Occupation of Independence

There are some oddities in life that I'm happy not to explain: for instance, a perfect morning. How impoverished life would be without mornings! And yet there are people who sleep through them. I'm experiencing day after day of morning perfection while camping in the Sonoran desert outside Ajo. It's a miracle that six toy-haulers don't move in next to me, so I'd better enjoy this while I can. There is nothing better in this old world of ours than a mountain bike ride to town for a good cup of joe and a muffin at a high-quality bakery, especially when the dirt road is virtually noise-mobile free. When I leave at just the right time, the air is still chilly, especially in the dips at arroyo crossings. Also, the sun hasn't yet cleared the small mountains. I need gloves but I deliberately leave them off  to feel the contrast of cold fingers and sunlight that will explode any minute now. Coffee Girl is leashed to my waist belt. Her attitude is different than whe

One needn't be religious to appreciate the importance of the religious imagination to history and to an individual's mental ecology. We have a capability and tendency to construct an internal mental world which is more congenial than the objective world. This also explains the importance of poetry, comedy, sentimentalism, romanticism, or art in general. Wishful thinking is a big part of what we are. It can be a constructive thing if managed carefully. So regardless of your religious or atheistic views, how do you feel about Tebow and other athletes pointing towards heaven or publicly praying at sporting events? I find it distasteful. How could a so-called religious person trivialize his own Faith like that? Imagine some parents praying and carrying on like fools before their son's pee-wee hockey team hits the ice. Did it ever occur to them that somebody on the opposite team has the same faith as they do? If so, whose team is the Deity, the Author of the Universe, the Ar

Ajo, AZ. This has been a remarkable autumn and early winter. The weather didn't become nice and snowbird-friendly until late December. Since then it has been postcard-perfect.  It was fun to enjoy calm, sunny, and warm days. Of course a yellow light starts blinking in the back of my head when I start to feel comfortable. You can't help but feel that you are becoming soft. This morning a cold wind is blowing. How are the nearby tent campers liking this? Seeing them reminds me how much I disliked tent camping way back when, and how valuable it is to have a hard-walled box to hide from cold wind. Talking to these tent campers yesterday, and visiting with my house-bound friends a couple days ago, I am reminded how carefully comfort-and-discomfort must be managed in order to make life both sensible and tasty. To the human animal, comfort is delightful prey that becomes a boring meal. The trick with comfort is learning how to consciously experience it. The best way I know of is

I hope to never outgrow an eyelash-fluttering susceptibility to dilapidated or funky buildings as seen in mining and desert rat towns. One of the best was a decaying stucco dump next to the bakery in Ajo. The friendly baker told me that it had been razed because it was 'ugly, dilapidated, and unsafe'. Yea well, So What, lady. Who wouldn't love ocotillo-reinforced adobe? Ugly indeed! (But say one word in criticism of the bourgeois mindset that wants to destroy beauty, and readers will dismiss the blogger as a "cynical curmudgeon.")   Fortunately I've been finding some new dumps to replace this lost love. This one is certainly unique:    I didn't even know that corrugated tubes for under-road culverts came that big. Hopefully they've got some insulation in there! Perhaps the local building codes and ordinances limit culvert-housing to flat lots.

In Ajo the other day I noticed a nice-sized fifth-wheel (small but practical) and I complimented the owners on it. As it turned out, they were from British Columbia. One thing that you notice on the Snowbird Trail is a type of prejudice that could be called "longitudinalism". People migrate as efficiently south-ish as possible, with little veering to the east or west. Some of this is to save fuel, but much of it is geographical and cultural affinity. There are cultural differences between the Left Coast and the so-called Hinterlands or Fly-over states. From the point of view of the former, the Great Lakes and the Texas coast are still isolated in the hinterlands, despite being accessible to ocean-going vessels. But the prejudice works in both directions. For instance, "BC" is not my favorite province. Too many trees. In the winter most of the Canadian ex-pats in Mexico are from BC. They are stereotypical left-wingers, whose praise of Mexican culture really comes d

Life has become a social whirl for the dogs and me here in Ajo, AZ. We had a reunion with Ed Frey and the new gal in his life, Patches. I was a bit nervous about my Coffee Girl (kelpie) meeting a muscular American Staffordshire bull terrier, but it went OK after the first couple minutes. Soon we were walking off leash on a small patch of BLM land near town. It is a rare treat for me to become acquainted with an RVer who likes long walks, especially with a dog. I predict great success between Ed and Patches. Ed has an interesting and practical RV lifestyle. He travels full-time in a moderate-sized Class C motorhome, with no small-towed-car behind it. He'll live in an RV park for one month, pay a reasonable monthly rate, and then move on. For entertainment and exercise, he is a walker, not a hiker; he simply begins walking from his own front door. A dog along will make his walks much more fun. Then I went on a couple hikes with an old RV friend who dropped out to become a townie

Recently I got my mountain bike serviced in Phoenix. When picking it up I walked into the wrenching end of the shop and spoke to the young mechanic. He seemed proud of improvising on the bracket, thus relieving me of staying in the Phoenix area for a long time while waiting for a special order to come in. I was happy to stand there and be his appreciative audience. He also installed a new chain. They don't last as long as they used to, in part because they are narrower and thinner and cocked at weird angles to accommodate the 10 (!) gears in the back; with the 3 in the front, it makes for a 30 speed bike. We commiserated about faster wear and tear, and more finicky adjustments.  No sooner did 30-speed bicycles become obligatory for any serious cyclist than a hot new trend arose: single speed bikes with no derailleurs whatsoever. Only really tough, cool guys bought these, and it was for practical reasons, if you were to listen to them. How and why did consumers allow them

Sometimes I try to imagine the world of the Positive Thinker, as the term is typically used in popular culture as defined by squishy, trendy social science and by boob toob commercials. How bland and sugary it must be!  Although I mock dualistic religions and political philosophies on this blog, the truth is that I love dualisms aesthetically. Nature, like a movie, is no better than its villain. This winter I've been having fun imagining Malevolences looming over and threatening the landscape: Unfortunately this buzz only lasted until I could glance at the cause: The most exciting time to hike is early in the morning, when gaps in the sky island threaten you with Plutonian and diabolic cold and uncertainty.

Watching the glorious Green Bay Packers last night, I had some questions about how football should be interpreted. How far can we carry the analogy between football and war? How literally we can see it as mock war? The football team is an army, dominated by its commander-in-chief, its American Caesar, the quarterback. It has kicking (artillery), running backs (mobile armored divisions, or cavalry in the old days), and passing (an air force). No navy, though. The cheerleaders' job is to quicken the animal spirits in the fans, a job for which they are admirably, uhh, suited; their equivalents in the political and military arenas are the talking-heads in the media, whose job it is to promote the popularity of the war with the public. There is a well-defined front in gridiron battle. It is symmetrical warfare. The team moves the ball into enemy territory. Getting through the goal posts of the enemy is like seizing a national capital. When fans pull the goal posts down after a victory

It was so cold in Silver City NM that we only had one good birding year. Sensible birds go to Arizona in the winter, but not to dry lunar settings like where I am now. The best refuges are along creeks in southeastern Arizona. I miss photographing these rascals. Of course to do it right you need a five pound camera, a one-foot-long telephoto lens, and a tripod. You must also be willing to go where the birds are, rather than the other way around. So I'll never be a real birder. Still, it's fun to get what I can. It's remarkable how much variation there is in the color of red-tailed hawks.

People who aren't completely accustomed to airline travel sometimes feel affected by the big picture when they take off and leave the trivial earth-bound details behind, or rather, below. A calm perspicuity can set in at 35,000 feet. But at times perspicuity is troubling rather than calming. In a famous scene in the classic film noir, The Third Man : Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles ride alone to the top of a Ferris Wheel type ride at an amusement park in post-World-War-II Vienna. The cynical and ego-centric Welles character stops the ride at its apogee where they can look down at small objects, people, crawling around on the surface of the earth a hundred feet below. He asks the Joseph Cotton character, 'Would he really mind if one of those ants stopped scurrying, because it died from the watered-down penicillin that Welles was smuggling in Vienna?' It is thought-provoking, and yet troubling, to come in from a solitary camp in the desert and hit the outskirts of a mon