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.

first post in months!

a good spanish word that nobody uses is "chispiante" which literally means "sparky". i'm not even sure i'm spelling it right anymore.
does nobody use it because it's not even a real word?
me and my chilean friends used it between 10 and 100 times a couple years ago. so it's not completely fabricated like the stuff they have at the macys in the shopping center in pittsburgh.
by which we presume i mean that it has some emotion to it, love even, a meaning deeper than the dollar or literal communication.
chispiante is a clever-sharp combo with a side of new.
prometheus was the only one to do something chispiante, as above and also literally, at the same time. ha.

what can i say? pittsburgh is seeping into my veins like jungle juice at a frat party. i could be soberer (metaphorically), but i'm not doing much about it, although everybody around me is doing their part by either dropping me a ladder or putting some distance between themselves and this trainwreck. or at least that's how it feels.
if i could only relax.
life is a state of mind. i'll be happy when i'm relaxed when i'll be happy. i'll relax when i can relax. being home? not actually helping. my fault for sure.

today at the park i met a pleasant fellow. a 31yrold asian cmu grad student. loves computer programming and economics. grand ambition - to write programs for faster-than-human trading companies, make millions.
i had to ask: what will you do with all that money? buy a fancy car?
no, he said, i think i'll buy lots of gold and then bury it with me in one of those things.
a sarcophagus?
yeah.

what happened to my optimism?

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)