Occupation of Independence

Quotidiana.org deserves a compliment for choosing a classic essay by Jonathan Swift (of Gulliver's Travels fame) on improving conversation. Actually it is a timely topic for those in snowbird country. It certainly takes some effort to adjust to the prose of the early 1700s, but if you are willing to read his brief essay you are likely to enjoy it. Rather than rehash his essay, let me confine myself to updating it to our times or looking for issues that he overlooked. Most of the schemes for 'solving the world's problems' are difficult, slow, or even doubtful. What is tantalizing about the sorry state of conversation is that improvement is not only feasible, but almost easy! Just about anybody could become a better talker and listener with just a few minutes of thought about some common bad habits, followed by a moderate amount of willpower and practice. Snowbird meccas are great places to observe the maladies of conversation that seem to grow worse with age. Peopl

Please don't think I'm on some kind of vendetta against Apple. I'm not. But the decade-long run that might be ending for their stock and company is quite unique in the history of the gadget industry. Are you likely to see something of the same kind and degree during the rest of your lifetime? If you pay any attention to the gadget industry or the stock market, you might be getting tired of articles about the rise/fall of Apple. I am getting several such articles per day and I haven't even asked for them from SeekingAlpha.com . They don't seem badly written. They are the professionals -- I am just an amateur. (Hence, you should never take anything I say about investment s as the basis for buying or selling anything.) So what can an amateur expect to accomplish by writing about stocks, or Apple stock in particular? Some of the professional analysts seem like young whippersnappers who spend too much time playing with a spreadsheet program. They take the publishe

How many years has it been since Time magazine switched from their famous "Man of the Year" award to "Person of the Year? " But that's still anthropocentric, you know. The award would be more PC if it were opened up to all species. Coyotes come to mind, especially wily ones. Since the financial turmoil of 2008 it has become almost common to picture our economy -- actually the world's economy -- as Wile E. Coyote running over the edge of a cliff, finally looking down and realizing the situation, and then disappearing into a shrinking point and a final poof at the bottom of the canyon. Despite its aging, th e coyote metaphor is so perfect that it should get the award for 2012. Just think of all the time and effort you could spend discussing so many issues and problems of our times; it tires you just to think of it. And we are sick of it anyway. Sometimes the metaphor seems to apply to someth ing perfectly, but the coyote in question just hang s out t

People think of retire ment and snowbirding as a low-stress lifestyle. Well it is in many ways, but not in all . After shopping i n the Walmart and putting the stuff away in my van, out in their p arking lot, I threw a couple standard plastic bags full of household trash into the shopping cart, and started rolling the cart to one of the corrals in the middle of the parking lot, where I could throw the trash bags into the waste cans. But before I got ten feet, an old biddie started chewing me out, "That's not a garbage truck!", or something like that. I guess she thought I was going to just leave the trash in the cart, instead of throwing it in the trashcan at the cart corral. What gave her the right to assume the wrong thing? But then I noticed the Old Biddie's license plate: B.C., Bolshevik Columbia. That explains that. Albertans, Saskatchewanners, and Manitobans are the nice Canadians, you know. You don't suppose that I'm displaying the longitudin

Yuma, AZ. Didn't Aristotle say that the aim of a good tragedy was to give the audience a katharsis, a violent expurgation of the soul? But who needs a tragedy? Wouldn't a rousing folk dance do the job? Before the television era, many people would have answered 'yes'. There are still sporting events in large stadiums that can provide a catharsis to the audience. There are even more examples of how to purge the soul, and I just got back from one. After being a mountain biker/hiker for the last couple years, I got back on the road bicycle and did a club ride, my first in 5 years. If more people just understood what they are missing... Many of the people in the club are 70-ish. They are fast! They used to hike on Wednesday, for variety's sake; but that tradition has been eliminated, perhaps because too many people were complaining of sore this and that when hiking, although they can pedal a "metric century" on any given day. They are few moments sweete

There must be many people who consider Thanksgiving to be one of our best holidays.  And least corrupted. Granted, its proximity to Christmas, our most obscene holiday, gives Thanksgiving a halo. But even without the easy comparison, Thanksgiving is easy to feel good about. Even people who dislike the vague religious overtones of the word "thankful" can still be comfor table be ing grateful to a "what", rather than a " who". Wouldn't it be nice if the fine sentiments expressed at Thanksgiving really meant something -- something beyond mere ritual? Maybe they do , for some of the people who express them. They have a different life story than mine, or they have more imagination, or are making more of an effort. Who knows? My guess is that most p eople have difficulty feeling genuinely thankful at Than ksgiving, although of course they all like to say they do. The holiday tradition should de-emphasize the meal and the ensuing food coma. Aren't

Occasionally it is fun to see if I can catch the readers sleeping by giving them a pop quiz. A couple comments about eReader gadgets recently revealed an opportunity for me to move in for the kill (grin). There seems to be a misunderstanding of what it takes to read a book comfortably .  This is an important topic for those of us who see internet addiction (on trivial and repetitive websites) as a serious problem to overcome. Has anyone ever beaten a vicious habit by trying to replace it with a vacuity? I doubt it. They need to replace it with something that has a positive existence; something that is tangible, lively, and takes up time. In my case that means giving up the insulting trivialities of the blogosphere and going back to reading "books." Now for the multiple choice quiz: which factor has the greatest beneficial effect on your comfort, endurance, and attention span when reading a book? Display size of the eReader, i.e, 7", 10", etc. Operating system

Real travelers -- as opposed to mere sightseers -- might yearn for opportunities to learn of new manners and customs, languages and religions, and ways of life. But it's tough to do that without traveling to third world countries, with all the costs and risks. Even there you would need opportunities to live and work with the locals, rather than just gawk at them as quaint caricatures.  Perhaps one of the biggest advantage of dispersed camping on public lands is that it makes you so separate from the normal American that you get to experience what could be seen as exotic foreign travel when you return to the most ordinary metropolitan areas in your own country.  When the ol' desert rat or dispersed camper -- think of him as a Noble Savage -- returns to the city, what exactly happens to him as he becomes "normal" again? Adjusting to the obscene onslaught of noise, 7 and 24 and 365, is the most immediate and obvious change. Do most people see this Noble Savage as

These days there is quite a bit of discussion on business and investing blogs about the slow decline of the once-mighty American middle class; we are splitting into losers -- 99% of us -- and a 1% who are benefiting from bankster and Washington DC corruption. That is, we are becoming a kleptocracy of the kind that is common in Latin American or third world countries. Indeed, it is in such countries that an American traveler might first notice that "most in the middle" is not the global norm, and that he has been taking it for granted all his life. How long has this phenomenon have been noticeable? Boswell reported an outline made by Samuel Johnson after his one and only trip to France, near the end of his life. Johnson remarked that everybody in France appeared desperately poor except for the few who were unbelievably rich, and how different that was from England. A historian would probably explain this in the context of the rising bourgeoisie in the late Middle Ages in

Gunnison CO. I've never been in town when the college students were back in session, so the town seems crowded. Colorado, with its exercise and non-obesity culture, makes for some enjoyable girl-watching. Now, I think we can all agree that the decline of girl-watching is one of the things that shows America's inexorable moral and cultural decline. But I had more fun watching some of the middle-aged women in town. I'm not being facetious. Colorado has developed a "Copenhagen chic" bicycle culture that has spread even to backwoodsy Gunnison. What an improvement it is to abandon the uni-sex athletic jock look, with a boy's bike, spandex, and a plastic/styrofoam brain bucket; and then to see real women -- in flouncy summer dresses no less! -- jump on ("into", actually) an old-fashioned girl's bike with chrome fenders and wicker baskets and streamers on the handlebars; and off she pedals to a store to do some errand. Girls will be girls after all

With the exception of a doctor repairing our body, is there anything that relieves us of worry like getting our motor vehicle repaired? I thought about this after a long-distance tow to town, recently. Both the van and the trailer were towed, so I could sleep overnight in the repair shop's parking lot. Being stranded at an inopportune place could cause a lot of worry for an RVer. I envied the owner of the repair shop. He did a job that was tangible and crucial to his customers. Contrast that with some insignificant college boy in a cubicle at a large organization, wasting his life by writing reports that no one will read, attending useless meetings, following arbitrary organizational rules, laughing at the boss's jokes whether they are funny or not, and hoping to dodge layoffs in middle age. Of course there are a number of reasons why my mechanic might think that running a car-repair business is a hard way to make a living. Do you think he subscribes to the one-time Americ

Uhh! Uhh. It's been so long since the wind was knocked out of me that I forgot how scary it was. The first couple seconds were precious because I felt no sharp pain -- and didn't that prove that no bones were broken?   After about ten "uhhs" I started breathing normally and pushed myself off the dirt trail. I was going down a single track trail built for "downhill" mountain bikers.  Naturally I was only willing to test a baby jump or two. After jumping one small log on the steep slope I must have taken my hand off the brakes momentarily because the bike shot forward and downward like a rocket; I flew over the handle bars, mercifully landing on a rock-free ramp up to the next -- and larger -- "ski jump." Ski jump for bikes in the background -- ouch! Long-suffering readers know that the foolishness of technical mountain biking and trails is one of my standard stump speeches, so we'll skip that. Suffice it to say that I walked down t

Springerville AZ, the White Mountains. James Howard Kunstler must be furious. American gasoholics (virtually all of us) feel that 'happy days are here again,' now that regular gasoline has plummeted to $3.50 per gallon. Let's hope they are still making money on snacks, cigs, or the 40 ounce buckets of fructose fizz they are known for. Gee maybe it's time to bring back the Hummer? Has Kunstler ever written an essay about the RV industry? It would be amusing to read it, if you could handle his goose quill, dipped in venom. For my part I think that RVers have their work cut out for them if they want their lifestyle to continue long into the future in a way that is recognizable. Sure, they could camp in one place forever and drive around town in a tiny "towed", but too much of that would represent a completely different lifestyle.  Despite the recent -- and no doubt temporary -- relief at the fuel pump I continue to press against promiscuous driving, that

It must be mere impressionism because it really doesn't make sense that a mountain biker would see more wildlife than a hiker, but such has been my experience. On today's ride I saw a bobcat stop in the middle of the forest road, a hundred yards ahead of Coffee Girl and me, and then do a double-take. Connected by a leash tied to my hip, we must have looked like a pretty strange animal to that bobcat. After a couple seconds it scampered off. There's no mistaking that short tail. Speaking of impressionism is it really true that the middle of a forest is as depopulated of wildlife as it seems, or do too-many-trees simply get in the way of seeing what animals are there? Wildlife biologists must know the answer to that. My version of common sense -- which could be mistaken -- is that there just isn't as much to eat in the middle of a pine tree monoculture as there is at the edge of a forest, or for that matter, in somebody's backyard on the edge of town. You'd t

Glenwood, NM. What time is it? My cellphone comes on and looks for service without finding it. Thus it won't display the time. Perhaps the first lifestyle adjustment you must make when living in remote towns is turning the clock back to the day when we all wore wristwatches. Imagine how tired waitresses get (in towns like this) when outsiders make weird dietary requests. One city slicker won't eat meat; another eats nothing but meat. None of them is happy with canned goods off-loaded from the Sysco truck or Little Debbie's fine baked goods, which is all there is to rural cuisine. They must wonder if there is anything that isn't against somebody's food ideology. James Howard Kunstler would be amazed with places like Glenwood. He sees America as a dispersed and ugly strip-civilization of fast food joints and big boxes. Our suburban nation is based on cheap oil, but rural areas are even worse. It is staggering to consider how much malinvestment there is in America wh

Boondocking on raw, unimproved land has a great effect on your notions of value and common sense. What does it really mean to "improve" land, such as they are said to do in national parks, monuments, and other "special" areas? Recently I was in the Tucson area where one such park is called Madera Canyon. It is a special area in the national forest in the Santa Rita mountains south of Tucson. I always go into such a place with a chip on my shoulder. Despite that, it is fair to say that the US Forest Service is doing more things right than wrong there.  I rode the mountain bike up to the summit in the canyon. At the entrance a sign warned the visitor that a list of rules and regulations was coming up soon. I tensed up. But the rules were small in number and full of common sense, of all things. These days a "park" of any kind is expected to be anti-dog, unless it's a dog park. That is the first manifestation of city-slicker culture that makes me