Occupation of Independence

 It seems like every "fall back" season, when Daylight Time goes back to Standard Time , I am traveling near the junctions of Utah , Arizona , and Nevada .  What a mess that makes! I start off with Mountain Daylight Time , then Mountain Standard , then Arizona Time , and finally Pacific Standard .  The only thing I miss is Pacific Daylight . I hate resetting the clock in the van.  Various electronic devices in my trailer do not adjust themselves -- perhaps they would if I spent an hour wading through the Settings menu.  The phone is the only gadget that is adjusted automatically, but I have always wondered if it uses the Time at the celltower or the time at the phone's location. And my poor little dog.  When do I feed her?  She only cares about the Tummy Time Zone. Still, this area makes for a nice visit.  Yes St. George Utah now has the traffic of Las Vegas .  What a skill it is to allow yourself to visit a place that used to b e good, and...

 Has it finally come to this?  The Traitor-in-Chief in the White House calls MTG a "traitor", despite his ambassador to Israel, Huckabee , having had a meeting with a convicted spy and traitor, Jonathan Pollard . Is there no limit to how craven the US government can be towards Israel? Anyway,  Kim Iversen deserves to be praised for her recent video on this topic. Maybe it is time to plant FBI agents in the congregations of Protestant Evangelical churches , make Christian Zionists register as foreign agents, and keep them on electronic bracelets in the mean time. The Wall of Shame for American politicians

  Israel's war of extermination in Gaza has radicalized me.  It has made me openly contemptuous of anything connected with the old Canaanite storm god, Jahweh. (Or El , if you prefer.)  This bumped my You Tube algorithm towards the " Cold Reason " channel.  Typically they beat up on Christianity, probably because it is an easy and obvious target.  I would rather see them go after other religions, for a change.  And they finally did:  They savaged Buddhism recently. Buddhism usually gets a lot of good press, but does it really deserve it?  Perhaps it gets off too easily, just because it is a non-Abrahamic religion  and because the European and American audience wants to rebel against the religion of its parents. Buddhism likes to promise tranquillity, coming from the extinction of desire  and pulling away from the world.  But we will all be peaceful enough when we are dead, so why brag up Quiescence while we are still alive? In ...

 I did a double-take when I saw the sign at the grocery cart corral: Was the grocery store bragging about not charging you for a grocery cart?  What the heck was going on? Next to this line of grocery carts was another: Now they are bragging about not needing an app to go grocery shopping?  Wait a minute: they had tablets built into the dashboard of the grocery cart! And fancy charging stations for the grocery cart tablets.  Can someone please explain how this lowers the price of groceries ? What is the purpose of the tablets, anyway?  Was it to encourage you to use digital coupons, something that I never use in stores?  Actually I never understood the purpose of coupons of any kind. Ahh, but wait.  The real purpose of electronic tablets attached to the grocery carts must be to force advertisements and obnoxious music on the shopper, like those damn videos and music at the gas pump. Recall that funny dialog in " The Mirror Has Two Faces ," when t...

 What's the official inflation rate these days?  2.9%?  And they wonder why ordinary people don't believe the government anymore.  I looked twice because I was so shocked.  The washer was a large one; it should have cost $5 or so. There weren't any customers there.  And I left too.  There was an old-fashioned laundromat a few blocks anyway that had good machines and reasonable prices. A long-suffering reader probably thinks, "Why should we listen to you?  You are just an old cheap-skate." But actually, I happily spend a little more at laundromats that have an attendant who keeps things clean and orderly.  I don't mind spending a little more if it is going to a real person. But the laundromat with the $11 washer had been redesigned to look like a Starbucks or something.  Let me guess: some giant Wall Street firm like Blackrock is buying up small, modestly priced, old-fashioned laundromats across American, and then "upscaling" them.  ...

 Most people born before 1980 have memories of the demise of the Soviet Union around 1990 and 1991.  Do you remember how unreal and sudden it seemed?  It seemed too good to be true.  At the time, I wondered most about how nuclear weapons were going to be divided up amongst the constituent parts of the old Soviet Union. Much to everyone's relief, the world made it through those times without any mushroom clouds.  Then Wall Street went to work on the Soviet carcass.  And NATO began expanding.  The military-security industry shifted its justification from the Cold War to the Global War on Terror . And now many Baby Boomers have lived to see another extraordinary political earthquake: the sudden dissolution of Zionist support in the USA.  Of course, I am only talking about public opinion.  How exactly will this trickle up to the institutions?  It is hard to imagine a tangible path.  The political elites in Europe and America have...

 It can take so many years to become a good walker , but it is worth the thought and effort.  I was camped in such a nice place and with such good weather that I fell easily into a slow, leisurely sauntering.  Perhaps the slowness helped me spot a pretty and rare orange flower , at the beginning of November.  At this time of year?  Flowers seemed completely out of place, here. A couple days later, the small handful of such flowers was gone. I have always appreciated autumn flowers .  They are, to the more voluptuous flowers of early summer, what a sturdy, dependable 35 year old wife is to a beautiful 19 year old girl. Having a good role model certainly helps one become a good walker, and you know who mine is: If you think I praise dogs too much, the photo above shows that humans can add something positive to the world.  What care somebody had gone to, in building this emergency shelter !  Still, dogs really do have the right attitude to being good...

' Wadi ' is an Arabic term that you might remember from the movie, " Lawrence of Arabia ."  It is a valley that is dry most of the year, and sees water flow a couple days per year.  My area in central Utah has a wadi with a lot of mud deposited on the floor.  But water concentrates and carves out steep-walled slots 10 to 20 feet deep, in this otherwise flat area. The edge of the slot is almost a perfect 90 degree corner.  I was reluctant to walk within 3 feet of this edge, out of fear of it crumbling away.  Looking along the mud slot I could see a lot of places where the walls had collapsed.  In the narrower slots, this would trap a man. But I poked at those 90 degree corners with my hiking pole, and found them surprisingly strong. My little sweetie pie walked along the edge, close enough to give her daddy a heart attack.  At one spot she stumbled when she was only a couple inches from the edge.  But she quickly recovered. She might not have been...

Central Utah .  Most scenery tourists go ga-ga over redrock cliffs , canyons , and arches .  After all these years, I still enjoy seeing such things and look forward to my October migration through Utah.   But once a 10,000 foot, sheer vertical, fire engine red cliff becomes a standard postcard, it loses its aura of mystique.  The human mind yearns for a sense of wonder, and that can only come from being  surprised.  Such as vertical arroyo walls in mud :  Yes, I laugh at myself for preferring this kind of scenery.  But I can't help it.  We will return to this "slot" canyon soon, unsnap the doggie, and enjoy a genuine exploration.  Free of the tourist industry .

 Most people probably know someone who has has gone off the deep end when it comes to religion.  They can't make it through the day without popping another religion-pill. Before feeling superior to that person, a non-religious person should admit that human beings need a certain amount of emotional comfort  -- perhaps coming from a violent catharsis --  and if there aren't constructive approaches to that issue, people will be find a bad approach. Let's back up a step and try to summarize the history of Christianity over the last 500 years, in just a few sentences.  The Protestant Reformation brought on a century of religious wars that discredited the whole idea of taking religion seriously.  At the same time, the Scientific Revolution happened. So, in the 1700s, European intellectuals outgrew their Christian traditions .  They had enough common sense not to throw out the 'baby with the bathwater.'  They just wanted to deemphasize sadistic not...

Last post I was up to my old tricks of denigrating intellectuals, theologians, and philosophers, while praising the cyn ical point of view, in the original sense of the word, meaning 'dog-like.'  So it is quite a contradiction to praise purpose in walking.  But how can I resist praising purpose when walking in the desert southwest ?  In the north, hiking trails wind their way to mountain tops.  The path seems random and pointless.  Actually, what good is a mountain peak?  It is just barren rock.  You can't eat it. If you walk in a rocky and jumbled desert landscape, without official trails, you feel lost initially.  But then you forget about yourself and start to melt into the land.  The natural highways are arroyos , dry washes.  Your walk latches onto the arroyo.  You soon become part of a larger purpose: winding and flowing down to the great southwestern Father of Waters, the Colorado River . Every autumn I look forward to these...

  It is remarkable how you can spot a little dog even when it is almost completely camouflaged by the surrounding rocks.  Of course, she has to move.  The human eye and brain notice motion so easily. She runs around like a maniac, investigating every crack between the rocks.  Jumping left, right, up, down, cornering, braking.  She runs off-leash in a geometrical puzzle world and is interested in every bit of it.  Strangely there is no wildlife around here, except lizards .  I am in awe of her earnest playfulness.  She is as engrossed in it as young children get sometimes, in their play. A camouflaged cutie If she would just come back to me better, she would get more off-leash freedom.  But in reef country , there is so little vegetation that I can see her if she runs off, and there is no need to have a great fear of coyotes -- I doubt they can even make a living here. A couple times per year I like to give advertisements for a scene in Cha...

 It was getting on to mid-day, but it was still calm like early morning.  The air was a bit chilly.  I was underdressed.  A strange idea popped into my head: maybe I should move to the south side of the trailer and find a nice warm rock to sit on.  I did so.  And just basked in the sun , comfortably, with no desire for anything more than for it to stay just the way it was. This strangeness excited me into a sort of reckless euphoria .  Maybe I should take the little dog for a 30 minute loop.  In the middle of the day!  We did so, and had a great time. In a long career as a camper and outdoorsman , I had never basked in the sun before.  I had never gone for a walk in the ' heat of the day .'

 People who don't live in the western states just don't appreciate how boring and monotonous dry skies can be.  So it is worth jumping up and down over real clouds and rain, and we had some recently in central Utah . If I lavish superlatives over this kind of weather, what is actually accomplished?  Talk is cheap.  What I really need to do is put my money where my mouth is. Seriously, what better way is there to celebrate the occasion, for a professional cheapskate , than to loosen up a little and buy the first real raingear I have owned for years?  But that's not so easy.  Have you ever noticed how mens' rain jackets are waist-length jokes?  Womens', on the other hand, are knee-length.   Mens' jackets are short in order to jump in and out of a car, easily.  But do no men walk in the rain, not even dog owners?  Women think it is unattractive to have a skirt or dress sticking out below a short jacket, therefore they have knee-lengt...

Northern Utah .  How long has it been since experiencing a violent thunderstorm ?  I was unwilling to go to bed until the wind relaxed a bit.  The lightning seemed to attack me.   My goodness, no wonder a book on comparative religions would mention several storm gods .  The next morning I saw the mud, debris, and rocks strewn over the paved entry road to this area.    But it was worth it to put up with Thor's temper tantrum .  All of nature had gone through a catharsis , Aristotle's "violent expurgation of the soul."  The Utah desert smelled good, the air was clean, and the ground was damp.  The temperatures are no longer summer-like. Before the storm It is easy to have mixed feelings, after returning to red rocks, mesas, and canyons .  The good news is that it only takes small rocky features to please me. Good home for a mountain lion ? I get easier to please every year.  Just think of the practical advantages of being ...

 Many people must be surprised how quickly American opinion has turned against Israel.  Personally I have started to overlook political differences with 'the usual suspects' as long as they speak up against Israel.  For instance I watch " The Young Turks " on You Tube.  Maybe that type of "difference-burying" solidarity is necessary when a people coalesce into a real nation.   Many Americans are starting to see that 'their' government is not really theirs.  How can Americans even see America as a sovereign country when its leaders have been completely suborned by a tiny little shit country in the Mideast? But isn't American nationhood already strong, because of  World War II ?  I am not sure that war really counts because the country's existence was not in doubt.  My mother was a teenage girl during WWII and she once told me that she couldn't even tell a war was going on.    I will always be grateful to the Four Score Gray...

The world is in better shape than I thought.  Yesterday was the second anniversary of "October 7".  Notice how it is referred to in shorthand, as if it were 9/11 or the Fourth (of July).   In contrast to what I expected, President Trump did not sign an executive order making October 7 a new American national holiday. Then, anybody not celebrating it could be censored or deported.  Or their QR code could be tattooed on their forehead so that cameras could automatically scan those codes at airports or government offices.  At the very least, they would be accused of being anti-Semitic .

 Here I am again at the edge of a plateau-like mountain , at the end of summer, and at the border between the inland northwest and southwest in northern Utah .  As usual, hunting season is about to begin.  Surprisingly, I rather like hunters as camping neighbors, probably because they don't make gunfire sounds very often and they drive so slowly! Still, I try to escape camping neighbors.  Physical obstacles can be used as screening devices, but in this case I almost screened myself out.  Sometimes, it's a game of inches. I had to back out of this mess.  It was pure dumb luck that I made it. Oh sure, there are lots of golden aspen at 8200 feet of altitude at this time of year: But this sort of thing is best left to weekender-leaf-peepers and RV newbies .  My main interest is the last copse , on the left side of the photo: For years I fluttered my eyelashes at this last lonely and forlorn copse of aspen, on the edge of the plateau before it descended...

The last few years I have watched myself become indifferent to "spectacular" red rock tourist scenery and desert scenery of the type that northern snowbirds coo over.  In contrast I have become intensely appreciative of clouds, rain, soil, grasslands , and trees with leaves.    This is reassuring.  We could think of our ageing-selves as large and old trees, with only a thin layer on the outer diameter made of living cells.  The vast interior is just "dead wood."  But we still have the living cells! All of this is a preamble to today's post.  Driving south and east in Idaho I revisited a favorite canyon -- favorite because it is a Vermont wannabee . People who don't live in the intermountain West probably don't realize how appreciative you can become of real trees, rather than the monotonous bark-and-needle type. Elk season starts in a couple days.  The deer can still afford to be brave: We are on the northern edge of red rock Utah .  A...