Pretty goooood.

Mad science

Sept. 18, 2010

My memories from Friday night were strangely coherent as I woke up Saturday morning: the coffee shop, the girl with the wax on her face, some hippie bar with cheap beer, the caveman guy with a wide-open Hawaiian shirt, a bigass red Cadillac, too much talk about money and science, a near hit ('n run), very loud vocal impressions of dub-step music, a free ride in some dude's pickup truck, a fall into the river, creeping through the woods, being chased off by security, a handful of aggressive drug salesmen, and a long trek through a loud canyon.

I was wide awake, but stayed in my sleeping bag at least a half hour anyway. The basement smelled like greasy broccoli.

It was 10 a.m. and I was in a mad scientist's den. Next to me was a tall stack of mason jars, some random parts of electronic equipment, a few scattered pieces of clothing and a couple curious-looking (closed) boxes. Also there was a Pop-tarts wrapper – I ate a couple s'more-style snacks the night before. Strewn throughout the rest of the apartment were several plastic tubes, a doctor's mask, a couple 5-gallon containers full of brown liquid, a partly disassembled CPU, many more jars (some empty, some not and some I wasn't sure about), a variety of plants, a projector, a scale, a box full of what appeared to be torn pieces of cardboard, six small bottles of hair spray (colors: red, green, orange, yellow, violet and indigo), compost in a small plastic container, a box of OxiClean, an Einstein quote on the wall, a few bottles of liquor and a paperback copy of "Adventures in Space and Time."

By the time I finally stood up there were people talking in the other room. Someone was cooking.

These notes begin a few minutes after I walked into the other room and discovered the broccoli smell was indeed broccoli — and eggs, onions, bacon and who knows what else. It tasted good. Anyway, someone said something about energy/life/matter/physics/etc. and that triggered my first note, labeled 10:43 a.m.: "I need to write this shit down." Here's the rest.

10:50 a.m. - "We are spiritual beings in biological jumpsuits."

11:02 a.m. - Dub-step impressions, McDonald's commercials..."right when I connected with the mothership. Woo!"

11:15 a.m. - Walking towards downtown. Discussion about investing in gold. Money is worthless. Glenn Beck.

11:17 a.m. - "A bird doesn't come up with a new way to catch a fish!"

11:40 a.m. - Talk of the worthlessness of money is peppered by stops at ATMs.

12:06 p.m. - DIY Fort Collins. Homemade beer, other intoxicants.

12:25 p.m. - Tourist shop. Cowboy hats and dreamcatchers. I'm back in Santa Fe.

1:01 p.m. - Sustainable Living Fair. Little girl to her mom: "I'm going to start eating healthy foods."

1: 07 p.m. Wind turbine. P = 1/2 x M x A x V(cubed). Everyone is wearing dirty sandals.

2:06 p.m. - Got a beer. Author: "Some people say the sustainability movement is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. If it is, let's put all the chairs in a circle and have a good time."

2:15 p.m. - Sitting on a hay bail. Author: "Pretty much all ya'll are going to have to live in a shack and shit in a bucket if you're serious about this."

3:01 p.m. - "I was getting such a sick vibe from her. When I sat down, I could just feel her presence."

3:12 p.m. - Plants. "What we want to do is harness the life force." (2nd IPA)

3:56 p.m. - One of the hippies stole my beer glass. Big surprise.

4:12 p.m. - Worm lady: "You just want to know to help you grow your pot plants." Wrong, lady.

4:40 p.m. - "Karma killed the bee."

5:11 p.m. - Banjos. Mead.

5:40 p.m. - "It's like eating a sandwich, if me and the sandwich are both drunk."

6:50 p.m. - Little girl falls off a hay bail on her face.

LOTS OF DANCING AND BEER

7:54 p.m. - "The earth is too big to stay in one place."

8:12 p.m. - "I don't have a problem with smart people having a butt ton of kids."

8:16 p.m. - "I should just open a credit card and fucking go apeshit." - one dude. "You don't have to pay it back." - another dude

10:46 p.m. - At the coffee shop. "We're trapped in this life to figure something out about the proclamation of God. And when we do, we know why."

11:15 p.m. - "This third dimension is such a small part of what there is. Hey, what's up dudes?"

11:16 p.m. - "Egyptians, three pyramids, clones and shit."

1:22 a.m. - Drunk. Eating chocolate chip pancakes at a Christian coffee shop.

2:22 a.m. - Back at the house. It smells like puke. Tired of conversations about (illegible) and the law. Who does jury duty anyway?

The puke smell, apparently, was caused by the oven being left on all day and night. Presently, I'm back in New Mex and about to fill out the forms for jury duty. Peace.

Promises

I told Katie I would update, so I am.

But really, I've got nothing. Nothing that comes to mind anyway.

So I'm posting something from a few months ago. At the time, I was mostly fleshing out my thoughts about something stupid, and I thought I deleted it immediately, but I didn't. In retrospect, it sounds like a junior high student talking to himself, making it an almost too accurate view of my actual thought process. But I promised.

Here:

It was a little surprising when a we ended up ankle-deep in snow. In the Valley it had been sixty degrees. A friend and I had driven into the mountains, but only a few miles. The snow was nice, in a sort of peaceful way, but also irritating because my tennis shoes were soaked a couple miles into the woods. The landscape was pretty decent: real tall trees, an ice-covered creek, some bear tracks and a few huge piles along the trail that seemed to be elk shit. For a while we talked about Where the Red Fern Grows, then about Accelerated Reader, then about sham marriages.

Hiking has been a part of almost every one of my weekends since arriving in New Mexico, and I would rank this particular experience somewhere in the middle. Anyway, I was in a decent mood when we got back to the car — my socks were sopping wet, but things were generally fine.

We drove a few miles down the mountain and the conversation slowly wandered into a few sketchy areas: first the Catholic Church, then Thanksgiving, then problems at work, then employer/employee relationships. It would take a while to explain this in detail, but the transitions between each of those subjects flowed fairly smoothly. They were connected in subtle ways, and I had no intention of stumbling into a discussion about labor. But I did. Not that there's anything wrong with talking about workers' rights, but this didn't seem like the time or place or friend for that. I mean, I wish it had been — I'm constantly in search of that time, place and friend — but it wasn't.

Some of the most disheartening experiences of my life have involved long, frank, arguably "serious" conversations with people who genuinely believe they're especially savvy as to how the world works. I'm talking about people who recycle the same clichés over and over without ever apparently thinking critically about what they're saying. Then they say "I'm just being realistic" and sort of believe themselves. One of the heavier burdens I carry through my human existence is a tendency not to tell these unimaginative fucks to shut up.

This post-hiking convo didn't quite enter the "I'm just being realistic" realm, but it came close. The condescending tone was present, but just below the surface. Again, the details are probably unnecessary, but I mentioned a fairly typical complaint about my boss and that led to a more general conversation about exploitation, power, etc. Well, it's worth explaining that it wasn't entirely a collaborative effort to take the conversation into that arena — my reasoning was questioned repeatedly until I was essentially forced into explaining a couple elements of context that would be important to somebody who was THAT interested in my thinking. Usually people are satisfied with letting touchy discussions die at superficial levels, especially when the parties don't really know each other too well, but this thing just kept getting deeper.

So I found myself describing what, to me, is not just a simple concept, but also one that should be very apparent to anyone, especially anyone interested in labor, employment, power dynamics, etc. Basically, I said the relationships between employees and employers are by their nature unequal. I'm speaking in the modern, conventional, American capitalist sense because I have no experience otherwise. This doesn't seem like leftist banter to me. (Again, this just wasn't the conversation for that. I'm not opposed to leftist banter.) By the nature of the arrangement, a business owner will exploit his or her employees. The unbalanced see-saw is pretty hard to miss: the owners in this structure almost always have higher wages, more ability to determine specifics of their daily activities, and the power to hire and fire. I don't know of many instances in which this isn't true.

An issue arose in the car when I mentioned that this relationship didn't seem natural to me. I said — and I believe this as much as I believe anything — that the arrangement is unfair, inappropriate and obscene, so it should be actively resisted. My reasons for coming to that conclusion aren't worth explaining here, although they're probably easy enough to guess. Essentially, I said that my boss's recent actions were effectively a "fuck you," and his message was amplified by the fact that his position as an authority figure is itself a "fuck you."

I mean, that's my opinion. It's not necessarily a definition of "how the world works" — it's just what I feel.

This is when the discussion took a sharp turn down, straight to hell as far as I'm concerned. For approximately the billionth time during my post-fetus existence, I was given this purportedly foolproof prescription: stop thinking about that stupid shit. I'm paraphrasing, obviously, and adding my own interpretation, but that was the gist of the communication. I think the quote might have been "Well that's going to be the case at any job, and you're never going to be happy anywhere if you go in with that adversarial attitude."

See what I mean? He thinks he's being savvy and, at the same time, brutally honest with someone he thinks needs a dose of brutal honesty. What a fuck.

In the past I've heard virtually the same message as "That's just how it is," "You've got to work within the system," and "You're wasting your vote." It's annoying every time, not just because the statements are condescending, based in some poorly examined version of common sense, and nearly always hinge on one or two anecdotes, but because they are self-fulfilling prophesies. If every progressive voter assumes he or she is one of only a few lunatics with the desire to vote for Ralph Nader, then of course Nader is written off from the beginning — never mind large percentages of people who say they support his policies. The collective thought process behind this situation is pretty bizarre: significant groups of people say they want something they don't want because they heard somewhere that some larger collection of people (which, of course, includes the group in question) wants something different (which clearly isn't totally the case). The same issue, which seems to come down to a basic problem of inertia, happens in the workplace when the lower ranking workers (generally the biggest group) assumes there is nothing they can do to better their collective situation. People are best controlled when they feel isolated, even when they're actually far from isolated.

The other issue I had was with the "you're never going to be happy" thing. The assumption was that in my list of priorities, somewhere near the top is "achieving happiness." Knowing almost nothing about the history of psychology and philosophy, I have no idea when happiness emerged as some all-important goal for a human being — I suspect Oprah was somehow involved. At some point the command, "enjoy," became the declaration most fundamental to discovering meaning in existence. And if it's not Oprah telling me to do it, it's me telling myself. Even though I know it's wrong, or at least relatively wrong, I can't stop myself. This is unquestionably a learned behavior. And it is somewhere at the top of my list of tendencies to eradicate within myself.

The "enjoy" directive, for me anyway, is difficult to get a handle on. At first, it seems like there would be at least a few glaring exceptions to this insistence on pure contentment: religious orders, societal demands, the law, etc. But the conversation in the car seems to exhibit why these don't usually play out as exceptions. The direction to enjoy effectively supersedes, or at least flows between the cracks, of any of these other mandates. Instead, a person is expected to reorganize their preferences, to alter their own structure of biases that lead toward satisfaction, in order to indulge a world that would purportedly leave them miserable if they didn't do so. We are told: Yes, follow the law, as much as anyone ever does anyway, and give up any values that might keep you unhappy as a reasonably law-abiding person. Those values are no good because they will cause you to feel bad.

Stop thinking about that stupid shit.

(There is alternative here that I think is also popular: you can keep the values that make you feel bad as long as you enjoy feeling justified in your combative stance. You can feel bad as long as you feel good about feeling bad. But it's unacceptable to simply feel bad. I think.)

This is, as far as I'm concerned, exactly the wrong way to act. It's depressing even to think about. I admit, it is a tempting way to make choices — even if I don't understand why — but it is the definition of the go-with-the-flow attitude that seems to be at the root of senseless clusterfuck after senseless clusterfuck every day. It is surrendering the most basic part of our humanity, the consciousness that makes us aware of whether it might be appropriate to instead go against the flow — or at an angle to the flow, or to swim faster downstream, or to sink to the bottom and see how long we can hold our breaths... Whatever it is, there is a distinct likelihood it's not best to just go with the flow.

I would argue even that it might never be right for people to find their desires in perfect harmony with the direction these external forces move. By allowing these inhuman pressures to push us a certain way (down stream), we ignore our humanity — the ability to help pull ourselves out of the mire. By going with the flow, we move in the same direction as all the shit that moves that direction because it has no thought, no consciousness: unjust and nonsensical laws, oppressive societal standards, the most obscene religious practices, etc. There may very well be many attractive parts of the river (the apparent happiness of the actor, for example, or good laws or liberating societal forces or whatever) but they are always accompanied by the shit. Almost everyone seems to acknowledge this at some level. (In a way, people who claim Buddhist enlightenment might be an exception. I think they are at peace with the shit, or something.) As people, we can at least try to differentiate between shit and what's not shit. And move away from the shit. At least.

What I mean is it seems like there is often value in whatever makes life more difficult, to the extent that it doesn't make it unlivable, I guess. (There could still be value in unlivable difficulties, I guess, but that's a different conversation.) And pushing back against an unjust design that allows a few dipshits run the show while the rest of us are robbed of basic dignity at work would be one of those valuable, but difficult, things. The mathematical likelihood of seeing some incredible transformation in this relationship for our efforts is not important. Changing my point of view to accommodate the alleged inevitability that I can't escape the paradigm is not worth it. It's not worth anything.

I realize this isn't something revolutionary. I didn't invent it, and it's a long way of way of saying something very simple. But it just seems like a lot of people totally ignore it.

Anyway, before I got to explain any of these thoughts to the dude driving the car, the conversation was derailed by our stopping at a roadside taco stand. I immediately managed to eat a chile that was so hot I could barely breathe and I spent at least a half hour trying to get the burning to stop. It was extremely painful. I wasn't really able to talk, and there was no meaningful conversation for the rest of the ride, which was probably good. Eventually he dropped me off at home, where I drank about a half gallon of milk and finished my tacos. They tasted like shit.

Suicide fight.

I didn't write this story, and it's confusing if you don't know the context, but it's a fairly tame documentation of a weird day a few weeks ago. "Shoving a reporter" refers to me.

4/24

7:30 a.m.

Fuck. Up too late drinking Hamms and compiling "White Sands Beer Cans." Tired, and barely hung over. Whatever — how much sleep do you need to hang in the desert?

8:10 a.m.

No laundry left. I should stay home...and get something done for once. Like the fucking laundry. Maybe wash a dish or something. Why am I so tired?

This beard is getting ridiculous.

It would be cool to own a dog.

Throw my bag in the car. Drive to Lou and Sarah's.

9 a.m.

On the road. Sort of. Drove for three minutes and stopped at the old Taco Bell. Ordering a Country Burrito. Just realized I haven't eaten since yesterday's lunch. No reason. "Green sauce" on an empty stomach.

10 a.m.

Stop for coffee and a bottle of water. Collin is pissing off the dog.

Back on the road.

"I walked 47 miles of barbed wire. Use a cobra snake for a neck tie. Well I got me a house on the road side, made out of rattle snake hide. I got me a chimney made on top, made out of human skull."

12 p.m.

Off the interstate, onto the highway. Everything everywhere looks abandoned. Cows all over the place. Southern New Mexico. Maaaaaannn.

Sign: "Trinity Site: The nuclear age began with the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb at the Trinity Site on July 16, 1943. The site may have been named Trinity by Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who said at the blast, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," quoting from the Bhagavad Gita."

Now I am become Death.

12:15 p.m.

Guards and cops at the Trinity Site. No entry. Something up on the hill looks like a Bucky dome.

1:30 p.m.

Please pay $2 to see the petraglyphs. No thanks. I'll just walk past your sign for free.

Some Texan woman is screaming at a bunch of first graders to shut up while she talks a bunch of bullshit about Indians. Failure.

What is a petraglyph? Am I to believe the drawing of a man with a fluffy moustache was done by Native Americans centuries ago? What about the anarchy symbol? "Petraglyphs are so postmodern." I agree, Lou.

3 p.m.

Here we are. It only took a couple Crushers, but we made it. White Sands National Monument.

Brochure: the unique component of the sand is gypsum, which is water soluble. Two hundred fifty million years ago this was all a lake. There are white lizards here.

Shit is weird. Seriously, what is this? It looks like hills of snow forever. I'm on a different planet.

3:20 p.m.

Left our shoes at the car. Filled the backpack with Bud Light and a Crusher. Off into the wild.

3:45 p.m.

Can only see sand...and mountains in the distance. The sun is a little warm. It's somehow unsettling to be this far from shade.

Oh my god. You can jump down these hills. Just run....and jump. Into the sand. This should be so uncomfortable, but it's perfect.

4:15 p.m.

Laying on a dune, finishing a Crusher. Covering my face with my shirt. Don't wanna sunburn.

The dog is eating sand. And he's drinking water from a beer can.

4:45 p.m.

Thoughtful discussion.

"Twenty-Five Pounds of Cocaine Shoved Up a Dog's Ass: How Phallic Burritos and a Startling Critique of Georgia O'Keefe Revolutionized Norteño Art."

5:30 p.m.

Jumping down the biggest hill we can find. Writing a 75-foot message (PARTY) below.

6:15 p.m.

Out of water and beer. Time to leave. Final message: ALIEN BOOM! PARTY

The dog leads the way. Only gets us half-lost once.

8 p.m.

Las Cruces is a 10-mile long Wal-Mart. Lots of stuff, but nothing.

It costs $80 to stay at the Best Western. Lou and Sarah are banned from the other hotel... What to do?

8:30 p.m.

No cover at Graham Central Station. Drinking $1.50 beers and watching bar employees sing karaoke to "Creep." Stupid.

9:15 p.m.

More beers. Signed up to sing Johnny Cash. No one is here. Where are we going to stay?

10 p.m.

Assholes at the bar crossed off the song. Oh well.

Gas station food and a long drive home. Why are we leaving?

Eating chips in the back. Lou drives. Who's got the oil can?

10:15 p.m.

Yes, officer, we're all citizens.

3 a.m.

How long have I been sleeping? Yeah, Ok, let's get the hell back home.

I need a quesadilla.

3:30 a.m.

I should have cleaned this pan before cooking this quesadilla. I should have done my laundry.

There is sand in my ears, hair, pockets, wallet and cell phone. It is time to sleep for years.

nm travels

The hippy must have been drinking all that liquor about the time I was talking with the shoplifter and the guy who looks like a game show host. By the time I wound up our conversation and drove fifteen miles down the highway to the gas station, he was staggering.

"Too many horses showed up, man. Too many horses."

Four other dudes, all locals who seemed pretty strung out, were drinking with him at the gas station's bar. One of them apparently bought "a million shots for everybody." It was five o'clock, and I missed the fucking party. Now he needed a ride.

He didn't look like a hippy at all actually, more like the image I have of a stereotypical highwayman. Like a 19th century British outlaw, what I imagine that would look like. He was probably about 60 years old, close to 6'6" and wearing a long, black coat with heavy boots. His face was sunburnt and he had a strangely creepy, permanent half-smile.

But the guy told me he was a hippy. Or maybe it was more like he was of hippies, at least once.

"I was out there for a while — out in California, man, back in the 70s. Then I drifted out here with the hippies. A bunch of us came out here to the mountains, I don't know why."

In retrospect, it seems shitty of me to grill him about his identity before letting him in the car, although he didn't seem to mind. The decent thing probably would have been to ask those questions during the strange trip down the same dirt road five times as he drunkenly gave me terrible directions to his trailer. Every couple minutes during the drive he drifted from one half-baked story to another, always forgetting to tell me when to turn. At one point I pulled over so he could get out and piss next to the post office. It was 5:30.

"I know where we're going, man. We've just got to get there."

He told me he made a hundred bucks that day cleaning horses for some rancher a few miles up the mountain. But there were only three dollars left when I found him. Not that I asked him for money, but he told me anyway, maybe thinking I would ask.

About six o'clock he flagged down a truck and asked directions to a fire station he said was near his place. I was getting hungry, and was feeling pretty sure this drunk/hippy/outlaw/asshole was making a lot of things up. He looked approximately as much like an average northern New Mexican as I did, which he noted.

"It's tough being a white guy in Canjilon, man — the Spanish never give me a break. You, where are you from? Illinois? Yeah, you look really Lincoln-esque. Seriously. You could be president, man."

Then he started in with a long description of some half-drunken accident a couple months earlier when he tried to ride his prize horse over a cattle guard in town and it fell through. The accident almost killed the horse and the hippy was stuck on the back of the thing until some dude helped pry him off. Most of his neighbors (the Spanish) had reportedly been mocking him since, which must have bothered him.

Somehow the physics of that story don't make sense to me (like how the hippy wasn't seriously injured), but the underlying narrative does: forty years after moving here, this dude was still an outsider. The locals drink with him at the gas station, even buy him enough liquor to get so drunk he forgets how to get home, but they still laugh extra hard when his dumb ass almost kills his favorite horse.

I've been in this goddamned place six months — maybe he was trying to make a point.

He told that story as I was finally driving the last hundred yards up to a muddy spot where I dropped him off. He said the trailer was a couple hundred yards away, past an area where he grew "organic vegetables." As a thank you for the ride he offered me some fresh broccoli (in March?) and a joint. I was told both "vegetables" came from the garden.

For some reason, I turned both down. So he got out and stumbled into the woods.

Not that it exactly matters, but I still have no idea if he really lived there, or whether he actually owned any horses or if he even had any weed. I don't even know if he knows, actually. He might have wandered into those woods like he and I both wandered into this state, having no real plan.

I've got to move, or get a horse.

It's been a few months.

I should probably use this thing a little more to "keep in touch," but it's been hard to figure out what to say. There's just too much, but somehow also nothing.

For the past five minutes, I've been staring at the wall and trying to decide what goes best after George Jones: Simon and Garfunkel or The Soviet Army Chorus Band. I've been thrift store shopping for records.

Also, my brain is generally scrambled. I should take out the garbage.

I'm at home. It's the same place I've lived for the past six months, since moving here. That situation came real close to falling apart during the past couple weeks, but it's been salvaged. My landlady tried this weird scam, and I called her a bloodsucking liar, and she called the cops on my friend, so I talked to the cops about her, and then I refused to pay the rent, and she eventually caved. Now we're cool, I guess.

"The silence is like thunder as the enemy prepares another round."

Thank you, George Jones.

Without getting into any serious philosophical talk, my notions of trust and honest communication (basically: what is a lie?) have mostly adapted to northern New Mexico by now. It's frustratingly difficult to verbalize, and I won't try. But it's approximately as unsettling as it sounds. On any given day, the landlady might be the third or fourth person to speak to me in a way that at one time (like, a couple months ago) I would have termed dishonest. But it's really not...somehow.

Everyone is a fucking cowboy.

There is this bizarre sensation I've been getting more and more often: everything I know — or really, my image of what I think is everything I know — is pivoting on some axis I just realized existed. That sounds like bullshit, and it is bullshit, but that's what it feels like. The word, pivot, sort of echoes in my brain every time it happens...

And it's not "culture shock." At least, I don't think so. When I think of culture shock, I think of the new reporter from Wyoming who seems weirded out when drunks at Tiny's sing karaoke in Spanish. Or this time when I stopped at a taco stand and tried to order from a guy who didn't speak English and somehow ended up eating half a pepper that burned my mouth for about two hours. Maybe I have a pretty superficial understanding of culture shock. Or something...?

The copy of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" I bought from Somebody Else's Treasure is apparently scratched to hell. I guess it's "Hymn to Lenin" then.