Posts from — October 2005

Pattern Recognition.  One of those books read a couple of times.  And probably will be a couple more.  The makers studio reminds me of the boxmaker, up in the Tesser Ashpool cores, in Count Zero.

Collections of randomness, arrayed in a manner that somehow captures the sadness and beauty of humanity.

I am going to harvest vegetables tomorrow.  This is not my normal job.  Nor is it something that up past midnight huffing butts playing endlessly with the web prepares me well for.  But then, these ‘evenings’ don’t prepare me well for my day job.  Or for anything else for that matter …

Nice not to have to care about finding clean pants for work, for I’ll come back covered in mud.  Have to remember to bring a change of clothes, though, shaving stuff so I can shower at a friends and cleaned up for the next eight hours at the office.

Tomorrow is the last harvest.  Cold enough I’ll have a couple of layers on.  Don’t have to worry about mosquitos, though.  I stand in the field with a my coffee, watching the sky, smoking.  Peaceful in the fields down by the river in the morning.  This late in the year the geese have flown, but there are always

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Best I have seen on how to blog, at tonypierce.com   busblog.  Kind of like a 20 something edgy urban version of the writing advice exercises in Natalie Goldberg’s ‘Wild Mind’.  Dead on. 

Well, gonna give typepad a try. Thinking of moving my main blog from radio land to moveable type, and somehow I wound up here. Maybe a scrappy little reading and writing blog. Know I’ve got the fever when I’m listening to Prairie Home Companion, eating rice and beans as I type, first meal of the day, dark and where’d the day go?

In this week’s Seven Days, a well written piece about the Second Vermont Republic. 
Well, now.  This is an idea that has been knocking around my brain
for years, and recently I have found myself having little use for the
current mainstream america.

Two days after Katrina hit, FEMA still fumbling, Bush doing his
fly-over, and I went down to the local state police barracks to drop
off a load of groceries.  One local outfit had donated a load of
pallets, another a forklift.  Folks dropping off food, water,
toys, toothpaste … guys on their way to work, a mom with her kid
trailing behind lugging a gallon of water, a white haired lady on her
way to tennis lessons.  Volunteers sorting and wrapping the piles
of goods.  The trucks, thirty-five of them, would be departing
Brattleboro at 2:00 that afternoon, full, headed for Gulfport.

I looked around at these people, ordinary Vermont’s coming together to
do what needs to be done, and I thought “We know how to do this.” And
then I thought of the ten grand I pay in federal income tax alone, and
at the complete non response on the part of the federal government, at
the ineffectiveness of our leaders.  In that moment it became very
clear, in a very concrete way.  We don’t need the Feds.  I
was ready to secede.

So here it is:

One question raised in the article was “Can Vermont Feed
Itself?”.  I would like to raise the question “Can Vermont Provide
It’s Own Energy?”  I guess maybe yes.  I haven’t done the
calculations but I do know that we could grow a considerable amount of
our own fuel in the form of BioDiesel.  I’ve been doing a bit of
work in this area, and … well,  if I told everyone the reason
was so that we could gain energy independence as one of the key steps
towards secession they might think I was on the lunatic fringe. 
But there it is.

I thought maybe my Radio Userland license had run out.

Fall is a writing time of year. Snowed today. No NaNoWriMo in ‘05 though … two paying jobs and two ‘volunteer’ jobs, one working for food, one looking to be maybe paid someday and changing the world while I’m at it …

Feel kinda wimpy about not doing NaNoWriMo, but six twelve hour days at work, and no more time left to write, but what I can do here.