Occupation of Independence

People who are unfamiliar with the American Southwest in the winter would be surprised to see a camper get out of bed and quickly grab a winter coat and stocking hat.  And shoes go on quickly -- the RV floor feels like ice.  Why call it a stocking hat?  One morning I became obsessed with this issue.  It doesn't look very much like a stocking.  The name conjures up images of Hans Christian Andersen or maybe a painting of Dutch ice skaters back in the 1700s. Wouldn't a young person scoff at 'stocking hat' as an old-fashioned term?  On Amazon I actually had to think what term wasn't antiquated.   They used 'beanie'.  And yes, the human skull looks more like a bean than a stocking.  I prefer 'skull cap.' Suddenly I thought of those books about the history of the English language.  They sometimes say the normal rate of evolution of a language means unintelligibility in 1000 years.  Of course 1000 is just a convenient round number. ...

  Most of the time when you see people walking in the desert, they are trying please their dog.  And those are the people I start to talk to.  When that happened a couple days ago, it turned into a nice conversation.  Why doesn't that happen more often when winter camping? Anyway, he told me about an interesting canyon and what mile marker it was at, out on the paved highway.  I didn't drive to it.  Could I find it on the mountain bike?  I headed off in that direction to see what would happen. When I hit a long steep hill that forced me into pushing the bike into the sun.  I started to suspect this route was going to be interesting. Something about trudging up the hill while pushing my bike, the harshness of the rocks, and the sun in my face conjured up the idea of Noble Suffering, like a pilgrimage -- say, El Camino de Santiago -- that a penitent peasant would have pushed through in the Middle Ages. When I popped over the top of the hill and saw ...

Never have I approached anything with the caution I am using on Trump 2.0.  I stubbornly cling to Hope, not because it is sensible but only because life is too grim for a puny human being without it.  My expectations have been pushed down to almost zero. How long will it take before we can see him stepping into the 'Peace with Honor' trap that Nixon used to extend the Vietnam War from 1968 to 1975?  Perhaps Trump will try to avoid that trap.  But the first time somebody accuses him of looking "weak" relative to Putin, he will fall for the trap.  Then the Democrats can smirk about how they destroyed his administration right at the beginning. So let's think of cheerful things on this day of his inauguration.  Like mindless eye-candy.  I have quite a backlog of photos from this fall's migration that haven't been used. Corrupting a friend with canyon camping Lake Mead Utah being Utah Cloud shadows and mountains

Is it just my imagination or are people actually getting stupider these days in west central Arizona?   The Quartzsite camping situation swells in late January.  Perhaps as crowds swell, one should expect people to act stupider and stupider. This is an unpleasant thought so it would not be beneficial to dwell on it.  But it might make sense to notice it, if only to steer away from it. Also, it might be fundamental to the human condition.  And if so, how can you really make a holy cause out of democracy?  There is no better time to think about that issue than when you are surrounded by hordes of the "general public." I try to be flexible, but I just can't see why 4WD vehicles are as popular as they are.  A small fraction of the time, the road becomes an interesting geometrical challenge to them.  They need to get it all right: angles, momentum, tire location, etc.  But 99% of the miles logged by the industry is nothing more than (noisy) 'channel su...