Propagation

Redwood shoots from sapling

Redwood cuttings

Round tip

Flat tip

Propagation seems to have gone by the wayside. You know; go to college, meet a girl, get a job, and get married and raise a family? See Dick and Jane run. Dinner is every night at six. PTA is once a month. The kid’s college fund is in US savings bonds. Only Dick Junior pissed that away on coke and his kids were taken away by CPS after that thing with the coven of vampires that was living in the same house. Jesus, they were better off when daddy was a Klingon. By the time their mom was thirty she was too bunged up to work out of the strip club. She had been telling all the johns that she was going to school to be a kindergarten teacher, but her kids never saw any of that. Mom actually tried to get them out of foster care but there was that thing with the hepatitis C, which she claims was from when she got her clitoral hood pierced but the state maintained it was from her using again. Sometime next year she is supposed to be getting out of county lockup but they think she will deliver this next kid in jail.

Yeah, romance is dead, what are you going to do? Every once in a while somebody steps up at a rock show and breaks it down, how much time per piece, how many pieces, and so on. There might be some intricate thing in quartz or ruby, or a string of a thousand pieces of something hard to get. It’s nice when someone shows up with the acumen and experience to know what they are actually looking at. This is my life. The carvings I do are my wife, my two kids, and my job at the post office or whatever cubicle they thought they had my name on. It was a conscious choice. I looked at the way the world was and about the way I thought it was going to be and how I imagined that would affect a child, how it would infect a child. You would think they would fix things; that somehow the world would be made whole and to live up to it’s promise. Instead they want to dumb you down and roll you up and name brand you and eventually turn you out into the herd of the most profitable livestock the world has ever seen, the American consumer. People are breaking down the fences to get in. Whoopee! Ain’t it great? There’s nothing like being a cog in a well oiled machine. You are welcome to your dream so long as you buy it from us.

And every time somebody thinks their dream isn’t what they thought it would be then you know what to do. Pitch a scare into them. Some shortage or threat or wrinkle in the routine that will remind them that a broken dream is better than whatever nightmare is behind door number two. Yeah, let’s make a deal! You take messed up environment and cancer and endless pharmaceutical concoctions and kids from Mars and broken homes and a life of gadget, trinket, and sensation and we will take the money, the bottom line. Just don’t look at your wife’s bottom line or any of your daughter’s IM threads or your son’s fake myspace profile. It isn’t personal, it’s business.

Only this is my life. It’s not a business. It is personal. I don’t lie down to sleep without first going over in my head what I did that day that shows how I lived, how I spent my time, and what I was about. I try not to think about how the rest of the world went about laying waste to the planet. That isn’t some Green Moonie Vegan Save Tibet and Wear A Che Guavera T-Shirt gob of yuppie pseudo liberal hyperbole. It’s simple. Look at your day and ask one question. Did you produce more than you consumed. Either way, do you think you can afford to keep doing that? What about the underclass that already can’t? Is it getting a little weird out in your neck of the woods?

In my neck of the woods I’m planting redwood trees. I’m propagating something that isn’t bulimic, pierced, dyslexic, angry, suicidal, and looking up to whatever pop culture whacko of the moment for guidance and inspiration. I’m okay with that. How could I be so obtuse and obscure to think that it makes any difference in the world, a hundred trees? A thousand? Why would you even give a shit? Talk about a drop in the bucket, a waste of time, a pointless exercise in what? Romance? Responsibility? A return to the past or some pipe dream for the future? Where is the profit in any of it? But I tell you what, you take your serotonin reuptake inhibitors and I’ll propagate and plant trees.

If you have never been out in a redwood forest then I can’t help you with that. Get in the car and go. Get some scale in your subconscious, in your soul. Get some first hand experience with the concept of vibration, with matter and time, and with just plain nature. I can’t really tell you why to plant a redwood. That is something that if it doesn’t resonate with you on some inner level, then the best I can offer is to ask, “Why?”
Maybe you can work back from there.

How you propagate a redwood is a little easier. The tree pretty much does that itself. You have to see one fallen in the woods to believe it. From there you have to get some stock. Google it, pilfer it, drive out to the coast and get it. It’s like meth, you have to have the desire. Once you have some stock; cuttings from someone’s tree, seedlings from a dealer, stuff you dug in the woods; once you have some plants growing in pots, then you can think of where you are going. First off is diversity. The tree is pretty much cloning itself. I wonder how much diversity is in a given watershed. I’m always looking for stock from different locations up and down the coast. Once you have some stock you can start propagating. The fastest way to start is from cuttings. The easiest cuttings for me have been from vibrant soft tips. There are two kinds of tips, the ends of a branch. There are what I call round tips and flat tips. The flat tips will root but won’t really send up a terminal lead. They tend to just stay bushy and sprawl. I’ve tried to let them get established to see if they wouldn’t send up a shoot, I’ve then cut them back to the ground, hoping for the same. I’m still waiting. Round tips are the way to go. I use a rooting hormone and put them in whatever media. I’ve used straight potting soil, sandy potting soil, and vermiculite. It seems to me that if they are going to go they are going to go. I like to root them in the spring so by fall they are ready to go through a Washington state winter. If a lot of cuttings take, I just plant the extras out. I keep the ones that seem the most vibrant and are putting out the best growth. By the third year or so they are about an inch and a half at the base and they will start to send up shoots from there. These are easy to root. I want to experiment with just planting them straight out. The base will start to develop a boll and if you get a piece of that at the base of your cutting then rooting goes way fast. I’ve seen places offering pieces of boll that you put in water and they send up shoots but I’ve never been able to make one from the woods work. Cuttings and shoots have been much easier. Around here the deer have ignored the redwoods but that could change at any time. They are just huge tree eating rats and I have seen them ignore stuff for long periods and then just mow it down. I’ve talked to a couple of people who say that if you lose your terminal lead that you can cut the sapling back to the ground and then take cuttings of all but your new lead…..

I don’t think there is a quick fix for the environment. You may have a Green New Deal and some people may buy that, both here and abroad. A lot more are going to go on using until there is nothing left, if only because they can and they must. They are addicted to it. I’ll continue to do what I do and to pay whatever price I have to pay in order to live the way I want to live. Thoreau was two and a half years out on Emerson’s property on the pond. I’ve been out here for thirty or so years on dozens of ponds and countless forests, streams, and shores. I’ll propagate as much of that as I can and pass it on. The rest of the world can go its own way, business as usual.

Hard Science

Whoa! Hey! Economics? Fella, these are the guys who are going to save your world. This is Master of the Universe Stuff. This is a quarter of a million dollars worth of student loans just to get in the same room with them. These are the financial wonder bras who make it all look so good, who trickle it down to you, who get on the shows and lay it all out there in pseudo superiority speak. Hell yeah, you just sit back and relax and let the big dogs do their stuff, patch the leaks, shore it up, paint it, and invent retarded analogies to describe it as anything other than what it is. It's a convoluted form of Voodoo that is twisted, manipulated, and contorted for the soul purpose of concentrating wealth in the hands of people who didn't work for it.

There's a lot of money involved. So much so that there isn't any meaningful denomination to put on it. A quadrillion dollars? What is that really, other than a lot of rolls of green toilet paper spooling out of a printing press, a bazillion, gazillion, a big ass pile, a shitload of moolah that these guys are all earnestly trying to explain like a weatherman describing what red wine tastes like. It might as well be spoken Mongolian for all the guy on the block knows. So the name of the game has always been to sell him on it. To convince him, Joe Shmuckatelli, that you know what you are doing, that you have a firm grip on the situation, that this is after all, just science.

Only the science has long gone from one of labor, capital, resources and entrepreneurship to the vested interest of the state, the system, and all the leeches they attract. Their viability and interests are paramount to everything and everyone. The people, the environment, the future in any healthy and sustainable sense, these are just anomalies, unscientific data to be massaged out of the equation. That's because for this particular crap game to work, you have to rig the dice. You don't want them falling on the mortgage crisis, the decimated resource base, the increasing numbers of people walking away from the electoral process, from organized religion, and from traditional family structures. This is supposed to be the richest country in the world, the greatest economy driving the finest democracy and instead you have a burgeoning underclass that has no hope of ever reintegrating into the American dream. Their best option is coexistence in a dual society where two sets of values, of justice, and economic principals prevail.

Hey, this is science bub! This is real ivory tower shit. The big men on campus have the facts and figures right here at their fingertips. Demand and production and reduction and market adjustments and derivative assets and it will all trickle down. You bail out the mortgage lenders or it could be a catastrophe and that would definitely hurt the homeless and the poor and the disenfranchised. Science baby!

Only in your science, in anybody's pin factory, wealth flows from labor. That labor could be in a coal mine or an auto plant or in a plastics factory in China, but somewhere, somebody has to pick up a tool. A good scientific mind will immediately try and minimize his labor costs. Automation, specialization, computerization, whatever it takes to economize, to maximize production, to achieve the best bottom line, the most viable form of production to meet demand. That is unless the demands are changing. What about demands on the environment, demands on a finite source of fossil fuels, demands of emerging nations, demands of young people in a educational system that doesn't work, that hasn't worked? Forget about any unseen demands around the corner, say, water resources, health concerns, population growth, loss of species, climate change, and whatever else comes our way. The best economists can do is cook the books, hopelessly simplify, and wail for another bailout using the rhetoric of weapons of mass financial crisis.

In the end it will come down to right livelihood. To man's ability to do something wholly uneconomic, to throw out the book, to boot the pinhead economist in the ass and stand up for a sustainable future based on anything but raping the land, exploiting the labor, and hording the capital. The beauty of a crisis is the option to choose other solutions, never before tried. The beauty of history is being able to visit the ruins of the civilizations that didn't.

Just a moment....

Satori is dead. Enlightenment comes from the glow of a 42 inch HDTV. Zazen is sat on a couch. If you are to ponder and weigh the entirety of life, if you are to see into your nature, then why not simplify? Your special transmission comes from a satellite disc. No need for knowledge of words or letters. All you have to do is point directly at whatever it is your nature wants.

Let’s wallow in a kshantic acceptance of life, its irrationalities and momentary glimpses of impersonal, intuitive insights that might waft about like psychic fart. Because c’mon, what’s the point of all this gibberish? Life is pain? They’ve got pills for that. Do I really want to see into one’s nature? Talk about pain. Hsing me a song just like the other one and waltz me around by my willy. What is the use of toiling and moiling so? Why beat your ego shell on the wall? Why twist your own nose?

Hey, why not get with the program. No mind is where it’s at, sunyata for the masses. No pain, no nature, no mind, no problems. Need a momentary sense of exaltation? Have a Prozac and wash it down with Red Bull. Turn on, tune in, and cartoon out. What else is there to do? Your wants and desires are provided for almost instantaneously. Nature is a channel on the TV anyone can look into anytime. Enlightenment is likely overrated. Once you have peaked, once you have broken the game wide open and achieved the dreams meted out, where do you go from there?

I wonder about the dumbing down of existence, of experience, of nature. Most cruel is the dumbing down of change. Hope for a new world order. Rescue from any chaffing irritation of the moment. The people have spoken, the system has rules, good over evil, rah rah rah….Only when was the last time you saw a revolution where any of the promises were carried out? How soon before the nature of the thing outweighs any promise or intention?

God is just some dude sitting there in his white beard and robes and someday he is going to get his shit in order. Individual peckerwood existence is just a well oiled hamster wheel. Good and evil, cats and dogs, all the dualistic stereotypes are so banal and washed out that they don’t mean a thing. Occasionally there is some horrific natural cataclysm that only serves to punctuate the insular quality of the mass’s opiate addled, everyday stumblebum dream. Welcome to the warm doughy amniotic embrace of the American experience. Why think or thrash or give a shit? Why make it any more complicated than it already is? Why look into the nature of things, into yourself, or any of the connections that still may exist? Go with the flow. Who is it that carries for you this lifeless corpse of yours?

ceaselessly against the tide

For a long time I would take the time to go watch the salmon. At first I would just go to the observation window at the locks because I just didn't know where else to go. Later I would watch them come back to a small stream they left from. They would arrive and and circle in front of the mouth of the stream. Round and round for days. Once I put on a snorkel and went out to try and swim with them but all I could do was wait for them to come around and file past. They seemed unconcerned to see me, intent as they were on whatever the forces that moved them.

Sometimes it rained, but more often not. As the days passed the salmon would circle closer and closer to the mouth of the stream. A big gravid female would lead them. She would bring them in close and I would think , well this is it, but she would veer away almost as if undecided at the last instant. Around and around they would come. By now people are coming to fish, throwing treble hooks over the school and reefing it back to snag one. I fished for awhile but in the end I just felt foolish and wrong. The fish never wavered, they would plow by driven by a force I could only accept. The lead female would come around to the mouth of the stream with her head up, almost out of the water. Her mouth would be open as she gulped in the fresh water, buoyant on top of the salt. Her head would sweep back and forth searching for whatever was the key to the next step. And one day all of it made sense and she would charge upstream. Their tails just pounding the water with a force that always surprised me. I wondered if it wasn't a signal to the rest of the fish or if their sedate pace in the Sound wasn't just conserving energy for this push. Over the next couple of weeks they would keep coming until this portion of their cycle was complete.

In late October I make the time to go to Tumwater Canyon on the other side of the mountains. The salmon there have arrived by a more arduous route. They have negotiated the Columbia and the Wenatchee and pushed up the east side of the Cascades. By October there isn't much left. The cycle is complete. The last of the males are still heading upstream. I don't think they eat. They are just living on what's left of their own tissue, though still driven by the force that brought them back here. It's cold and wet and the traffic on the road roars by without a second glance. The males with their rotting flesh and hooked jaws push upstream, only to slowly drift back. I used to think that I'd see one give up, but they never do. Maybe only in the night or when the light first hits the water. You can see they are exhausted, finished, and not about to quit. I take something away from that too.

How do you mess up something like a salmon run? It takes some effort. Look at how the Native Culture of the Northwest lived. Their year was spent doing artwork while waiting for the fish to come back. The connection between the fish and the culture was never out of their minds. Nature was linked with survival. I wonder if modern civilized man just destroyed nature so not to have to think of that. This endless stacking up of goods and money might just be some primitive hording instinct. How much fear is really out there?

I'm thinking about this as I head out the door. I'm going to drive around. Screw the price of gas, or what projects I have going on, or the deadlines I think I have to meet. I want to head up some creek, circle around the mountains. I want to see something differently. Experience a moment. I'll do what I do and it will motivate me somehow. On my return I will channel that energy into shaping something that has meaning to me and maybe someone else looking at it. I'm not going to some numbing slave job that serves every interest but mine. I'll pay for that I guess. My life has become economically superficial, a cultural afterthought, like the salmon.

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.