Trees Of Our Fathers

It's not often I get to do anything really foolish. My time is pretty much taken up with tools and books and cameras and making the ideas and images my brain churns out, into reality. Sure, I tend to travel too much. For no particular reason I'll drive to Maine or fly to Laos or piddle down the coast to the northern California redwoods. But that's still experiential and more often than not, adds to the quality of my life.

Let's not get into what really is a qualitative life. You really want to stick to the numbers anyways. Play it safe and stay between the lines. There is a system, and the system has rules. You need to learn to play by the rules. You need to learn how to get along in the system, to learn how to get ahead. Always get ahead or you are dead. I guess that pretty much sums it up?

What you don't want is any time on your hands. You don't want a chance to think and reflect. Keep your nose to the grindstone. No looking around. The military has known this for a long time. They keep you busy. They keep you looking straight ahead. The last thing you want is for your brain to click on, for it to start churning out comparisons, ideas, or just random data. Forget the birds of the field, that neither sow nor reap. That's uneconomical, maybe even bohemian. Stick to the schedule- up, coffee, work, lunch, work, home, eat, TV, and sleep. Forty years of that and you can retire and do what you want. Don't worry if you can't remember what that is, there's a system and it has rules and it will tell you what you want.

Only right now I want to plant a redwood grove for my dad. He caught a bad case of multiple myloma about three years ago. All you can do is pour on the morphine and pray that your own father dies. The week before he did, dad changed his mind about the whole Catholic way to go and opted to be cremated and his ashes dumped in the lake where he went to Y-camp as a boy.

So now I'm planting a memorial grove. For the last couple of years I have been propagating redwoods for just such an occasion. It's a big project, but so far I have been able to justify the time and physical effort. It's going to take a lot more. I'm okay with that. I just wonder how to write about it. How, is just some long winded essay on dig hole, put in tree. Why, might be a little tougher. Like the project itself I'll chip away at it whenever I have the odd free moment. Before long I might even make some sense. By fall I hope to have made some progress. My dad's not going anywhere. I get to do something off the reservation, against the odds, completely quixotic, wholly uneconomical, a freeform state of whimsy that could only happen because a man sacrificed his life to allow me that opportunity. So yeah, I have a couple of months to spend, and a mountain of dirt and rocks to move and a space to create. Hop in, let's go for a ride.

Holding The Pose

Image is everything. It's shorthand for your brain. In brains raised on television, shorthand is all they know. Perception, introspection, intuition, and even memory have gone by the wayside in favor of an endless supply of image. Fast food for your eyes. They come refined like fast food, retinal sugar and grease.

And you are what you eat. What do you do? Well I maintain my image. It's everything. It's what's for dinner. Got image? And with image then why do you need imagination? Why let the mystery of your brain formulating idea and form impinge on your daily life? There are huge media conglomerates out there who will do all of that for you. They will provide all of it prepackaged in handy to use choices and styles. Be the first on your block to try the latest one, the sporty one, the classic, the rugged individual. What's your pleasure? Want to do something really far out? Come up with a new image and we'll package that and put it out there and supersize it. Hip Hop anyone?

It's all good, you pay your quarter and it's part of the video. The cracks are only getting wider. I steer my life through them and as long as I'm left alone then why do I care? Other peoples choices are theirs to make. I don't need or let them make any for me. The only rub is when I brush up against an image or two. Sorry I smeared your paint, I tramped mud on your rug, I pissed in your soap bubble. Or not. The deal is that your movie ain't my reality. It's a movie at best. A stream of carefully collated looks that may or may not have been worked on and agonized over. Is this look right for me? I so want this look.

Having achieved a precious look I suppose it's only natural to make it sacrosanct. To align it with as many other sacred looks and causes as possible so as to engrave it on the moment. The portrait of a young artist as a vegan, meterosexual, environmentalist, free Tibetan, pilates twice a week, open minded, fair trader who someday wants to build a straw bale house and grow all his own food.

Go to a war protest and it's not about the war, it's how they look as war protesters. Boycott China? Sure throw that on my tab too. Earth First tree sitters forever! I'm totally down with the image of your cause.

Do you want me to take your image seriously? Carve it in stone. Short of that, base it in experience, in talent, and in commitment. Get real. I don't have time for your fake Internet profile, for what you are someday going to do, for what you feel the planet needs to survive. You've got smaller problems. Weaning yourself off the media tit would be a good start. Break that addiction and get clean and lets focus on our experience of our life instead of images of a pseudo nature doled out to us at our own expense.

Jerkoff Nation

With young boys, it's probably the first insult they use. You're a real jerkoff! Even before they know anything of the actual physical pursuit, the derogatory connotation is hardwired into the archetypal psyche. The only other epithet that might be embedded as deep would have to do with obesity. Woe to the fat jerkoff.

In my early teens I was quite pleased to realize that not all onanistic connotations were negative. What a handy way to deal with the pressures of puberty. The golden years before the advent of actual women and the experience of actual sex. After sex, masturbation was relegated to rubbing one out when and if the occasion arose. What the hell, it's yours, wash it as fast as you want.

These days, having turned fifty, I have to say I've reached the point of diminishing returns. I just don't have the time it takes or the ability to convince myself that it's on par with even bad sex. The whole key is to don't look down. It's my fault for having depleted my store of fantasy, having converted it into actual experience. I just can't be jerking off all the time. Get up and do some yoga. My addiction to isolation is better served out at the beach or at treeline on a mountain of my choice.

And of course somewhere down in the dank basement of my subconscious is that evil little monkey who posits that maybe I should get off my blog and get out there on the computer and rustle up some freaky new fantasies. The pop ups go on forever. There are obviously some serious lower chakric disorders roaming the Internet halls. I honestly wish there was something that caught my attention, that drew me in and occupied my mind to the point where I could forget that I have a couple of hundred files in photoshop that I have to get to tonight, that I have a shitload of things I have to get done before I go to Mount Rainier for four days this week, and that my obsession with actually living my own life has outran my desire to pretend to relive the same experience over again for the umpteenth time.

On the Internet it seems that jerking off is big business. They have taken a deep human need and conditioned it into a social habit, perhaps even an institution, and definitely a commodity. It's all part of the human zoo. The environment is supposed to shape behavior, but what is the link? Degrade yourself and your experience and environmental degradation is inevitable. Each new depth requires a new sensation, a new titillation, a further sense of hypocrisy that allows you to reshape your reality and to hone your isolation. To me it all looks the same, formulaic and soulless and generally lacking in imagination of any kind. What impresses me is that jerkoffs are willing to pay for that. Worse than that are the ones who are naive enough to think they are getting something for free. While they are flogging their dummy the world is going by. Maybe that's the point, that it's better to grab on to what you know than to try for something real and miss. Miss enough times and you're happy to sit there in fool and be fool.

The world is okay with that. It's designed to pick up the slack and profit from it. People used to go to the movies to escape. Real wealth is being able to turn your life into a movie. One that always has a happy ending. If you can delude yourself that you are doing Sharon Stone doggy style, then it's not a far leap to Shock and Awe and Mission Accomplished. You can pretend that the oil companies aren't bending you over the proverbial barrel. You can pretend that all is well in the world and your life really does matter, that it amounts to something, that you are leaving your mark. Sadly it's on the rug next to your computer.