IN MEDIUS RES....

 

Juan got a traffic ticket for $250 because he didn’t wait for five seconds at a stoplight before moving on.  The judge said he could pay $100 and then $50 a month. 

 

“It’s a good deal.” Juan says and I say

 

“Yeah, except you don’t deserve it.”  (and except he didn’t ask for community service which he could have worked  off with me but now that he started paying, it’s too late.)

 

He grinned.  And  I loaned him the money for the down payment, and I never worry about him working off a loan, but it still feels sore because, like Juan, I’m under the gun from two city inspections, (equally petty and stupid  according to me) and from a potential lawsuit from another laborer, and the threat of extinction from ...well it just goes on and on, no good deed goes unpunished....like that. 

Later Juan comes over to the desk I set up in the outdoor kitchen/command headquarters and says he needs to leave early to take  his daughter to the hospital because she has a....he stumbles over a word...

 

“Goiter?” I guess, and he says yes.  And I think about the way he has to work day labor to support his family and how his kids are always sickly, probably because he can’t afford better food, and how the city just contributes to that social damage by trying to balance its budget on the backs of the poor, but it’s too late to say anything on any account. 

 

I come home late that night, tired from job after job just beating my head on the wall, methodically and congratulating myself on completing each baby step, but still wearied from the constant beatings from deadbeats and mechanic work that won’t get done because of the inherent perversity of inanimate objects....”Demons” I call it for short.  I notice Juan has left the radio on to the Mexican station he always listens to but ignore it, start to write and can’t, swing the hammock out from one pole of the shade construction to another and lie there watching the flicker of my home made tiki torches loaded with citronella oil for the mosquitoes, fall asleep and wake up at three a.m., go over to the radio that has finally toned down the commercial shouting and mechanized commercial music to some acoustic original corrido.  At last, at least, the crying is real but I can’t sleep with it going on and on, even faintly, in the background.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All my Colorado Salt Bushes are gone, they grew up in the most adverse of possessions, out of dirt that is 90% clay and silt left here by a tributary of the Santa Cruz when it used to run year round before agriculture and the city sucked all the water out of the aquifer.  And now all those nutrients sucked out of hard, unforgiving ground and not chipped and shredded and put back as compost, have to be taken to the dump to become part of useless pollution and poison instead, because the city thinking it knows what absolute beauty is and is not, demanded immediate removal so a 6 ft.fence could be built to hide what was already hidden.

go figure

in a little island off the coast of South America a little oil company named EXXON MOBILE starts drilling a little ol oil well.  You can see sludge and chemicals and oil from the drilling rig running down the once clear streams.  The natives suddenly start getting cancer and other diseases, their babies are born with birth defects, their livestock and crops are dying.  They sue in court.  The court says they can't prove cause and effect and anyway the court says it has no jurisdiction and they have no standing. 

 

in a little country called Kuwait black smoke and particulates are raining down because a little dictator named Saddam Hussein in a fit of pique set fire to the oil wells.  Livestock, children, old people are getting sick and dying, it's hard for anybody to breathe.  A petty bureaucrat comes out to address a little crowd gathered before a government office.  He says, "Go home.  The air is clean, the water is pure and good to drink.  Go home to your farms and homes."  It's the rule of law he says, you can't consider health effects of government action.

 

in cities and towns (see the documentary, "GASLAND") across the U.S. oil companies move in and start fracking, using explosives 12000 feet underground to crack the shale layer and capture natural gas trapped beneath it.  People and their pets and livestock start getting sick and dying and they notice they can light a match under their water faucet while it's open and the water burns.  The court will not hear their grievances.  A special congressional committee will not allow an expert who has studied this practice for years to speak before it.

 

in neighborhoods across the U.S. communications companies such as AT&T put in cell towers.  The neighborhood associations and citizens groups protest.  They can be "heard" (in a way) but a large body of scientific evidence as to the health effects of electromagnetic  radiation from cell towers cannot be considered.  Why not?  It's the rule of law, never mind how it's been influenced by the rule of money. Health insurance rates go up, property values go down.  Even if people's fears are imaginary their stress is a health effect.  The rule of law says this can't be discussed.  

 

in a little jerkwater burg out west a big university with a big football program (almost rivaling that of Penn State with 20 towns clustered around it all beholding to IT'S football program) starts making deals with the millionaires' club and the City and out of state contractors to put up high rise dorms and parking garages and other monstrous buildings, using a little known code mechanism (subterfuge) called "OVERLAY" to subvert building and zoning codes.  A few people, and an ex council person ask , "Whose Vision IS This Anyway?" (see OCCUPY newsletter).  But it's progress, you can either help or watch or get out of the way, the gentrification steamroller (just like the Israeli bulldozers smashing down Palestinian villages) moves on regardless. Go ahead protest, write a letter to the editor, you've just been taken to a media concentration camp under extreme rendition, nobody can hear you scream....

 

in a little neighborhood near the Santa Cruz a large Southern Baptist University proposes to build a campus on 109 acres that used to be accessible as a park and golf course to a neighborhood.  The City Council, the movers and shakers and various self appointed economic experts, all say this is a wonderful deal.  Property values will go up, there will be jobs, there will be economic growth and downtown revitalization.  A few neighbors protest that what's left of a riparian corridor to the desert beyond will be lost, coyotes will no longer sing there at night, wildfowl will no longer drop in for the night on their way south or north, the ambient temperature of the neighborhood will rise by 5 to 10 degrees.  They propose instead, a wildlife sanctuary, golf course and recreation area combined....their voices are lost in the flurry of letter writers and budget wonks talking about jobs and growth for growth's sake.

 

Hey boys and girls can you see any similarity in the above instances?  I knew you could!  That's right, individuals, some of them your friends and neighbors, are being objectified, quantified, their health and the health of the natural community are being ignored, their constitutional and judicial rights are being subverted or violated, and the health of their habitat, the natural community is swirling in the toilet bowl, ready to go down the tube, because a little known economic concept called "intergenerational well being" (meaning the value of nature to future generations) is being unconsidered even as it's being developed by respectable economists.  

 

Another common thread, as George Orwell and others have noted, one of the main jobs of government is to LIE, and petty bureaucracies (sometimes with the aid of new mechanisms like photo radar and cell phone surveillance, sometimes just with old fashioned building codes and older fashioned pride and arrogance)  consider themselves above the constitution.  These forces combine to create a situation where people are being used as monopoly chips and pawns in a highly abstract game of growth for growth's sake, never mind that's the philosophy of the cancer cell, we're talking the future of a town here. If you build it they will come, but, but, but.... 

 

But who's going to come when the urban heat island effect is exacerbating the natural rise of global warming induced temperatures to over 120 degrees?

 

And hey experts, officials, developers, budget wonkin fellas and gals, don't mean to rain on your parade or nothing, but by the way WE LIVE HERE! 

 

 

 

 

THERE SHOULD BE ZEROES

THERE SHOULD BE ZEROES

 

We were working on the little reach-in sandwich prep.  I’d called him when he was halfway home and asked if he could come help me because I was too tired (depressed) to work alone.  I was grumping at him now & then, as usual, when he got kind of bull headed about putting things together too fast & furious, like he’d done for years, but we got along.  Then all of a sudden he said,

 

I feel dizzy. 

 

But he wasn’t articulating enough that I could understand him.

 

You’re busy?  You don’t want to work with me anymore?

 

No I feel dizzy.  I need your help.

 

He looked at me like a child, thinking a grownup could move mountains and reverse the course of rivers.

 

How can I help you?

 

I need to sit down.  Can you take me over to the tables. 

 

He put his hand in my arm and I led him over to the upholstered benches he’d made himself in this restaurant he’d built himself.  He took his bridge out and laid down in the booth.  A little later he rose up enough to look at me and say,

 

Today was a very ugly day. 

 

Why?

 

I don’t know.  I couldn’t do anything right. 

 

I knew he had a tumor, just above the ear where he puts his cell phone.  I’d heard of other cases.  But they’re just anecdotes.  Let’s wait until a few thousand people die and before we do something. I said,

 

I think we’re wasting precious minutes.  You need to go to the emergency room.  I’m calling an ambulance.

 

No, that will cost too much money. 

 

I’ll drive you there in your car then.  What hospital do you want to go to?

 

I don’t know the name....the one my doctor works out of....

 

Where is it?  What are the cross streets?

 

Grand....(again he couldn’t articulate, he was trying to say Grant)

 

I don’t know any such street...here let me draw you a map....

 

It’s on Stone. 

 

Stone and what? 

 

His hand moved over the lines I drew on a card....he couldn’t recognize anything about the city he’d been in for thirty years. 

 

OK I’m taking you to the ER at UMC.  If you remember where your hospital is we’ll go there if you don’t we’re going to University Medical Center.  Come on, let’s go.

 

He looked even more like a scared, confused child.  He went into the back where we’d been working, just to get some little thing or go to the restroom, I thought, but he was taking too long so I went back to check on him and he was putting stuff away and pushing the reach-in back into its hole in the wall as if he was perfectly healthy.

 

Come on let’s go, I can do that later. 

 

And after this display of sudden strength I had to help him into his car. 

 

Do you know how to drive this car?

 

Of course. 

 

Turns out I didn’t know where the emergency flashers were & instead pushed the button to open the trunk while I was trying to look back through the rear view mirror.  I kept thinking, 

 

This is too mundane, this isn’t real.  There should be Zeroes on my tail, there should be MIGs, I should be going low, to get under them, doing barrel rolls and end to end flips and hitting them with fifty caliber machine gun rounds, ka chaka chaka chaka chaka BOOM! I should be radioing in my kills, and dive bombing down into the smokestack of a carrier and watching the engine room explode.....I should ask for a police escort to the hospital and at least make a little noise,  but they won’t get here until it’s too late and all that racing and jarring would just make his condition worse probably....

 

But there should be Zeroes......well maybe they’re here. 

 

I was sorry I’d been so grumpy with him all these years.  Telling him,

 

Fuck that other restaurant (abandoned up in the foothills), fuck your big ass ideas about turning the restaurant into condos and destroying the land, come on, let’s turn the café’ you’ve still got into a sculpture garden with big old trees over live ponds and sculptures and kinetic sculptures people can sit and  eat in....we’ll get a grant, come on, you think I want to do this boring grinding crap the rest of my life, give me a little hope, I can’t work without hope....

 

And he’d laugh like I was crazy and amusing, but lately he was actually coming around, agreed to draw some blue prints for the project....he could do that, better than a lot of architects and then this had to happen....now there’s nobody even there to grump at.  John Muir said, “In wilderness is the salvation of the world”. We don’t get to wilderness by building condos in it, we get there by recognizing the need for a respectful distance between it and our miserable species....which I’ve been watching for years and still can’t crack the code. . 

 

He vomited on the way in to the hospital, and the rasta guy in the weird haircut with shaved temples and a pony tail shoved a tray in his lap.  I noticed they had a dozen trays just like it stacked up behind the desk.  We got to an examination room and his wife suddenly appeared behind me, finally, someone who knew how to handle this guy.  But did she?  He’d used all their money on schizophrenic dreams and schemes.  One day he’d be telling me he’d traveled all over the world, knew seven languages, had grown his huge garden, played his music,  seen his children grow up, didn’t need anything else, wanted to give something back, and the next day he was going to make millions building condos.  Meanwhile I was feeling Schizophrenic too.  I needed his constant optimism but it drove me crazy because it seemed to be about nothing. 

 

Big shots,

 

I said, driving his used up old Mercury out of the parking lot, and wanting to ram every car in it,

 

Big shots, they can all just go fuck themselves.

 

And out on the road I was especially attracted to cop cars, anything with those beautiful red and blue and white flashing lights, sudden strange vectors of vehicles crashing into each other, sweet oblivions that you could crawl into out of the same old same old daily grind that was killing you worse than any sudden death ever could. 

 

Brains,

 

I said,

 

Brains, I was thinking, back at the restaurant, cleaning up the mess, putting the tools away.  And then I just sat in one of the empty booths, looking at the picture on the wall of a sweet little kid holding a dog.  The kind of thing he’d chosen to fit the theme of Old Times Restaurant.  It made me sick.  How was that part of this reality? It just was.  Part of that tumor with cells going nuts, making blood supply lines, sloppily, randomly, like a developer on steroids.  Maybe those vessels burst, maybe it was just the tumor pressing on the arteries or the brains themselves.  Brains, I thought,  because just that morning I’d been listening to a naturalist on NPR talking about the wonder of insect brains, so, what about human brains....

 

HUMAN brains?  Hey, wait! Is this some kind of joke? 

Note on a grant app to WWOOFUSA

Casa Goofy International is about community. 

 

It’s about art and humor as bridges between ego and reality.

 

And about art and humor as bridges and interfaces between human communities, and between the human and the natural community.  Bridges and interfaces that we need because?

 

Because the natural community is the enduring community and we’re just transients, just passing through, packing up and moving on (at least since we got here).  

 

Because OUTWARD is the primary principle of the universe and the intelligence of nature (at least since the Big Bang & possibly even earlier).

 

And when we invest in that enduring community we can endure all the losses of ego that flesh is heir to, because all flesh is grass and all grass is dirt. And therefore art is dirt.

 

And so the emphasis on Art-In-Nature.   

 

And so the emphasis on crossing borders to build the real community, the invisible community of those who care about the earth but who may never see each other

 

It’s about creating interfaces between the human and the natural communities through art, art-in-nature and intensive gardening methods, interfaces, (art and culture and gardening methods) which can give people in cramped apartments in cities, and even the homeless, the same sense of entitlement to the community of nature as those who have inherited farms and ranches. 

 

And so we’re about creating a third world gallery circuit with an emphasis on art-in-nature____________because there is a need there for recognition that art becomes most real when it pauses and then begins again like a child, improvising, working beyond the illusions and stresses of recognition, the structures and anxieties of traditional esthetics and their abstract commodity and speculative and investment based systems of value that flock around people and things that are “special” like teenagers on Facebook. 

 

Au contraire we’re about community  and investing in community that recognizes no such mandate in anybody to be judge and jury over the ultimate value of any being, any work.  We’re about seeking and building community that cares about essences instead of appearances. 

 

Therefore we’re about reinventing the old International Arts Center that used to be here in the old Y before the gentrification steamroller smashed it down under the inevitable injustice of money (because money is an abstraction).  We’re about reinventing it as an investment in community and common ground instead of big buildings with money targets on their butts.

 

How would that work?  It would work like student exchange, and Couchsurfing and WWOOF USA only it would be an international exchange of art and artists who are like those hardy souls above, born to look and move OUTWARD because they were born knowing that we are community before we are individuals, that we are the earth beneath our feet so we can never be lost, and the common man, the common person is common to us. 

 

I enjoy having a house I built beside the road, I enjoy hosting and being a friend to these transient people and I enjoy being part of a larger conversation than what occurs in board rooms and university seminars, a conversation made of dirt and rocks and plants and written on the living air between us.  I have been overwhelmed by the largesse of those who have nothing, and underwhelmed by the betrayals of big shots who have enough to worry themselves to death with the fear of losing it.

 

Physicists are now telling us reality is just information, and law books are telling us truth is just an arbitration.  Dude like whatever floats your ego, I’m just glad to be a nobody in nowhere representing the little guy, not with much hope that any of us can survive the feedback loops of global warming, but with a grain of faith the size of a mustard seed that shitty as life with others gets sometimes, this much is given to us, that we can hold dirt and water and seeds in our hands and look up at the stars.

 

And once we get to a place that’s not a place but a process, a process that’s real made of things and dirt and rocks and plants, we have nothing to fear except those constructs of mind divorced from nature, those things that aren’t things at all, those things that like money and drones can kill without conscience or feelings, those things which we call abstractions because they are abstracted, i.e. taken from something more basic and real.  But all  language is an abstraction, every word is a leap of faith, so?

 

So ya gotta have a sense of humor.  And therefore:  Casa GOOFY International. 

 

But what are we about in more concrete terms?  We’re a program under the non-profit, Artfare with six ponds and six greenhouses almost at the point of being an off grid aquaculture system, a sculpture garden, 17 units of housing about 25 percent converted to artists’ live/work spaces with workshop/studio/greenhouses attached. Two units of free bunkhouse housing for volunteers onsite, two units of offsite bunkhouse housing for volunteers (and maybe, just maybe an atrium gallery as one station in a Third World Gallery Circuit)  at the Artfare Hotel in the hotly contested and not quite totally broken heart of downtown Tucson.  (But keep trying Centurions, et. al., once you get the riff raff and the city bus center and a certain historic hotel block out of the way, downtown will be totally revitalized and sterilized.)  And we’re supporters of Los Amigos Childcare.

 

We bring the music and art and gardening (natural science) hour to children of low income families Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3 p.m. (or times like this when the funding is low, WHEN WE CAN) right after their naps, so they’re not totally cranky and impossible to control.  We’re pursuing solar water heating, solar electric generation, waste veggie oil processing, biodigestion for methane and fertilizer, parking shades with unisolar roll out photovoltaic film, and all other mechanical sustainable permaculture contrivances that might help our cause without costing too much money during the start up chaos with the inevitable 98 percent failure rate for most inventions.

 

And what in particular will we do with two thousand dollars if and when we get it?  The West side of the pond/greenhouse complex is finally ready to rumble with solar charged Caterpillar batteries running pumps that circulate water between all the ponds and from the lowest to the highest pond.  The water then flows down through siphons back to the middle and then the lowest pond.  That’s the basic pond system.  Here’s how we add the greenhouse system to the pond system:

 

A pair of larger solar powered pumps pump a greater volume of water to the top pond where it comes down through a larger siphon into a hydraulic ram pump made from common plumbing parts which uses only the energy of a large volume of falling water to pump a small volume of water, 30 feet, three times as high as the fall, to the top of the highest greenhouse where it will trickle down through troughs made from salvage sheet metal duct and eventually arrive back at the lower pond.   

 

In these troughs are “grow boxes” made from junk food coolers with slots in them so plants can grow out the sides as well as the tops.  The food coolers have wicks in them which wick up the pond water into the soil so the plants can use just as much as they need with minimal loss to evaporation and so that no soil goes back into the ponds.

 

Meanwhile heavy duty steel shelving frames over the top ponds repeat this kind of cycle for outdoor planting and some of the lower shelves in these frames have vermiculture tubs in them where kitchen scraps are used to feed worms for the fertilizer. 

 

In the back of the greenhouses where there’s less sunlight are mushroom beds and storage of gardening supplies.    

 

Two thousand dollars would buy us enough supplies, expertise and skilled labor to repeat the hydraulic ram pump application on the East side of the pond/greenhouse system.

 

This completed system with the addition of living fences made from recycled pallets, intensive raised bed gardens,  a stock of fingerling Bass, Tilapia, and Catfish, a stock of small livestock and birds will turn us from an experiment into a working farm and art-in-nature laboratory for international exchange artists to use and for children from Los Amigos Childcare and children of all ages to tour under shade cloth and tree shade to protect them from the merciless Southern Arizona Sun that’s soon to get more merciless under the stresses of global warming. 

 

But more importantly are we having fun yet?  Are we there yet?  How will we know when we get there? 

 

We’ll know when we complete the giant turtle out of shade cloth stretched between poles which can be seen from GOOGLE EARTH, just to tell those illegal aliens from outer space to come on down, but just be aware that we don’t care....

 

....WHAT some silly bunch of intergalactic bureaucrats think our purpose here on earth is, we’re all about the native Americans’ concept of America as “TURTLE ISLAND”.   Aliens, (illegal schmegal) global warming?  (Charming.)  Can’t scare us.  You guys are visitors here. You can’t actually arrive until you know you’re nothing.

what's an assault? & what weapons should be used?

Attention K-Mart Shoppers

 

There has been an incident in the ladies’ lingerie section

 

a broken person with no other hope for meaning in his life

 

than death and a headline

 

Has shot and killed five hostages, wounded eleven other people, and then

 

Killed himself

 

The police and paramedics are here and the incident, ,

 

Is under control.,

 

The mall is safe for you to continue shopping

 

For items of denial

 

Attention grade school students, someone jealous

 

Of the attention you are getting because of your potential

 

Has stolen his parents’ guns

 

And entered the building in order to kill

 

As many of you as possible

 

Because he is angry because

 

Parts of his brain dealing with sympathy

 

For others, no different than ours only

 

More so, are missing,

 

don’t worry, the President will make a speech

 

And we’ll enact new gun laws

 

In your honor

 

Good Evening, this just in,

 

A disappointed actor has broken in

 

To a studio shooting a soap opera and shot

 

Everyone in a scene full of self conscious anxiety

 

And a man in fatigues has cried “I’M NOBODY!”

 

And opened fire in a crowded theater.

 

And a dictator representing all our anxiety and will

 

To power and simultaneously our failure

 

To grasp our decaying relationship

 

With the natural community, a drug lord,

 

A poor little bitty person who needs to be a big shot

 

In the name of the people, has just seized all

 

Government power in Columbia

 

And legalized and nationalized all drugs

 

Please try to contain your enthusiasm.

 

Attention Wal Mart Shoppers

 

Listen to the words of the former President

 

Be afraid, be very afraid,

 

Go shopping

 

Buy some stuff, buy a gun in our sports

 

Department or else the terrorists will

 

Win. In the words of a very former President,

 

“Let us begin again.” . let us also remember

 

the political posturing can never end. 

 

With all due respect (and then some)

 

 Mr. President, Mr. Vice President,

 

Speaker of the House, since both sides of this debate

 

Are wearing invisible Nascar patches on their

 

Adult drag suits, let’s not get too sanctimonious

 

About this,  yes we have to do

 

the assault weapons ban but how about a ban

 

on 3-D printed guns, how about a ban

 

on nations using drones against innocents or

t

their own citizens? Or have you ever noticed

 

How fast someone with no training and just a little

 

practice can reload?  Or that there are hunting rifles

 

that can hit a nine inch target at 1000 yards?  So which

 

is more terrifying, being killed from a distance

 

with one bullet or up close with fifteen?  It took one bullet

 

to kill Lincoln, approximately three

 

to kill JFK, one to kill Martin Luther King...

 

Mr. President, members of Congress and

 

K Mart and Wal Mart shoppers for more symptomatic

 

Relief try some Asprin or Advil but I submit the issue

 

We need to address

 

Is not

 

The number of rounds in a magazine,

 

It is the number of sensationalist, frivolous articles

 

In the nation’s magazines, it is the disappearance of self

 

That comes from the disappearance of

 

The community of nature, it is the number

 

Of  holes in the national soul. 

KJKJK

HJHJH