Occupation of Independence

The world just doesn't appreciate how hard Greta (Thunberg) and I work to save the Planet. My earlier post about imposing a planetary lockdown against scenery tourism did not generate a massive amount of applause. Very well then, I accept the challenge of  improving the plan. Just look at the throw-away water and soft drink bottles that have to be hauled out of here after a holiday! Disgusting. How about a $1 tax on every one of those bottles. I'm not being facetious. I wonder how many of these bottle-junkies are blue-voting, green-voting hypocrites from Boulder and Denver. There should be a "head tax" every time they cross the county line.  Better yet, tourists should be sent to a dot gov site to initiate the process of filling out a simple 23-screen application for a scenery-passport. Guarantee them a response within 6 months. If they don't like this method, they could stay closer to home where there are excellent recreational trails and public parks. If those

I was almost laughing at myself as I did it: as I drove the utility vehicle by a campsite of (south Asian) Indians, I waved at small Indian children, and they waved back. It was impossible not to feel delighted with the little munchkins.  I actually remember my grandparents acting like that around my siblings and me 60 years ago. But I never act like that around mainstream-white-middle-class kids, and haven't for decades. In fact I completely ignore them. I dislike them. Why the double standard? Physical cuteness? -- nah. Do they first perceive behavior from me that then starts them into cute behavior? Or do they start it? What a strange thing it is for a human to be delighted with just about any dog and to feel indifference or even disdain toward little members of his own species. I doubt my reaction is all that different from most Americans. It is possible that the inability to be delighted with "our own" children is one of the best proofs that we are circling the drain

Two perfect days in one week. You won't believe this but I actually sat in a chair outdoors.  Rare for me, but some people do a lot of it. The air was a little cool and the sun was a little warm. So it was possible to adjust the angles to be perfect. But what about what really matters: the wind. It was dead calm. What a rare experience it is in the Southwest not to feel under relentless assault from the sun and wind and blowing dust. Perfect moments are really perfect when they are combined with just the right music. A good suggestion for this moment is Schubert's Rosamunde D. 797, No.3 (Andantino). My goodness, they love to label things with confusing jargon. It is on an album, "Schubert, The Essentials." In order to deprive Bezos of a little business, my music comes from ClassicalArchives.com  .    

Many people have probably watched videos of the tsunami that hit Japan a half dozen years ago. Some people describe the shoreline pulling out to sea just before the tsunami hits. Sometimes they talk about an eerie silence. I guess that is easy to explain: as the shoreline pulls away from you, the usual sound of waves on the shore is further away from you. _____________________________________  Today I was trying not to surrender to Fear and Dread about the upcoming holiday since there should be one more day of normalcy, it seemed. It was late morning and yet the wind was not howling. The morning outflow of campers was already over. The campground had an eerie silence to it. I turned the engine off so I could just soak it in. It was a precious moment and deserved to be honored. Then suddenly, without any warning, cars started driving into the campground. Their driving wasn't blatantly aggressive, but somehow it seemed menacing. Oh no, here it comes! I thought it would hold off until

  The Texans are readying their rigs for the start of the camping season in Coloraduh. It has been a while since we had a caption contest, so... Credit goes to Ed, the great quotemeister of the internet!

  It has made the virus-lockdown easier for me to focus on the good things that came out of it. For instance, I have always been in favor of 6 feet of distance between people. Being greedy about it, I would prefer 6 become 10. I like seeing those plexiglass sneeze-guards go up to protect people who work in retail settings and get sneezed on 100 times per day, during a typical flu and cold season. Let's hope the plexiglass stays up. It is disappointing that half the parking spaces at stores haven't been painted off. Wouldn't it be nice to open your car doors and not worry about smacking somebody else or getting smacked by them? Many people eat "out" less than in the past, and save a small fortune by that discipline. And if you do eat out, the diners next to you aren't bumping into your chair every time they shift a little bit. If I were a Democrat I would be worried about the nonchalance of people in ultra-blue Colorado about mask-fear-compliance. (Granted, the

  Help me here, people. I am trying to get worked up to doing a little homework on the Mind-Body Problem of philosophy. But before tackling this, it is worth noting how being a campground host opens your mind up to question democratic pieties of the 1800s. Countries ratcheted their way towards universal suffrage back then, as if going one more notch in that direction was "Progress." I wonder if any of the mighty theorists of universal suffrage had ever worked at a retail store or as a campground host. Now that I have made excuses for dismissing history and political sciences as useless theorizing, let's move on to philosophy. Let's take Plato as the symbol of the Mind-Body Problem. He was a male. Would a female philosopher, tied closer to the circle of life, be as easily taken in by the notion of disembodied thought? Didn't Plato have a house-full of slaves and servants that got him out of doing a hour of honest work in his life? That also makes it easier to sit o

  A couple posts ago I was admiring some campers' fortitude and cheerfulness when bad weather hit.   Yesterday I was in town all day. Returning in the late afternoon, I was surprised to see the campground 1/3 full of undaunted campers. They were quite upbeat despite hours of cold rain. One campsite in particular was fun to drive by. They were the only ones who had managed to get a fire going. The rain was too slow to put it out. The fire had no practical effect on their body temperatures; nor did they cook with it. Everybody uses a stove. But what an effect the fire had on them and me psychologically! Naturally it brings to mind that movie "In Quest of Fire" by the French director, made back in the '80s. Do you suppose they will manage to get the fire started this morning? We have five inches of snow and it is still falling. They are quite intrepid and seem to enjoy the challenge of everything. It would make a wonderful picture if they got it going again. I will run o

What a world it is! It certainly made me appreciate some progress taking placing in the RV industry. I spoke to an older generation RVer who was on their maiden vogage with their loooonnnnng trailer. There were all bushy-tailed and bright-eyed about living the dream. He was from Texas, where his rig might have been a good fit. There were three sites (out of 25) in this campground where his rig would have fit. But of course, they were filled. But he still felt optimistic. After all, they were finally living the dream. from lovethoseclassicmovies.blogspot.com I don't know where they ended up camping for the night. He mentioned that they were now on their way to Moab. Talk about leaving the fry pan for the fire! It was reminiscent of Lucille Ball in "The Long, Long Trailer." I got a kick out of the conversation. In contrast, consider the younger generation in their vans: they can actually fit in campgrounds or parking lots. They are wise to give up on the long RVs of the old

I am still waiting for somebody to explain a bizarre situation that affects many thousands of people per year in Coloraduh. There is this enormous crush of campers trying to get into campgrounds that simply aren't that desirable in the first place.  Why? Don't worry, I won't go on a rant about everything that sucks about Coloraduh camping. The specifics are already well known and are too depressing to read. The explanation is what is at issue. Consider an analogy: my first time in New York City, as a bit of a young hayseed, I exited the taxi from the left side of the back seat. The driver instantly tensed up and shouted, "Hey man, this is New Yawk..." or something like that. With all the traffic rushing by at suicidal speeds just a few inches to the left of the taxi, I believed the driver, took his advice, and didn't make that mistake again. So why is there this crush of people showing up at sunset on a Friday night at a campground in Coloraduh? Couldn't t

I was pleased the other day when I walked up a trail to a tourist attraction, despite disliking tourist attractions and rocky trails. Many people see aversions as a "negative" thing, something to be avoided at all costs. Rubbish.  Aversions are part of a natural cycle that "charges up" the intensity of subsequent pleasures. Without aversions and suffering, experiences are just a bland sugary routine consumer experience. They become American cheese. Yes, the trail was rocky. So I had to reach out in some non-standard-tourist direction to escape this aversion. For awhile it felt good to throw rocks off the trail. Then I got close enough to the waterfall to hear it. It is an interesting and unique sound. Soon we were at the creek below the waterfall, but still couldn't see it. The air was cool and moist. What higher praise can you give? It was a microclimate there along the creek. The trees were tall and straight, unlike the usual scrawny diseased trees of Colorado

A couple times during the night I heard a funny sound on the metal roof of my camper trailer. It must be a very light rain or mist, I thought. Not so. In the morning the campground woke up to an inch or two of snow. It was not crowded here last night, but we had a half dozen campers.  Some people's reaction to this photo might be, "Can't they find something better to do?" It was dead calm for the first time in days. And it was calm in another sense of the word: snow in the trees seems to make it seem quieter, a lovely feeling that is almost the ultimate luxury in a noisy, overcrowded world. One young man was camping by himself. He had his kit arranged neatly on his picnic table. Steam was rising out of his coffee pot. I asked why his tent fly had no snow on it; he said the support-poles were collapsing a little, so when he got up for breakfast, he just shook the snow off. What an attitude this guy had! He took what other people would consider a setback, and made it a

Long-suffering readers of this blog probably think I am such a snob about scenery-tourism that I wouldn't be caught dead in a tourist area. (And a cynical reader probably just thinks I am doing this just to give myself something to complain about...) But here I am, campground-hosting four miles outside a national park. We essentially function as an overflow bin for the national park. And here I was, walking up a trail to a waterfall that a hundred thousand (?) other people do every year. How was I supposed to think about this?  Was I supposed to be excited about the mere act of gawking at a waterfall? What for? -- I have already seen a photo of it. (Essentially that is my argument for the fundamental uselessness of scenery-tourism.) But it was early in the day, so the tidal wave of tourism hadn't yet hit. Nor did I get hot, as usual on a hike. It was strange how many softball-sized rocks were on the trail. Why were the tourists so lazy? They should have kicked some of these sem

We were driving up the steep road, up and into the Sangre de Cristo mountains. It was BLM land so you could still see between the smallish trees. Off to the south I saw something I had never seen before in person: a wall of dust coming north. It was almost unnatural looking because the wall was a straight line, lined up east-to-west, and advancing northward through Colorado's San Luis valley. (Technically it is Colorado, but in reality it is the northern end of New Mexico.)  My camp was 1500 feet above the valley floor, so perhaps it would be above the oncoming wall of wind and dust? Nope. The rush of wind and dust happened in a couple minutes. Visibility fell to a couple hundred yards. But in five minutes it was over and the sun came out again. So the experience was mild compared to the Great Mother of All Haboobs which hit Arizona a couple years ago. Still, it was a 'personal best.' The famous Arizona haboob of 2018 Most people don't go through that many freakish nat

If you aren't careful, you can get discouraged by thinking about the state of the world. One way around this is to ignore news programs and pundits' articles and essays. This has worked well for me. Another technique is to think about what you can do today during your "off" hours, compared to your recent ancestors. They could spend their evenings watching sitcoms and commercials on television, or listening to pop music on the radio. There was no way for them to watch classic movies. They had books, you say. Did they? How many books did they have access to in small towns? Compare that to the books and music available online to anybody anywhere today! I thought about this when I was watching the Criterion Edition of the Russian movie "War and Peace" made in the 1960s. I am indeed fortunate. Ironically this movie does tie in with world events. Consider the reckless saber-rattling and trouble-making by NATO and the USA's Deep State in Ukraine. I doubt that t

If you shop around for 'sleep, relaxation, ambient, white noise' music, they try to sell on their relaxing sounds of nature. Since when are the sounds of nature necessarily sleep-inducing? Last night I was on another cliff-line in southwestern New Mexico. The wind was howling, although most of the fury seemed to be in the tree tops. The forest floor was semi-calm, comparatively. But it sounded like a storm at sea. Think of the courage that sailors had until the last couple generations. It is hard for we moderns to imagine it. Here is a photo from the archive of myself and the Little Mariner, "clambering off a lee shore" near the tip of the Baja peninsula. When you have been camping in the desert for awhile, it seems dangerous to be where ponderosa trees weighing tons could possibly fall on you. It happens. Remember that this area has volcanic rocks near the surface so the trees' root systems are not well-developed. I felt under attack. But at sunset the wind fell