far too anchored for my tastes). It might be a very simple cottage industry, such as fashioning beaded jewelry and selling it at festivals. Ambitious or modest, settled or nomadic, to live free it is absolutely essential to be one's own economic master.
And so, I am currently engaged in the less-than-sexy, but vitally important experiment of building a freelance teaching income.
Since this constitutes the bulk of my current thoughts and experiments, I'll start sharing my ups, downs, strategies, and ideas on this topic here on Hobopoet.
I'll also look forward to future nomadic adventures- which will be independently funded!
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
A Pause
by Skald
As many readers have noticed, I've been taking an extended break from Hobopoet. My life is generally going well, and I've got a few interesting projects going on. Mostly these relate to my efforts to learn a language (Spanish) and teach one (English). These activities may (or may not) be interesting-- but I feel they don't really relate to the purpose and spirit of Hobopoet.
Likewise, while I continue to live cheaply in a small one room apartment in San Francisco.. and indulge in the usual Hobopoet experiments and activities.. I have already covered these ideas many many times. No use repeating them yet again.
I do not intend to quit Hobopoet altogether. However, I need some time to determine a new direction. After a while, my posts had become little more than rants, complaints, and emotional venting. That was nice for me psychologically, allowing me to release some stress-- but didn't fit the spirit of Hobopoet either.
And so I'll be taking some time to figure out where to go from here. While I do that, I hope that Matt and other contributors will take up the slack and continue with their excellent (but far too infrequent :) posts!
As our beloved CA governor say, "I'll be back"!
(And if the oh so fascinating world of foreign language learning excites you, come on over and check out Effortless Language Acquisition, a significantly less radical blog!)
As many readers have noticed, I've been taking an extended break from Hobopoet. My life is generally going well, and I've got a few interesting projects going on. Mostly these relate to my efforts to learn a language (Spanish) and teach one (English). These activities may (or may not) be interesting-- but I feel they don't really relate to the purpose and spirit of Hobopoet.
Likewise, while I continue to live cheaply in a small one room apartment in San Francisco.. and indulge in the usual Hobopoet experiments and activities.. I have already covered these ideas many many times. No use repeating them yet again.
I do not intend to quit Hobopoet altogether. However, I need some time to determine a new direction. After a while, my posts had become little more than rants, complaints, and emotional venting. That was nice for me psychologically, allowing me to release some stress-- but didn't fit the spirit of Hobopoet either.
And so I'll be taking some time to figure out where to go from here. While I do that, I hope that Matt and other contributors will take up the slack and continue with their excellent (but far too infrequent :) posts!
As our beloved CA governor say, "I'll be back"!
(And if the oh so fascinating world of foreign language learning excites you, come on over and check out Effortless Language Acquisition, a significantly less radical blog!)
Saturday, June 24, 2006
"GYPSY"
(homage to Motorcycle Nomad Gypsies legacy)
A teenage kid pumping gas at his dad's independent shop on outskirts of a little town looked up as sound of a motorcycle zapped him,and a lone rider on a big black Harley chopper bent into wind ''''rain, left an impression on him that would haunt him even when he'd got his own bike and chopped it in expressioin of his own individuality, as he'd do in the future.
The Biker was solely obsessed with finding a cheap motel,like,real goddam quick, as he was cold,wet,and dangerously numb and tired from eight hard hours rollin' down twisty,screwed up backroads.
He spotted a neon motel sign,turned in 'n' dismounted in front of the office. His eyes scouted out the place quickly,appreciatin' funkiness of the cabins,apparent scarcity of customers.
The proprietor,a guy in his thirties,stared at the bedraggled Biker as he came into the office,shook his head,said,"From the looks of you,you been havin' a tough go of it on that motorcycle of yours in that there shitty weather?"
"Y'got that right,mister. It's miserable out there! I'm beat 'n' cold,wet 'n' in serious need o' a hot shower 'n' a bed. Do be hopin' y'can help me out?"
"That's my business. Where y'comin' from?"
"Been doin' some house paintin' up in West Virginia…"
"Headin' somewhere particular or just goin'?"
"Jes goin'…"
"You with one of them outlaw clubs?"
"No sir,not me. Jes me 'n' m'machine…Ah,how much y'get for a night? Like I said,
I'm bone weary 'n'…"
"Aw,sure,sure,sorry t'be talkin' at you and bugging you with all these questions.It's just kind of lonely around here…"
"Hey,I understand, Ain't n'problem."
"$25.00'll do her."
"That's fine. Anywhere nearby I could get some chow?"
"Yup, about two miles down the road there's a honky tonk,they got burgers 'n'
ribs and all that kind of thing."
"Sounds perfect."
He walked into the cabin,threw down his gearbag,pulled off his old scarred
leather jacket 'n' cutoff made into his own personal colors,yanked off his boots,
fired up a cig,turned on the tube and slumped down on the bed,feeling the road weariness beginning to seep out of his pores.
He stripped,took a long,hot,euphoric shower,shaved,brushed his teeth,came
back into the room naked and stared at his hard,scarred,tattooed 48 year old body
In the mirror. His arms thick from years of hard work,be it wrenching on bikes,construction,house painting,welding,he'd done it all at one time or another.
His gallery of tattoos,all of his own design,although not full sleeves,were many and blended together to reflect his highly individualistic personal style and
perspective. His thick mahogany-colored hair hung down to his waist. His Face ruggedly handsome,burnt by wind and sun to a dark leathery swarthiness.
His Zapata mustache,unlike his hair,laced with silvery-gray.
He pulled out his other pair of Levis and a clean T-shirt. He'd hit a laund-
ramat in the morning and clean up the jeans,T-shirt and flannel shirt he'd been wearing.
He looked outside and dug that it was raining even harder,said,"Fuck it!"
He figured he'd cop a hearty breakfast in the morning. It wasn't as if he'd never gone hungry before. Over the twenty-four years he'd been a motorcycle nomad,there'd been many a time he'd gone hungry for one reason or another. Been many a night when he'd ended up sleeping like a wild dog in the bush or a ditch on side of the road for lack of anything else. That was part of the dues you paid in the life.
Wandering had always been integral to his experience. His granddad had given his dad an Indian Scout motorcycle for his sixteenth birthday. When WW II came his dad joined the Army,went to Airborne,and eventually worked for Military Intelligence
and usually got around on a Harley servi-car trike. At war's end,he bought a '45 Harley Knuckle and became a Motorcycle Gypsy just as his father had been,riding all over the American continent,drinking hard,fighting hard,blowing weed,making a living by any means. He was epitome of kind of Hipster Marlon Brando had wanted to depict in the legendary original Biker film "The Wild One". While cruising through
El Paso,he'd met Juanita Castananza; she'd climbed on his iron horse,after riding his bones,without a second thought and they roared off into the unknown future together.
He'd been born while his dad was doing a stint as a construction worker in Alburquerque. He'd grown up digging beBop and rock 'n' roll,weed,chicks,and his outraegeously Hip parents.
They'd live in a place for about 6 months,renting a po' trash trailer or shack, then they'd up and move on,his dad on his bike,his mom and him and his sister In their woody station wagon.
Like many of his generation and that of his mom and dad,after seeing Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin in "The Wild One",and mostly being his dad was a genuine Motorcycle Gypsy,as were all his closest friends,he was obsessed with motorcycles and Biker Mystique. At 14,he had a dirt bike that he rode into the ground. At 16.his dad gave him a Triumph and helped him chop it to his own personal taste.
He got drafted,did a tour in 'nam,came back irrevocably convinced the world was hopelessly fucked up and his only hope was to be in the wind,on a chopped hog,going his own individualistic way,avoiding and evading as much as possible all the ludicrous laws,greedy Robopathic people,that whole goddam sick societus,and carrying on the motorcycle Gypsy legacy that his dad had brought him up to love and respect as their own unique other culture.
He eventually sold his Triumph and copped a '69 XLCH Harley Sportster. He stretched the front downtubes of the frame 3 1/2",put a 10" over Springer front end with a 21" wheel;added a King Sportster gas tank;high chopper pullback handlebars mounted on 3" dogbone risers;a rolled aluminum oil tank;a solo saddle;and a 22" sissybar.
He'd work awhile,not very long,just enough to save a stash to get in the wind once again. Touring from Laconia to Daytona,to New Orleans,Seattle,Old
Orchard beach,coast to coast,north to south,making it as best he could,he lived and worked to maintain his machine and his motorcycle Gypsy lifestyle.Many of the friends he'd meet,fellow Bikers,shop owners and wrenches,remained friends for life,therefore,he never lacked places to go and folks to see.
He'd sort of tried settling down once. Passing through Tucson,he'd stopped in a saloon to down to down a few cold ones,and before long was rapping to a
very beautiful Apache Indian girl who lived on a commune. He gave her a ride there,checked out the scene and dug it,so ended up staying for two years.
They had a kid together,but drifted apart eventually.
He rented a trailer on the outskirts of Tucson,worrking at this and that.
Morning Star and their son T-Bird came down for awhile and they tried to get it together again but it just didn't work out.Wasn't like he didn't love the
woman and child,he did in his own peculiar way. Nor did he abuse them in any way. If he was rowdy and needed to get out his aggression,there were all
too many lowlife asshole men he could seek out and stomp. Bottom line was, his only real loyalty was to his machine and his motorcycle Gypsy lifestyle.
Actually,he probably wasn't really all that different from those first motorcycle Gypsies at the beginning of the century when they were riding
Harleys,Indians,Excelciors,Hendersons and other innovations on the emerging art of what is a motorcycle:a sculpture of iron that a person can mount and
ride everywhere in the world if so inclined.Like them,he was an adventurous and and restless man in what still remains the "Wild West".The motorcycle Gypsies, like their brothers the Hoboes,were a unique subculture bred of American soil,a nomadic subculture as profound in its folklore and lifeways as the Romany Gypsies and the nomadic Native American tribes,as well as the other nomadic cultures throughout the world.Being the kind of creative and intelligent individual he was,he was thoroughly aware of this.He felt he was part of and a participant in this continuing tradition,living it every moment.
Eventually he cut out of Tucson and headed south of the border into Mexico.
He loved Mexico.He ate plenty of chow,drank too much Mescal,smoked primo weed constantly,ate Teo Noncaital Sacred Mushrooms,geezed plenty of crystal, made the love with many fine brownskinned women.
He lived in San Felipe Pueblo in Oaxaca for awhile,then wandered over to Yucatan,up to Veracruz,and then further up through Texas,Oklahoma,Missouri,and then on East.
He ended up working as a wrench in a bike shop with an outlaw bro,Danny,in Connecticut.He'd go on runs with the clubs,but wouldn't join any even though he was more than welcome to.He'd make it with a chick for awhile,but it never lasted.It was as if he were cursed with the enigmatic brand of the lobo solo:
the lone wolf.
Then one night Danny went over the high side and died when his chopper went out of control on a rain slick I-95.He got in the wind once again.
His last period of downtime,which is what he considered those times when he was sedentary for awhile,had been in Misty Creek,in West Virginia.He'd gotten a gig as a house painter and had rented a dilapidated derelict house,amidst broken cars,washing machines,refrigerators,mutilated furniture,weeds growing densely, on the outskirts of town.
His decision to leave all that behind and be in the wind once again had started one dismal day,rain pounding down in torrents,howling banshee winds shrieking, whipping telephone lines,clothes hanging on backyard rigs.
His newest bike,a Knuckle chopper he and Danny had built,gleamed on the porch.
Inside the house,illuminated by kerosene lamps and huge candles,he'd been sitting in the remnants of a once stuffed chair,reading Lee Gutkind's "Bike Fever", a book that had become for him like a sacred text.It was especially on stormy days like that one,he'd read yet again the chapter on the history of motorcycle Gypsies,and it'd reaffirm his personal vision of how he and his life must be.
He'd taken a long hit on the thick joint,drawing the sweet pungent smoke deep into his lungs,down into his abdomen:the center of human willpower,digging it no end as it permeated his genitals and began to arouse the Kundalini Serpent which began to mystically writhe up his spinal column seeking release through the Magikal door of his crown chakra at the top of his skull,in other words,he was getting loaded,like,crazy!
He laid the book down,gazed out the window,his intense brown eyes piercing the veils of rain,the dark fog,experiencing visions of the Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse riding past,only they looked like out of "Road Warrior" on their fierce sleek Harley choppers.
He slid a Warlock tape into the GB,giggling to "Kiss of Death" as he twisted another stick of weed.
He crashed for awhile,waking up hungry,horny amd restless.The rain still pounded down so he jumped in his pick up,cut into town to the Office Saloon,a
hard core Biker bar.He gulped down a shot of Corvaissier cognac and a bottle of Bud,wolfed down two bowls of Mama lee's chili.Another shot of cognac and a Bud and then he was into a game of pool with one of his bros,Johnny,from the Biker owned and operated house painting/construction business he worked for.
He punched Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again" on the jukebox and slouched like Brando in "The Wild One",a Camel hanging from his lips,his eyes hooded and dreamy.He dropped the 8 ball,downed the shot and beer Johnny bought him.
"Wanna blow some weed,Gypsy,man?" Johnny asked.
"Sure thing,bro,"Gypsy answered in his rough muted nuances with a slight
Chicano accent.
They cut out back,squatted on the riverbank neath the shelter of a huge old weeping willow tree,passing a joint.
"S'what's the happenings wi' y',man?"Johnny asked.
"Nada mucho,hombre…I was hangin' in m'pad getting' fucked up 'n' crashed, woke up,had t' cut in here 'n' reassure m'self there be a life outside m'own lonely skin,y'dig?Thinkin' I'm due t' be in the wind again,like,real pronto."
"No shit?You ain't been here that long!"
"I'm never nowhere too long,bro.Dig it,I'm gonna be big 50 years old.I don't know how long I got left 'n' see,I'm feelin' like Jim Morrison laid it down,like,'I
wanna get m'kicks before this whole shithouse goes up in flames!' Thinkin' of cuttin' down to Mardi Gras 'n' maybe West again…maybe even back down to Mexico 'n' points south…I dunno…wanna be ridin' m'scoot all the time,kickback,Jack,thems the facts,y'dig?Time I saw m'folks again too…"
"Y'really are a Gypsy ain't you,man?"
"Y'got that right,bro.It's like,y'know that book I'm always rappin' about."Bike Fever" by this righteous bro Lee Gutkind?Well,man,anyways,in beginning he talks about the history of motorcycle Gypsies,hardcore nomad scooter trash,mostly older cats,who started out back in the '20s 'n' '30s when there was a shitload o' 'em roamin' around on their Harleys 'n' Indians 'n' all them other big ass first bikes,but it wasn't jes depression,dig,cause they'd been doin' it before 'n' after it,'n' they're doin' it now,man,they're the cats who've stayed free 'n' are pioneers o' this whole wild international Biker Subculture.
I relate t' that s'fuckin' much,man!I mean,fact is,I am a fuckin' third generation motorcycle Gypsy for real!It's in m'blood same as any nomad Romany Gypsy anywhere in this world!…That's why I gotta get in the wind again,bro,cause I really need independence 'n' self-respect…'n' like this other primo book"The Complete Motorcycle Nomad" says,like,Bikers are the last o' a breed,in tradition o' Apaches 'n' Sioux 'n' all other nomad Native Americans 'n' Romany Gypsies,Bedouin Arabs,all them tribes…Dig,for me,that's where it lives,'n' that's where I gotta be…"
The decision had been made while he was talking to johnny.The next day he'd sold the pick up to one of the guys he painted with,packed up his gear,and got in the wind.
He crashed and slept deep,and dreamed the interesting dreams he always had.He woke up refreshed and ready for more hard riding.He was ecstatic when he stepped outside and the sun was shining,the sky a deep turquoise blue,the air scented sweet.
He kicked the Knuckle into life and headed down the Road.A couple of hours later,Gypsy geared down and pulled into the parking area of a truckstop café.All eyes were on him as he entered,but he smiled and nodded and as usual with him, the citizens got the vibe that this was a good ol' boy even if he was a longhaired saddle tramp.He slid onto a stool,fluttered his eyes and clutched his heart historonically as the pretty young waitress came over and asked if she could help him.her face lightened up and she laughed as she studied the handsome leather-skinned Biker.
"Where you coming from?"She asked.
"Well,now,sister,do you mean that philosophically or literally?'
"What?"
"Sorry.Right now I'm comin' outta West Virginia."
"Going out West?"
"Yeah,eventually."
"Must be great…well,you want coffee or something?"
"Coffee for sure 'n' a steak dinner."
"Sure thing.What do you want with your steak and how do you want it?"
"Mash potatoes wi' gravy,carrots 'n' peas 'n' hot buttered corn bread…
steak rare."
"Hang in there.I'll tell the cook to fix you up with a trucker's hungry man special,OK?"
"You're a lady 'n' a scholar."
It didn't take Gypsy very long to wolf down the delicious hearty meal,and then he kicked back smoking,drinking coffee,and rapping to Janie,the waitress.
Then reluctantly sort of,he paid,told her he'd make sure he came by that way again sometime in the future,cut out and mounted up.He turned and waved to her before he kicked his ride into life and cut back onto the long black snake of highway.
Janie watched him disappear and felt a restlessness she'd never known before gnawing at her.
Gypsy didn't have the foggiest notion what his destination was.All he really knew was that he was truly of that rare breed,the motorcycle Gypsies.
He had his sunrise in the morning and his Moon at night.He stopped when he felt for it,and set up camp.He stopped when he needed to work as a painter,welder,a Wrench,or one of his various skills,to make enough bread to journey on.He was even putting together a book of photos and his writing,a kind of celebration of the nomad Biker lifestyle. He was a free man in a world progressively more complex and self-destructive and incarceratory.He felt that fantasy and reality had merged finally for him into a lifestyle permeated with legacy.He was like a troupadour during medieval times,bringing the Word to those who'd bend an ear and listen.
Like a weird kind of Johnny Appleseed,only he was planting the seeds of a survivalist nex millennium lifestyle.He was a self-made man who had the courage and conviction to make his stand.
And he was laughing as he screwed it on and raced toward the always elusive horizon…
Anticopywrite:Gypsy James-2003
A teenage kid pumping gas at his dad's independent shop on outskirts of a little town looked up as sound of a motorcycle zapped him,and a lone rider on a big black Harley chopper bent into wind ''''rain, left an impression on him that would haunt him even when he'd got his own bike and chopped it in expressioin of his own individuality, as he'd do in the future.
The Biker was solely obsessed with finding a cheap motel,like,real goddam quick, as he was cold,wet,and dangerously numb and tired from eight hard hours rollin' down twisty,screwed up backroads.
He spotted a neon motel sign,turned in 'n' dismounted in front of the office. His eyes scouted out the place quickly,appreciatin' funkiness of the cabins,apparent scarcity of customers.
The proprietor,a guy in his thirties,stared at the bedraggled Biker as he came into the office,shook his head,said,"From the looks of you,you been havin' a tough go of it on that motorcycle of yours in that there shitty weather?"
"Y'got that right,mister. It's miserable out there! I'm beat 'n' cold,wet 'n' in serious need o' a hot shower 'n' a bed. Do be hopin' y'can help me out?"
"That's my business. Where y'comin' from?"
"Been doin' some house paintin' up in West Virginia…"
"Headin' somewhere particular or just goin'?"
"Jes goin'…"
"You with one of them outlaw clubs?"
"No sir,not me. Jes me 'n' m'machine…Ah,how much y'get for a night? Like I said,
I'm bone weary 'n'…"
"Aw,sure,sure,sorry t'be talkin' at you and bugging you with all these questions.It's just kind of lonely around here…"
"Hey,I understand, Ain't n'problem."
"$25.00'll do her."
"That's fine. Anywhere nearby I could get some chow?"
"Yup, about two miles down the road there's a honky tonk,they got burgers 'n'
ribs and all that kind of thing."
"Sounds perfect."
He walked into the cabin,threw down his gearbag,pulled off his old scarred
leather jacket 'n' cutoff made into his own personal colors,yanked off his boots,
fired up a cig,turned on the tube and slumped down on the bed,feeling the road weariness beginning to seep out of his pores.
He stripped,took a long,hot,euphoric shower,shaved,brushed his teeth,came
back into the room naked and stared at his hard,scarred,tattooed 48 year old body
In the mirror. His arms thick from years of hard work,be it wrenching on bikes,construction,house painting,welding,he'd done it all at one time or another.
His gallery of tattoos,all of his own design,although not full sleeves,were many and blended together to reflect his highly individualistic personal style and
perspective. His thick mahogany-colored hair hung down to his waist. His Face ruggedly handsome,burnt by wind and sun to a dark leathery swarthiness.
His Zapata mustache,unlike his hair,laced with silvery-gray.
He pulled out his other pair of Levis and a clean T-shirt. He'd hit a laund-
ramat in the morning and clean up the jeans,T-shirt and flannel shirt he'd been wearing.
He looked outside and dug that it was raining even harder,said,"Fuck it!"
He figured he'd cop a hearty breakfast in the morning. It wasn't as if he'd never gone hungry before. Over the twenty-four years he'd been a motorcycle nomad,there'd been many a time he'd gone hungry for one reason or another. Been many a night when he'd ended up sleeping like a wild dog in the bush or a ditch on side of the road for lack of anything else. That was part of the dues you paid in the life.
Wandering had always been integral to his experience. His granddad had given his dad an Indian Scout motorcycle for his sixteenth birthday. When WW II came his dad joined the Army,went to Airborne,and eventually worked for Military Intelligence
and usually got around on a Harley servi-car trike. At war's end,he bought a '45 Harley Knuckle and became a Motorcycle Gypsy just as his father had been,riding all over the American continent,drinking hard,fighting hard,blowing weed,making a living by any means. He was epitome of kind of Hipster Marlon Brando had wanted to depict in the legendary original Biker film "The Wild One". While cruising through
El Paso,he'd met Juanita Castananza; she'd climbed on his iron horse,after riding his bones,without a second thought and they roared off into the unknown future together.
He'd been born while his dad was doing a stint as a construction worker in Alburquerque. He'd grown up digging beBop and rock 'n' roll,weed,chicks,and his outraegeously Hip parents.
They'd live in a place for about 6 months,renting a po' trash trailer or shack, then they'd up and move on,his dad on his bike,his mom and him and his sister In their woody station wagon.
Like many of his generation and that of his mom and dad,after seeing Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin in "The Wild One",and mostly being his dad was a genuine Motorcycle Gypsy,as were all his closest friends,he was obsessed with motorcycles and Biker Mystique. At 14,he had a dirt bike that he rode into the ground. At 16.his dad gave him a Triumph and helped him chop it to his own personal taste.
He got drafted,did a tour in 'nam,came back irrevocably convinced the world was hopelessly fucked up and his only hope was to be in the wind,on a chopped hog,going his own individualistic way,avoiding and evading as much as possible all the ludicrous laws,greedy Robopathic people,that whole goddam sick societus,and carrying on the motorcycle Gypsy legacy that his dad had brought him up to love and respect as their own unique other culture.
He eventually sold his Triumph and copped a '69 XLCH Harley Sportster. He stretched the front downtubes of the frame 3 1/2",put a 10" over Springer front end with a 21" wheel;added a King Sportster gas tank;high chopper pullback handlebars mounted on 3" dogbone risers;a rolled aluminum oil tank;a solo saddle;and a 22" sissybar.
He'd work awhile,not very long,just enough to save a stash to get in the wind once again. Touring from Laconia to Daytona,to New Orleans,Seattle,Old
Orchard beach,coast to coast,north to south,making it as best he could,he lived and worked to maintain his machine and his motorcycle Gypsy lifestyle.Many of the friends he'd meet,fellow Bikers,shop owners and wrenches,remained friends for life,therefore,he never lacked places to go and folks to see.
He'd sort of tried settling down once. Passing through Tucson,he'd stopped in a saloon to down to down a few cold ones,and before long was rapping to a
very beautiful Apache Indian girl who lived on a commune. He gave her a ride there,checked out the scene and dug it,so ended up staying for two years.
They had a kid together,but drifted apart eventually.
He rented a trailer on the outskirts of Tucson,worrking at this and that.
Morning Star and their son T-Bird came down for awhile and they tried to get it together again but it just didn't work out.Wasn't like he didn't love the
woman and child,he did in his own peculiar way. Nor did he abuse them in any way. If he was rowdy and needed to get out his aggression,there were all
too many lowlife asshole men he could seek out and stomp. Bottom line was, his only real loyalty was to his machine and his motorcycle Gypsy lifestyle.
Actually,he probably wasn't really all that different from those first motorcycle Gypsies at the beginning of the century when they were riding
Harleys,Indians,Excelciors,Hendersons and other innovations on the emerging art of what is a motorcycle:a sculpture of iron that a person can mount and
ride everywhere in the world if so inclined.Like them,he was an adventurous and and restless man in what still remains the "Wild West".The motorcycle Gypsies, like their brothers the Hoboes,were a unique subculture bred of American soil,a nomadic subculture as profound in its folklore and lifeways as the Romany Gypsies and the nomadic Native American tribes,as well as the other nomadic cultures throughout the world.Being the kind of creative and intelligent individual he was,he was thoroughly aware of this.He felt he was part of and a participant in this continuing tradition,living it every moment.
Eventually he cut out of Tucson and headed south of the border into Mexico.
He loved Mexico.He ate plenty of chow,drank too much Mescal,smoked primo weed constantly,ate Teo Noncaital Sacred Mushrooms,geezed plenty of crystal, made the love with many fine brownskinned women.
He lived in San Felipe Pueblo in Oaxaca for awhile,then wandered over to Yucatan,up to Veracruz,and then further up through Texas,Oklahoma,Missouri,and then on East.
He ended up working as a wrench in a bike shop with an outlaw bro,Danny,in Connecticut.He'd go on runs with the clubs,but wouldn't join any even though he was more than welcome to.He'd make it with a chick for awhile,but it never lasted.It was as if he were cursed with the enigmatic brand of the lobo solo:
the lone wolf.
Then one night Danny went over the high side and died when his chopper went out of control on a rain slick I-95.He got in the wind once again.
His last period of downtime,which is what he considered those times when he was sedentary for awhile,had been in Misty Creek,in West Virginia.He'd gotten a gig as a house painter and had rented a dilapidated derelict house,amidst broken cars,washing machines,refrigerators,mutilated furniture,weeds growing densely, on the outskirts of town.
His decision to leave all that behind and be in the wind once again had started one dismal day,rain pounding down in torrents,howling banshee winds shrieking, whipping telephone lines,clothes hanging on backyard rigs.
His newest bike,a Knuckle chopper he and Danny had built,gleamed on the porch.
Inside the house,illuminated by kerosene lamps and huge candles,he'd been sitting in the remnants of a once stuffed chair,reading Lee Gutkind's "Bike Fever", a book that had become for him like a sacred text.It was especially on stormy days like that one,he'd read yet again the chapter on the history of motorcycle Gypsies,and it'd reaffirm his personal vision of how he and his life must be.
He'd taken a long hit on the thick joint,drawing the sweet pungent smoke deep into his lungs,down into his abdomen:the center of human willpower,digging it no end as it permeated his genitals and began to arouse the Kundalini Serpent which began to mystically writhe up his spinal column seeking release through the Magikal door of his crown chakra at the top of his skull,in other words,he was getting loaded,like,crazy!
He laid the book down,gazed out the window,his intense brown eyes piercing the veils of rain,the dark fog,experiencing visions of the Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse riding past,only they looked like out of "Road Warrior" on their fierce sleek Harley choppers.
He slid a Warlock tape into the GB,giggling to "Kiss of Death" as he twisted another stick of weed.
He crashed for awhile,waking up hungry,horny amd restless.The rain still pounded down so he jumped in his pick up,cut into town to the Office Saloon,a
hard core Biker bar.He gulped down a shot of Corvaissier cognac and a bottle of Bud,wolfed down two bowls of Mama lee's chili.Another shot of cognac and a Bud and then he was into a game of pool with one of his bros,Johnny,from the Biker owned and operated house painting/construction business he worked for.
He punched Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again" on the jukebox and slouched like Brando in "The Wild One",a Camel hanging from his lips,his eyes hooded and dreamy.He dropped the 8 ball,downed the shot and beer Johnny bought him.
"Wanna blow some weed,Gypsy,man?" Johnny asked.
"Sure thing,bro,"Gypsy answered in his rough muted nuances with a slight
Chicano accent.
They cut out back,squatted on the riverbank neath the shelter of a huge old weeping willow tree,passing a joint.
"S'what's the happenings wi' y',man?"Johnny asked.
"Nada mucho,hombre…I was hangin' in m'pad getting' fucked up 'n' crashed, woke up,had t' cut in here 'n' reassure m'self there be a life outside m'own lonely skin,y'dig?Thinkin' I'm due t' be in the wind again,like,real pronto."
"No shit?You ain't been here that long!"
"I'm never nowhere too long,bro.Dig it,I'm gonna be big 50 years old.I don't know how long I got left 'n' see,I'm feelin' like Jim Morrison laid it down,like,'I
wanna get m'kicks before this whole shithouse goes up in flames!' Thinkin' of cuttin' down to Mardi Gras 'n' maybe West again…maybe even back down to Mexico 'n' points south…I dunno…wanna be ridin' m'scoot all the time,kickback,Jack,thems the facts,y'dig?Time I saw m'folks again too…"
"Y'really are a Gypsy ain't you,man?"
"Y'got that right,bro.It's like,y'know that book I'm always rappin' about."Bike Fever" by this righteous bro Lee Gutkind?Well,man,anyways,in beginning he talks about the history of motorcycle Gypsies,hardcore nomad scooter trash,mostly older cats,who started out back in the '20s 'n' '30s when there was a shitload o' 'em roamin' around on their Harleys 'n' Indians 'n' all them other big ass first bikes,but it wasn't jes depression,dig,cause they'd been doin' it before 'n' after it,'n' they're doin' it now,man,they're the cats who've stayed free 'n' are pioneers o' this whole wild international Biker Subculture.
I relate t' that s'fuckin' much,man!I mean,fact is,I am a fuckin' third generation motorcycle Gypsy for real!It's in m'blood same as any nomad Romany Gypsy anywhere in this world!…That's why I gotta get in the wind again,bro,cause I really need independence 'n' self-respect…'n' like this other primo book"The Complete Motorcycle Nomad" says,like,Bikers are the last o' a breed,in tradition o' Apaches 'n' Sioux 'n' all other nomad Native Americans 'n' Romany Gypsies,Bedouin Arabs,all them tribes…Dig,for me,that's where it lives,'n' that's where I gotta be…"
The decision had been made while he was talking to johnny.The next day he'd sold the pick up to one of the guys he painted with,packed up his gear,and got in the wind.
He crashed and slept deep,and dreamed the interesting dreams he always had.He woke up refreshed and ready for more hard riding.He was ecstatic when he stepped outside and the sun was shining,the sky a deep turquoise blue,the air scented sweet.
He kicked the Knuckle into life and headed down the Road.A couple of hours later,Gypsy geared down and pulled into the parking area of a truckstop café.All eyes were on him as he entered,but he smiled and nodded and as usual with him, the citizens got the vibe that this was a good ol' boy even if he was a longhaired saddle tramp.He slid onto a stool,fluttered his eyes and clutched his heart historonically as the pretty young waitress came over and asked if she could help him.her face lightened up and she laughed as she studied the handsome leather-skinned Biker.
"Where you coming from?"She asked.
"Well,now,sister,do you mean that philosophically or literally?'
"What?"
"Sorry.Right now I'm comin' outta West Virginia."
"Going out West?"
"Yeah,eventually."
"Must be great…well,you want coffee or something?"
"Coffee for sure 'n' a steak dinner."
"Sure thing.What do you want with your steak and how do you want it?"
"Mash potatoes wi' gravy,carrots 'n' peas 'n' hot buttered corn bread…
steak rare."
"Hang in there.I'll tell the cook to fix you up with a trucker's hungry man special,OK?"
"You're a lady 'n' a scholar."
It didn't take Gypsy very long to wolf down the delicious hearty meal,and then he kicked back smoking,drinking coffee,and rapping to Janie,the waitress.
Then reluctantly sort of,he paid,told her he'd make sure he came by that way again sometime in the future,cut out and mounted up.He turned and waved to her before he kicked his ride into life and cut back onto the long black snake of highway.
Janie watched him disappear and felt a restlessness she'd never known before gnawing at her.
Gypsy didn't have the foggiest notion what his destination was.All he really knew was that he was truly of that rare breed,the motorcycle Gypsies.
He had his sunrise in the morning and his Moon at night.He stopped when he felt for it,and set up camp.He stopped when he needed to work as a painter,welder,a Wrench,or one of his various skills,to make enough bread to journey on.He was even putting together a book of photos and his writing,a kind of celebration of the nomad Biker lifestyle. He was a free man in a world progressively more complex and self-destructive and incarceratory.He felt that fantasy and reality had merged finally for him into a lifestyle permeated with legacy.He was like a troupadour during medieval times,bringing the Word to those who'd bend an ear and listen.
Like a weird kind of Johnny Appleseed,only he was planting the seeds of a survivalist nex millennium lifestyle.He was a self-made man who had the courage and conviction to make his stand.
And he was laughing as he screwed it on and raced toward the always elusive horizon…
Anticopywrite:Gypsy James-2003
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Teaching On The Internet
by Skald
A few folks have asked for more information about teaching English on the internet. So here goes:
First of all, realize that this takes time. Its a very slow building process to get students, do a good job with them, build word of mouth, etc. At the moment, Im nowhere near making a living at doing only this. On the other hand, teaching on the internet is a very pleasant, relatively easy, autonomous way to make a bit of extra money. In the future, who knows? I may be able to make most of my income in this way.
For a fairly detailed account of teaching English on the internet, and teaching English in general.. see the blog "Effortless Language Acquisition". In addition to the posts, check out the links.
A good place to start as a tutor is Tutopia. They have excellent internet teaching tools and a good system overall. They take a $10 cut, but I think thats a pretty fair price for what they offer.
Another option is to keep things simple and go with Skype. If you don't know, Skype is an internet phone service. It allows you to make international computer to computer calls for free. The great thing about Skype is that it allows for conference calls. Thus, you can have a group discussion with up to 4 students at one time. This allows you to charge more per hour while each student gets to pay less. Everyone wins. Ive enjoyed doing group discussions... and in many ways they are more interesting and more effective than one on ones.
Whichever tool you decide to use, the next step is finding the students. The best thing to do is register and advertise with online services or boards.
One such service is My Sensei, out of Japan. This is free for teachers. Students peruse the boards, and then must pay to get the contact info of a tutor they like. To be effective, you need to constantly renew your ad, so it stays near the top.
Another place to advertise is Craigslist. This link is to the main Bay Area website, but there are ones for many cities around the world. Some are more popular than others (The Bay Area's Craigslist is incredibly busy). Just post an ad under "classes" every week.
A very slow, longterm strategy... but an ultimately effective one... is to start an English Learning blog. Eventually, such a blog will attract students. The best (most popular and useful for students) are podcast blogs that provide audio and text. The best example is a podcast site called ESL Pod. This one is quite professional, but that's not entirely necessary. See English Conversations for another excellent example.
So that's about it.... a brief starters guide to teaching English on the internet. Be sure to check out my teaching blog (Effortless Acquisition) for more details... and email me (at my teaching blog email) if you have questions.
Good luck!
A few folks have asked for more information about teaching English on the internet. So here goes:
First of all, realize that this takes time. Its a very slow building process to get students, do a good job with them, build word of mouth, etc. At the moment, Im nowhere near making a living at doing only this. On the other hand, teaching on the internet is a very pleasant, relatively easy, autonomous way to make a bit of extra money. In the future, who knows? I may be able to make most of my income in this way.
For a fairly detailed account of teaching English on the internet, and teaching English in general.. see the blog "Effortless Language Acquisition". In addition to the posts, check out the links.
A good place to start as a tutor is Tutopia. They have excellent internet teaching tools and a good system overall. They take a $10 cut, but I think thats a pretty fair price for what they offer.
Another option is to keep things simple and go with Skype. If you don't know, Skype is an internet phone service. It allows you to make international computer to computer calls for free. The great thing about Skype is that it allows for conference calls. Thus, you can have a group discussion with up to 4 students at one time. This allows you to charge more per hour while each student gets to pay less. Everyone wins. Ive enjoyed doing group discussions... and in many ways they are more interesting and more effective than one on ones.
Whichever tool you decide to use, the next step is finding the students. The best thing to do is register and advertise with online services or boards.
One such service is My Sensei, out of Japan. This is free for teachers. Students peruse the boards, and then must pay to get the contact info of a tutor they like. To be effective, you need to constantly renew your ad, so it stays near the top.
Another place to advertise is Craigslist. This link is to the main Bay Area website, but there are ones for many cities around the world. Some are more popular than others (The Bay Area's Craigslist is incredibly busy). Just post an ad under "classes" every week.
A very slow, longterm strategy... but an ultimately effective one... is to start an English Learning blog. Eventually, such a blog will attract students. The best (most popular and useful for students) are podcast blogs that provide audio and text. The best example is a podcast site called ESL Pod. This one is quite professional, but that's not entirely necessary. See English Conversations for another excellent example.
So that's about it.... a brief starters guide to teaching English on the internet. Be sure to check out my teaching blog (Effortless Acquisition) for more details... and email me (at my teaching blog email) if you have questions.
Good luck!
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Working From Home
by Skald
Recently Ive begun to teach English over the internet, using Skype. I've talked to students in Japan, Taiwan, Canada, the US, Germany, Sweden, and England. I find it very gratifying to chat with folks from all over the world, and to have a student clientele that is scattered all over the globe.
Even more gratifying is being able to work from home. What decadent luxury! I open the curtains wide, open the window, kick back in a chair, put on my headset... and "work". My headset has a very long cord, so its no problem to move around the (tiny) apartment, get something to drink, lay on the bed, etc. And when Im done teaching, Im done.... no one to answer to.
Nor do I ever have someone looking over my shoulder or monitoring me in any way. What happens is between my student clients and I and thats it. Its a wonderful feeling.
Interestingly, my sister works for a big mega-corporation and yet she too has a work at home arrangement. She's been doing it for years now. The company supplies her with a laptop and high-speed line. She uses that to organize and manage projects, chat with customers, chat with co-workers, etc. They also put in a land line at her house.
So while she still has a "corporate job"... she has an amazing amount of freedom and flexibility. She recently had a baby, and can now work in her home "office" and have the baby right beside her. She can take as many breaks as she wants for needs. She dresses how she wants. Like me, she has no boss looking over her shoulder.. micro managing every minute of her work day.
As corporate jobs go... its not a bad arrangement.
In some ways these situations remind me of Gandhi's praise for cottage industries. Perhaps it is now possible to have a high tech "cottage industry" in your tiny little apartment... or even in your van?
Perhaps its easier to be a "young homeless professional" than every before.
Recently Ive begun to teach English over the internet, using Skype. I've talked to students in Japan, Taiwan, Canada, the US, Germany, Sweden, and England. I find it very gratifying to chat with folks from all over the world, and to have a student clientele that is scattered all over the globe.
Even more gratifying is being able to work from home. What decadent luxury! I open the curtains wide, open the window, kick back in a chair, put on my headset... and "work". My headset has a very long cord, so its no problem to move around the (tiny) apartment, get something to drink, lay on the bed, etc. And when Im done teaching, Im done.... no one to answer to.
Nor do I ever have someone looking over my shoulder or monitoring me in any way. What happens is between my student clients and I and thats it. Its a wonderful feeling.
Interestingly, my sister works for a big mega-corporation and yet she too has a work at home arrangement. She's been doing it for years now. The company supplies her with a laptop and high-speed line. She uses that to organize and manage projects, chat with customers, chat with co-workers, etc. They also put in a land line at her house.
So while she still has a "corporate job"... she has an amazing amount of freedom and flexibility. She recently had a baby, and can now work in her home "office" and have the baby right beside her. She can take as many breaks as she wants for needs. She dresses how she wants. Like me, she has no boss looking over her shoulder.. micro managing every minute of her work day.
As corporate jobs go... its not a bad arrangement.
In some ways these situations remind me of Gandhi's praise for cottage industries. Perhaps it is now possible to have a high tech "cottage industry" in your tiny little apartment... or even in your van?
Perhaps its easier to be a "young homeless professional" than every before.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Jessica
Today is Jessica's Birthday. For those of you who knew her, I encourage you to take some time to think of her, and perhaps visit her memorial website :)
Jessica's Memorial Website
I will always feel grateful to have known & loved her.
Jessica's Memorial WebsiteI will always feel grateful to have known & loved her.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Waking Up From The Suburban Nightmare
by Skald
You know, this simple housing issue has ramifications that go far beyond our individual lives. The truth is, my father's massive McMansion is not just a personal choice. That house, and the entire suburban lifestyle it represents, comes with tremendous costs... costs that all of society must pay, not just my father. In truth, the suburban nightmare is subsidized by all of us... by force. We are forced to pay local, state, and national taxes. These taxes pay for the suburban infrastructure. They pay for the miles of highways, for the miles of water lines, for the miles of electrical lines. In truth, that McMansion costs a helluva lot more than what the buyer actually pays.
And Im only mentioning the economic costs. The suburban nightmare also carries severe ecological costs. Forests, wetlands, streams, rivers, and farmland are destroyed. Small communities are bulldozed and replaced by sterile boxes.
And the whole damn thing depends completely on the automobile. Suburbs dont have public transportation (certainly not viable public transportation).
As such, this kind of obscenely luxurious living may be endangered, as James Kunstler predicts on his blog-
http://www.kunstler.com/:
" I try to avoid the term "peak oil" because it has cultish overtones, and this is a serious socioeconomic issue, not a belief system. But it seems to me that what we are seeing now in financial and commodity markets, and in the greater economic system itself, is exactly what we ought to expect of peak oil conditions: peak activity.
After all, peak is the point where the world is producing the most oil it will ever produce, even while it is also the inflection point where big trouble is apt to begin. And this massive quantity of oil induces a massive amount of work, land development, industrial activity, commercial production, and motor transport. So we shouldn't be surprised that there is a lot happening, that houses and highways are still being built, that TVs are pouring out of the Chinese factories, commuters are still whizzing around the DC Beltway, that obese children still have plenty of microwavable melted cheese pockets to zap for their exhausting sessions with Grand Theft Auto.
But in the peak oil situation the world is like a banquet just before the tablecloth is pulled out from under it. There is plenty on the table, but it is about to be overturned, spilled, lost, and broken. There's more oil available then ever before, but also so many people at the banquet table clamoring for it that there is barely enough to go around, and the people may knock some things over trying to get it.
A correspondent in Texas writes: "On a four week running average basis, total US petroleum imports (crude + products) have been falling since 2/24/06, until last week, when we finally showed an increase of 1.3 percent, after bidding the price of oil up by about 20 percent. IMO, we bid the price up enough to (temporarily) increase our imports. We will see what subsequent weeks show, but I think that we are in the early stages of a bidding war for remaining net export capacity. The interesting question is what countries may not be importing because they can't afford the oil."
A substantial amount of total house sales are made up of new suburban McHouses built in places at the furthest extreme distance from employment centers -- because that's where the remaining cheap land is after sixty-odd years of suburban development. How many prospective house-buyers will close on those things with gasoline over $3 a gallon? Probably fewer than are required to sell them all. And more McHouses will be coming on the market in any case because they are products of a planning and permitting process that takes years for things to finally get built. Once the house-selling racket, and its associated mortgage racket, stop grinding along, the machinery of the US economy has to seize up. The financial sector, which used to be an appendage of the economy, but has become an end in itself, has to implode when the stream of rebundled securitized mortgage debt stops flowing into it.
When tablecloths are pulled out from under banquet tables, it is hard to say how the platters, bowls, and ewers will tumble and fall, but we can bet that few if any of them will land right-side up, unspilled. One also has to wonder how the other people at the table are going to behave when things come tumbling down. "
You know, this simple housing issue has ramifications that go far beyond our individual lives. The truth is, my father's massive McMansion is not just a personal choice. That house, and the entire suburban lifestyle it represents, comes with tremendous costs... costs that all of society must pay, not just my father. In truth, the suburban nightmare is subsidized by all of us... by force. We are forced to pay local, state, and national taxes. These taxes pay for the suburban infrastructure. They pay for the miles of highways, for the miles of water lines, for the miles of electrical lines. In truth, that McMansion costs a helluva lot more than what the buyer actually pays.
And Im only mentioning the economic costs. The suburban nightmare also carries severe ecological costs. Forests, wetlands, streams, rivers, and farmland are destroyed. Small communities are bulldozed and replaced by sterile boxes.
And the whole damn thing depends completely on the automobile. Suburbs dont have public transportation (certainly not viable public transportation).
As such, this kind of obscenely luxurious living may be endangered, as James Kunstler predicts on his blog-
http://www.kunstler.com/:
" I try to avoid the term "peak oil" because it has cultish overtones, and this is a serious socioeconomic issue, not a belief system. But it seems to me that what we are seeing now in financial and commodity markets, and in the greater economic system itself, is exactly what we ought to expect of peak oil conditions: peak activity.
After all, peak is the point where the world is producing the most oil it will ever produce, even while it is also the inflection point where big trouble is apt to begin. And this massive quantity of oil induces a massive amount of work, land development, industrial activity, commercial production, and motor transport. So we shouldn't be surprised that there is a lot happening, that houses and highways are still being built, that TVs are pouring out of the Chinese factories, commuters are still whizzing around the DC Beltway, that obese children still have plenty of microwavable melted cheese pockets to zap for their exhausting sessions with Grand Theft Auto.
But in the peak oil situation the world is like a banquet just before the tablecloth is pulled out from under it. There is plenty on the table, but it is about to be overturned, spilled, lost, and broken. There's more oil available then ever before, but also so many people at the banquet table clamoring for it that there is barely enough to go around, and the people may knock some things over trying to get it.
A correspondent in Texas writes: "On a four week running average basis, total US petroleum imports (crude + products) have been falling since 2/24/06, until last week, when we finally showed an increase of 1.3 percent, after bidding the price of oil up by about 20 percent. IMO, we bid the price up enough to (temporarily) increase our imports. We will see what subsequent weeks show, but I think that we are in the early stages of a bidding war for remaining net export capacity. The interesting question is what countries may not be importing because they can't afford the oil."
A substantial amount of total house sales are made up of new suburban McHouses built in places at the furthest extreme distance from employment centers -- because that's where the remaining cheap land is after sixty-odd years of suburban development. How many prospective house-buyers will close on those things with gasoline over $3 a gallon? Probably fewer than are required to sell them all. And more McHouses will be coming on the market in any case because they are products of a planning and permitting process that takes years for things to finally get built. Once the house-selling racket, and its associated mortgage racket, stop grinding along, the machinery of the US economy has to seize up. The financial sector, which used to be an appendage of the economy, but has become an end in itself, has to implode when the stream of rebundled securitized mortgage debt stops flowing into it.
When tablecloths are pulled out from under banquet tables, it is hard to say how the platters, bowls, and ewers will tumble and fall, but we can bet that few if any of them will land right-side up, unspilled. One also has to wonder how the other people at the table are going to behave when things come tumbling down. "
Rat Bikes
Rat Bikes Are No-Nonsense.
Motorcycles? Sure - they use less fuel than cars, and motorcycles are easier to maneuver, park etc. But, deep down, the True Secret is: Motorcycles Are Fun. That's it! That's why we ride them, all the rest is just so much rationalizing. And Ratbikes are the ultimate distilled evolution of motorcycling: No Bullsh*t involved. Just do the minimum to keep them healthy and Ride. Let your bike wear it's visual history with pride. No time consuming cleaning, washing, polishing, adding shiny parts that do nothing. None of that, forget about it! Embrace The Pure and Essential Essence of Riding - Ride A Ratbike!
----
If you ask a person on the street what a biker is, he or she will inevitably describe a guy sporting a ZZ Top beard and beer gut, riding a chromed-out Harley chopper. Or this person might offer a portrait of sportbikers, guys on high-performance Japanese bikes with cryptic alphanumeric designations wrapped in cocoons of bright plastic, often wearing shorts and tennies. Somewhere between these two extremes, though, a new urban motorcycle culture has formed, and at its center is the rat bike.
"A rat bike generally means any motorcycle that is in a shitty order of repair but is still being ridden by some broke fuck," says Paul, a biker from San Francisco via England, New York City, Arizona, and parts in between. "It's got to be kind of dirty and old and decrepit. It could be your girlfriend's CB 750, covered in stickers and paint, with mismatching bodywork. It could be your buddy's F2 ex-race bike – 'Only raced once, guv'ner, honest' – with no bodywork and so many scratches and dings on it that [you can tell] he hasn't got loads of money."
"Everybody gets their bikes from some crashed squid motherfucker." Translation: rats are scavengers, living off the superfluity of the wasteful classes, surviving at street level on their wits.
"The whole symbology of the Rats was kind of a religion for me," Slick says. "Here's this life of salvage that we've made. Nothing was good enough for anyone else, but it was always good enough for us to fix, then beat the shit out of until it's gone, so it doesn't last anymore, then step up and get the next good thing, you know?
"All those guys up at the Wall [a meeting spot for racer types in Tilden] had full leathers and bright sportbikes, and all the Harley guys were racist backwards hicks. But all my friends rode motorcycles, and we all had our own style of motorcycles, which was to paint 'em flat black and trick 'em out the way we do. Not putting money into anything to make 'em look fancy, just putting money into souping them up, otherwise letting them go to hell. Always repairing things with JB Weld and duct tape. Baling wire. And from there it just escalated."
But unlike streetfighters, super motards, and standards, a rat isn't pretty. At least not in a conventional way: it has a face only a mother can love, the vehicular equivalent of a droopy-jowled bulldog or clipped-eared pit bull. The true rat was born of economics: if you're a bar back or motorcycle messenger, living in a city with one of the highest rent rates in the world, what can you do to keep your bike on the road? You may not be from the ghetto, white boy, but you live there now, and the bike under your haunches is a testament to urban survival.
(snippets -- full article at Rat Bikes
Motorcycles? Sure - they use less fuel than cars, and motorcycles are easier to maneuver, park etc. But, deep down, the True Secret is: Motorcycles Are Fun. That's it! That's why we ride them, all the rest is just so much rationalizing. And Ratbikes are the ultimate distilled evolution of motorcycling: No Bullsh*t involved. Just do the minimum to keep them healthy and Ride. Let your bike wear it's visual history with pride. No time consuming cleaning, washing, polishing, adding shiny parts that do nothing. None of that, forget about it! Embrace The Pure and Essential Essence of Riding - Ride A Ratbike!
----
If you ask a person on the street what a biker is, he or she will inevitably describe a guy sporting a ZZ Top beard and beer gut, riding a chromed-out Harley chopper. Or this person might offer a portrait of sportbikers, guys on high-performance Japanese bikes with cryptic alphanumeric designations wrapped in cocoons of bright plastic, often wearing shorts and tennies. Somewhere between these two extremes, though, a new urban motorcycle culture has formed, and at its center is the rat bike.
"A rat bike generally means any motorcycle that is in a shitty order of repair but is still being ridden by some broke fuck," says Paul, a biker from San Francisco via England, New York City, Arizona, and parts in between. "It's got to be kind of dirty and old and decrepit. It could be your girlfriend's CB 750, covered in stickers and paint, with mismatching bodywork. It could be your buddy's F2 ex-race bike – 'Only raced once, guv'ner, honest' – with no bodywork and so many scratches and dings on it that [you can tell] he hasn't got loads of money."
"Everybody gets their bikes from some crashed squid motherfucker." Translation: rats are scavengers, living off the superfluity of the wasteful classes, surviving at street level on their wits.
"The whole symbology of the Rats was kind of a religion for me," Slick says. "Here's this life of salvage that we've made. Nothing was good enough for anyone else, but it was always good enough for us to fix, then beat the shit out of until it's gone, so it doesn't last anymore, then step up and get the next good thing, you know?
"All those guys up at the Wall [a meeting spot for racer types in Tilden] had full leathers and bright sportbikes, and all the Harley guys were racist backwards hicks. But all my friends rode motorcycles, and we all had our own style of motorcycles, which was to paint 'em flat black and trick 'em out the way we do. Not putting money into anything to make 'em look fancy, just putting money into souping them up, otherwise letting them go to hell. Always repairing things with JB Weld and duct tape. Baling wire. And from there it just escalated."
But unlike streetfighters, super motards, and standards, a rat isn't pretty. At least not in a conventional way: it has a face only a mother can love, the vehicular equivalent of a droopy-jowled bulldog or clipped-eared pit bull. The true rat was born of economics: if you're a bar back or motorcycle messenger, living in a city with one of the highest rent rates in the world, what can you do to keep your bike on the road? You may not be from the ghetto, white boy, but you live there now, and the bike under your haunches is a testament to urban survival.
(snippets -- full article at Rat Bikes
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Homeless In Vegas
by Skald
Just found a very interesting blog called Homeless In Vegas.
The writer is doing a Masters thesis and, as research, has decided to fly to Las Vegas and live as a homeless person. He will chronicle his experiences on his blog.
His homeless stint begins this Saturday, May 27th. Check in and see how he's doing!
Just found a very interesting blog called Homeless In Vegas.
The writer is doing a Masters thesis and, as research, has decided to fly to Las Vegas and live as a homeless person. He will chronicle his experiences on his blog.
His homeless stint begins this Saturday, May 27th. Check in and see how he's doing!
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Basic Questions
by Skald
When deciding where to live, I think its important to ask some very basic questions. The most basic of all is.. what, exactly, is the purpose of a house or apartment? As Thoreau noted, we seem to have forgotten.
The most practical answer is that an apartment provides shelter from harsh elements. It keeps us warm and dry. Another purpose is to provide safety and security. Locked doors keep away those who might hassle us while we sleep, swipe our food, etc. I suppose a shelter also provides security for our "stuff"... our clothes and other possessions.
From a practical standpoint, that's about it. To these practical considerations, some might add aesthetic ones.. .such as a place to feel warm, safe, comfortable, and at peace... a gathering place for friends and family.
Whats clear from this list is that all of these requirements can be met by a very modest shelter indeed! My van, in fact, met most of these requirements. It kept me warm and safe and dry. It gave me a decent amount of security and provided a place to keep my "stuff". It was too small for socializing, but I found it easy to use other spaces for that (coffee shops, parks, etc.).
For those not wanting to go that simple, why not just a small one room efficiency? Thats what Im living in now. I live in a one room apartment in downtown San Francisco.. that has a shared bath. It has advantages over the van... Ive got nearby showers, a sink, hot water. Ive got a stove and fridge. I even have a desk, closet, and internet connection. In other words, Ive got all the necessities met and a great deal of comfort and luxury too.
Beyond this kind of arrangement, housing becomes ridiculous. I think of my father, for example. He and his wife live in a GIANT suburban house. Its got three bedrooms. Its got a living room, dining room, huge kitchen (with a dining table), a huge basement (far bigger than my apartment), a "bonus room" and a finished attic.
I dont mean to pick on my Dad... lots of suburbanites live in these sorts of dwellings. The question is, why? Doesnt luxury reach a point of diminishing returns? Just how many rooms does one need? Just how many appliances?
When I judge these houses, I do so not from a sense of puritanical zeal, but from a perspective of selfish practicality. After all, that gargantuan space comes with a gargantuan price tag. People mortgage their lives away to live in luxurious mansion that really dont add much to their lives. Would they really suffer by living in a place half the size? One quarter? I dont think so.
In fact, not only would they not suffer.. they would thrive. Theyd find they had a lot more money to enjoy... money for travel, money for savings, money for golf, money for books, money for whatever. The drastically lower costs of a smaller place would also buy them TIME. They could afford to work less. They could retire earlier. They could take a lower paying job that was far more satisfying.
In other words, they could trade all that extra space for a drastic increase in FREEDOM.
To my mind, that is a very profitable trade.
When deciding where to live, I think its important to ask some very basic questions. The most basic of all is.. what, exactly, is the purpose of a house or apartment? As Thoreau noted, we seem to have forgotten.
The most practical answer is that an apartment provides shelter from harsh elements. It keeps us warm and dry. Another purpose is to provide safety and security. Locked doors keep away those who might hassle us while we sleep, swipe our food, etc. I suppose a shelter also provides security for our "stuff"... our clothes and other possessions.
From a practical standpoint, that's about it. To these practical considerations, some might add aesthetic ones.. .such as a place to feel warm, safe, comfortable, and at peace... a gathering place for friends and family.
Whats clear from this list is that all of these requirements can be met by a very modest shelter indeed! My van, in fact, met most of these requirements. It kept me warm and safe and dry. It gave me a decent amount of security and provided a place to keep my "stuff". It was too small for socializing, but I found it easy to use other spaces for that (coffee shops, parks, etc.).
For those not wanting to go that simple, why not just a small one room efficiency? Thats what Im living in now. I live in a one room apartment in downtown San Francisco.. that has a shared bath. It has advantages over the van... Ive got nearby showers, a sink, hot water. Ive got a stove and fridge. I even have a desk, closet, and internet connection. In other words, Ive got all the necessities met and a great deal of comfort and luxury too.
Beyond this kind of arrangement, housing becomes ridiculous. I think of my father, for example. He and his wife live in a GIANT suburban house. Its got three bedrooms. Its got a living room, dining room, huge kitchen (with a dining table), a huge basement (far bigger than my apartment), a "bonus room" and a finished attic.
I dont mean to pick on my Dad... lots of suburbanites live in these sorts of dwellings. The question is, why? Doesnt luxury reach a point of diminishing returns? Just how many rooms does one need? Just how many appliances?
When I judge these houses, I do so not from a sense of puritanical zeal, but from a perspective of selfish practicality. After all, that gargantuan space comes with a gargantuan price tag. People mortgage their lives away to live in luxurious mansion that really dont add much to their lives. Would they really suffer by living in a place half the size? One quarter? I dont think so.
In fact, not only would they not suffer.. they would thrive. Theyd find they had a lot more money to enjoy... money for travel, money for savings, money for golf, money for books, money for whatever. The drastically lower costs of a smaller place would also buy them TIME. They could afford to work less. They could retire earlier. They could take a lower paying job that was far more satisfying.
In other words, they could trade all that extra space for a drastic increase in FREEDOM.
To my mind, that is a very profitable trade.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Impressions
by Skald
Now that Ive recovered from the worst of return culture shock I can think more rationally about what was going on. Many people have asked me.. "what was so difficult about returning to the United States?"
There are many answers, but the simplest one echoes a statement recently made by one of my English students: "I was shocked by how materialistic Americans are". This girl went on to discuss the differences between her country and this one. She noted that in her country, most people emphasized conversation, social time with friends and family, and education. She said it was considered rude to talk about money or consumption. She was therefore shocked when she arrived here and found that the foci of American society are money and consuming.
I had a similar shock, despite having grown up here. Still, after more than two years in Thailand, Id grown accustomed to a more human way of life. Of course Thai people need a certain amount of money too.... and I certainly needed an income while I was there. But money never felt like the focus of life. In fact, it never seemed like much of an issue to me. I always had ENOUGH. Not a lot. Not luxury. But enough.
In Thailand I had plenty of time too. My life revolved around reading, relaxing in coffee shops, eating at sidewalk food stalls, and seeing friends.
Upon arrival in America, money immediately became my number one concern. I was hyper stressed the first few months I was here. I had modest savings.. but had to find more to pay for all the expenses of getting set up here-- the fees, the deposits, the rent, etc...
Worse still, it seemed that most of the Americans I encountered also focused on money. TV and movies were full of vulgar commercials and other displays of materialism. Friends, family, relaxation, learning, contemplation, art,... all seemed to take a back seat to the all important gods of money and consumption.
Of course, this has not changed about American society. But Ive managed to find a simple place to live and a pleasant income source. Ive relearned my hobopoet survival strategies for living pleasantly in America. Once again, I find I have ENOUGH. Once again, I can focus my life where I want it focused-- on friends, family, learning, contemplation, etc...
As Ive relaxed and eased back into my preferred lifestyle, Ive begun to meet others who share my values. Thats one very positive thing about San Francisco. There is incredible diversity here, not only in terms of nationality.. but also in terms of lifestyle and thought.
Finally, I have been joined by more friends. One by one, they are moving here. That too makes a huge difference. Ive always felt that community is far more important than cash.
And so, while I still find much of mainstream American culture to be vulgar... I have found a very nice niche here in San Francisco.
Now that Ive recovered from the worst of return culture shock I can think more rationally about what was going on. Many people have asked me.. "what was so difficult about returning to the United States?"
There are many answers, but the simplest one echoes a statement recently made by one of my English students: "I was shocked by how materialistic Americans are". This girl went on to discuss the differences between her country and this one. She noted that in her country, most people emphasized conversation, social time with friends and family, and education. She said it was considered rude to talk about money or consumption. She was therefore shocked when she arrived here and found that the foci of American society are money and consuming.
I had a similar shock, despite having grown up here. Still, after more than two years in Thailand, Id grown accustomed to a more human way of life. Of course Thai people need a certain amount of money too.... and I certainly needed an income while I was there. But money never felt like the focus of life. In fact, it never seemed like much of an issue to me. I always had ENOUGH. Not a lot. Not luxury. But enough.
In Thailand I had plenty of time too. My life revolved around reading, relaxing in coffee shops, eating at sidewalk food stalls, and seeing friends.
Upon arrival in America, money immediately became my number one concern. I was hyper stressed the first few months I was here. I had modest savings.. but had to find more to pay for all the expenses of getting set up here-- the fees, the deposits, the rent, etc...
Worse still, it seemed that most of the Americans I encountered also focused on money. TV and movies were full of vulgar commercials and other displays of materialism. Friends, family, relaxation, learning, contemplation, art,... all seemed to take a back seat to the all important gods of money and consumption.
Of course, this has not changed about American society. But Ive managed to find a simple place to live and a pleasant income source. Ive relearned my hobopoet survival strategies for living pleasantly in America. Once again, I find I have ENOUGH. Once again, I can focus my life where I want it focused-- on friends, family, learning, contemplation, etc...
As Ive relaxed and eased back into my preferred lifestyle, Ive begun to meet others who share my values. Thats one very positive thing about San Francisco. There is incredible diversity here, not only in terms of nationality.. but also in terms of lifestyle and thought.
Finally, I have been joined by more friends. One by one, they are moving here. That too makes a huge difference. Ive always felt that community is far more important than cash.
And so, while I still find much of mainstream American culture to be vulgar... I have found a very nice niche here in San Francisco.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
A Tiny Step Towards Autonomy
by Skald
This week I finally got hooked up to teach English over the internet. Ive got one student. She lives in Korea.
At the moment, of course, Im still very much dependent on my regular job. But Im hopeful that slowly, over time, I can build the number of online students I have. Eventually, I hope to completely replace my standard job at the school with a private tutoring practice (mostly online, though possibly with face-to-face students too).
This has been a long time coming. And while full autonomy is probably a ways away, it feels great to finally take a tiny step in that direction. By "that direction" I mean a step away from having a boss.
Whatever form it takes, Im convinced that true freedom and autonomy require owning your own "business"... whether it be busking on the street, vending on the sidewalk, tutoring on the internet, or launching a software company. As long as we have a "boss", we are essentially wage slaves.
This week I finally got hooked up to teach English over the internet. Ive got one student. She lives in Korea.
At the moment, of course, Im still very much dependent on my regular job. But Im hopeful that slowly, over time, I can build the number of online students I have. Eventually, I hope to completely replace my standard job at the school with a private tutoring practice (mostly online, though possibly with face-to-face students too).
This has been a long time coming. And while full autonomy is probably a ways away, it feels great to finally take a tiny step in that direction. By "that direction" I mean a step away from having a boss.
Whatever form it takes, Im convinced that true freedom and autonomy require owning your own "business"... whether it be busking on the street, vending on the sidewalk, tutoring on the internet, or launching a software company. As long as we have a "boss", we are essentially wage slaves.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
"Expensive" San Francisco
by Skald
"San Francisco is a great place but its so expensive, I could never live there". I cant count how many times people have said that to me.
In terms of rent/housing, its absolutely true. And yet, it is possible to live here and pay reasonable rent. By reasonable I mean 400-500 dollars a month (utilities included). With the minimum wage at $8/hour... thats doable. The problem is you get a very small and simple place for that kind of rent. Thats no problem for me or most of my friends. My best friend G. will be splitting that rent with her partner.
While from a hobopoet perspective thats still a lot of money,... compared to most cities in America its not much more. You'd pay about the same thing to live in downtown Atlanta, for example. The only difference is that in Atlanta you'd get a bigger place for that. But then again, you'd be stuck in Atlanta, surrounded by conservative right wing Republicans (albeit with a few pockets of mild liberalism).
Ive got a smaller place here but the city is so much richer in terms of diversity, thought, tolerance, geography, language, culture, art, music, literature, etc....
I guess my point is this-- we often use money as an excuse for not doing what we want to do or not going where we want to go. But if we are prepared to live simply, we can in fact do most of those things.
Dont let money, or the need for extraneous luxuries, prevent you from living the life you want to live.
"San Francisco is a great place but its so expensive, I could never live there". I cant count how many times people have said that to me.
In terms of rent/housing, its absolutely true. And yet, it is possible to live here and pay reasonable rent. By reasonable I mean 400-500 dollars a month (utilities included). With the minimum wage at $8/hour... thats doable. The problem is you get a very small and simple place for that kind of rent. Thats no problem for me or most of my friends. My best friend G. will be splitting that rent with her partner.
While from a hobopoet perspective thats still a lot of money,... compared to most cities in America its not much more. You'd pay about the same thing to live in downtown Atlanta, for example. The only difference is that in Atlanta you'd get a bigger place for that. But then again, you'd be stuck in Atlanta, surrounded by conservative right wing Republicans (albeit with a few pockets of mild liberalism).
Ive got a smaller place here but the city is so much richer in terms of diversity, thought, tolerance, geography, language, culture, art, music, literature, etc....
I guess my point is this-- we often use money as an excuse for not doing what we want to do or not going where we want to go. But if we are prepared to live simply, we can in fact do most of those things.
Dont let money, or the need for extraneous luxuries, prevent you from living the life you want to live.
Saturday, May 13, 2006
From The Perfect Vehicle
By Melissa Holbrook Pierson
All things considered there are only two kinds of men in the world: those that stay at home and those that do not.
—Rudyard Kipling
There are only two kinds of bikers: those that have been down and those that are going to go down.
—Biker saying
At precisely this moment someone, somewhere, is getting ready to ride. The motorcycle stands in the cool, dark garage, its air expectant with gas and grease. The rider approaches from outside; the door opens with a whir and a bang. The light goes on. A flame, everlasting, seems to rise on a piece of chrome.
As the rider advances, leather sleeves are zipped down tight on the forearms, and the helmet briefly obliterates everything as it is pulled on, the chin strap buckled. This muffled weight with its own faint but permanent scent triggers recollection of the hours and days spent within it. Soft leather gloves with studded palms, insurance against the reflex of a falling body to put its hands out in midair, go on last.
The key is slipped into the ignition at the top of the steering head. Then the rider swings a leg over the seat and sits but keeps the weight on the balls of the feet. With a push from the thighs the rider rocks the bike forward once, again, picking up momentum until it starts to fall forward and down from the centerstand. At this moment the rider pulls a lever with the first finger of the right hand, and the brake pads close like a vise on the front wheel's iron rotor. At the almost instantaneous release of the brake, the bike rises slightly from the forks, which had telescoped under the heft. Now the 450 pounds of metal, fluid, and plastic rests in tenuous balance between the rider's legs; if it started to lean too much to one side, the weight that had lain low in a state of grace would suddenly assert itself in a manic bid to meet the concrete with a crash. Inherently unstable at a standstill, the bike is waiting for the human to help it become its true self. Out there running, it can seem as solid as stone.
The key turns; the idiot lights glow. The green is for neutral gear, the red for the battery, another red for oil pressure. The starter button on the right handlebar, pressed, begins a whirring below. A simultaneous twist of the right grip pulls the throttle cables and the engine bleats, then gulps, then roars. There is contained fire within inches of the rider's knees. As the plugs in the two cylinders, posed in a 90-degree V, take their inestimably quick turns in sparking a volatile cocktail of fuel and compressed oxygen, the expanding gases forcing back the pistons, the machine vibrates subtly from side to side.
A flip of the headlight switch on the handlebar throws the garage walls to either side into theatrical relief. (The rider knows to run through all the lights—turn signals, taillight, brake lights tripped by hand and foot—to make sure they work, but is sometimes guilty of neglecting this step.) The rider pulls in the left-hand lever, then presses down with the left foot. There's a solid chunk as first gear engages.
In the neat dance that accomplishes many operations on a motorcycle—one movement to countered by another fro, an equilibrium of give and take—the squeezed clutch lever is slowly let out while the other hand turns the throttle grip down. The bike moves out into a brighter world where the sun startles the rider's eyes for a moment and washes everything in a continual pour.
Out in the early-morning street there is little traffic, for which the rider sends up thanks: on a bike, cars are irksome, their slow-motion ways infuriating. Pulling out of the drive, the rider shifts into second, this time with the boot toe under the lever to push it up. The small jolt of increased speed from the rear wheel is experienced in the seat, just as in the elastic pause when a horse gathers strength in its haunches before springing into a canter from a trot.
To warm up the tires, the rider shifts so slightly in the seat it is hardly noticeable except to the bike, which dips left. Then quickly right again, then left, then right, until the machine is drawing a sinuous S down the road. They could dance like this all day, partnered closely and each anticipating the next step so surely it is not at all clear who is who.
As they reach the exurban limits and turn onto a narrow road that ascends among trees and infrequent stone houses set back in the shadows, other riders are accelerating up highway ramps; riding gingerly in first gear between two lanes of traffic jammed on a city bridge; hitting the dirt front-wheel-first after being launched from the top of a hillock in a field; trying to pass a motor home making its all-too-gradual way into a national park; feeling a charge move from stomach to chest as the bike straightens up from the deepest lean it's yet entered; following three friends also on bikes into the parking lot of a diner for coffee; slowing down, cursing, to the shoulder because the clutch cable broke.
Today, on the way to a particular, longed-for destination, while joy taken in the wheels' consuming revolutions conflates with the desire to arrive, the journey becomes one of combined anticipation of its end and pleasure in its duration. Riding is an occupation defined by duplicities.
Take the numbers: seven million who ride stacked against 225 million who don't. (To get an idea of the minority status this number confirms, consider the fact that some twenty million Americans call themselves dedicated birdwatchers.) Those who ride are both alone and held tight in the fold of the elect. They draw together for protective warmth and take strange relish in needing to do so at all. The glue between these relative few can be tenacious: a rider traveling through a small town, spotted by a rider who lives there, is—because of this simple fact—invited home and given food and advice. A rider stopped by the roadside, even for a cigarette, prompts another biker to stop and ask if help is needed. At the very least, barring the occasional internecine feud that can make motorcyclists embody a sort of nationalism on wheels, they wave as they pass one another. It's as if they all came from the same small burg where street greetings are as obligatory as wearing clothes.
The road, constantly turning, constantly offers up the possibility of something unexpected around the bend—gravel in a tumult across the road, a car drifting over the yellow line, a dog maddened by the din from the pipes. The rider processes data from the road and its environs with a certain detachment, translating them nearly as quickly into physical response: eat or be eaten. There is no room in the brain for idle thought (except on the highway, when idle thoughts appear and float and reconfigure in endless array), and a biker can go for miles and miles without waking up to any sudden realization, including the one that nothing at all has been thought for miles and miles. The faster you ride, the more closed the circuit becomes, deleting everything but this second and the next, which are hurriedly merging. Having no past to regret and no future to await, the rider feels free. Looked at from this tight world, the other one with its gore and stickiness seems well polished and contained at last.
This peculiar physiological effect, common to all high-concentration pursuits, may be why one finds among motorcyclists a large number of people who always feel as if there were a fire lit under them when they are sitting still. When they're out riding, the wind disperses the flame so they don't feel the terrible heat. The duration of the ride starts to be the only time they know happiness, so they go on longer and longer or for more and more rides, while their families become more and more unhappy. For a few, those who become racers, relief is to be had only at 160 mph down a straightaway. They simultaneously embrace and deny the risk, the worst outcome of which is confined to accidents, that which is outside the norm. But the norm stands for much less here than it does elsewhere, and the realm of accident is much larger. Instead of admitting to insanity to want to live in such a place, they imagine their way out of it: Well, if I fall, I'll land on the tires or hay bales or grass berm. Then I'll pick up the bike and if it's not too badly damaged I'll finish the race. That's what they're prepared to allow. Their once colorful leathers are scuffed gray and held together with duct tape.
Every rider of a motorcycle lives with a little of the same denial, which is after all healthy and spares us from living in a world made entirely of dread. It is also the price of admission to a day like this. If the rider wants, the throttle can be cracked open so suddenly the handlebars yank the arms, threatening to run away with that paltry creature on back now reduced to hanging on and enjoying the ride.
The roar left to ring under the trees as the machine passes is like the laser arc of red drawn by a taillight in a long-exposure photograph at night. It is the ghost remnant of how the bike cleaved the air, and what the rider felt as gravity battled flight against the rider's body. The curves play games with the rider, and the rider is lost in the concentration it takes to match wits with an impressive opponent. How fast to enter this turn? The fact that you can be sadly mistaken is what gives the right choice its sweet taste.
But the rider has never known a fear quite like the one when riding just ahead is the object of deep affection. Flying along in tandem, an invisible wire stretched between them to connect the distance through a moving world, the one looks to the other like an insect clinging to the frenzied body of its prey. The rider, behind, watches this transformed human and sees right through the leathers to the tender skin as it looked while sleep was upon it. In one flash the rider sees how laughably easy it would be for something to happen. It is that pernicious distance between them that does the trick: a few yards that is an unbridgeable gap. Perhaps it's all projection—that the rider, looking toward the other, at once feels how vulnerable the self truly is. But isn't that what love is anyway? In hoping for the other, you realize how much you hope for yourself?
When things conspire—the traffic is thick and wild, the sun is leaving moment by moment, rain slicks the surface of the road—the rider best understands what can otherwise remain hidden: that a motorcyclist is both the happy passenger on an amusement park ride and its earnest operator. The rider splits into two, navigating between vacation and dire responsibility.
As the road leaves home farther and farther behind, it makes its own friendly advances to keep the rider happy: See, this is where you stopped your bike once and ate an apple from the tank bag and took off your boots to feel the damp grass beneath your socks; this is the place your beloved bought you a handful of fireballs when you stopped for gas. And there is always the chance that the unexpected around the bend may turn out not to be a danger to avoid, but a sight or smell that appears suddenly like a check in the mail.
Now, with a hundred miles on the clock, the going has taken on a life of its own. The rider has nearly forgotten what it means to sit anywhere but on this seat; the eyes are swinging back and forth in unchanging rhythm like sonar. Brake; slow; lean; heat up. Brake; slow; lean; heat up. Again and again until it's a rocking chair, a hundred freestyle laps, a hand absently stroking the skin.
The road's painted line, a vanishing point in reverse, is eaten up under the wheels, like a video game where the landscape flashes past while the vehicle stays put. The wind is a steady reassurance on the chest. The rider now becomes susceptible to white-line fever, which feels not so much like a need to continue on forever but as if all options for anything else have been removed. It is simple: the power to go, the power to stop, are as reduced as a metaphor and made to fit in one small hand. The rider, naturally, fears this state. And, keen on the perversity that always hides deep in pleasure, the rider, who is me, wants nothing more.
All things considered there are only two kinds of men in the world: those that stay at home and those that do not.
—Rudyard Kipling
There are only two kinds of bikers: those that have been down and those that are going to go down.
—Biker saying
At precisely this moment someone, somewhere, is getting ready to ride. The motorcycle stands in the cool, dark garage, its air expectant with gas and grease. The rider approaches from outside; the door opens with a whir and a bang. The light goes on. A flame, everlasting, seems to rise on a piece of chrome.
As the rider advances, leather sleeves are zipped down tight on the forearms, and the helmet briefly obliterates everything as it is pulled on, the chin strap buckled. This muffled weight with its own faint but permanent scent triggers recollection of the hours and days spent within it. Soft leather gloves with studded palms, insurance against the reflex of a falling body to put its hands out in midair, go on last.
The key is slipped into the ignition at the top of the steering head. Then the rider swings a leg over the seat and sits but keeps the weight on the balls of the feet. With a push from the thighs the rider rocks the bike forward once, again, picking up momentum until it starts to fall forward and down from the centerstand. At this moment the rider pulls a lever with the first finger of the right hand, and the brake pads close like a vise on the front wheel's iron rotor. At the almost instantaneous release of the brake, the bike rises slightly from the forks, which had telescoped under the heft. Now the 450 pounds of metal, fluid, and plastic rests in tenuous balance between the rider's legs; if it started to lean too much to one side, the weight that had lain low in a state of grace would suddenly assert itself in a manic bid to meet the concrete with a crash. Inherently unstable at a standstill, the bike is waiting for the human to help it become its true self. Out there running, it can seem as solid as stone.
The key turns; the idiot lights glow. The green is for neutral gear, the red for the battery, another red for oil pressure. The starter button on the right handlebar, pressed, begins a whirring below. A simultaneous twist of the right grip pulls the throttle cables and the engine bleats, then gulps, then roars. There is contained fire within inches of the rider's knees. As the plugs in the two cylinders, posed in a 90-degree V, take their inestimably quick turns in sparking a volatile cocktail of fuel and compressed oxygen, the expanding gases forcing back the pistons, the machine vibrates subtly from side to side.
A flip of the headlight switch on the handlebar throws the garage walls to either side into theatrical relief. (The rider knows to run through all the lights—turn signals, taillight, brake lights tripped by hand and foot—to make sure they work, but is sometimes guilty of neglecting this step.) The rider pulls in the left-hand lever, then presses down with the left foot. There's a solid chunk as first gear engages.
In the neat dance that accomplishes many operations on a motorcycle—one movement to countered by another fro, an equilibrium of give and take—the squeezed clutch lever is slowly let out while the other hand turns the throttle grip down. The bike moves out into a brighter world where the sun startles the rider's eyes for a moment and washes everything in a continual pour.
Out in the early-morning street there is little traffic, for which the rider sends up thanks: on a bike, cars are irksome, their slow-motion ways infuriating. Pulling out of the drive, the rider shifts into second, this time with the boot toe under the lever to push it up. The small jolt of increased speed from the rear wheel is experienced in the seat, just as in the elastic pause when a horse gathers strength in its haunches before springing into a canter from a trot.
To warm up the tires, the rider shifts so slightly in the seat it is hardly noticeable except to the bike, which dips left. Then quickly right again, then left, then right, until the machine is drawing a sinuous S down the road. They could dance like this all day, partnered closely and each anticipating the next step so surely it is not at all clear who is who.
As they reach the exurban limits and turn onto a narrow road that ascends among trees and infrequent stone houses set back in the shadows, other riders are accelerating up highway ramps; riding gingerly in first gear between two lanes of traffic jammed on a city bridge; hitting the dirt front-wheel-first after being launched from the top of a hillock in a field; trying to pass a motor home making its all-too-gradual way into a national park; feeling a charge move from stomach to chest as the bike straightens up from the deepest lean it's yet entered; following three friends also on bikes into the parking lot of a diner for coffee; slowing down, cursing, to the shoulder because the clutch cable broke.
Today, on the way to a particular, longed-for destination, while joy taken in the wheels' consuming revolutions conflates with the desire to arrive, the journey becomes one of combined anticipation of its end and pleasure in its duration. Riding is an occupation defined by duplicities.
Take the numbers: seven million who ride stacked against 225 million who don't. (To get an idea of the minority status this number confirms, consider the fact that some twenty million Americans call themselves dedicated birdwatchers.) Those who ride are both alone and held tight in the fold of the elect. They draw together for protective warmth and take strange relish in needing to do so at all. The glue between these relative few can be tenacious: a rider traveling through a small town, spotted by a rider who lives there, is—because of this simple fact—invited home and given food and advice. A rider stopped by the roadside, even for a cigarette, prompts another biker to stop and ask if help is needed. At the very least, barring the occasional internecine feud that can make motorcyclists embody a sort of nationalism on wheels, they wave as they pass one another. It's as if they all came from the same small burg where street greetings are as obligatory as wearing clothes.
The road, constantly turning, constantly offers up the possibility of something unexpected around the bend—gravel in a tumult across the road, a car drifting over the yellow line, a dog maddened by the din from the pipes. The rider processes data from the road and its environs with a certain detachment, translating them nearly as quickly into physical response: eat or be eaten. There is no room in the brain for idle thought (except on the highway, when idle thoughts appear and float and reconfigure in endless array), and a biker can go for miles and miles without waking up to any sudden realization, including the one that nothing at all has been thought for miles and miles. The faster you ride, the more closed the circuit becomes, deleting everything but this second and the next, which are hurriedly merging. Having no past to regret and no future to await, the rider feels free. Looked at from this tight world, the other one with its gore and stickiness seems well polished and contained at last.
This peculiar physiological effect, common to all high-concentration pursuits, may be why one finds among motorcyclists a large number of people who always feel as if there were a fire lit under them when they are sitting still. When they're out riding, the wind disperses the flame so they don't feel the terrible heat. The duration of the ride starts to be the only time they know happiness, so they go on longer and longer or for more and more rides, while their families become more and more unhappy. For a few, those who become racers, relief is to be had only at 160 mph down a straightaway. They simultaneously embrace and deny the risk, the worst outcome of which is confined to accidents, that which is outside the norm. But the norm stands for much less here than it does elsewhere, and the realm of accident is much larger. Instead of admitting to insanity to want to live in such a place, they imagine their way out of it: Well, if I fall, I'll land on the tires or hay bales or grass berm. Then I'll pick up the bike and if it's not too badly damaged I'll finish the race. That's what they're prepared to allow. Their once colorful leathers are scuffed gray and held together with duct tape.
Every rider of a motorcycle lives with a little of the same denial, which is after all healthy and spares us from living in a world made entirely of dread. It is also the price of admission to a day like this. If the rider wants, the throttle can be cracked open so suddenly the handlebars yank the arms, threatening to run away with that paltry creature on back now reduced to hanging on and enjoying the ride.
The roar left to ring under the trees as the machine passes is like the laser arc of red drawn by a taillight in a long-exposure photograph at night. It is the ghost remnant of how the bike cleaved the air, and what the rider felt as gravity battled flight against the rider's body. The curves play games with the rider, and the rider is lost in the concentration it takes to match wits with an impressive opponent. How fast to enter this turn? The fact that you can be sadly mistaken is what gives the right choice its sweet taste.
But the rider has never known a fear quite like the one when riding just ahead is the object of deep affection. Flying along in tandem, an invisible wire stretched between them to connect the distance through a moving world, the one looks to the other like an insect clinging to the frenzied body of its prey. The rider, behind, watches this transformed human and sees right through the leathers to the tender skin as it looked while sleep was upon it. In one flash the rider sees how laughably easy it would be for something to happen. It is that pernicious distance between them that does the trick: a few yards that is an unbridgeable gap. Perhaps it's all projection—that the rider, looking toward the other, at once feels how vulnerable the self truly is. But isn't that what love is anyway? In hoping for the other, you realize how much you hope for yourself?
When things conspire—the traffic is thick and wild, the sun is leaving moment by moment, rain slicks the surface of the road—the rider best understands what can otherwise remain hidden: that a motorcyclist is both the happy passenger on an amusement park ride and its earnest operator. The rider splits into two, navigating between vacation and dire responsibility.
As the road leaves home farther and farther behind, it makes its own friendly advances to keep the rider happy: See, this is where you stopped your bike once and ate an apple from the tank bag and took off your boots to feel the damp grass beneath your socks; this is the place your beloved bought you a handful of fireballs when you stopped for gas. And there is always the chance that the unexpected around the bend may turn out not to be a danger to avoid, but a sight or smell that appears suddenly like a check in the mail.
Now, with a hundred miles on the clock, the going has taken on a life of its own. The rider has nearly forgotten what it means to sit anywhere but on this seat; the eyes are swinging back and forth in unchanging rhythm like sonar. Brake; slow; lean; heat up. Brake; slow; lean; heat up. Again and again until it's a rocking chair, a hundred freestyle laps, a hand absently stroking the skin.
The road's painted line, a vanishing point in reverse, is eaten up under the wheels, like a video game where the landscape flashes past while the vehicle stays put. The wind is a steady reassurance on the chest. The rider now becomes susceptible to white-line fever, which feels not so much like a need to continue on forever but as if all options for anything else have been removed. It is simple: the power to go, the power to stop, are as reduced as a metaphor and made to fit in one small hand. The rider, naturally, fears this state. And, keen on the perversity that always hides deep in pleasure, the rider, who is me, wants nothing more.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Welfare
by Skald
I have failed, thus far, to discuss one popular Hobopoet living strategy: government welfare. In truth, some hobopoets consider this to be a fantastic strategy. Ive got one friend who has all his basic expenses covered by government checks. While right-wing Republicans and various other good citizens might condemn him,... I dont. These folks should be much more concerned about the BILLIONS of dollars doled out for corporate welfare and war.
That said, Ive never considered welfare to be a viable option. Its not that I have a moral objection to milking the government. My objections are more practical... welfare comes with a price: loss of autonomy. To get a welfare check, you must meet with government social workers, attend government classes, send in regular reports... and generally accept a high degree of interference in your life. That sort of goes against the whole point of hobopoet living, in my view.
Also, you can get dependent on that government check.... and dependence is pretty much the opposite of self-reliance.
And so, I dont recommend the option of welfare except as a short term, emergency option. If you are in danger of hunger, or involuntary homelessness, by all means get what you can get.
But as a long term solution, its far better to establish some sort of independent or tolerable income.
I have failed, thus far, to discuss one popular Hobopoet living strategy: government welfare. In truth, some hobopoets consider this to be a fantastic strategy. Ive got one friend who has all his basic expenses covered by government checks. While right-wing Republicans and various other good citizens might condemn him,... I dont. These folks should be much more concerned about the BILLIONS of dollars doled out for corporate welfare and war.
That said, Ive never considered welfare to be a viable option. Its not that I have a moral objection to milking the government. My objections are more practical... welfare comes with a price: loss of autonomy. To get a welfare check, you must meet with government social workers, attend government classes, send in regular reports... and generally accept a high degree of interference in your life. That sort of goes against the whole point of hobopoet living, in my view.
Also, you can get dependent on that government check.... and dependence is pretty much the opposite of self-reliance.
And so, I dont recommend the option of welfare except as a short term, emergency option. If you are in danger of hunger, or involuntary homelessness, by all means get what you can get.
But as a long term solution, its far better to establish some sort of independent or tolerable income.
Monday, May 08, 2006
Hyper Reality
by Skald
Hyper reality. Every form seems carved from the same plasticine substance. Each blade of grass. Each crystal water bottle encased in sunlight. The vibrating weave of my blue jeans.... the dust that drifts on the air.
Hyper reality. Every form seems carved from the same plasticine substance. Each blade of grass. Each crystal water bottle encased in sunlight. The vibrating weave of my blue jeans.... the dust that drifts on the air.
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
The Beauty of Loss
by Skald
Ours is an age of acquisition. GETTING is the religion of our time... ever grasping, ever clutching for more more more.
Its a sickness. A rotting mental disease. A disease that infects in a thousand ways, with a millions symptoms.
By contrast, loss is abhored in our culture. We deny not only death, but aging. We are terrified of losing our money, our property.
More to the point, we are terrified of losing our strength, our dignity, our respect.
Most of all, we are terrified of losing control.
And yet.
Loss has beauty. Loss is the birthspring of compassion. Loss is our first, best teacher. Loss teaches us that all is impermanent,.. that ultimately, we control absolutely nothing.
If we are sensitive, and careful, loss teaches us the incomparable lesson of letting go. Of pain. Of wealth. Of all we thought we knew, believed, wanted.
This is the inevitable path we must all follow.
There is no escape.
Only surrender.
Ours is an age of acquisition. GETTING is the religion of our time... ever grasping, ever clutching for more more more.
Its a sickness. A rotting mental disease. A disease that infects in a thousand ways, with a millions symptoms.
By contrast, loss is abhored in our culture. We deny not only death, but aging. We are terrified of losing our money, our property.
More to the point, we are terrified of losing our strength, our dignity, our respect.
Most of all, we are terrified of losing control.
And yet.
Loss has beauty. Loss is the birthspring of compassion. Loss is our first, best teacher. Loss teaches us that all is impermanent,.. that ultimately, we control absolutely nothing.
If we are sensitive, and careful, loss teaches us the incomparable lesson of letting go. Of pain. Of wealth. Of all we thought we knew, believed, wanted.
This is the inevitable path we must all follow.
There is no escape.
Only surrender.
Tribe Re-established
by Skald
Tribe. Clan. The building blocks of ancient human social structures. Today,... all but gone.
We live in an atomized world. Today, in fact, even the 1950s "nuclear family" is a relic.
And community? Forget it. What community? The average American is an isolated soul.
But it doesnt have to be that way. Its possible to reconstruct the archaic social forms.. in new and novel ways. Today, we no longer need to (nor usually want to) limit our tribe to blood relatives.
My own modern tribe consists of my closest friends, and their significant others. Im blessed to have such a tribe and very happy that we are now, once again, in the same place. We've migrated from South Carolina, to Georgia, to Thailand, and now to San Francisco together.
Truth be told, I feel lonely and depressed when cut off from them (as Ive been for the past 6 months). But slowly, one by one, we've migrated here.
Its hard to underestimate the power of a self-created community. Such a group counters many of the social ills that modern capitalist life inflicts upon us. A tribe is the foundation for a life lived outside the work-consume herd. The tribe makes such a life enjoyable, meaningful, interesting... fun.
And so I recommend to every Hobopoet and would-be hobopoet-- set about finding each other. Create your own community. Dare to resist the bitter isolation that modern life inflicts on so many.
Tribe. Clan. The building blocks of ancient human social structures. Today,... all but gone.
We live in an atomized world. Today, in fact, even the 1950s "nuclear family" is a relic.
And community? Forget it. What community? The average American is an isolated soul.
But it doesnt have to be that way. Its possible to reconstruct the archaic social forms.. in new and novel ways. Today, we no longer need to (nor usually want to) limit our tribe to blood relatives.
My own modern tribe consists of my closest friends, and their significant others. Im blessed to have such a tribe and very happy that we are now, once again, in the same place. We've migrated from South Carolina, to Georgia, to Thailand, and now to San Francisco together.
Truth be told, I feel lonely and depressed when cut off from them (as Ive been for the past 6 months). But slowly, one by one, we've migrated here.
Its hard to underestimate the power of a self-created community. Such a group counters many of the social ills that modern capitalist life inflicts upon us. A tribe is the foundation for a life lived outside the work-consume herd. The tribe makes such a life enjoyable, meaningful, interesting... fun.
And so I recommend to every Hobopoet and would-be hobopoet-- set about finding each other. Create your own community. Dare to resist the bitter isolation that modern life inflicts on so many.
Friday, April 28, 2006
The Storm Has Passed
by Skald
As many no doubt noticed, I was recently hit by a powerful wave of reverse culture shock. The transition back to San Francisco has generally been easier than past returns to the States (to Georgia). San Francisco is an international city with a very large Asian population, so in many respects I didnt feel like I was completely in America.
However, all sorts of American cultural encounters have slowly built up... and about a month ago... Wham! I found myself in a REALLY foul mood. Two months of incessant rain didnt help matters. Nor does the news I pick up about Iraq, try as I might to avoid too much of it. Add the stress of moving to a new city... and well, the results werent pretty.
Im happy to say the worst seems to have passed. The sun is once more shining in San Francisco, my best friend is moving here today, the teaching gig is going amazingly well (not withstanding the usual bullshit that goes with all jobs), and Im slowly adjusting to some aspects of American culture again.
Of course Ill never adjust to the vulgarity or runaway capitalism, nor do I want to. But this city seems to have its fair share of folks who dont buy into all that... I finally connected with some last night at an art showing (a very trippy & interesting experience... for another time).
And finally, today, I got an internet connection in my apartment.. .which will open opportunities for teaching English over the internet (as a freelancer).
Its funny. When I talk to most travelers... especially first time travelers.. they always worry about the culture shock they'll experience in the new country they are visiting. That has never been a problem for me.
For me, its always the return that is brutal. But the worst seems to be over.
As many no doubt noticed, I was recently hit by a powerful wave of reverse culture shock. The transition back to San Francisco has generally been easier than past returns to the States (to Georgia). San Francisco is an international city with a very large Asian population, so in many respects I didnt feel like I was completely in America.
However, all sorts of American cultural encounters have slowly built up... and about a month ago... Wham! I found myself in a REALLY foul mood. Two months of incessant rain didnt help matters. Nor does the news I pick up about Iraq, try as I might to avoid too much of it. Add the stress of moving to a new city... and well, the results werent pretty.
Im happy to say the worst seems to have passed. The sun is once more shining in San Francisco, my best friend is moving here today, the teaching gig is going amazingly well (not withstanding the usual bullshit that goes with all jobs), and Im slowly adjusting to some aspects of American culture again.
Of course Ill never adjust to the vulgarity or runaway capitalism, nor do I want to. But this city seems to have its fair share of folks who dont buy into all that... I finally connected with some last night at an art showing (a very trippy & interesting experience... for another time).
And finally, today, I got an internet connection in my apartment.. .which will open opportunities for teaching English over the internet (as a freelancer).
Its funny. When I talk to most travelers... especially first time travelers.. they always worry about the culture shock they'll experience in the new country they are visiting. That has never been a problem for me.
For me, its always the return that is brutal. But the worst seems to be over.
Saturday, April 22, 2006
World's Fastest Indian
by Stefan
Watch the movie "The Words Fastest Indian". It's a fantastic movie about travel
on a shoe-string budget, and motorcycles. It's based on the true story of a man
from New Zealand who travels half-way around the world to race his home-made
bike on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.
At some point in the movie, an old Indian asks our hero:
"What you wanna ride that contraption for?"
He answers, "I suppose the reward is in the act of doing it itself."
Later he drops one of the best quotes in the movie:
"You live more in five minutes on a bike like this than most people
live in a lifetime."
Watch the movie "The Words Fastest Indian". It's a fantastic movie about travel
on a shoe-string budget, and motorcycles. It's based on the true story of a man
from New Zealand who travels half-way around the world to race his home-made
bike on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.
At some point in the movie, an old Indian asks our hero:
"What you wanna ride that contraption for?"
He answers, "I suppose the reward is in the act of doing it itself."
Later he drops one of the best quotes in the movie:
"You live more in five minutes on a bike like this than most people
live in a lifetime."
Friday, April 21, 2006
Trust Yourself
by Skald
"Trust yourself to react appropriately when catastrophe happens. Failure of nerve is really failure to trust yourself."
--Alan Watts
I didnt go abroad for the first time until I was 27. Id often thought about it, but never did it. Finally, I met a guy whod traveled to India. He filled me with tales of crowded markets, wandering sadhus, spices, chaos, colors. India seemed to me the mirror image of America... a place full of energy and color.
Somewhat hesitantly, I decided Id go to India. I had no money. Id never traveled. I knew nothing about India other than his stories. No matter.
When I got my student loan check, I promptly bought a ticket to Bombay. I lived off ramen noodles for the rest of the semester but I was thrilled. Next I bought a guidebook. I spent my impoverished days reading through it.. growing more excited each day.
But there were fears too. I had all the first-time-abroad worries. I worried about getting sick. I worried about not bringing something I would need.
More than that, I worried I wasnt up to the task. Would I be overwhelmed? Could I manage everything by myself? What if something bad happened and I was all alone.
Turned out that one of these fears did materialize. Two weeks after arrival in India, I became deathly sick. I eventually collapsed outside a fort in Jodhpur.... dehydrated and exhausted. A kind fellow-traveler got me into a rickshaw and told the driver to take me to the nearest hospital.
He took me to a hospital that had never had a foreign patient. My first challenge was to negotiate with the attendant. Though I could barely sit upright, he insisted that the doctor was not available and would not be for a long time. Panicked.. trying to stay conscious, I begged him. He said, "You must pay extra". In other words, I had to bribe him to call the doctor.
I was diagnosed with dysentery and stayed in the hospital for four days. The doctor spoke English and was very good..
It wasnt a pleasant experience. It wasnt "comfortable".
But everything worked out fine, as these things usually do. More to the point, I learned that I could indeed handle such a situation. I learned that my fears were mostly phantoms.
Nowadays, I dont usually bother with a guidebook... and I dont worry too much about "what might happen". In fact, the unexpected is the very best part of travel... why try to eliminate it.
The point is this- bad things might indeed happen should you take a big (or small) risk.
The thing is, you will handle it.
Alan Watts is right, failure of nerve is really failure to trust yourself.
"Trust yourself to react appropriately when catastrophe happens. Failure of nerve is really failure to trust yourself."
--Alan Watts
I didnt go abroad for the first time until I was 27. Id often thought about it, but never did it. Finally, I met a guy whod traveled to India. He filled me with tales of crowded markets, wandering sadhus, spices, chaos, colors. India seemed to me the mirror image of America... a place full of energy and color.
Somewhat hesitantly, I decided Id go to India. I had no money. Id never traveled. I knew nothing about India other than his stories. No matter.
When I got my student loan check, I promptly bought a ticket to Bombay. I lived off ramen noodles for the rest of the semester but I was thrilled. Next I bought a guidebook. I spent my impoverished days reading through it.. growing more excited each day.
But there were fears too. I had all the first-time-abroad worries. I worried about getting sick. I worried about not bringing something I would need.
More than that, I worried I wasnt up to the task. Would I be overwhelmed? Could I manage everything by myself? What if something bad happened and I was all alone.
Turned out that one of these fears did materialize. Two weeks after arrival in India, I became deathly sick. I eventually collapsed outside a fort in Jodhpur.... dehydrated and exhausted. A kind fellow-traveler got me into a rickshaw and told the driver to take me to the nearest hospital.
He took me to a hospital that had never had a foreign patient. My first challenge was to negotiate with the attendant. Though I could barely sit upright, he insisted that the doctor was not available and would not be for a long time. Panicked.. trying to stay conscious, I begged him. He said, "You must pay extra". In other words, I had to bribe him to call the doctor.
I was diagnosed with dysentery and stayed in the hospital for four days. The doctor spoke English and was very good..
It wasnt a pleasant experience. It wasnt "comfortable".
But everything worked out fine, as these things usually do. More to the point, I learned that I could indeed handle such a situation. I learned that my fears were mostly phantoms.
Nowadays, I dont usually bother with a guidebook... and I dont worry too much about "what might happen". In fact, the unexpected is the very best part of travel... why try to eliminate it.
The point is this- bad things might indeed happen should you take a big (or small) risk.
The thing is, you will handle it.
Alan Watts is right, failure of nerve is really failure to trust yourself.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Freedom
by Skald
Some of the freest people Ive met are the street vendors and micro-entrepreneurs of Thailand. What wonderful people. What a wonderful lifestyle.
These are folks who "work for themselves" in the very best sense of that phrase.
People without a boss. Without timesheets. Who work when they want to; and dont when they dont. These are people who are not in a rush.... who are generally happy to share a drink and chat with their customers; who seem not to distinguish between work, play, and socializing.
Its not uncommon to find a vendor sitting on a blanket with a group of friends-- sharing a beer, food sprawled next to the goods for sale. Contrast this with America, where wage-slave employees are punished for talking to friends "on the clock"... where "efficiency" is God.
There is humanity in the Thai street vendors way of life... none in the American employee's. For the Thai, "work" is as much about camaraderie as profit. "Efficiency" is not a word one hears often in Thailand... on the street or in the office.
The same is true in India. Indian micro-entrepreneurs LOVE to chat. In fact, I often sensed they were disappointed with the "show me the money" mindset of their western customers. They seemed to delight in the process as much as the exchange of money... The invitation to the shop, sharing tea and shooting the shit, the long and elaborate display of goods, the humorous drama of haggling, the thanks and congratulations once the deal is concluded.
This is the kind of ease... the kind of humanity.. you find only among the free. No wage slave institution can reproduce it (nor do they want to). As an employee, work is a faceless, vulgar, dehumanizing affair.
But not so on the streets of many countries. In these places we gain a glimpse of another way... a small-scale, autonomous, pleasant means of "making a living".
Some of the freest people Ive met are the street vendors and micro-entrepreneurs of Thailand. What wonderful people. What a wonderful lifestyle.
These are folks who "work for themselves" in the very best sense of that phrase.
People without a boss. Without timesheets. Who work when they want to; and dont when they dont. These are people who are not in a rush.... who are generally happy to share a drink and chat with their customers; who seem not to distinguish between work, play, and socializing.
Its not uncommon to find a vendor sitting on a blanket with a group of friends-- sharing a beer, food sprawled next to the goods for sale. Contrast this with America, where wage-slave employees are punished for talking to friends "on the clock"... where "efficiency" is God.
There is humanity in the Thai street vendors way of life... none in the American employee's. For the Thai, "work" is as much about camaraderie as profit. "Efficiency" is not a word one hears often in Thailand... on the street or in the office.
The same is true in India. Indian micro-entrepreneurs LOVE to chat. In fact, I often sensed they were disappointed with the "show me the money" mindset of their western customers. They seemed to delight in the process as much as the exchange of money... The invitation to the shop, sharing tea and shooting the shit, the long and elaborate display of goods, the humorous drama of haggling, the thanks and congratulations once the deal is concluded.
This is the kind of ease... the kind of humanity.. you find only among the free. No wage slave institution can reproduce it (nor do they want to). As an employee, work is a faceless, vulgar, dehumanizing affair.
But not so on the streets of many countries. In these places we gain a glimpse of another way... a small-scale, autonomous, pleasant means of "making a living".
Monday, April 17, 2006
Natural Happiness
by Stefan
Man, over the last couple hundred of thousand of years, has been conditioned by evolution to require certain outside parameters to experience a happy life: access to fresh air, beautiful nature (why do you think simply looking at it lifts the spirit), close and nourishing relationships with other people, a fair measure of physical exercise, etc.
The modern world, however, forces people into the most un-natural surroundings and forces them to live in ways not in tune with their ancient history: living, cut off from their peers and their natural habitat, in tiny boxes in concrete jungles, sitting still for eight hours a day doing work largely inconsistent with the much more physical "work" of their ancestors. The family structures that lent them stability have largely been disbanded over a false notion of freedom and women's lib, spread out over vast geographical areas or simply abandoned in pursuit of the false gods of money and success.
It is no surprise this makes people unhappy. The sad thing is most people are unable to realize even why they are unhappy and make the right changes to their life style.
The marketing machine jumps in on cue and exploits the unhappiness: hey are you unhappy? Buy this monstrous car, it will make you feel safer. It will make you feel better. Eat these psychopharmaceuticals. Or just eat, eat eat our salty sugary comfort food. Watch these bullshit shows. Buy buy buy buy buy. And all the while the true root of the problem lies unadressed, providing fertile soil for the bullshit marketing system for ever.
Will people ever wake up and start living again in a way consistent with their history, and experience true happiness?
Man, over the last couple hundred of thousand of years, has been conditioned by evolution to require certain outside parameters to experience a happy life: access to fresh air, beautiful nature (why do you think simply looking at it lifts the spirit), close and nourishing relationships with other people, a fair measure of physical exercise, etc.
The modern world, however, forces people into the most un-natural surroundings and forces them to live in ways not in tune with their ancient history: living, cut off from their peers and their natural habitat, in tiny boxes in concrete jungles, sitting still for eight hours a day doing work largely inconsistent with the much more physical "work" of their ancestors. The family structures that lent them stability have largely been disbanded over a false notion of freedom and women's lib, spread out over vast geographical areas or simply abandoned in pursuit of the false gods of money and success.
It is no surprise this makes people unhappy. The sad thing is most people are unable to realize even why they are unhappy and make the right changes to their life style.
The marketing machine jumps in on cue and exploits the unhappiness: hey are you unhappy? Buy this monstrous car, it will make you feel safer. It will make you feel better. Eat these psychopharmaceuticals. Or just eat, eat eat our salty sugary comfort food. Watch these bullshit shows. Buy buy buy buy buy. And all the while the true root of the problem lies unadressed, providing fertile soil for the bullshit marketing system for ever.
Will people ever wake up and start living again in a way consistent with their history, and experience true happiness?
Fear
by Stefan
In Germany, there is an ancient figure of speech: "Angst ist ein schlechter Ratgeber". "Fear is a bad advisor".
There is a great truth to this, hence it appals me to see most of todays world completely run by fear. Fear of terrorist attacks. Fear of evil drugs. Fear of real or imagined enemies. In America, the irrational fear of an unseen outside world most never even bothered to explore.
This fear is exploited, and it brings with it changes to the worse. Fear will never steer you to make the right decisions.
People are so chicken-shit these days, it makes me sick. They are afraid of having to look for another job, or maybe afraid of not finding one, so they put up with bull-shit at work that drives them to sickness and despair at the hands of despotic bosses. They are afraid of smut on the Internet, of the black man in the street, afraid of their shadow on the wall. They say to me "I could never ride a motorcycle, it's so dangerous! I need the safety of my Range Rover. I've got kids now, you know." Fear is the guiding motive in their lives, and it's making everything worse. Yet, in America, they call themselves the home of the "brave". True bravery is something else.
What ever happened to Churchill's old motto of "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself?" Bravely accept the inevitable risks in life. Accept you might be killed in an accident, and ride with abandon, feeling the air blowing into your face, making you feel alive. Accept that life is limited anyhow and might end at any minute and commit yourself to living it to the fullest. Accept risk, forget fear, and move on.
Don't become a quivering bastard living in fear. There are too many of them already, all around you. And their collective pussy-footedness is ruining this world for everybody.
In Germany, there is an ancient figure of speech: "Angst ist ein schlechter Ratgeber". "Fear is a bad advisor".
There is a great truth to this, hence it appals me to see most of todays world completely run by fear. Fear of terrorist attacks. Fear of evil drugs. Fear of real or imagined enemies. In America, the irrational fear of an unseen outside world most never even bothered to explore.
This fear is exploited, and it brings with it changes to the worse. Fear will never steer you to make the right decisions.
People are so chicken-shit these days, it makes me sick. They are afraid of having to look for another job, or maybe afraid of not finding one, so they put up with bull-shit at work that drives them to sickness and despair at the hands of despotic bosses. They are afraid of smut on the Internet, of the black man in the street, afraid of their shadow on the wall. They say to me "I could never ride a motorcycle, it's so dangerous! I need the safety of my Range Rover. I've got kids now, you know." Fear is the guiding motive in their lives, and it's making everything worse. Yet, in America, they call themselves the home of the "brave". True bravery is something else.
What ever happened to Churchill's old motto of "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself?" Bravely accept the inevitable risks in life. Accept you might be killed in an accident, and ride with abandon, feeling the air blowing into your face, making you feel alive. Accept that life is limited anyhow and might end at any minute and commit yourself to living it to the fullest. Accept risk, forget fear, and move on.
Don't become a quivering bastard living in fear. There are too many of them already, all around you. And their collective pussy-footedness is ruining this world for everybody.
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Paramilitary Policing in the Drug War
More insanity from the "War on Drugs" (TM)
Just before dawn one August morning last year, a Sunrise, Florida, SWAT team moved into position outside its target. At a commander's signal, the team kicked down the front door and began its assault with paramilitary precision. Within seconds shots rang out, and within moments it was clear that the team had secured its objective and killed its target.
Was it a bank robber holed up for a desperate last stand? Was it a psychotic kidnapper barricaded with his hostages? Was it a tweaked-out ex-con with a grudge and an AK-47? Was it a foreign terrorist operative about to blow a landmark to smithereens? No. It was a 22-year-old bar tender who police had heard might be retailing small amounts of marijuana. He had a pistol permit -- a fact police knew -- and perhaps unsurprisingly, police claimed he went for his gun when a gang of masked, screaming, heavily armed men burst through his door in the pre-dawn darkness.
The Sunrise SWAT team left with the evidence: A couple ounces of pot, and a set of scales. And while Anthony Diotaiuto was dead as a result of the SWAT team's actions, not one of its members faced criminal charges or even departmental discipline. They had gone by the book, even if the result was a life snuffed out over a couple ounces of marijuana.
While the Sunrise incident was unusual in that it ended up with a young man dead, fatal outcomes are bound to happen when the aggressive tactics of SWAT are employed. There are numerous examples: Eleven-year-old Alberto Sepulveda killed by a SWAT team shotgun blast as he lay on the floor during a 2001 Modesto, California, drug raid.
Alberta Spruille, a 57-year-old New York City woman who died of a heart attack after a SWAT team with the wrong address threw flash bang grenades into her apartment. John Adams, a 64-year-old Lebanon, Tennessee, man killed by a SWAT team when he picked up a shotgun to defend himself and his wife from masked invaders who kicked down his door in the middle of the night -- another case of the wrong address. And on and on.
All of the incidents above are examples of paramilitary policing run amok. Whether they are called SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams, Special Operations teams, Emergency Response Teams, or something else, paramilitary police units are now common throughout the country -- and are the stuff of fawning reality TV programming.
The heavily-armed, often black uniformed, helmeted, masked police squads look and behave as if they are chasing insurgents in the back alleys of Baghdad, and that is little surprise given their antecedents in military special forces units.
SWAT teams are designed for use and are arguably appropriate in limited, extremely dangerous circumstances, such as capturing armed, barricaded hostage-takers. But they are now widely used for run of the mill drug raids and other routine law enforcement work. In the last month, SWAT teams have been used to arrest seven Tibetan Buddhist monks on immigration charges (Carter Lake, Iowa), raid an apartment above a busy restaurant owned by the mayor only to find less than an ounce of marijuana (Denver), search for a missing woman in a well-publicized case (Orlando), and to conduct a routine drug raid on a house they managed to set on fire with flash bang grenades (Pompano Beach, Florida). A few weeks earlier, in late January, a Fairfax, Virginia, SWAT team shot and killed an unarmed optometrist under investigation for gambling when he walked out his front door. Those are just the examples that make the news.
Across the country, seven days a week, SWAT teams are kicking down doors on drug raids that don't make the news -- it's just business as usual. In a scene undoubtedly repeated across the country, in Huron, SD, last month, a multi-agency SWAT-style team investigating an apartment house where a multi-pound package of marijuana being surveilled by police had previously been refused, burst into one apartment with guns drawn, knocked the female inhabitant to the ground, handcuffed the male inhabitant for three hours while they searched the premises, and came up with a couple of marijuana pipes. It being South Dakota, police were also able to order the inhabitants to submit to drug tests and were able to charge them with "internal possession" of drugs based on those tests, so they didn't come up completely empty-handed.
"This is an under the radar, but truly massive phenomenon," said Dr. Peter Kraska, professor of criminal justice and police studies at Eastern Kentucky University and author of "Militarizing The American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and Police."
"Very few people understand the magnitude of what it means to have police go from enforcing the drug laws through traditional undercover operations to a paramilitary approach where they gather together in heavily-armed squads and conduct crude investigations using search warrants to get inside people's homes," Kraska told DRCNet. "This has not happened before in American history, except way back when the military was looking for contraband."
According to statistics uncovered by Kraska, there were some 3,000 SWAT team deployments a year in the mid-1980s. By the late 1990s, that number had increased ten-fold, to some 30,000 a year, and is probably near 40,000 a year now. The resort to SWAT teams has also spread from large urban police departments to such violent crime hot spots as Grand Island, Nebraska, Bullhead City, Arizona, and Eufala, Alabama.
"We now have a situation where even in small departments, more than 70% have a fully functioning SWAT team," said Kraska. "The question is what are they going to do with them? It's highly unlikely these small-town departments are going to run into a legitimate hostage or barricade situation, so the departments have to figure out a way to use the SWAT teams, something to use them for."
"I think this is an example of build it and then you have to find a use for it," said retired Detective Lieutenant Jack Cole, a 26-year of the New Jersey State Police veteran who is now executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. "SWAT tactics are appropriate when you have a life and death situation, but they are being used when they simply are not necessary. When I was a drug detective, one partner and I would go and arrest people when now they're calling in the whole SWAT team. Back then we did it better and did it quietly without people getting hurt. I worked narcotics for 14 years, and we never needed a SWAT team," he told DRCNet.
"This has all happened in a decade or so," said Kraska, "and it represents a fundamental shift in how police approach the drug war. In fact, it is the single most important indicator of them handling it as though it were a war as opposed to a drug problem. They are using teams modeled on military special operations squads, and even though they have different rules of engagement from the military, they are still using highly aggressive tactics for generally low-level drug use and dealing. SWAT teams place themselves and citizens in an extremely dangerous situation and not for justifiable reasons like a dangerous felon with a hostage, but for a few people smoking pot."
"Using SWAT teams to enforce the drugs laws is, in most instances, like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer," said Cole. "It's not necessary and it's very expensive. That's part of the problem. Departments equip these people at great expense and train them and train them, and then the departments figure they should use them for something, but they are really only appropriate in very limited circumstances."
SWAT teams come dangerously close to crossing the bright line separating law enforcement from military operations, Cole said. "There is something about training a police officer to go to war that I don't like," he said. "We're police, not soldiers, but we've got these guys dressed in black from head to toe, wearing body armor and riot helmets, carrying superweapons -- and we're using them for drug raids and walking the beat. This is a real warlike mentality that we don't need as far as I'm concerned."
Many departments allow SWAT team members to hide their identities. "Why on earth do these departments allow their SWAT teams to wear ski masks?" Cole asked. "That's just horrible. It intimidates and terrorizes people, and it hides your identity so you can do anything you damn well want. What do you think happens to kids traumatized by a dozen masked, uniformed strangers charging into their homes with machine guns and laser search lights running across their chests? Why do the good guys feel they have to wear masks? They're treating American citizens as if they were enemy combatants."
Just before dawn one August morning last year, a Sunrise, Florida, SWAT team moved into position outside its target. At a commander's signal, the team kicked down the front door and began its assault with paramilitary precision. Within seconds shots rang out, and within moments it was clear that the team had secured its objective and killed its target.
Was it a bank robber holed up for a desperate last stand? Was it a psychotic kidnapper barricaded with his hostages? Was it a tweaked-out ex-con with a grudge and an AK-47? Was it a foreign terrorist operative about to blow a landmark to smithereens? No. It was a 22-year-old bar tender who police had heard might be retailing small amounts of marijuana. He had a pistol permit -- a fact police knew -- and perhaps unsurprisingly, police claimed he went for his gun when a gang of masked, screaming, heavily armed men burst through his door in the pre-dawn darkness.
The Sunrise SWAT team left with the evidence: A couple ounces of pot, and a set of scales. And while Anthony Diotaiuto was dead as a result of the SWAT team's actions, not one of its members faced criminal charges or even departmental discipline. They had gone by the book, even if the result was a life snuffed out over a couple ounces of marijuana.
While the Sunrise incident was unusual in that it ended up with a young man dead, fatal outcomes are bound to happen when the aggressive tactics of SWAT are employed. There are numerous examples: Eleven-year-old Alberto Sepulveda killed by a SWAT team shotgun blast as he lay on the floor during a 2001 Modesto, California, drug raid.
Alberta Spruille, a 57-year-old New York City woman who died of a heart attack after a SWAT team with the wrong address threw flash bang grenades into her apartment. John Adams, a 64-year-old Lebanon, Tennessee, man killed by a SWAT team when he picked up a shotgun to defend himself and his wife from masked invaders who kicked down his door in the middle of the night -- another case of the wrong address. And on and on.
All of the incidents above are examples of paramilitary policing run amok. Whether they are called SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) teams, Special Operations teams, Emergency Response Teams, or something else, paramilitary police units are now common throughout the country -- and are the stuff of fawning reality TV programming.
The heavily-armed, often black uniformed, helmeted, masked police squads look and behave as if they are chasing insurgents in the back alleys of Baghdad, and that is little surprise given their antecedents in military special forces units.
SWAT teams are designed for use and are arguably appropriate in limited, extremely dangerous circumstances, such as capturing armed, barricaded hostage-takers. But they are now widely used for run of the mill drug raids and other routine law enforcement work. In the last month, SWAT teams have been used to arrest seven Tibetan Buddhist monks on immigration charges (Carter Lake, Iowa), raid an apartment above a busy restaurant owned by the mayor only to find less than an ounce of marijuana (Denver), search for a missing woman in a well-publicized case (Orlando), and to conduct a routine drug raid on a house they managed to set on fire with flash bang grenades (Pompano Beach, Florida). A few weeks earlier, in late January, a Fairfax, Virginia, SWAT team shot and killed an unarmed optometrist under investigation for gambling when he walked out his front door. Those are just the examples that make the news.
Across the country, seven days a week, SWAT teams are kicking down doors on drug raids that don't make the news -- it's just business as usual. In a scene undoubtedly repeated across the country, in Huron, SD, last month, a multi-agency SWAT-style team investigating an apartment house where a multi-pound package of marijuana being surveilled by police had previously been refused, burst into one apartment with guns drawn, knocked the female inhabitant to the ground, handcuffed the male inhabitant for three hours while they searched the premises, and came up with a couple of marijuana pipes. It being South Dakota, police were also able to order the inhabitants to submit to drug tests and were able to charge them with "internal possession" of drugs based on those tests, so they didn't come up completely empty-handed.
"This is an under the radar, but truly massive phenomenon," said Dr. Peter Kraska, professor of criminal justice and police studies at Eastern Kentucky University and author of "Militarizing The American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and Police."
"Very few people understand the magnitude of what it means to have police go from enforcing the drug laws through traditional undercover operations to a paramilitary approach where they gather together in heavily-armed squads and conduct crude investigations using search warrants to get inside people's homes," Kraska told DRCNet. "This has not happened before in American history, except way back when the military was looking for contraband."
According to statistics uncovered by Kraska, there were some 3,000 SWAT team deployments a year in the mid-1980s. By the late 1990s, that number had increased ten-fold, to some 30,000 a year, and is probably near 40,000 a year now. The resort to SWAT teams has also spread from large urban police departments to such violent crime hot spots as Grand Island, Nebraska, Bullhead City, Arizona, and Eufala, Alabama.
"We now have a situation where even in small departments, more than 70% have a fully functioning SWAT team," said Kraska. "The question is what are they going to do with them? It's highly unlikely these small-town departments are going to run into a legitimate hostage or barricade situation, so the departments have to figure out a way to use the SWAT teams, something to use them for."
"I think this is an example of build it and then you have to find a use for it," said retired Detective Lieutenant Jack Cole, a 26-year of the New Jersey State Police veteran who is now executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. "SWAT tactics are appropriate when you have a life and death situation, but they are being used when they simply are not necessary. When I was a drug detective, one partner and I would go and arrest people when now they're calling in the whole SWAT team. Back then we did it better and did it quietly without people getting hurt. I worked narcotics for 14 years, and we never needed a SWAT team," he told DRCNet.
"This has all happened in a decade or so," said Kraska, "and it represents a fundamental shift in how police approach the drug war. In fact, it is the single most important indicator of them handling it as though it were a war as opposed to a drug problem. They are using teams modeled on military special operations squads, and even though they have different rules of engagement from the military, they are still using highly aggressive tactics for generally low-level drug use and dealing. SWAT teams place themselves and citizens in an extremely dangerous situation and not for justifiable reasons like a dangerous felon with a hostage, but for a few people smoking pot."
"Using SWAT teams to enforce the drugs laws is, in most instances, like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer," said Cole. "It's not necessary and it's very expensive. That's part of the problem. Departments equip these people at great expense and train them and train them, and then the departments figure they should use them for something, but they are really only appropriate in very limited circumstances."
SWAT teams come dangerously close to crossing the bright line separating law enforcement from military operations, Cole said. "There is something about training a police officer to go to war that I don't like," he said. "We're police, not soldiers, but we've got these guys dressed in black from head to toe, wearing body armor and riot helmets, carrying superweapons -- and we're using them for drug raids and walking the beat. This is a real warlike mentality that we don't need as far as I'm concerned."
Many departments allow SWAT team members to hide their identities. "Why on earth do these departments allow their SWAT teams to wear ski masks?" Cole asked. "That's just horrible. It intimidates and terrorizes people, and it hides your identity so you can do anything you damn well want. What do you think happens to kids traumatized by a dozen masked, uniformed strangers charging into their homes with machine guns and laser search lights running across their chests? Why do the good guys feel they have to wear masks? They're treating American citizens as if they were enemy combatants."
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Limitations of Blogging
by Skald
Blogging, Im afraid, has made my writing worse. As I review the writing Ive done during the last year, I see a steady decline in quality. After much reflection, I attribute much of the decline to increased blogging. The more I blog, the worse I seem to write.
Its not a conclusion I wanted to make... I enjoy blogging. Blogging has many benefits. I like its interactivity... the quick feedback. I like the exchange of ideas. I like the immediacy. Blogging is a great way to develop and refine IDEAS.
But thats the problem. Increasingly, I write about ideas. Ideas divorced from immediate experience. Im commenting on comments. Im blogging about a comment about a post on another blog. Blogging has increased the mediation of my writing experience. As a result, the PROCESS of writing, for me, has lost much of its magic.
I used to sit in cafes with a pen and notebook, just watching. I watched people going by. I watched the trees sway. Mind quieted. Often, I sank into a meditative reverie..... lost in immediate perceptions.
Nowadays, I sit in coffee shops with a laptop... connected through wireless. My eyes are stuck to the screen. No observation. No reverie. Just agitated excitement...
Not unlike watching TV, in fact.
Im beginning to realize that for all its power of connectivity, the internet, and blogging... is still a very powerful form of mediation. A machine that cuts us off from immediate experience. Its easy to get lost in the internet's virtual world of abstract ideas. Its easy to believe the debates and abstractions are "real". Much like TV, the internet/blogging experience can become an addictive escape.
And so Im changing my writing routine. While Ill continue blogging, I plan to do so much less.... and (hopefully) more thoughtfully.
Beware ALL forms of mediation,... including (especially) this one.
Blogging, Im afraid, has made my writing worse. As I review the writing Ive done during the last year, I see a steady decline in quality. After much reflection, I attribute much of the decline to increased blogging. The more I blog, the worse I seem to write.
Its not a conclusion I wanted to make... I enjoy blogging. Blogging has many benefits. I like its interactivity... the quick feedback. I like the exchange of ideas. I like the immediacy. Blogging is a great way to develop and refine IDEAS.
But thats the problem. Increasingly, I write about ideas. Ideas divorced from immediate experience. Im commenting on comments. Im blogging about a comment about a post on another blog. Blogging has increased the mediation of my writing experience. As a result, the PROCESS of writing, for me, has lost much of its magic.
I used to sit in cafes with a pen and notebook, just watching. I watched people going by. I watched the trees sway. Mind quieted. Often, I sank into a meditative reverie..... lost in immediate perceptions.
Nowadays, I sit in coffee shops with a laptop... connected through wireless. My eyes are stuck to the screen. No observation. No reverie. Just agitated excitement...
Not unlike watching TV, in fact.
Im beginning to realize that for all its power of connectivity, the internet, and blogging... is still a very powerful form of mediation. A machine that cuts us off from immediate experience. Its easy to get lost in the internet's virtual world of abstract ideas. Its easy to believe the debates and abstractions are "real". Much like TV, the internet/blogging experience can become an addictive escape.
And so Im changing my writing routine. While Ill continue blogging, I plan to do so much less.... and (hopefully) more thoughtfully.
Beware ALL forms of mediation,... including (especially) this one.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Sun
by Skald
Woke up this morning, threw on jeans, and headed to breakfast with my friend Sky. Clouds covered the city, and as we walked, a light rain fell. We loped along slowly... heading to a small diner. As we did, irritation popped forth.. like a ripe seed sending out shoots. Throughout breakfast, I snarled, pouted, and ate silently.
Once finished, I headed back to the apartment. I relaxed a few minutes, then grabbed the laptop... time for the daily pilgrimage to a coffee shop. This time, I noticed my mood lifting as I walked. A smile cracked my face. Energy surged. A bit curious, I wondered why the sudden change in mood. Then I looked up and noticed the sun. Clouds were breaking up, the rain was gone.
We've had a miserable month in San Francisco... drab, chilly, and rainy. For the last month, Ive been grumpy and bored. A coincidence?
Hardly. Perhaps I inherited sunlight sensitivity from my Nordic ancestors? I dont know. What I do know is that lack of sunlight quickly sends me into depression. Id almost forgotten this phenomenon, after living in tropical Thailand for two years. In Thailand, its always hot and sunny... even the rainy days are bright (compared to North America).
All this got me to thinking about the "Snow Bird" lifestyle. Snow Birds are retirees who migrate according to the season. In the summer, when the South is unbearable... they load into their RVS and vans and head north. They may spend the summer in Michigan, or New York, or the northwest. But when the cold air and dark days come... they head south... to ride out the winter in Florida, Georgia, Southern California, or even Mexico.
This strikes me as very sensible. Birds migrate. Many herd animals migrate. In the ancient past, human tribes migrated too. They followed the animals, or the sun.
While we CAN live in cold/harsh climates, clearly humans are designed for mild or tropical weather.
And so Im starting to think of creating a migratory life for myself... to move according to the seasons. Mainly, this would involve escaping North America (and other cold climates) for at least half the year. I plan to open my own school(s) one day... and have decided to do so with migration in mind. In other words, Id like to have a school in a warm climate and one in a cooler one (say, San Francisco). Id share time between them, according to the seasons.
There are simpler ways to do this. Surf/Ski bums often follow a migratory approach. In the winter they head to the mountains.. where they work in resorts as instructors or service staff. When the snow melts, they head for the beach and the waves... or elsewhere for seasonal work... or they go to a cheap warm place (like Thailand) and ride out the summer. Its sort of a Snow Bird life in reverse.
There are many possibilities. While I deplore traditional teaching environments, they do have one advantage... schedule! Summers off. Thats a damn good perk. While the ratio isnt great (only 2 months off)... the schedule beats the hell out of other traditional jobs. Many teachers (especially in the UK, it seems) spend their summers traveling. They spend two plus months wandering foreign countries... taking vacations... and generally having a great time. NOT a bad lifestyle, and it probably makes them more interesting teachers too.
So here's a thought: consider your ancient roots. Consider a migratory lifestyle. Follow the birds. Follow the sun.
Woke up this morning, threw on jeans, and headed to breakfast with my friend Sky. Clouds covered the city, and as we walked, a light rain fell. We loped along slowly... heading to a small diner. As we did, irritation popped forth.. like a ripe seed sending out shoots. Throughout breakfast, I snarled, pouted, and ate silently.
Once finished, I headed back to the apartment. I relaxed a few minutes, then grabbed the laptop... time for the daily pilgrimage to a coffee shop. This time, I noticed my mood lifting as I walked. A smile cracked my face. Energy surged. A bit curious, I wondered why the sudden change in mood. Then I looked up and noticed the sun. Clouds were breaking up, the rain was gone.
We've had a miserable month in San Francisco... drab, chilly, and rainy. For the last month, Ive been grumpy and bored. A coincidence?
Hardly. Perhaps I inherited sunlight sensitivity from my Nordic ancestors? I dont know. What I do know is that lack of sunlight quickly sends me into depression. Id almost forgotten this phenomenon, after living in tropical Thailand for two years. In Thailand, its always hot and sunny... even the rainy days are bright (compared to North America).
All this got me to thinking about the "Snow Bird" lifestyle. Snow Birds are retirees who migrate according to the season. In the summer, when the South is unbearable... they load into their RVS and vans and head north. They may spend the summer in Michigan, or New York, or the northwest. But when the cold air and dark days come... they head south... to ride out the winter in Florida, Georgia, Southern California, or even Mexico.
This strikes me as very sensible. Birds migrate. Many herd animals migrate. In the ancient past, human tribes migrated too. They followed the animals, or the sun.
While we CAN live in cold/harsh climates, clearly humans are designed for mild or tropical weather.
And so Im starting to think of creating a migratory life for myself... to move according to the seasons. Mainly, this would involve escaping North America (and other cold climates) for at least half the year. I plan to open my own school(s) one day... and have decided to do so with migration in mind. In other words, Id like to have a school in a warm climate and one in a cooler one (say, San Francisco). Id share time between them, according to the seasons.
There are simpler ways to do this. Surf/Ski bums often follow a migratory approach. In the winter they head to the mountains.. where they work in resorts as instructors or service staff. When the snow melts, they head for the beach and the waves... or elsewhere for seasonal work... or they go to a cheap warm place (like Thailand) and ride out the summer. Its sort of a Snow Bird life in reverse.
There are many possibilities. While I deplore traditional teaching environments, they do have one advantage... schedule! Summers off. Thats a damn good perk. While the ratio isnt great (only 2 months off)... the schedule beats the hell out of other traditional jobs. Many teachers (especially in the UK, it seems) spend their summers traveling. They spend two plus months wandering foreign countries... taking vacations... and generally having a great time. NOT a bad lifestyle, and it probably makes them more interesting teachers too.
So here's a thought: consider your ancient roots. Consider a migratory lifestyle. Follow the birds. Follow the sun.
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