Sunday, September 28, 2008

Random Pictures

felt like posting some pictures from hither and thither...



a dreamcatcher I recently purchased from Moses, a southbound through hiker, in Delaware Water Gap where we were working. All materials were found in the woods. Support your local economy!



relaxation

This was one of the best days of 2008 for me. It was a gorgeous day and we had a great trip in Grayson Highlands State Park hiking from the valley alongside a tumbling trout stream with waterfalls to being on top of it all in the unique environ that is the highlands.



how I love your curves



fog rolling in

Every evening outside of Fontana Dam at the edge of the Great Smokies the fog rolled in and felt like an air conditioner.



ted and I in wonderland

Part of the highland experience.



its a color land

On the streambank of Poverty Creek, one of my favorite camping spots outside of Blacksburg and right over Brush Mountain from where I used to live. She was looking towards some trapazoidal cavities a pileated woodpecker made looking for a meal.




say hello to jack, of jack in the pulpit

The only spot relative to Blacksburg that the Nature Conservancy owns is Falls Ridge, a gorgeous spot known for tons of wildflowers in the spring, blankets of trilliums plus bloodroot, showy orchid, columbine along the cliffs, a travertine waterfall, a kiln, and much much more.



swirling water

A good day while my cousin Griff was up visiting and a bunch of us went to the Cascades, the most popular spot in the Jefferson National Forest inside the New River Valley.



dad botching a shot in the 08 putt putt champsionship

Another good day.



clearing the head

Quick bike trips to the Duckpond are always fun. It was really only my hangout when the weeping cherry trees bloom, one of my favorites.




light on ripples

This trippy serendipitous moment came about as I was filming a river otter swimming around, twirling and barking.



we all need something to lean on sometimes

An old weeping willow at the duckpond on VT campus. The tree has long been used to relieve headache and reduce fevers since salicylic acid, the precursor to aspirin, is found in the bark from which teas can be made.



Chicken of the woods anyone? mm



the essence of life



Bloodroot, one of the first flowers of the Appalachian Mountains to spring, opening up.



Carolina Chocolate Drops rip the stage. Rockin' out on the bones.



Jam session between the guy from Toubab Krewe with his kora and the Duhks



Windrock back in the day



All up in your face



Momma heron coming to feed her youngins. The gluttonous guttural sounds of the young herons reminded me of dinosaurs. I love this shot which takes me back to my time on Woodstock Pond at York River State Park, a beautiful place.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my? That doesn't touch flailing markets, decreasing sperm quality, and cannibalistic polar bears, oh me...

Well, its Tuesday again, I had a blast in Blacksburg last weekend for the celebration and now I'm relaxing before our return to the woods as 5 hours of sweet music starts again. Grooves provided by George Penn on WUVT with a great Outkast song, Unhappy. "Might as well have fun cause your happiness is done and your goose is cooked." But I'm a rather happy fellow, just confused, and I don't gander with geese. So if you understand this conundrum let me know.

It’s a nice warm start to autumn this year. The earth is balanced, the day and night are of equal length. The time of Libra. We in the northern hemisphere begin our tilt away from the great hydrogen ball. Yet the sun is still shining strong and the nights are cooling off.

But things don’t seem very balanced all in all, especially the books. And now in the midst of our market glitch we, the US, are considering a $700 billion bailout. Now we are seeing the FBI is talking about mortgage fraud with these money piddling covetous fools. Some say we could erase our oil deficit with that bailout amount instead. Who knows.

And zoos are having green polar bear problems, DC has homeless polar bears, and the Artic has auroras of cannibalistic polar bears as things begin to become ‘slim pickins’ for sure. All the while Mrs. Palin just got called out again for another lie, this time in her attempt to get polar bears taken off of their threatened status saying their numbers are increasing. For this bold statement she won the Rubber Dodo Award in her vain effort to protect the oil industry. The tempest fails again, let us pray she does not get a chance to rise.

Maybe scientists should’ve made a word that didn’t sound so fancy, because albedo just sounds too fancy for normal people to recognize and pay attention to and too much like libido to sidetrack short attention spans, but we'll get to that.

What’s your albedo? Frankly, that’s none of your business!

Well the Artic’s albedo is high, and it is dissipating with the melting ice causing heat to absorb and not reflect, and the polar bear will be one of the first to pave the way in the newest and coolest trend, extinction, and now we’ve all heard it enough to where it effects us about as much as a couple more deaths in a war.

This tolerance to critical information is slightly foreboding and not my idea of population control. Not to be askew or amiss, for we all knew it somewhere in our minds, research finally tells us the proximity of cell phones in pockets to men’s reservoirs of reproductive genetic material reduces sperm quality. Imagine that. Next thing you know they’ll be injecting stuff in meat that will lower our structural integrity. Oh, they already do that. (If you want meat go hunt or go to a farmers market!) At least our waterways are clear and clean. Ha, they blow up mountains covering headwaters while streams closer to urban life team with pharmaceuticals and birth control pills that synergistically mix into a stew that who knows what it will do.

Our footprint is changing from a tap dance to a mosh pit with the tenacity of a swarm of drunken wall street bankers at a first come first serve backdoor deal.

Who cares about these things, they are a part of life, a necessary evil right? Kind of like tipping and Rosie O’Donnell. Yikes. No, it is time to wake up and as Zach used to say, "It's time to Take the power back."

What are these bailouts all about? Giving some corporations another shot at not being able to handle their books right that lost gambling with some risky shady unmentionables that leave their ravenous quarterly reports foaming at the mouth because their little charts didn’t continue to rocket like they used to in the good ole days, before the world got flat again. Mortgages and housing markets and all this economic filigree of insanity and abstinence and apathy of a rigid market that needs to bend. You better diversify yourself girlfriend. Crazy days.

The world doesn’t seem so crazy in the woods, that’s for sure. Only when I return to the internet and civilization I see so much crazed ridiculousness oozing out of the news and our world. What does it all mean? Is there a method to this madness, a crack in the sundial, an escape route to a better tomorrow awaiting somewhere off in the distance, hopefully around the next bend. Or is it like that spring right around the next bend the thirsty through hiker hears about yet never quite finds.

We got ourselves into a heck of a jam, a long row to hoe, a real humdinger of a flimflammer. And now we get yet another canary in the coalmine as the State of the World's Birds just released their newest study stating biodiversity is dropping in another installment of what is becoming overwhelming documentation that we are negatively altering all levels of this planet and we need to reassess the situation.

With the rise of colony collapse as well we now have a whole new can of worms to open up when we look our young children in the eyes and tell them about ‘the birds and the bees.’ “Well Jimmy, your little Elmo doll came a looong way, all the way from China, that place we borrow money from, but your doll used a lot of oil to get here and coal to power the sweatshop factory, as with the cartoon show we have you watching here learning about McDonalds through product integration and Teletubbie tolerance so your mother and I can have a minute to decompress from our slightly stressful and unfulfilling jobs two hours away. And all that oil and coal and cell phone signals and radio towers is confusing the bees and poisoning ecosystems killing off the pretty birds like the ones in that book you love so much. Yes the one with Charlie the cardinal. Well Jimmy, they’re disappearing, with a bunch of other animals. I’m sorry son, but this is why you need to know about the birds and the bees, because they make babies, and uh, mommy and I made you too the same way, but you can’t, because…well, there’s just too many durn people. We just can’t take anymore. So no sexing for you ok?! Maybe this cell phone will help, keep it on at all times, you just never know…Ok…”

Little Jimmy will never be the same. Nor will anyone. It’s a strange time to be alive, young or old, but especially for the young ones being thrown into an ultra speed dog eat dog culture of instant gratification where multitasking texting and typing while trading stocks is the new milking the cow and the old bald coke riddled used car salesman fad has given way to the metro sexual aderol addled ipod listening constant facebook updater look. But we’ve got machines milking cows now and mediocrity for conversation. Little Jimmy should be worried. Little Jimmy should invest in wind and solar. The times they are a changing. And as an old baseball catcher once said, ‘the future ain’t what it used to be.’

But it can still be what we make it. And as always, tomorrow is only a dream away.




Power to the people. It's time to get this peaceful revolution underway in a very serious way. Things are too crazy not to.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Mid Atlantic Season Underway

It is Tuesday evening here at Scott Farm, and I lay back listening to the sounds of Pink Floyd start off another Tuesday night of my favorite music block from the greatest radio station in the world, WUVT, based out of Squires Student Center in Blacksburg, Va. The Soul Jones and The Moneyshot bring it every week and I am ecstatic they stream online. I don’t know if it’s the awesome music or the nostalgia of Tuesday nights at Buckshot, either way I love this 5 hour block of music where they do it to your earhole. Check it out one tuesday night. If you like good music, you won't be disappointed.

I miss Virginia and I will be returning there this weekend, I cannot wait.

The first two weeks of Mid-Atlantic crew have been a blast. Very rocky and we’ve gotten to move rocks I never thought I’d see moved. But there’s more to it than moving rocks, that’s for sure. The trail brings us together, people from all over the world, and we all learn from each other and grow while having a good time. The trail community is a very interesting niche of people that I wish I started getting to know earlier because they are a very strange, caring, smart, and individualistic bunch, flowing through life like fireballs enlightening and touching lots of people. True characters, which is wonderful in the rat race we sometimes get surrounded by in this year of our Lord 2008 A.D.

I digress, here are a few pictures as of late.


Ted admires some fine cribbing.



Thats a big momma of a spider.




You cannot fool me with your stick like camo, Stick bug.




I did not expect my first big view of New York to look like this.



Me helping move a very big rock with the help of the grip hoist. I really just wanted to show off these sweet shades I found under another rock up there.





The always hungry Lilipadia Pacmanius



Nothing like sweet jazz in the Poconos after a hard day on the trail




The sun is setting on another day as summer comes to a close. The vernal equinox is upon us. The leaves will be showing us their true colors soon enough as chlorophyll production stops and we get one final beautiful bang for the optical spectrum before the muted tones of winter slide in to chill for awhile.

I love the mood of crisp autumn. It is surely on its way. The proof is in the pudding. A volunteer staying an extra night just told me he saw over 17,000 birds today migrating south. Birders are a wild and interesting bunch. Most people won't see that many different birds in their lifetime and he saw them in one day.

Get on up. James Brown is funking it up. Herbie Hancock, Tribe Called Quest, Santana, the Soul Jones is rocking my world.

One of my favorite autumn shots from last year at Twin Lakes State Park one afternoon after a day of too many meetings.



I can't wait.

The night is young, more to come...

Monday, September 1, 2008

"There is Something happening in America"

I know its time for me to get back into the woods for sure now, since I’m sitting here thinking about politics.

The Democratic National Convention finally really got going after a slow build up, outside of Ted Kennedy’s speech which I enjoyed. I don’t know much about the VP nominee, but I like what I heard earlier at the Convention. Clinton and Biden both had great speeches.

Change is brought from the bottom up. That’s what Obama said. I agree.

All this political puppetry and theatre is finally going to get somewhere maybe.

But as the convention continued I kept thinking about the ghost of Hunter S Thompson roaming around the halls there in Denver. I’m sure he was there in spirit. Slick Willy gave a helluva speech earlier. All the facts were touching , but it is always the intangible that stands out. The parts of his oration that really gave it meaning, really connected me as a listener and I’m sure many others, included his mentioning of Hunter’s favorite topic: the American Dream.


Hunter's visceral hatred for Nixon and everything that was wrong with our country hit a nerve for many Americans, and his questions about the Fear that was running this country was so dead on in so many instances that I sometimes wish people hadn't become so obsessed with his excessive character and listened to his worried words more. His predominant theme through most of his work was with the Death of the American Dream, and it is still something I think about often.




He knew what was going on before many people did and it scared him. He always stayed close to politics, a self proclaimed political junkie ever since he wrote Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in 1972 when George McGovern lost to the greed head swindler Nixon.




He also got me into writing as I became familiar with his work. The Collegiate Times had no time for my thoughts of Gonzo Journalism but he still lit a fire under me I will never forget. Long live Gonzo.



But back to Slick Willy and the Dream, first the past president stated,

The American Dream is under siege at home, and America's leadership in the world has been weakened. Middle-class and low-income Americans are hurting, with incomes declining, job losses, poverty, and inequality rising, mortgage foreclosures and credit card debt increasing, health care coverage disappearing, and a very big spike in the cost of food, utilities, and gasoline.
And our position in the world has been weakened by too much unilateralism and too little cooperation...
(APPLAUSE)
... by a perilous dependence on imported oil, by a refusal to lead on global warming, by a growing indebtedness and a dependence on foreign lenders, by a severely burdened military, by a backsliding on global nonproliferation and arms control agreements, and by a failure to consistently use the power of diplomacy, from the Middle East to Africa to Latin America to Central and Eastern Europe.
(APPLAUSE)
Clearly, the job of the next president is to rebuild the American Dream and to restore American leadership in the world.


Clearly.

Intense words. They felt genuine as he stood up there, either the sign of a good politician or a good man speaking, or just maybe both.

Biden teamed up on the theme adding, “The American Dream seems like its slowly slipping away.”

But for the big kicker Mr. Clinton called The Big O’s life ‘a 21st century incarnation of the old-fashioned American Dream.’

Deep. Nice.

He continued...

His achievements are proof of our continuing progress toward the more perfect union of our founders' dreams. The values of freedom and equal opportunity, which have given him his historic chance, will drive him as president to give all Americans -- regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability -- their chance to build a decent life and to show our humanity, as well as our strengths, to the world.

They really worked the American Dream. It is time for the rebirth of that dream. Many folk said sometime between the end of the 60’s and now we witnessed the death of the American Dream. We did, countless times, all over the place.

What is life but the ever shifting balance and struggle between the birth and death of dreams.

But now we have a concentrated chance of redefining that dream and manifesting it back into reality in the midst of this dire mire where we so desperately need a new kite to fly. New ideas. Change. Will Barack be our new kite flying in the clouds, leaving us squinting into the sky dreaming and smiling like happy barefoot children.

I don’t know about that, but he does seem eerily like some astronomical avatar of hope.



Obama is not going to solve our problems, but he is allowing many people to look at things in a different light, a light of hope. Obama is just a normal man, one who believes in the power of the people. The power of communities united.

2012 is not a date for the end of the world, it is a projected date for the end of an age. Perhaps the age of unreason will dwindle into this flickering candle of one last chance. We’ve about ran out of chances of shifting the societal mythos that is digging us into an ecocidal grave, lets hope we can get it right this time. Perhaps this is the great shift on the balance beam of homeostasis. Can you feel it in your bones, the barely present tingling of a better tomorrow?

This election is interesting because these themes are so emotional and real. People’s hopes and dreams. I suppose they always talk about it, but something is different this time. It doesn’t feel so phony.

Joe Biden declared about Barack’s heart:

I watched how he touched people, how he inspired them, and I realized he has tapped into the oldest American belief of all: We don't have to accept a situation we cannot bear.
We have the power to change it. That's Barack Obama, and that's what he will do for this country. He'll change it.


Let us hope so.

Let’s help him do it.

And since this has been a quote frenzy post, I had to add some scribbling I found from long ago about now and that ethereal dream.

The start of the 21st century is beginning to look like a bad Orwellian novel, or possibly an incredible miscarriage of justice and freedom from the bowels of the American Dream. But in the midst of all of this there is also a great wave of hope and passion building towards ideals founded in being stewards of this beautiful country and world we all share. How did we get so detached?

Above all is the concern of the seeds we sow for our children. The reaping of this intergenerational issue is one of dire importance, one we can be proud of if we decide to step up and do the thing we do best: use our drive, care, and ingenuity to rise above our fallacies thereby ensuring our continuance in the face of great odds. Lets not be that ship that drifts aimlessly until it sinks, let us navigate the unruly waters to the destination we all truly feel deep in our bones and heart, one where our offspring and those yet to be born won’t look us in the eye asking why we did nothing, but one where they sincerely thank us for caring about more than our comfortable lives, one where we earnestly care for theirs.


picture from RollingStone


Its been a few more days now, Barack gave his speech, which was awesome, and McCain surprised us all with the picking of his running mate. Not the boring ole predictable man anymore eh? An interesting move and I don’t know if it will help or hurt him.

Obama kept the American Dream theme going, but I guess for the sake of him being a piece of that dream he called it the American Promise.

Tonight, I say to the American people, to Democrats and Republicans and Independents across this great land - enough!  This moment - this election - is our chance to keep, in the 21st century, the American promise alive.


Then later…

But I stand before you tonight because all across America something is stirring.  What the nay-sayers don't understand is that this election has never been about me.  It's been about you.

For eighteen long months, you have stood up, one by one, and said enough to the politics of the past.  You understand that in this election, the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result.  You have shown what history teaches us - that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn't come from Washington.  Change comes to Washington.  Change happens because the American people demand it - because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.

America, this is one of those moments.