on being obliged to watch

on tuesday, whitey the sheep was slaughtered*. i felt obliged to be present for a lot of reasons, none of them peer pressure--i wanted to bear witness, to experience the impact of a life passing to take responsibility for the role of death in producing a meat- and animal-driven lifestyle, to face my complicitness, to see which parts or which people seemed cruel, if any...i don't think anyone is particularly cruel, and it's not easy for anyone. walt says that if it were easy, one shouldn't be doing it--there's a risk of detachment, of becoming too capable of killing something without thinking about it too much. i took the opposite route, holding on tight to the memory of whitey eating as she bled to death from her neck, slowly crumpling onto the ground but never in pain, never bleating--in short, remembering life as the cost through the process of removing the hide, fat, organs, cutting up the meat into chunks the next day.

in some ways, the experience of watching whitey die and the next day eating a bite of her was a beautiful closed-loop system...her body going to nourish windward, the people and earth and animals, and the impact of the flock on the land is being balanced so that they can survive the winter and to make space for new lambs to be born. i'm coming to feel and recognize my place in these cycles and circles of things--domesticator and cultivator but also spreader-of-seeds, feeder-of-bunnies, enricher-of-earth, consumer-of-predators-and-prey. the truth is that i, and most people i think, don't have nearly enough information to figure out how to choose a diet or way of living that impacts the earth as little (or as positively) as possible...monocrop agriculture and the cultivation of annual grains has fucked a lot of shit up too. and although humans have fucked up a lot more than our due on this planet, it also doesn't seem quite right to put us on the top of it all, the Ruiners and the FuckUppers...the earth has evolved along with us, animals evolved to live in synchrony with humans, cars replaced natural predators in controlling the deer population...how do we begin to take responsibility for all this?

something is always dying for us to eat,
and i think that is one reason i felt obliged to watch.
watching whitey get hoisted up, dying quietly--it didn't make me want to eat meat, really,
and when i ate a little it tasted...okay, i guess.

all my little molecules and cells, nourished on this and that, more and more from this land, from the garden and the goat milk and the soft white wheat, and eventually i will be eaten by a tree hungry for bones and calcium or some grasses or maybe some critter. who knows. but that it as it should be, i think, in this cycle of nutrients and lifegiving and lifetaking. life and death and birth go together, cycling and cycling and keeping each other in check--what separates us is not our faces or our speaking abilities or our ability to build televisions, i think, but our sense that we have a choice about how we want to compete or cooperate, take responsibility or destroy, take lives gracefully in order to live or destroy life in order to dominate. we don't know how, or we have forgotten why, to keep ourselves in check. how to recognize that the resources for us to live and bear children are no longer available...because they're not, we're past topsoil and living on fossil fuels, eating and drinking this painfully extracted blood of the earth.

and what to do with all this knowledge,
all this information that we were never told,
i was never taught,
some of me craves cities and traveling, people people people,
easy small relationships, opening myself daily,
i am not ready to settle and dwell. not here, anyway.
but it lets me see the possibility of how it might be done,
how we might live responsibly with the land and its critters--plants and animals and bacteria and us.
nothing is easy. but we have so many choices.

*the words chosen carefully to describe death are prolific...culling, harvesting, giving death to, slaughtering, butchering, doing...rarely killing.

sensitivity training 101 - on casinos and their food courts

tonight i walked into a casino
looking for the "food court"
and found myself somewhere between the cracks--
it's 2 am and people are lounging in their businesswear and fuck
i'm white but dirty-scruffy, people stare but don't question, and i'm
friendly-fullofaffinity towards the people sweeping, cleaning, mopping, serving
(i asked, "do you like working here?"
and one woman said, "it's okay." and smiled strangely)
or maybe i was the strange one--
oversized dad-coat and bleachedpants, suspenders, my anarchy-democracy sneakers,
hood up,
i closed my eyes to walk through the lines and lines of moneygames,
people sitting like watching TV but playing for high stakes,
what a different kind of "limits" than the spheres
i usually like to touch.

anyway,
i bumped into people and things,
trying to avoid visual overstimulation,
and cause i was white they let me go everywhere, the manager
doublechecked the miso drypowder to see if it was veg
and apologized about the fish stock
and i apologized back to the chinese woman working there
because i felt out of place, guilty, kind of haunted.
"sorry" when my habits of forming chains of association mean that
oh wait i can't eat ANYTHING here and now i'm just picky and you're sorry
so let's cut it all short and i'm sorry.
it's not an apology, i'm just sick of you working here and me eating this shit and the world spinning a speed set by the clanking of change (into the casino owner's pocket at the end of the day, not that fisherman whose fish became dry stock became a little powdered packetbag but don't worry "it's japanese" you just haven't heard of it)

the feeling stuck with me on the bus back to white rock,
just sad,
not enough consumer,
not quite autonomous,
not american, not canadian, and yeah i'm thrilled with my nomadic mentality except it's hard to always be thrilled with being an outsider when most people are still eating up the global-capitalist-nationalist lies we're all told to swallow for our own good,
so i'm left as nothing but a sketch kid in his dad's big jacket
(perfect for liberation, i thought! but who knows about these canadian liquor depots...)

generally, before that,
my night was okay,
a fabulous rendezvous with cecile at a bar called "lolita's" on davie (gay) street,
warm family times.
but my life, built to be better and better for me and the world,
makes me so sensitive to all this BULLshit and oily inorganic faux-"mediterranean" pizza and miso soup from a dried package and fish stock and plastic spoons and styrofoam and teriyaki-who-knows-what and somethings masquerading as vegetables
and i just want to cook for myself, just want some autonomy, just wanna know
where everything comes from and feel good about everything in my body
but at 2 a.m. in vancouver stuck at the bridgeport skytrain-station-slash-casino,
life sometimes gets complicated
+ watearfalls (not cachoeiras, this is a different breed i tell you)
+ demographically oriented marketing
+ dreams of a better life but you know, i think you're not gonna find it here
and i'm pretty sure i'm heading in the right direction for me but sometimes it makes life a little hard to take.

finally back here,
after the taxi driver who rescued me offered me red-white-blue wine and asked
"you don't like girls? you don't like boys? who are you?"
with his arm creeping round my shoulder onto my thigh and oh oh oh please just get me to marine street)

missing the 24 hour plays, buddies, festivities, celebration,
queer love,
hugs,
karma,
spontanaeity,
lentils,
fabrications of autonomy,
fabric of reality,
lots of things lacking&surfeiting tonight. looking forward to coming home tomorrow.

and casinos suck for reasons! now you know!

fuck europe

for eating all of my money. fucking a.

this is an unimaginative post, it's just me sharing links. then i'll get off the screen and go to the barn.

Saturday evening in Pune someone bombed the German Bakery. Now the count is 9 dead, 60 injured. I wonder if the U of C will do a program there next year.. it's a funny city. I don't know why anyone would target the Pune German Bakery over any of the other ones in the country. Maybe proximity to the Osho Ashram? (AKA the Sex Ashram, it's an expensive place to go and very popular with western tourists. and they hang out at the german bakery a lot. it's a good place to meet creeps and drink kombucha and watermelon juice (mmmm), eat green hummus and really really good coffee-chocolate cake). I guess Headley (one of the main guys involved in planning the 26/11 attacks in Bombay last year) visited the Osho last year, scoped it out. so maybe... well anyway. this happened. feels weird.

completely unrelated to that
I've been listening to the radio because the CD player in my parents car is still broken from when justin, alonso and I went to Maine last december. 1) it's all gaga 2) if it's not gaga, it's me trying to figure out what magic is contained in the refrains of these three songs
Replay by Iyaz

Whatcha Say by Jason Derulo

Let's Hear it for New York by Jay Z and Alicia Keys

there's something in these refrains that makes me feel something. it comes from outside of me and i feel good or strong, or like driving faster, or like singing loudly and bouncing up and down. also present in the Kaskade Remix of Break the Ice by Britney (~50 seconds in). this sort of feeling I think is unique to pop. it feels contrived, dirty, manufactured. it's like the assholes who made that song "Tonight's Gonna Be a Good Night" knew they were gonna make it big.

i think it's that aaj kal (these days) I'm supersensitive to media. I feel like I'm overloading, I'm hyperstimulated. my mind's been whirling a mile a minute, even now when I'm alone with my dog in the house. I can't be quiet except when I went to the Quaker meeting house on sunday. i'm so excited and confused to be back and but i haven't yet given myself any responsibilities that come with home. whirr whirr whirring with activity and a low balance on my bank account. waahfladjklfa ca

but while we're on the topic of youtube,
check out Julia's Bad Romance video (julia is mine and justin's friend. she lives in Mass and made this video for something at her school. &she won!)

oh also wayyyyy to much gaga. i'm taking a break for a while. probably until j comes back. (a week)

tingle tangle...pull one string and the others feel it

I've been thinking about the worlds we build together. The vortex you force into being with just you and a few other people. Last week I was thinking about time travel and after talking to Lelz about memory and shaping of the past through thought and interpretation, I've been thinking about the tangles of reality-bending groupdom that exist beyond time and space (though they are infintely bounded to us) that we have forged in the fires of our hearts. Wormholes, of the non-physics variety. Gravitational pulls of the charismatic type. I'm talking about radiance.

Edward said to Jane, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you - especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, - you'd forget me."

And I believe that. It is the thing I have believed the longest. It is as close to a Bible verse or a benediction as you will get with me.


Do you know what it means to be a Sagittarius? I apparently can't believe in string. Knots should be beyond me. I couldn't tie my shoes if I tried. I should be warding off potential strings with a pair of trusty silver shears at all times. So what's the deal here? I am breathtakingly befuddled.

Where does all this come from anyway? Existence itself is an incomprehensible squall of accident and pure chance. A stew of unplanned happening, right? What then is the desire to frantically attach a web of strings to various creatures and persons and objects? And further to arrange the strings, to move and jockey and position one's self, to arrange those strings into a clean, pleasing, BEAUTIFUL in that it's meaningful way? Into a web, like a spider.

And the tangle of our veins. Here is a system I love: the cardio-vascular system. Perfectly positioned. But put one thing out of place and it all goes wrong. We build webs to match our veins, delicate as all get out. But we are capable of abstraction. We are capable of existing beyond what is natural, to rise above our nature. What kind of statement is that? Rising above our baser nature, is that not seeping reek of Christianity? But I think we could be more abstract. In love, I mean. In loving one another, we could be more abstract, don't you think?

And the second self? What if there is a third self? And a fourth self? More than one equal and more than one likeness? Or even, if there is no second self at all, no loss of you-ness because you never existed. What then would love or friendship or acquaintance-hood look like? No desire for completion, fulfillment, no unending search, no more Hugh Grant movies. Only contact. And really then, really, really, really, what would selfhood be? Could it be radiant, unshackled? Could we make defunct the phrase, "Defining myself by..."

I'm trying to say - I don't know if this is about me, or about you, or about us. I don't know if the horizon is getting blurry or if my eyes are getting worse. I looked to the internet (a new thing we are trying) and it said, "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: ... Post this address all over the Internet and curious people will click to a ... Dear Leticia, This morning, I looked up at the beautiful blue sky, ... Thank you sharing in this wonderful year with us! ... Love & Gratitude, ..." and also "It also makes me wonder if we can't administer oxytocin to ameliorate some behavioral problems. .... the jackpots of treats would soon come to outweigh the fear of the trim. ... I assuaged my grief and need for fur contact by knitting up all the yarn ... when suddenly I am hanging on to their leashes for dear life"

Well. So, yes, I'll be knitting up all the yarn. And kissing. And hanging on for dear life.

for your consideration...

i think this is a pretty interesting article that conflicts interestingly with this whole line of thinking i've been doing about alienation, labor exploitation under capitalism, greed, excess, money...for me, this makes me want to think more about the language i'm using to describe the system and where i'm placing (or depriving) people of agency/desire to do good. (what is the desire to "do good?") anyway. i'd love to hear your thoughts.

whole text is at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/2007/02/army-of-altruists.html

"Army of Altruists: On the alienated right to do good
By David Graeber
Harper's Magazine 2007

You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq. -- Senator John Kerry (Democrat, Massachusetts)

Kerry owes an apology to the many thousands of Americans serving in Iraq, who answered their country's call because they are patriots and not because of any deficiencies in their education. -- Senator John McCain (Republican, Arizona)"

(continue reading here)

from the warm&quiet isolation of the regenstein,
elz

fuck all states

i cant, i wont, i dont have time. im supposed to be writing, or thinking, or sleeping, or buying a plane ticket to singapore, or dancing,  or or orrr or

my visa expires in six weeks. i dont want to leave. i have to leave and spendspend spend sending my money to jetairways or kingfisher so they can buy petrol and shoot me over to the land of fast bureaucracy where visas are fast and plentiful, 

if i can

if they allow foreigners to put their life and lineage and intentions on a PDF and pay $150 and get a stamp in a book and get punted back across the bay, sea, ocean to the land of slow bureaucracy and classical dance festivals and trains to the mountains

at this point it's just cheaper to come home in six weeks

fuck everything

i have a 10 page paper due about ________ by sunday morning (it's friday night). i have one paragraph written. all my friends are leaving tomorrow by 7pm. alex and chloe are ready to go, samantha never wants to leave, hannah is going to delhi to meet her parents and "do" rajasthan. i'll see her in chennai later. then pondicherry, ooty, and back to delhi? names names names and places i've seen so many places. im writing about temples... when they are sacred and when they are not. ive been in 9 active temples, 9 places of ambiguous or informal worship, and 18 abandoned temples. if there is no image in the center shrine, and if the image is not bathed and fed and adorned daily by a brahmin, there is no normatively sacred space but i still take my shoes off and stay quiet like a museum. why are ruins museums? 

hannah has returned to use her computer

now my room is hoppin

life is complicated

i hate a lot of things

but am confused and feeling so many thingswordswordswordsss

can't sleep with the man who dims my shine

so last saturday justin and i left port angeles to begin a 6-day adventure into and around olympic national park
and while i was there, and after i've come back, i've wondered how to write about it here
because as certainly as i am a cephalopod,
this was an adventure.

here is a map and some lists. they suffice to tell the story.

purple star is where i live, red is bus, yellow is hitchhiked, blue is hiked

things i saw (copied from my notebook-- i made these lists every night except the first and last):
sun 30 aug at the beach in lapush
-mushrooms: alcohol inky caps, mycena amicta, wine-colored agaricus
-bald eagle atop a rocky outcropping with a seagull diving at it
-a living, washed up shark, about 3 feet in length
-wily chipmunks
-surfers
-grizzled gulls
-my breath
-pelican party
-the town of forks, taken over by twilight-readers/watchers
-trees and rocks that look like caspar david friedrich paintings, only west coast so no oaks-- spruces instead

mon 31 aug in the hoh river valley (948 ft elev)
-lots of mushrooms! including chicken of the woods and baby oysters, pleated pluteus, tawny almond waxy cap, yellow pholiotus
-a skeletal mountainside, graves of trees, white from a fire 30 years ago
-my broken camera
-the hoh river, bluey grey with rock and trees, classic pacific northwest image
-big big tree with a whole ecosystem at its base so tall and thick
-moss on phone booth roof at visitor center

tues 1 sept at hoh lake, (4500 ft elev)
-mushrooms! orange, purple, red, brown, white, scaly vase chanterelle
-the clouds from above (and in them, and below them)
-BIG BIG BIG cedars, spruce, fir
-a composting toilet with spectacular mountain views
-right now, these ridiculous trees covered in moss.dripping from everywhere, a light, sickly green, like something dr seuss or meghan would draw
-the meadows which smelled like delicious baking
-a doe and her 2 fawns
-a black bear bumbling on the hillside opposite our camp
-these mountains mountains snow and glaciers (mount olympus and all its peaks)
-tadpole parade
-submerged logs in hoh lake, slumber slumber
-trout babes and jumping fish

2 sept at appleton pass (5000 feet elev)
-that black bear, but close up
-an owl at bogachiel peak
-ravens at heart lake
-a goat outside our tent, nibbling and sniffing and terrifying
-blueberries blueberries blueberries staining my fingers and lips
-two small scummy nasty ponds

and there's no more written in my journal for the trip anymore, though the next day we went to the hot springs on our way out of the park so i got all this sludgey slime on me and smelled like eggs and nakedly asked strangers for directions. and saw a beautiful forest along boulder creek... the descent from appleton pass, though it was rainy, may have been my favourite part of the trip (???)

my mental soundtrack (songs that got stuck in my head on those long silent days of walking):
'leaving today!' christina aguilera
'i like it rough' lady gaga
'i am a wizard' harry and the potters
'genius next door' regina spektor
'man, i feel like a woman' (who sings this??)
'be our guest' beauty and the beast
'felix felicis' harry and the potters
'can you feel the love tonight' lion king (the parts where timon and pumbaa are talking)
'welcome' christina
'paparazzi' gaga
'elbow room' schoolhouse rock

and i can't remember anymore! i tried hard to remember my mind's playlist.

in other news i am trying to remember hindi and it is really sad. and to do reading for my civ class which starts in 3 weeks BLECH

also blech that this farm is boring and i can't imagine being here until the 19th... i have arranged a rideshare out of seattle on the 20th. there's really nothing to do here; i think all i do is weed and harvest. by the time i leave i will have accomplished nothing! weeds grow back and so do veggies. maybe i'll run away somewhere earlier or something. suggestions?
gee this blog has gotten active and i like it. hello good work i like your brains
.zee

the marked hen

this is not a story for the faint of heart

here on west wind farm there live about 25 mature hens who lay about 25 eggs every single day. in a separate coop there reside about the same number of 3-month old chicks (who are black and blue and slightly brown and haven't grown their red gobble gobbles on their heads), who will replace the others when they become too old (they're near the end of their lives).
russell, the 22 year old from seattle who came to these lands 4 months ago and has decided he will never leave, is the master of the hens. he feeds them, collects their eggs, and spends good time with the chicks, allowing them to become accustomed to the human touch.
about two weeks ago, russell began noticing queer occurences in the coop. at least one, if not as many as 3, eggs were broken each dusk as he went in to collect them. who was the culprit? the mystery continued...
until last week, russell walked into the coop and saw a hen run out of the wall of nests, with a shell and bit of yolk on her beak. she was caught red handed.

quickly she was moved out of the mature hens coop and into the pen with the younger hens where she could not eat any more eggs. but she kept getting back into her old coop, the wily one. she was then splattered in blue paint, for us to more easily identify the disrupter of order on the farm. since then she has remained with the younger ones.

and there are still more gruesome facts... it seems she is teaching the young chicks of her ways; by laying eggs and pecking at them. the young chicks have never seen eggs before and now, it is feared, all they know is to peck at them until they break.

something must be done about the marked hen. it is russell's mission (a directive from peter, master of the lands) to get rid of her. most likely by outsourcing her death to a neighbor who will find some unsavory use for her tough body.

she will be remembered by the few as a boundary-breaking, devil-may-care, rebel with an unknown cause who was murdered for her beliefs.

rest in peace, marked hen.


----
edit at 3:07pm:
russell dutifully placed the hen in a dog crate and about 10 minutes ago coleman (the neighbor) came by with his dogs in the bed of his truck, placed the hen in with them, and rode away. her body will be too tough to eat plain-- she will have to be boiled or put in a stew in order to be tasty. i told peter i hoped i wouldn't get carted away if i started drinking my menstrual blood and he said if people found out, i just might. but then again no one harvests my blood to sell at saturday markets for $4/dozen. this is so fucked up... she is being killed for eating her own eggs (she laid and ate another one today). apparently with chickens these days it's actually bred out of them to fuck. there is a rooster here who lives with 25 hens and only rarely does one of them actually guard her egg and take care of it (it's called brooding) because she knows it's fertilized.
maybe we will have a little ceremony tonight for her by the fire.