Occupation of Independence

It is that time of year, when visitors to the desert rhapsodize about red sunsets.  Here is my contribution:   I didn't deliberately do anything to enhance the colors, and yet it didn't look this red in real life.  The lying cheating camera added the color.  Even the cameras of the world have now been programmed to shoot for the maximum number of hits and clickbait income.  Sigh. Most people probably run their sunset photos through the editing software and then scream about how red the sunset is.  Who do they think they are fooling?  Hell, these days, you could take a picture of dog crap and then edit it into blazing red. There was a time when a red sunset was impressive and real; when a Jimmy Buffet song said, "Sunset is an angel weeping...holding out a bloody sword."  No longer.  I started losing faith in photography ten years ago when photo editing took over. For an analogy, consider when I was shopping for cars a few years ago.  I h...

It is strange  that "hiking" usually means walking in the mountains, when in fact, there is nothing in the mountains in  the desert Southwest.  Mountains are just heaps of rubble.  Sharp rocks.  Nothing green.  No animals, except a "borrego."  Stumble and bumble, slip and slide. In the arroyos in my neighborhood, the world seems lifeless, too, but only from a distance.  Close up you are surprised by all the green vegetation.  The ironwood trees can be 30 feet high!   I can't resist pronouncing the name, ahhrrrnwood.   I am camped low, where the arroyos flatten out.  The "streams" split and then rejoin in the most confusing way.  This is not true closer to the mountains, where the arroyos have steep banks or sidewalls and where the confluences are sensible and predictable.  This put me in a whimsical mood.  My mind drifted off to a Jimmy Buffet song that by chance I had listened to again, a few days back...

Maybe my little dog needed a Christmas present.  It can be frustrating and expensive to bounce around with different doggie boots before you finally find something that works.  Arizona might well convince you the trouble is worth it.  Surprisingly my little darlin' has pretty tough feet. We humans are so spoiled, walking around in shoes, in this gawd-forsaken wasteland.  Stickers, thorns.  Even the damned rocks are so sharp you wouldn't touch them without leather work gloves.   How does she do as well as she does?!  An Arizona dog needs hooves rather than pads. It is almost operatic to dwell on how awful the land is here.  Let it sink in.  Surrender to the horror.  It is quite cathartic.   The good news is that there is a way to beat it.  There are two types of terrain that are kind and gentle for those doggie pads.  Well-traveled two track roads are mercifully easy.  But the supreme highway to heaven in the dese...

  Quite a few Christmas movies have been made.  Most are pure schlock of course, but there is a noble exception.   E very year I like to give an advertisement for the Christmas movie,  "Joyeux Noel."   Its combination of hope and tragedy is quite touching.  A feeling of Hope seems to persist after you see the movie.  It seems especially timely with my own country responsible for two murderous wars right now.  But I don't expect the change of administration to improve the situation. What a shock the Great War must have been to people who believed in the automatic increase of Progress!  And what does the same person think today when they see Israel acting like genocidal German Nazis of World War II?  What was the old saying -- 'Never Again?'

I admit to being a man of the Hinterlands.  When I encounter people from the Left Coast, camping in the desert during winter, they don't seem like they are from the same country as me.   That in itself is not a bad thing.  But it seems like every topic, no matter how mundane, becomes a chance for them to intrude their fanatical ideology. At times it seems like we couldn't discuss the best shoestrings for hiking boots without hearing their tendentious preaching about racism, Trump, fascism, the next Hitler, what happened to the Native Americans, abortion, capitalism, or Climate Change.  They are emotionally addicted to moral indignation and moral posturing, as if screaming at somebody else long enough proves them to be a good person -- at least better than the person they are screaming at.  How do you tell them politely, "Let's just discuss shoestrings, shall we?" from abc.net.au This can get so frustrating.  But maybe that suggests an opportunity.  Tha...

  The recent invasion, conquest, and chaos in Syria seem to have taken the world by surprise.  I think I am using this event in a good way: as a spur to learn something about Islamic history.  Without a newsy and timely spur, it is too easy to put off such a project. I read a couple previews on Amazon.  It was disgusting how obsequious the authors were.  What a double standard!   Western intellectuals hold nothing back when it comes to "higher criticism" of the Bible and Christian traditions.  This seems like a mistake.  A person can be skeptical about a theology without 'throwing the baby out with the bath water.' And then they talk about Islam like they are walking on eggs.  One way to look at that is to call it condescending.   So I bounced around on Amazon and Kobo until I found a book that was rationally critical of the Islamic tradition.  The book was "Did Muhammad Exist?" by Robert Spencer.  It is refreshing to...

Lake Mead.  People have always been fascinated by eclipses, and rightly so.  I felt a different kind of eclipse the other day.   In mid-winter the mighty sun, Sol Invictus, weakens.  You can experience it but you still hardly believe it. High filmy clouds happen in the winter in the Southwestern states.  The sky is bright and cheerful.  But something is missing.  It is a little bit scary. Such clouds are not my favorite.  Recently I had a chance to experience puffy cumulus clouds in the tri-state, time-zone whiplash hell of Utah, Arizona, and Nevada. These photos might appear to show a freakishly variegated geology.  Believe it or not, it is just the lucky lining-up of shadows and mountains.  

Nobody knows for sure how Trump 2.0 will be sabotaged.  Political tricks are like military ones and terrorist ones: you can't use an old tactic a second time because the world has become wise to it.   So this time around it won't be "Russian collusion."  The obvious choice will be to turn Biden's lost and unpopular war into Trump's lost war.  A fair number of Trump's supporters are flag-waving jingoes who want their president to be tough.  Making America Great Again means roaming the world and telling other people who their government should be.  This will make it easy for Trump to stake out a tough position relative to Putin.  Trump's ego needs to show the world what a great deal maker he is. Russia will ignore this game and keep doing what it is doing: winning.  That will cause Trump to bluster a little harder.  In a matter of weeks, Biden's debacle will have become Trump 2.0's debacle. A movie metaphor came to mind.  The reader might ...

One can not praise stoic mental discipline too much during the winter camping season.  You have escaped heat and insects.  Congratulations!  But you must lose on something else, such as neighbors and motorhead yahoos.    Still, a person does have a bit of control over the situation.  In general, physical or geographical relocation does not help too much.  Rather than looking for a spot where you can get away from noisy neighbors, it might work better to be pro-active and give a welcome to good neighbors.  Encourage them to cluster around you.   Even more, maybe solar campers need to work as an organized group. That said, I had a bit of luck at a place where you really shouldn't expect to have much luck.  I was geographically separate from the morons but didn't expect it to last for long.  Still, it lasted long enough for a pleasant surprise as I stepped out of the trailer one morning: What was this beast doing a hundred yards f...

It takes a lot of mental discipline to camp in the desert Southwest in the winter.  It is difficult to escape neighbors with generators.  Some of them specialize in door-slamming or loud music. It helps to keep a sense of humor about one's own aversion to neighbors.  When I manage to get away from the hordes of moron-assholes, and feel pleased with my situation, it is only a matter of time before some vehicle is prowling around, looking for a spot close to me.     Did they see my white box from two miles away and then drive down the bumpy road just for the joy of ruining my camping?  What a look of pure malevolence must be on my face! What part of "Get off my lawn!" do they not understand?  That is when I laugh at myself.   Most of the time the invaders are not as bad as I fear.  It helps to have a plan B if they do turn out to be professional assholes.   From a big picture point of view, a dispersed camper has nothing to complain...

Occasionally a walker in the desert finds something a bit gruesome, in this case a dead burro I guess.   Naturally it will get used as a visual metaphor from time to time on this blog.  Even today I am tempted to put captions underneath it, such as: The last month of the Blinken/Sullivan administration. The state of American diplomacy. Trump's anti-war image. The future of NATO. The German economy. And then my favorite:  'It's only a dry heat.'  But it is winter, so that won't work. It is unpleasant to focus this post purely on the gruesome, so let's get some relief with some nice eye candy from Utah this autumn: