Answer #170 - Car Talk

What's more fun than Rush Limbaugh?

In a car with friends Tim Grimm, Scott Russell Sanders & Ruth Sanders, The 'car talk' is an education.

In three short hours we've broached:

1) Tribal legacy and the genetic advantages of offering your daughters for overnight excursions with visiting hunter-types

2) The devastating loss of top soil on the Earth, what this will mean to future generations if we don't stop the Agri-Borg, and how this 'loss of top soil' can equate to what Clear Channel has managed to do to the whole of music in the U.S.

3) The legend that the Welsh may have been in North America centuries before any other European culture, and the possibility that, along with their cultural artifacts & blue-eyed genes, they brought the Baby Jesus who ran into Joseph Smith along the way at
a ski resort in Utah.


4) The contribution of the internet / technology to the over-use of mind-altering chemicals in the human population. Tim's contention that the Human animal is not wired for constant awareness of the deaths per second that are occurring on a constant and unrelenting basis.  I, agree. However, I feel compelled to both blog the conversation and consult the GPS (which we've dubbed 'The Oracle') whenever determining the next turn on the road of my life.


Tim and Scott consider me now part of the larger problem. Though Rush Limbaugh is a bigger, fatter part of the problem.

Miles to go until Cobden, Illinois... we've just passed a sign that says 'Final Phase Next Exit.'

Ruth says, 'Let's not exit.  I'm not quite ready.'

Me neither.

Answer #169 - Digging into the loam

I'll be in Salina Kansas this weekend, at the Prairie Festival, sponsored by Wes Jackson's Land Institute.
 
Humbled by the work they're doing.  Trying to save the world and all.

Perennial polycultural is the method of sustainable agriculture Jackson's developed, by studying the prairie for the past 30 years or so.
                
Life Magazine called him one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century.

In celebration of its 35th anniversary, Smithsonian counted him as one of 35 people who have made a difference. 

Humbled.

My job? To write him a song. And sing it to him.  So I've written it... will bring it to my friend Malcolm Dalglish, and we'll snap it together - maybe duet it - like Sonny & Cher, or probably more like Carole King and Neil Sedaka...Or the Bergmans... nah... knowing us, it'll be Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers...

Anyway...
Humbled.
We'll play for and honor both Wendell Berry and Scott Russell Sanders as well.

Further humbled.  Because cleverness as achievement is hubris... while these men stand up, determine the direction of the wind, and offer shelter by way of solution.  No cleverness.  No bravado.  No hubris.
 
We walk in with our songs and stories, and we, all of us, leave - returning to our 'expanded tribe' with the hope of ideas of great minds to carry us forth into the uncertain future. 

"The binge is almost over," Jackson says.  "It's time to go home."

Humbled.

And immensely grateful for the existence of people like these.

Answer #168 - Call Me 7 of 9

I'm Zaphod Beeblebrox without the spongecake (I do occasionally have the martini, though).


The world wide web is an infinite space and I am a mostly hairless monkey with little ability to fathom big words like                               i n f i n i t e.

One string leads to another.. an infinite web of sites connected via the search engine neurons and linked infinitely and where does a mostly hairless mammal go when the world is too big and the brain is too small?

Sometimes, to the bath tub.  This is, of course, the most primal, fetal desire - to be completely submerged in warm water, with nothing but the sound of a heartbeat and the white noise of the organs and vascular systems whooshing and whirring.  Ah...

Just talked to a songwriter good friend... 'The road is actually restful,' she said.  'And how do you explain that to people?'

How indeed.  12 hours of driving between here and Wichita, and I'm rested upon arrival?  Surprisingly, yes.  For a short while, there was no internet in the car, so it was audio book and fast food time.  What's not to love?  What's not restful?  Open highways... yellow Subway signs... friendly Agri-Evil signs along miles of fields, assuring us that our genetically engineered crops are inevitable and that Resistance is Futile...

Wait. That's not restful. But most things about the road are.


But speaking of the Borg, being constantly connected to the WEB is a bit like being a Borg. Or The Borg.
All flushed, nearly instantly, with the same information.. hive mentality. Flush.

Is this our new evolution?  Connection to the hive?

If so, then the marmoset that lives in my mitochondria is having a hard time assimilating.

Still. I'm here. I'm connected. I'm 7 of 9.  Sans the blonde hair and ridiculously proportioned body...

But what I wouldn't give for a tiny piece of spongecake and sunglasses that turn black in the presence of danger.