#markqet

[coolcatsonly]

I want you to act as if your house was on fire. ... A great number of politicians have told me that panic never leads to anything good. And I agree. To panic unless you have to is a terrible idea. But when your house is on fire and you want to keep your house from burning to the ground then that does require some level of panic. Our civilization is so fragile it is almost like a castle built in the sand. The facade is so beautiful but the foundations are far from solid. We have been cutting so many corners. ... Around the year 2030 ... we will be in a position where we will set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it. That is, unless in that time permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of our CO2 emissions by at least 50 per cent. ... These calculations do not include unforeseen tipping points and feedback loops, like the extremely powerful methane gas escaping from rapidly thawing Arctic permafrosts. Nor do they include already locked-in warming, hidden by air pollution, nor the aspect of equity, nor climate justice, clearly stated throughout the Paris agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale. ... Our house is falling apart. Our leaders need to start acting accordingly.

--- Greta Thunberg, in 'No One is Too Small to Make a Difference,' 2019: Penguin Press.

[coolcatsonly]

Enjoy my deranged Caribou edit (18min)

[coolcatsonly]

Takk… (The Tape Variations)

Humbling to hear this so many years after 2005.

By the way, this is more than just a music blog. Although the complexity that will make that true will be spaced out. I'm not very productive, at least not for now (winter, hibernating, recovering, not burning out!)

[coolcatsonly]

"On my seventh night, a plant spoke to me. It wasn't an ayahuasca plant. It was just a simple rose plant on the grounds of the center, near the medicine hut, a plant I liked. It appeared to me and it talked to me, with a mouth and everything. It explained to me that plants ran the world. They kept the Earth from blowing away, they kept the sea from rushing headlong over the Earth, they made things cool, they were food, plants were everything. You're not in charge, the plant said to me, as clearly as if it were a person. We are in charge. Your health is good or bad because of us. We are everything, and you are here as our guests.

...

I thought about how most of my experience of going to Peru to drink ayahuasca had been about working through the shame of having done such a thing in the first place. I spent half a month's salary and met some awful people and a few good ones to discover a fact that I disclose with not a little embarrassment: plants can communicate. Some people will think I'm a crazy asshole for saying so, but they never gave a plant money and had the plant tell them actual facts in return."

—Sarah Miller, "Pirates of the Ayahuasca," n+1, Number Fifty, 2025, pp. 72-73.

[coolcatsonly]

They turn reverently toward museums, schools, and libraries, and renew their ideals through contact with others who are equally in the thrall of great things. Are they not also immigrants to the cities, and is it not thanks to them that the chariot of civilization continues to move forward through the ages?

When cities grow, humanity progresses, and when they shrink, the social body is threatened with regression into barbarism.

Without having studied the question, one might easily imagine that cities are distributed randomly. And in fact, a number of accounts depict the founders of cities leaving to fate the choice of a site on which to settle and build protective walls. The course of the flight of birds, the spot on which a stag was hunted down and taken, or the point at which a ship ran aground determined where a city was to be constructed. Thus the capital of Iceland, Reykjavik, is supposed to have been founded according to the will of the gods. (5)

In 874, the fugitive Ingolfur came in sight of Iceland and cast into the water the wooden images that served as his household idols. He sought vainly to follow their course, but they eluded him, and he had to establish a temporary camp on the shore. Three years later, he rediscovered the sacred pieces of wood, and moved his settlement to a nearby site, which turned out to be as favorably situated as possible in this formidable “Land of Ice.” (6)

(5): Labonne, Annuaire du Club alpin, 1886. [Reclus’ note] (6): Ingolfur Arnarsson was the first settler of Iceland. After being banished from Norway he set sail for Iceland. He brought along the posts from the high seat, or throne, of his home in Norway. On sighting land, he threw the pillars into the sea and asked the gods to wash them ashore at the appropriate spot for a settlement. He lost sight of the pillars and built a farm on the southeast coast. The posts were finally located along the coast to the west, and the settlement was moved to a spot that was given the Norse name “Reykjavik,” or “Bay of Smoke,” after the geothermal steam that rose there.

Elisee Reclus - "The History of Cities," available at http://theanarchistlibrary.org/.

[coolcatsonly]

Some people have work fatigue I have brainrot fatigue (monitoring the situation//cultural studies//saturation)

[coolcatsonly]

I wrote a song on Eight Dollar Mountain in Oregon. I had the idea to make place-based music, so I went to a local scenic spot. In this case, looking out from where I sat on a picnic table at a pullout high on the slope, I looked to the more distant peaks and thought of my past. First, of climbing a 14,000ft peak in Colorado (I only drove my truck up $8 Mtn), then I waxed poetic about a lost love and letting go, and coming to terms with the confusion entailed in being anything at all. I recorded that song (Love All the Time) and a pair of cover songs with my mandolin and the company of an acquaintance from France who joined me for that day trip up the mountain. If you want to listen, the songs are on my Bandcamp page, linked here.

[coolcatsonly]

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but my literacy declined over the past couple years. In what I feel economically-imposed social isolation, I found nowhere for my thinking to go - sharing online didn't feel real enough. I scrolled video after video for days on end. Last year I lived with someone who leans into their own isolation as a woodland hermit, and their way of thinking was surface level, and their time also heavily leaned into online video content, and their way of being rubbed off on me.

I fell into poor thinking from a spliced together web-based logic, and barely read anything apart from social media posts for a long time. I ran into a lot of cognitive hazards.

Today was a better day, as I reflect on these habits of consumption versus action. I began the day reading, I ate more, and better, and I listened to a talk on capitalist eternisation - or the sense that people fall into that there is no alternative to it.

What emerges, thinking of where my mind is now, is that I started to believe, automatically, in some external salvation, like a messiah of some sort that would transform mine and our collective lives. What I realize is that staying engaged in the moment and building the future is what makes things move. Yes, there are non-human forces in the world (the weather, the actions of plants and animals), no, there is no "knight in shining armor" coming to rescue me from isolation and poverty.

Instead of an infinite deferral of my own needs, I am absolving my guilt about past moping, allowing for error and nonlinear growth, and working to believe in myself as a social being. There are few free events where I live, but there are at least enough chances to interact that I feel a modicum of social liveliness.

I would like my learning habits to be daily, rather than weekly or semi-weekly, and I rouse myself some days earlier instead of hiding in bed. I don't want to name my experience as mental illness, but I do recognize that it can be detrimental to be so withdrawn.

My gripe with life is that I die and I do not accept any comforting lie about afterlife or reincarnation, even though I have heard many. I simply know what I get through perception, and I orient consciously toward the material. My dad always tells me to have purpose, but I tend to deny his advice because of a poisonous religious aspect to his thinking and action (which is, at a minimum, patriarchal and racist).

I am extricating purpose from that personal relationship; what I am adding now is a commitment to critical theory as a practice, my particular project which in effect stimulates liberation.

I have also found some web resources for adult literacy and basic learning, so that I have more than just a passing ability to use language and thought. It also gives me something simple but structured to focus on.

As a closing thought, I am grateful for the salmon I ate today, and for the avocado and spinach and bell pepper I was able to add to the grains and beans that are my staple. I am also grateful for the couple of friends I have - that they check in on me and socialize when me when we can arrange it.