Friday, March 30, 2007 9:35 PM

	You saw this two days ago. I stayed just short of four months in this spot, and it shows. Despite my aversion to stuff, I sure have a lot of stuff. Phil helped me out after I dismantled the steel frame of La Casa Blanca by taking the pipes and metal elbows and storing them at his Dad's house for next year's use. I took the black barrel in the foreground of the picture which contains the tarps and bungee ties for the structure, thank you Phil! Again.
	Making progress but I hadn't even started on the inside until this morning. My books run along my main table and as I packed them into a box I found 4 months worth of dust storms underneath. Below Left -Here it is nearly done thank god, late last night. Still this morning it took another 3 hours of getting the inside ready to travel, switching over to inside grey water, going to the dump station and dumping and flushing the black water and grey water, and filling up the thirty gallon water.
	I said goodbye to the dove who is sitting on the newly hatched babies in the palo verde tree to which you see over the truck canopy. She put up with the whole packing moving thing and just hunkered down and waited for it to be over, without budging. When I was watered, dumped and sorta washed it was off to Yuma, to get my tires installed.
	After I bought my new tires I drove to Pilot Knob, another one of the LTVAs in the BLM system. I got here early enough so that I could do my run Algodones run for antibiotics, etc for friends and myself. Since I have no medical insurance during my six months off from PeaceHealth, I go to Mexico to anything I might need. I've been told that during some parts of the snowbird season, 50,000 people per day do the same thing. Even at 4:30pm there was a line which you can see in my picture on the left. About 150 people long, the line stretched around the corner and down one street. As usual, going in to Mexico here there is no entry, you just walk in on the sidewalk. Coming back they opened up the Passport only line and it speeded the trip through.
	Left: That is the KNOB in Pilot Knob. Above: You're looking south into Mexico.

Pilot Knob is an empty expanse of rolling desert tarmac that extends from Route 8 south into Mexico. How eerie is it to be one of only very few RV's in the entire LTVA. Guess the season is over and the serious RVers have already headed north or east. My fun purchases for this trip for myself was Amoxicillin 60 tablets, $1.80, Cipro, 100 tablets 500mg, $9.75. I remember getting a script filled at Bi-Mart about 5 years ago and my co-pay for a 7 day course of Cipro, 14 tablets, was $60.00. Nothing fucked up about drug prices, right?

I received email about my post from the website that eviserated the movie "The Secret" that was extremely good and I will post it tomorrow morning along with some thoughts I have. I post links that upset me, upset you (I hope) and allow you to get mad. Recently a Chiclet that reads the blog asked me why I wanted blog readers to right me and tell me off. I give you permission to disagree and email me on anything because even if what you read or what I link to makes you mad, it is a start. Most of us live in a an apathetic puree of have finished tasks, half heard thoughts, idioms that have grown to become beliefs, knee jerk reactions, and old memes. Anger trumps apathy in rock, paper, scissors.
More on all that tomorrow, but right now it is 10pm and I'm sitting at the desk in the trailer above just as you see it, and there is a large expanse of quiet isolation around me broken only by the constant sound of groups of helicopters flying overhead. Bad juju here and tension in the air. Tomorrow, back to Yuma to hit the Goodwill looking for a boombox. If I fail there I will drive over to the pawn shop where Ed Foster and I picked out his digital camera, mostly because the sales lady was well built and on display. All this fits with my personal goal of buying on life critical stuff new (like my trailer tires). I do love quiet, but one side of my stereo had turned into noise and squawks so I have been without trailer full sound for about a month.
Night chickies, I am complete.

Friday, March 30, 2007 9:18 AM
Last post from the beautiful shores of Tyson's Wash in Quartzsite. I'll post later tonight from Pilot Knob near Algodones Mexico, 6 miles from Yuma. Not much Verizon signal there the last time I stayed there, so if you need to talk to me - email!

Thursday, March 29, 2007 4:50 PM
Its a Joshua tree, one of the Yucca plants. Thanks Kim, Phil and TJ!

Second topic - I'm leaving Q tomorrow so Blog readers don't look for me here or in Yarnell! I have an appointment for tires for the Safari Airstream in Yuma which means that I will do a divert to Algodones for various and sundry on Saturday and then off to Mittry Lake after that. I will attempt to coordinate my trip to the Mogollon rim with the beginning of the Iranian war, just for a sense of symmetry.

Here is a link to a site named Caroyln Baker.org that skewers the movie "The Secret." She does throw the baby out with the bath proclaiming us a infant culture that wants stuff now and screw everyone else. She has a very interesting review of the sources of the material for "The Secret." I thought a lot of what she has to say is pretty much dead on within her world of limited view, just as the secret of asking and receiving is dead on when simplified down to one person really wanting something. I think both are right, both are smaller versions of a larger co created reality.

So how can I think think she has good points to make and also think that "The Secret" is a good idea - that idea of asking for what you want? I do think what you attend to, visualize and expect will come true. We get pretty much what we expect. But where I veer from the course set by "The Secret" is that I believe we all are creating what unfolds, not just one of us, all of us. I will repeat this again later, so here's my take. We live INSIDE of the world which we all co-create continously.

I think what we expect and believe influences the creation of all things, not just material goods and personal relationship and cold hard cash (which was a focus that the movie has that irritated me). Like so many things I come to feel in my life, "The Secret" is simple and so incredibly complex in application that what appears to be evil in a Chinese sweatshop can appear along side with you cheating on your taxes, and your neighbor going out to rob, pillage and rape every other night and you making your first million dollars selling kiddie porn. It is all us, but not as easily controlled as the movie makes it appear.

That is not to say that concentrating, visualizing and putting energy in to really wanting something doesn't work, for it at least focuses YOU on what you want, which makes it much more likely that you'll work towards that goal rather than away from it. But there are so many of us, and our expectations and desires are like waves of creation, and it is in the intersection of these waves of creation that my questions are found. I think it is simple and I think it is so complicated. It is like rain drops hitting a pond, it is easy to follow the first few drops and their circular waves spreading outward, but when you have 6 billion expectations a second, not counting every other living thing, then the interference pattern is so complicated that it will produce behaviors that you and I might not expect through the ideas of simple "ask and you shall receive". So yes you should act as if it works one hundred percent, as at least then there is one clear wave going in a good direction for you, but I think you are on a much larger ocean with large waves and you are part of that too. It is your world too, you are not just the creator, you live INSIDE the creation.

For example there might be an 18 year old who is right now manifesting the hell out of a BMW, and while he is doing that, a much larger wave is rising under him, the upcoming war in Iran which will likely see him inducted in a draft to fight for energy for mom, sis, and his right to own a nice BMW. Maybe if he would shift to manifesting a humvee we could line up some congruence? Yes, he gets to drive a humvee in upcoming the Iran oil war.


Thursday, March 29, 2007 6:39 AM
Casa Blanca Down. Quail make chickens looks smart. News follows.
Yesterday my back improved to the point that I dismantled my canopy and pulled up the woven pad, pulled all the stakes and made piles. Here's a quick view of the mess and my unknown tree.

Above is what I thought was a juniper tree until I got back to the satellite uplink and found it is not. Any chicklets know what this is? Email me if you know!

Above, right are two pictures of the mess I make every time I repack the trailer. When I stop for weeks, or like this time, four months, and put la Casa Blanca, it naturally begins to accumulate "stuff." I believe this is exactly the same process that causes stationary people to become rooted. It is painful to give away and through away stuff. And, as you know, I believe that stuff owns us, not the other way around, so you can just barely see the burley bicycle trailer near then end of the trailer. It's load is much larger now. I'll put the usable items in front of the dumpsters where people will recycle them.

I should be moving tomorrow morning if all goes well today, and I think I am going south to Yuma. I've found what appears to be the tire of choice according to the top classic airstream rebuilders for a single axle trailer (like mine). So today I will try to find Goodyear Marathon 2.25/75/15 load range D tires in stock in Yuma.

Quail make chickens look smart. Having taken down the canopy after this many months I have changed the structural lay of the land, and yesterday a single quail flew up out of the wash, saw the trailer, apparently for the first time, and despite the "pull up, pull up" safety warning device that all quail are fitted with in Arizona, only managed to skim across the front curve and end up wedged under the front solar panel. He wasn't stuck and thought he had found quite an interesting place. What he hadn't done yet was look down. Under that front solar panel is a skylight that Gary and I put in 5 years ago. I walked under him and tapped the plastic of the skylight and he looked down and exploded out of there.
Quail at the best of times are on some very strong drugs. In groups they move in wild walking groups, apparently lost at all time and continually trying to avoid the appearance of organization. They are the most nervous looking bird that I know of, probably because they choose to walk most places. Mountain lions and coyotes, oh my! My explorer quail certainly got his money's worth and will be telling tales of courage and giant mammals under glass.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007 8:22 AM
I've been working on cleaning up the trailer after the dust storm. My back is much improved and I'll be back to packing up as soon as it warms up. This morning I finally got my value's list done. This is from the exercise on Steve Pavlina's website. Here's the link to this article. I highly recommend the doing of it, not just the reading of it. Living your values.
Here is my list. It is from most important to lesser importance, but all are very important to me.

Thanks for letting me ramble. I have no penetrating thoughts right now, I appear to be just waiting.

Monday, March 26, 2007 10:22 PM
Late night blog for me. Tweaked my back a bit moving a toolbox today and I'm laid up a little so I've been reading, watching movies on the Ubuntu Linux computer and doing some of the exercises on Steve Pavlina's website.
If you're following Gary's blog, he is crossing western Texas after fixing the tire that shredded and took a little bit of his fifth wheel with it.
I'm posting tonight because I just finished watching a Canadian home video production called "Of the Grid." detailing the year and one half it took a family to get remote property to reach the point of power for lights without a "hydro" bill - which is Canadian talk for an electric bill. They had to build or repair structures put in wood stoves and find water. What amazed me was how slow they were, and particularly with the solar electric. They made their deal on solar over a year before they flipped the switch and had a naked bulb in the young boy's bedroom. They talked about the tension in the family, the problems in home schooling without light, and yet they basically hired everything out. I can only imagine that they spent over $10,000 on the solar installation alone, probably more than that.

The point I'm trying to make is that they needed that power from day one, not 500 days into their project. 3 solar panels, some used batteries, salvaged wire and some Walmart inverters would have had them with lights, communications, music, and some comfort, for less than $1000. People who choose not to really learn pay twice. Once by not having what they need when they need it, and second when they pay for the safe decisions that all contractors tend to make. Contractors scale up, choose only high end (greatest add on margin), and then their labor is on top. Their batteries in the movie were the most expensive deep cycle batteries you can buy, yet they ended up with exactly the same wattage in panels that are on the roof of my Airstream.

Solar scales up easily - meaning you can start small and add afterwards without loosing anything your did previously. I was amazed that they didn't bring two panels in with them with a car battery, a cheap inverter, and a cheap charge controller the very first day.
There is supposed to be a big two day wind storm coming in tonight. I've collected all the loose items outside, tied the flaps of la Casa Blanca down, covered everything that will get powdered with light dust, and now I'm telling the satellite dish to lay down. Night chicklets!

Sunday, March 25, 2007 2:48 PM
Just a clarification to the post below. Phil wrote me an email just now that I was being a bit hard on Steve, close minded where I am open to almost everyone else. I looked at what I wrote again this morning and realize that some of you might think that I mine other people's thoughts based on how I emotionally react to them, and it is not. I assemble my world view and my view of the uncertain future from any sources that appear relevant no matter what my reaction to the writer might be. I love useful information from any source and I got a lot out of several of Pavlina's articles, in fact I've read only three articles so far and his blog back a while, but there is much more to look at. He has many more fully hatched ideas and directions than I do and some just plain great information. My problem was his tone, and that is what I was reacting to below, not the content. So I need to be more careful to not make it appear that I would throw the baby out with the bath. That was not my intention. Pavlina is well worth reading.
So all free chickens should feel comfortable to send me any link that might help us. Of course I'll have whatever emotional reaction to the sources that I have and will write about it because I try not to filter. For instance I love listening to Esther who channels Abraham-Hicks - I just love her voice and sweetness. Does that make the information better than the important future survival information on Primitive Ways website? Is it more relevant to all of us than the information in the movie The Secret - which I panned a little for glitziness and focus on wanting cars and money? No. Always send me anything you think relevant to you in your free chicken life, and let me see if I find lessons there for me too.

For example, TJ just sent me a number of movies, one of them is Threads - an 80's British work about a nuclear attack and a post holocaust hell that puts graphic examples to fuzzy thoughts. I am reeling from it. It was an emotional battering, and I also thought that it showed me several things of value that might become part of a post tomorrow. I will mention the way they played the worst possible scenario, or followed only those who were most impacted and yet, there were some important pieces for me, and maybe you, there too. Sometimes a lot of this information might seem saccharine and sometimes morose, but my goal is always the same, to winnow through and pick out what is important to me to build a pathway that leads away from the bleak existence of a post nuclear war, and from the likewise bleak existence of the world we currently live in where people try to "manifest" an expensive car. The first, horrible and the second is just plain sad.
Thanks, as always, Phil for making me look at my own internal consistency.

Sunday, March 25, 2007 9:07 AM
Oh boy did I sleep in today - until almost 7am. Recently a blog reader mentioned to me, upon meeting me, that I I don't look like my pictures. So when I did wake up this morning I went to pee and looked in the mirror. She is correct. I don't look like me at all. I'm not sure who I look like now, but definitely not me. Whoever he is, I shaved him and he looked a little better. Actually he looks better than me almost every time I look now. I like it.

Steve Pavlina. OK, this guy serves good information but personally feels like a bad example to me. I realized we were not only on different tracks but on different trains when I read his article on increasing visitors to your website. His "secret" is to write as if you are talking to an audience of people, and give them value that they can use. That sounds nice but I hate it. As soon as you start filtering what you would say and instead say what you should say to get a certain response, i.e., more links and readers to your blog, then for me, the humanness, the frailty, and the courage to expose myself disappears.

It is pretty easy to say how you got rich, and how others can get rich, because you are talking about a process that is not revealing of you. But it seems to me, and who am I with only five readers to disparage him, but it seems to me that revealing the process of being scared and living through it to triumph, failure or neither is the reality that most of us live with every day. My goal is always to say whatever I want, and to show you me, who is not a particularly strong or courageous person, trying to do new and unfamiliar things that can be wonderful, but often scare me. I do this because I know that I am not one iota different than you in the essentials. We all think we're not enough some of the time, not enough to even bear what we endure now, let alone any further changes. We can deal with that with bravado or hide in our room, but all of us are human, want to be loved, and would like to see other real humans confront fear and opportunity, love, and affection. How much better a story is for me when the writer admits that his success seemed accidental and that his adventures caused him to piss his or her pants, or that he started something and did not finish, as long as at the end, he or she shows me that their world seems a bit bigger now and that they have a sense of tenderness towards themselves.

I do write for you but first I write for me. Steve Pavlina would excite me more if he was less arrogant and more human. He says he makes forty thousand a month from his website, I get to bare my soul and expose myself to myself and to you but I don't make any money. I know it doesn't make much sense in Empire, but I like my way better. Also the people seeking edge over others, profiting by others, without revealing self, I'm not sure if that isn't Empire all over again anyway. That is just not going to work in our new future. It is hard to imagine a future that is mutually supportive and creative because I am 57 years old and hucksters and bosses and empire culture has molded me into a cubicle animal who thinks in terms of cost and gain, almost. I don't think our new world will be hard for children because we haven't broken them to harness yet. It is us slaves of Empire that will seek to recreate Empire in the smallest villages. We have to put that down and walk away from it. You and I have a right to live because we were born. Why do we shackle ourselves to our jobs rather than just walk away from it? Why do we choose to be slaves when we give our lives away, our creativity, our art, our ingenuity. We laugh at the Northwest Indians that flattened the back of their babies' heads as infants for future status, while strapping our souls to the boards of Empire's conformity plan for infinite cheap labor. This is the Matrix folks. Let us wake up together.

And the guy in the mirror, the one who is not me, I like him a lot because he is becoming untethered, because he is confused, because he is scared, and conversely because he is happier than every before in his life. I love him because he is lonely but will not turn away from this path. Most of all I love him because his emotions are waking up and he is not afraid to tell you. I love us because we have hope to remain free or become free. Free chickies, thank you for reading, and I hope I upset you every single day. Go look in the mirror right now, I bet it's not you there either.

Saturday, March 24, 2007 6:54 AM
Good morning chickies. Phil Churchill has been pointing me towards Steve Pavlina for a week or two and this morning I read several of his essays. This one on Lightworkers and Darkworkers interested me because by his definition I am a Darkworker. I agree if you accept the context of his discussion. I suggest taking a look at it because preparing to create the pathways of a new non-Empire world requires some hard looks at personal motivation, arrogance, selfishness, and service.
Self education is self programming and information from many sources gives us breadth and stability in our decisions now and in the future.
Other business, my friend Dixie wrote in with her changing observations of Big Dogs and I posted it. Read her comment here.
Other thoughts this morning before walking up the hill. I want to acknowledge the wonderful help that Gary gave me while he was here in Q. In just about two hours he looked at my five year old plan for the development of Heirloomseedsource, and solved several technical concerns I had, then sketched out a way to use Paypal shopping carts and clickable maps leading to them to replace the cumbersome cgi forms that I would have used. Gary, being outside the box, is a brilliant in conceptualization. Becky had many ideas and comments as well, and they have had personal experience in small instant gardens themselves. Thank you Gary!
Also Gary showed up with gifts, which I still do not know how to easily accept. A welding helmet to replace my box on head, a welding jacket, wire, chipping hammer, wire brushes, clamps, and a small vice. All of these will make my welding projects much much easier, cleaner and stronger in the future. I'll miss my box though. Thank you again Gary.

Friday, March 23, 2007 3:21 PM
I drove part way up the rim that cuts Arizona like a scimitar's slash. from upper left to lower right. I'm living in Quartzsite which is the south western corner of the state, and that 1/4 of the state is at a low desert level. Picture the northwest, northeast and east fourths of Arizona as a plateau, and it erodes and drops to the desert - like a giant Niagara Falls of erosion. The rim is name the Mogollon rim and it has completely different weather than the desert of lower Arizona. This makes it possible for many people to have property both up on the rim and down here on the floor, and thus live in pleasant weather almost all the year. There is a more expensive choice and that is to live at the point where the rim is crumbling to the desert - that is where you get more water, lower elevations, little snow, and gorgeous scenery, longer growing seasons, and yet escape some of the terrific heat of the Sonoran desert below. Here is where you find Sedona and Prescott.
While Sedona has become Bolder-ized in the Colorado way, perhaps even more expensive, remember this rim is extensive. There are many less populated valleys that run back towards the rim and provide good year round choice of a gorgeous life, springs, and the ability to create an entire community, off grid, out of Empire's heavy jackboot.
That is where I went today, to look to see if there was something for me, off the rim, if one of those future valleys might be a place to ride out the collapse and build a grounded center for my life and the work I wish to be part of, a sane future, connected to the earth, succored, complete, accepted.
Side note: I found my first Juniper trees just as the escarpment began to touch the rim rock. As you know I've been looking for bow materials that the local Indians used here near the Colorado, and Juniper was their first choice though Juniper does not grow at this low elevation. They traded or traveled to the rim to secure their bow wood.
Giant boulders and broken mountains spines, collapsing igneous caps overlay sedimentary fill. They mountains sketch the skyline and the climb up into the hidden valleys. I found myself very attracted to the region, but also felt rebuffed, in a way. When you are a pilgrim of my odd sort, a refugee from cubicle society, lacking the usual trappings to identify class, wealth, and education, being perceived in the round rather than in two dimensions, well, I felt untrusted. Or possibly I'm just not as pretty as mom told me I was: too ugly to live anywhere but the desert: not man enough to mesh, meld, enfold myself into the raw and beautiful geological fractures of the rim valleys. I would definitely need a cowboy hat to live here.
I have often noted here on the weblog how our physical and emotional selves will need to be light enough on our feet to enjoy and survive the building of our new world. Today my lesson, was that different geography also requires a different aspect of myself, a different reflection of the me. I certainly was a different reflection of me on Korsae, Micronesia, and again on the tropical shores of the Black Sea, and again a completely different reflection of me as I came together in the Sonoran desert last year, searching for meaning to an increasingly fractured life.
Today I thought I would be welcomed by this new world, ready to explore the connection to a new place filled with possibilities. Yes, no, not, and maybe. I was reminded of a young science fiction author who met Isaac Azimov, the father of science fiction to many of us, for the first time. He walked into a cafe at a convention center and a friend pointed out Azimov. The young author went over and stood before the great thinker, visionary and author. Azimov thinking the young man overwhelmed sought to make him feel more at ease, but the moment he moved to speak, the young author said, jeez, you're not so much!
Azimov told the story at various gatherings for the rest of his life and found it more and more profound each time. I'm no Azimov, not so smart as I have been told recently, and I was reminded of that in a different way today. I know I'm not so much, but what I am, like you, is everything.
The desert was and is a learning place for me, a sparser landscape, compared with Western Oregon, that has allowed me to walk unfettered through it, spend enough time in it, to find my life, my voice again.
Today was part of seeking the next step, the next place. I suspect that the Mogollon rim finds the desert mcnalan quite a silly creature, interesting, but too odd. Here in the desert I am King of the Bunnies, Cuniculosus! There, on the Mogollon rim, as Borat would say, "not so much." I arrived back at la casa blanca tired, and now I'm going to watch DVDs that TJ mailed me down from Eugene. Thank you Terry! Gary left today, and quiet reigns, but I miss them already.

Friday, March 23, 2007 6:33 AM
I'm packing to move the trailer, and Gary is leaving today, so time has been short. I am making a side trip today to an area around Prescott, without the trailer, just for the day and will post tomorrow morning or late tonight. There is much to say as always, but it will have to wait. It was the Solstice yesterday and we had exciting weather in the desert with thunderstorms and torrential rain. Oh and four coyotes stop by to smell my trailer while I was talking on the phone, Gary saw them, but was unable to get a good picture. When he approached the headed back to town where I hear they are staying at the Yacht club until the mountain lions move on.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007 9:52 AM
Ran Prieur nails it again! I love how easily he penetrates issues that I would use a 100,000 words on.

"The problem is not that I don't have health insurance -- the problem is there is such a thing as health insurance! I think all insurance should be illegal, because it nullifies responsibility -- it removes our awareness from the costs of something, and enables those costs to grow like monsters. Health care is a necessity, and all necessities should be cheap enough to pay for out of pocket. If we had clothing insurance, a t-shirt would cost $1000, thrift stores would be illegal, poor people would walk around in burlap sacks that they had to make payments on every month, and Hillary Clinton would support a trillion dollar program to provide $50,000 outfits to everyone."

Wednesday, March 21, 2007 9:21 AM
There is a new post in Big Dog this morning and I received a "ponderable" about guns and fear that doesn't fit in the big dog discussion, so I'll post it here:

Here are the two headless, rattle-less rattlesnakes that Gary, I, and Zoey (Gary's dog) found resterday in the middle of a wide path on the way to Q mountain. Even in death their patterns are so beautiful. I assume they were found in the adjacent trailer park, killed and then thrown out in the wash for scavengers to recycle. However they were still there untouched this morning. Also, Zoey would not touch them.

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