sepeblog

After 12 years in the Bay Area, I’ve decided it’s time for a break.

My current plan is to put stuff in storage, pack the truck and head north on June 24th. I’m targeting Southern Oregon. Its a nice midpoint between SF & Portland - two cities that I love and have lots of friends in, but it is also out of California proper and remote enough to feel far away. Actually its been more than twelve years - I’ve lived in the Bay Area since 1976 (with a 5 year hiatus in Santa Barbara for college) So I’ve been living here for 26 of my 36 years on this planet. That alone is reason to move!

I know that this may seem as a sudden shock to some of you; “How can this urban-party-hoppin-networking-multimedia-artist possibly survive deep in the woods?” Who knows?!? Its certainly an experiment. I really don’t know how I’m going to make this life shift. And there is a lot of sadness in leting go of that which is familiar to me - I will miss you my friends! However over the past six years, this intrepid explorer has been trying to reach escape velocity in my search for a life that feels sane. But for whatever reasons my spaceship has come smoking, skidding, crashing, back to this fair city by the sea. Allow me to explain a little about the planet I’m searching for.

I’ll start with the most esoteric reason first, because it really informs the rest, and if you only read a couple paragraphs, then at least I know you got the good stuff.

Reason #1: Sensitize Me

I’m seeking out a place where I can dive into a more intuitive-based way of existing. Natural Rhythms. Silence. Internal Visioning. Clean Healthy Living. I want to make some major changes in my mental, physical and emotional states. (more…)

Loyalty reigns in Bushies’ cult of incompetence

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070320/OPINION03/703200332/1068/OPINION
March 20, 2007
BY LEONARD PITTS JR.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS

First, let me tell you what I’m not here to talk about.

I’m not here to talk about the role politics played in the sacking of
eight U.S. attorneys. Or the fact that newly released e-mail exchanges
and other documents indicate Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his
deputies misled Congress when they said the White House had nothing to
do with the decision to fire those attorneys. Or the fact that Gonzales
is facing bipartisan calls for his head from angry lawmakers

All this I will leave to others. I want to talk about a word that
jumped out at me in news reports about this latest Washington scandal.
The word: loyalty.

(more…)

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/cold_turkey/

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This was passed on to me by my friend Leah Barlow. It comes from Ran Prieur.

How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth
December 19, 2004

1. Abandon the world. The world is the enemy of the Earth. The “world as we know it” is a deadly parasite on the biosphere. Both cannot survive, nor can the world survive without the Earth. Do the logic: the world is doomed. If you stay on the parasite, you die with it. If you move to the Earth, and it survives in something like its recent form, you can survive with it.

Our little world is doomed because it’s built on a foundation of taking from the wider world without giving back. For thousands of years we’ve been going into debt and calling it “progress,” exterminating and calling it “development,” stealing and calling it “wealth,” shrinking into a world of our own design and calling it “evolution.” We’re just about done. We’re not just running out of cheap oil — which is used to make and move almost every product, and which gives the average American the energy equivalent of 200 slaves. We’re also running out of topsoil, without which we need oil-derived fertilizers to grow food; and forests, which stabilize climate and create rain by transpiring water to refill the clouds; and ground water, such as the Ogallala aquifer under the Great Plains, which could go dry any time now. We’re running out of room to dump stuff in the oceans without killing them, and to dump stuff in the atmosphere without wrecking the climate, and to manufacture carcinogens without all of us getting cancer. We’re coming to the end of global food stockpiles, and antibiotics that still work, and our own physical health, and our own mental health, and our grip on reality, and our will to keep the whole game going. Why do you think so many Americans are looking forward to “armageddon” or the “rapture”? We hate this shitty world and we want to blow it up.

(more…)

A Bioregional Perspective: the place vocation
by Alejandro Meitin

Communities are identified with systems that are environmentally recognizable through a comprehensive totality definable as the place vocation. This integration of the place’s symbolic role and the form built in the natural landscape has been represented by art in most cultures.

Advanced research on immunodeficiency recognizes that the human body is connected to the environment by means of a neurochemical communication network that determines our health and wellbeing to a great extent.

Thus, in order to be connected with the environment, it is not necessary to develop a sense of sentimentality or mysticism, not even a vital and intense sense of connection with nature. It is simply necessary to understand the place vocation and to “give advantage” to that feeling, recognizing that the environment -its cultural and natural manifestations- is only an extension of who we are.
…..
…..
In this way, the bioregional perspective of place vocation is strengthened for the purpose of integrating an emergent movement arising from a communal life experience in the form of an autonomous area in which the antipower of cultural and natural remnants grows and acquires corporeal existence in the co-operation, in the flow of life, in the consideration of a movement displayed as a social doing. The work installed through this doing emerges in the experience of collective life and creates the world.

Read the whole article at greenmuseum.org

My health is deteriorating
I get migraines.
I get alcohol poisoning after 2 beers.
I rarely exercise (although I’m very active)
I eat junkfood,
smoke cigarettes,
drink coffee,
and consistently stick my hands into toxic materials.

I live in a major american city where pollution and toxins fill the air and water.
The human population is increasing exponentially.
The government is corrupt.
Poverty and crime are on the rise.
The economic system favors oppression and waste.
The educational system is backwards and inneffective.
The mainstream media is irresponsible and controlled by corporate interests.
The general population continues to consume more and more useless crap.
There is no saving grace of clean renewable alternative energy within the next 50 years &
The world is running out of cheap petroleum.

The ocean is turning acidic.
there are holes in the ozone layer.
the ice caps are melting.
the planet is the warmest is ever been in recorded history.
We are responsible for a mass extinction of species (more info on mass extinction here)
Biodiversity is being irreversibly destroyed by human activities at an unprecedented rate.
The top soil is eroding.
New inventions are continually repressed.

I am less social than I was 5 years ago (although I know more people).
I haven’t been able to maintain a solid intimate relationship for more than 3 months.
Parties seem empty and meaningless (even the “eco-consciosness awareness” ones).

Most of my friends (and myself) seem more concerned with making the next buck than making the next revolution,
or are convinced that making art and being beautiful is enough to affect positive change,
or simply don’t know what to do.

I feel lost. unfocused. innefective and increasingly poisoned.

HELP!

I need help. Humanity is trapped in a sea of doom. And I feel like I’m going down with the ship.

I’m seeking people with vision and action plans.

Not hope, not consolation, not pats on the back. I need a path that makes sense for now.

Soldiers Speak Out is a powerful, first-hand testament to the reality of the military experience told entirely in the words of American veterans who have been to war and are now opposing it. We hear how they came to join the military, about their experiences in training and in war, and what led to the turning point when they decided they could no longer, in good conscience, participate in the war or keep silent. This half-hour documentary sheds light on the growing and courageous anti-war and anti-occupation movement within the military and their families, and serves as a counter-recruitment and organizing tool for activists, schools and organizations. It provides a sober view of the war in Iraq and an important counterpoint to the ’stay-the-course’ rhetoric of the Bush administration.

source: empowermentproject.org
view the trailer… (more…)

This is a beautiful song and video written by Ian Rhett.

http://www.sharedvoice.org/unamerican/

lyrics:
http://www.sharedvoice.org/unamerican/lyrics.html

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i’m really emotional today.
this song makes me cry

tired of watching all my friends party party
tired of watching myself struggle struggle struggle
trying just to get by
trying to bring a smile to another
trying to find what happiness looks like for me

while greed, war, disease, destruction ravage our heritage, our family

tired of feeling like nothing matters
tired of feeling like we have no voice

tired of being ineffective
tired of being afraid

tired of being lied to
tired of not knowing the truth or anything close to it.

tired of being american

I’m just trying to clean up today!