Shawna and Chris stopped in this Saturday afternoon to visit, hike, and drop off a Christmas care package from my helpdesk cohorts. (Thank you all!) We hiked Q mountain, visited stone house, and hiked up to the blue green rock dry waterfall. Chris and Shawna both collected rocks. We returned to Casa Blanca and then loaded up and drove over to the petroglyph site. Here they are on the edge of the five deep grind holes, overlooking the wash. There has been more destruction of petroglyphs and one of the shallow blue green grind basins on the opposite side of the wash has been damaged by someone with a large hammer of some sort. Also someone has dug a hole in the top of the petroglyph bluff. Last but not least, there are more bullet holes in the petroglyphs. We returned, chatted, Phil Churchill showed up and joined us. As the sun set, Chris and Shawna aimed north towards that giant rain cloud called Oregon and work, and headed off.

Thursday, December 27, 2007 7:34 AM

A bit hard to see, but I broke down and paid the $38.50 for the green plastic floor cover. Jeez.
	So here's the complete sequence, ending with the vendor high wind secret. See the black straps? They are not attached to the structure, they cross over and hold the whole La Casa Blanca to the ground. As was explained to me, the finished stucture, once the sides and top are on it is actually a pretty good box kite. The various tie downs stop it from flying only if the joints of all the pipes stay tight (thumb screws). The two truck straps simply hold the kite down independent of the the joints of the pipes.

This little tent and pole structure allows me to get many items out of the trailer and truck and to have a place to work on projects. Last year Phil picked me up a long table (currently in the truck) at Walmart in Yuma, and that will be going in after Shawna and Chris visit tomorrow night. I found one grommet that has pulled out of the tarps, so repairs will be needed today. This is the third year that the tarps have been up, and for plastic reinforced cheap tarps, they have held up surprisingly well.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007 4:12 PM

I got the frame up today despite the heavy wind. I can't put the sides and top on until the wind dies down which will be tmorrow. The nest of ropes and metal is the culmination of three years of learning. The first year was mess. The metal poles were sharp and cut right into the soil, loosening everthing, and the wind just walked La Casa Blanca right along. It almost fell down or over twice that year. The second year I added slip on feet and nailed them down - worked great but the racking of the frame like box nearly ripped the grommets out of the tarps. This year, I have the secret system known to all real vendors who have to deal with wind. You'll see it in action tomorrow. Today I started with the frame without the sides which means I could get all the diagonal ropes exactly opposing each other. also I spent time getting each of the feet to bear similar weight. I used the claw of the hammer to dig holes for the poles that were higher. Also each side has an X of rope that tensions the side and makes it slightly more difficult for the rectangle to distort. There are four more larger hold down anchors, which just two are just visible in the picture. They will have the secret installed after the sides tomorrow!
	I love walking through along the banks of Tyson's wash. I'm amazed at the variety of plants, pods, flowers and foliage that exist in what at first appears to be a barren place. Here is a bright red seed pod about four inches long. I haven't looked it up to identify it yet.
	This is Midge Mountain which is south of Q mountain. It is not quite as tall, but behind it are two larger peaks. I took this picture three days ago. You can't really tell the height, but it is about 200 feet above the general watershed below. Today, with the wind gusting to 40 mph I went back to Midge, and experienced gusts at the top that almost blew me off the mountain. I had to use two hands to hold onto Barstick, and three times I had to fold up into a ball to stop from being blow off the mountain. Needless to say, no pictures from today!

Tuesday, December 25, 2007 9:48 AM

The Lokota Souix have announce succession, so perhaps it is time for me to do so too? But for now on this Christmas day, a wordy wandering state of the alanmcnalan message. This is sort of in reply to a friend who asked how far down that rabbit hole I had gone now.
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Christmas Day. Christmas in the desert. The short light time, the cold time, the blowing wind of the desert. The stark brevity of transitions. The sun is a switch, on and off. The solstice was a few days ago, but the sun seems just as late to leave its bed.

Each Christmas has been different here. Each year I have traveled from Eugene south to Quartzsite, Arizona, at first more to avoid the Eugene winter experience than to enjoy the desert. I came because it is cheap to live here, and soon will be very warm. Over the total of five years that I have come, the first two, very briefly, I have come to find a new home here, and for three years I have experienced great changes in myself in these months, each year different.

It is a truth for me that work, my work in Eugene, freezes me in place, stasis, very few changes occur. There is work, the relationships all around me, and they change but slowly. Here in the desert, alone, is very different. There is little to restrain introspection. It is a virulent disease, introspection and change. A potent combination for me is to be afraid of life, afraid of dying, and then to be in a place that does not wall my actions or thoughts or fears in, a place where my mental constructions are thrown against the desert wind that wears at the trailer, at me, just as it does at every thing here. It is relentless, it cares not what I think. It cares not what I believe. It is the reality and it erodes society's hold on me, it weakens the acculturation that my mother and father instilled, it is a relentless reality that makes me question, makes me abandon the idea that I am average, normal, OK. No, I'm am priveleged beyond previous generations to even conceive. I have millions of energy slaves at my command, I can fly the skys, eat what I choose, buy solar panels, drive where I want, enjoy unprecedented freedom and access based on my color, my language, and most of all, based on my access to a disproportionate share of the now and forever dwindly supply of nearly unbelieveable cheap energy. I am a god, in the last moments of Empire. I am mankind's low orbit, almost orbital insertion, but not quite,into the cosmos, but failing even at the zenith and beginning a thousand year plunge back to a not so godlike existence.

I am a white American fortunate to have been born in America, a pure accident of birth and thus privelege. Yet each of us, especially me, is rarely aware of our privelege, our posiition. We are who we are, and it is what we make with that defines our worth to each other and to ourselves. I have chosen to speak about the things under the covers, the things priveleged US citizens DON'T talk.about , shun and run from. No, not anal sex, no not bondage and nipple clamps, no not dildoes and porn and beastiality, I talk about the real unmentionable, such is the depth of my rabbit hole, the loss of our American privelege, the loss of our free all you can eat ticket, the loss of our master of the universe lifetime pass. I talk about the financial collapse of our capitalist system, the destruction of our planet, the effects of peak oil and a low energy future. That is my rabbit hole out of your fiction that this will be like this forever. Shit, even you know that isn't true, you can't pump all the oil and have more, you can pollute all the water and have clean water, you can fish all the seas out and have fish, you can't melt the polar ice caps and be surprised when the weather changes, you can't drive and drive and drive and use up 125 million years of fossils fuels in fifty years and not fuck up something. You know that right? Shit, I only right about how it might go down, you know in your heart, that this is done and you don't want to hear it. I get that. I guess my only thing to say to that is, well, fucking cowards, strap it on and pony up!

That I talk about it has of course cost me friends, family connection and my place at the retirement table to show pictures of the grand kids and talk about the good old days when . . . blah blah blah. The think about self denial, about not looking at the elephant in the room, you become unimportant to yourself. You have broken your agreement to think, to weigh, to enjoy fully. You are only partially alive, and more, you are partially dead.

But that is you, and yes probably me too, but this is my Xmas spew, so back to me. The first real year of change here began before I arrived here. I had a reaction to a diabetic drug and spent a night in the emergency room. Then I came and brought along my ex wife's cat. I lost him the third night here. He had to go, he wouldn't stay in that night, and I let him out for a moment and though I looked I never found him again. Then I became, ill, hurt my back, hurt my shoulder and got so low, so lonely. I woke up after that as I have written about before. I began to dance in the wash at night, play music and be transported. I came alive!

The second year I found the petroglyphs and the grind holes and I was greatly affected. I lost a friend, made one more, and learned to live comfortably here in my airstream.

This year I wait to see what comes. I have written my blog at length, called the collapse of the housing market a year before it went down, called peak oil a year before consensus world wide has agreed that yes, we are at maximum production and it is and will decrease every year from now on. It is a much lower energy world that awaits, and that particular horseman brings the destruction of capitalism in it's wake.

As you know this year I have begun a novel. It is a novel of a man who will chronicle the future changes I expect to see here in the next six months. But more than a novel, I believe that this time, my time in this beautiful desert will be the cat's bird seat for watching the collapse of America, the dollar, credit, jobs, and the onset of deflation and a depression that will eventually be worldwide, and greater than anything that has been seen. Instead of commenting directly, as my blog has links to people smarter, more erudite, and better with a metaphor and phrase than I will ever be, I will comment by incorporating the changes into Ben's adventure. I strongly recommend that if you have a head on your shoulders and actually can face reorganizing your world view that you read all of the Archdruid's works – which are linked from my blog.

What is the state of Alan today? Short days and cold temperatures restrict my outside world to about 8 hours, and I am making the most of that. Some of you know that I worked out intensely for the last 5 months because work had a gym and showers. I tried to move that strength immediately here, to maintain my muscle mass and then to improve my endurance. I immediately hurt my back and spent the last two weeks recovering. I'm back to working out again, but in a more gentle way. Emotionally, I'm happy. I'm a little lonely here, but that is a familiar transition that I have experienced each trip here. Work in Eugene is people, people, people; talking, talking, talking. Here I am quiet. I will become more so over the next two months. I look forward to that, things are simpler, I'm able to let more in.

I think sometimes we resist seeing who were are individually and as a group simply because we are on overload so much of the time. For those free chickens who are already retired, their life line is pension, social security and medical plans and that stops them from looking outside the box. Hell I live in my box but way the hell outside of most people's boxes. I suppose I'm a clean bum without a drug or alcohol problem.

What happened to our souls that so many of us have killed our curiosity, our ability for self exploration as we aged. What happened to our perfect little bundles of inquisitiveness. Where you born and placed in a bassinet at the hospital to only have the thought “I hope nothing changes until I die, because I don't want to loose what I have?” I expect you, the little inquisitive you, say without words – yahoo mother fuckers, I have arrived and I AM ALIVE!” Were we go? How do we get that back? How do we accept our impending deaths and put down the fear? There is still more to experience, more to change, more to know, more to love, and as we age, our net spreads wider, our understanding more profound.

Back to mcnalan. I await the impact of the changes that are sweeping the world. I think this will be the greatest rate of change in our society in my life, in the next six months. Personally I hope to experience what changes wait for me here this year. I will not try to go backwards, to hold on to what has been already learned, loved and lost. This beautiful Sonoran desert is a canvas for change for me. I am my own brush and every year has been different here.

I don't care about shows, quad runners, old people grouping to retell the stories of their past. I want to here the stories that help me change more. So here is where mcnalan is. He is in the desert, being quiet, being a sponge. I hike and let the reality of dust and rock and hills counterpoint the places my thoughts go as they reach out to try and understand the new social order that will evolve from the loss of a society based on unlimited free energy slaves.

I will and do continue to exercise, maintain and increase mobility and strength and endurance because it pleases me. I write because it pleases me, I learn and endeavour not to look away at what a infection we are upon this beautiful planet, and how our very nature makes us use it up, wear it out and destroy everything. We do this because of who we are, it is our nature. We create what we believe, what we expect and we create the world of our choosing. We have chosen this, and now we are choosing, all of us, unconsciously, to reset this. Good, and for now, on 25th day of December, 2007 we are just begun, and in an odd way, we are complete.

Friday, December 7, 2007 6:59 PM

I'm back! Actually I didn't go anywhere, but I certainly have not been here. I've just arrived in Quartzsite (yesterday). I'll bore each of you in person about the drive and the storms and going five hundred miles in one day. But I have some pictures to share. More tomorrow. Still dealing with transition time.

	This was a brief moment of no rain, but high winds. I have climbed out of Oregon and I'm at Weed, where it is always windy all the time. Mount Shasta is well covered in snow which is a very good thing for the central valley of California. A lot of the fruit you eat starts up there on that mountain, at least the watery part.
	This Barstick surveys the Q mountain which he has not seen in 7 months. This was yesterday afternoon, and I hadn't realized that I was running on adrenaline. Up we went! There's a flag at the top of that hill, and we'll go touch to say we're home!

View from the top. Barstick had it easy on his trip to the top of Q. Here we look out over Quartzsite. The dying sun just glints off the top of the staff.
Here is one of the rocks that has a shallow grinding stone ground into it. The rains this summer must have been severe. Huge amounts of gravel have been deposited here. The flat looking stone is the edge of the grinding depression. I left it covered which will keep it safe for a while.

I went to the petroglyph site, and across from that the village site. From last year you might remember these five grinding holes. They are very old and and two of them are quite deep. It is believed that wooden poles where used as pounding tools to crush the hard grains or the Acacia seeds. These holes are likely 4000 to 5000 years old. Yet as I sat there last summer and today, I imagine the conversations and work that was done here for so many thousands of years. This is an important place for me.

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