Santa Fe to Los Alamos to Española, NM
Tuesday July 26, 2005
7:39am I just woke up. The sun is coming up. It's all good.
7:49am Red alert! Red alert! I've had an alright morning. I got in a big debate with Wayne. He is being all ignorant and getting mad. He's getting all aggro. He lost his dog. Which made him even madder. I can't find my stick! It's missing. Where did it go?! This can't be happening. How could I have lost my stick? That's like my best friend. It is on me at all times. What the hell? I think this guy Wayne took it. He got all pissed off at me while we were arguing. I just can't believe he'd do that.
7:57am I found my stick. It was just laying on the ground in this field I hadn't gone to. I'm thinking Wayne just took off and hid it from me. I am so glad I found it. Thank you, San Antonio.
8:04am We are finally leaving. I had given up on my stick and said screw it, I'll get a new stick somehow. I thought Wayne had gotten mad at me because I wasn't helping them pack. Finding my stick was more important. It's not like they asked me for help or anything. I can't read their minds. Anyway, we're leaving now. I'm going to go hang out in Los Alamos.
I'm riding in the back of Rosemary's truck Hidalgo. I'm back here with her dog. He's a pit-bull.
I am almost positive that Wayne is the one who hid my walking stick from me. I looked around everywhere and didn't find it. I just know I didn't leave it where I found it. I would've remembered that. Right at the end I told myself I'd go look for it one last time, and I found it! Right after I made my prayer to San Antonio. I've read on the internet that Saint Anthony can help you find lost objects. He sure did. See, right when I lost it Wayne was all pissed off at me. He was arguing with me. I refuse to argue. I just share opinions. He was all saying, "Nobody is going to work for free!" I told him, "That's exactly what the problem is. You have no faith." He told me, "You're preaching against human nature." I told him, "I am preaching for human nature. It's human nature to be generous. Not the other way around." When will we ever learn?
He told me, "The only way we will be saved is if we find a way to get humans off this planet. Either that, or just kill them. We are way overpopulated." I told him, "Man, that's bullshit. Nobody's gotta die. There is plenty of room. We just need to spread out."
Page 342, Three Media Modes:
"THREE MEDIA MODES
The best way to understand its power is to place today's media revolution in historical perspective, and to distinguish clearly among three different modes of communication.
In highly oversimplified terms, we can say that in First Wave or agrarian societies, most communications passed mouth-to-ear and face-to-face within very small groups. In a world without newspapers, radio, or television, the only way for a message to reach a mass audience was by assembling a crowd. The crowd was, in fact, the first mass medium.
A crowd may "send a message" upward to its ruler. In fact, the very size of the crowd is itself a message. But whatever else the crowd may communicate, it also sends an identical message to all its participants. This message—which can be profoundly subversive—is simple: "You are not alone." The crowd, therefore, has played a crucial role in history. The problem with the crowd or mob as a communications medium, however, is that it is usually ephemeral.
The crowd was not the only pretechnological mass medium. In the West during the medieval era, the Catholic Church, because of its extensive organization, was the closest thing to a durable mass medium—and the only one able to transmit the same message to large populations across political boundaries. This unique capacity gave the Vatican immense power vis -a-vis Europe's feuding kings and princelings. It accounts in part for the seesaw power struggles between church and state that bloodied Europe for centuries.
The Second Wave system of wealth creation, based on factory mass production, needed more communication at a distance and gave rise to the post office, telegraph, and telephone. But the new factories also needed a homogeneous work force, and technologically based mass media were invented. Newspapers, magazines, movies, radio, and television, each capable of carrying the same message to millions simultaneously, became the prime instruments of massification in the industrial societies.
The new Third Wave system, by contrast, reflects the needs of the emerging post-mass-production economy. Like the latest "flexible manufacturing" plants, it customizes its image products and sends different images, ideas, and symbols to closely targeted population segments, markets, age categories, professions, ethnic or life-style groupings.
This new high diversity of messages and media is necessary because the new system of wealth creation requires a far more heterogeneous work force and population. The de-massification foreshadowed in Future Shock and elaborated in The Third Wave thus has become a key characteristic of the new media system. But this is only one of its aspects."
1:36pm We are in Los Alamos.
2:00pm Turns out I'm in Pojoaque, not Los Alamos. Scott, in front of the Phillips 66, gave me a cigarette. I appreciate it, brother.
2:07pm I'm talking to Scott, telling him my story in front of the Phillips 66. What was your email? scodygoh@aol.com
I just had a greta presentation in Pojoaque. This guy on a motorcycle. I hit him up for my story. He sat down and I was able to tell him my whole odyssey.
2:36pm I changed my mind about asking for rides at the gas station. Right when I jump over the highway to start walking I spot a Santa Fe Park and Ride bus. I'm going to go see if I can get a courtesy ride to Los Alamos. I'm almost positive he goes there.
2:39pm Called that. The bus driver is hooking me up with a courtesy ride to Los Alamos. I appreciate it, brother.
3:09pm I am talking to the bus driver and he's telling me about, what was his name? Corbin Harney. He's got some place in Southern California. I'll look it up on the Internet.
Whoa! The bus driver gave me ten bucks! He told me, "Here's a couple bucks for your journey."
3:12pm I just got dropped off in Los Alamos. In front of the public library. Let me go see if they have a CD burner. The bus driver was cool as hell. He was a Native American.
3:22pm I am talking to Lydia and her friend Abby. What was your email? coswimmers@yahoo.com and shutupandgetoutofmyface@hotmail.com
3:37pm I had a good presentation with these two girls in front of the library.
3:51pm I stopped at some rock bench here along the sidewalk and tagged it with Victor the Liberator with a peace sign with my silver marker. Somebody else had tagged "Esperanza was here."
I want to go to some of the museums they have here in town. In case you didn't know, Los Alamos is a big nuclear research town.
3:57pm I just got to the big man-made lake. This big pond they have here. I'm going to look for some kids to tell my story to.
I came to the Chevron and bought some cigarettes. Marlboro Light 72's. It's raining outside, so I'm going to stay here for a little bit.
4:27pm Guess where I'm going. I'm going back to Santa Fe. I was walking around and there was nobody to talk to in this town. I was reading all the nuclear plaques in the park. All of a sudden I see a Park and Ride bus! I thought, "Oh man, it may be going back to Santa Fe!" Just like that, I'm on the bus going back.
With those ten bucks the last bus driver gave me, I bought a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I have five dollars left.
That timing was just perfect. When I saw it I was hoping it would still be there when I walked up to it. Right when I stepped on, he took off. Perfect, perfect. I am meant to get out of this town.
4:35pm I have an update to make. I was on the bus going back to Santa Fe. While it was still in Los Alamos I asked the driver, "Think we'll be in Santa Fe in time for me to catch the bus to Española?" He told me, "You want to go to Española? It's right there." Right when he pulled up, the bus to Española was taking off. He called him on the radio and was able to flag him down for me. Just like that.
Page 351, good section.
"THE "SCREENIE" GENERATION
At almost the precise midpoint of the 20th century, George Orwell published 1984, his scorching indictment of totalitarianism. The book pictured a government in total control of the mass media. Orwell's brilliant neologisms, like newspeak and doublethink, entered the language. The book became a powerful assault weapon in the fight against censorship and mind manipulation, which is why it was banned for decades in the Soviet Union.
While it helped rally forces opposed to dictatorship of the mind, however, the book's projection of the future turned out to be highly questionable.
Orwell correctly envisioned such technologies as two-way television screens that could be used to deliver the state's propaganda to viewers while simultaneously spying on them, and his warnings about potential invasions of privacy are, if anything, understated. But he did not foresee—nor did anyone else at the time—the most important revolution of our era: the shift from an economy based on muscle to one dependent on mind.
He did not, therefore, anticipate today's astonishing proliferation of new communication tools. The number and variety of these technologies is now so great, and changing so swiftly, that even experts are bewildered. To confront the army of technical abbreviations, from HDTV and ISDN to VAN, ESS, PABX, CPE, OCC, and CD-I, is to sink into alphabetical asphalt. Even to scan the advertisements for consumer electronics is to come away dazed.
Rise above this clutter, however, and the basic outlines of tomorrow's Third Wave media become strikingly clear.
The electronic infrastructure of the advanced economies will have six distinct features, some of which have already been foreshadowed. These half-dozen keys to the future are: interactivity, mobility, convertibility, connectivity, ubiquity, and globalization.
When combined, these six principles point to a total transformation, not merely in the way we send messages to one another, but in the way we think, how we see ourselves in the world, and, therefore, where we stand in relationship to our various governments. Put together, they will make it impossible for governments—or their revolutionary opponents— to manage ideas, imagery, data, information, or knowledge as they once did."
355, More Than Compassion
"MORE THAN COMPASSION
Ubiquitization, the fifth key, is something else. By this we mean the systematic spread of the new media system around the world and down through every economic layer of society.
A potential nightmare facing high-tech governments derives from the split-up of populations into the info-rich and the infopoor. Any government that fails to take concrete action to avoid this division courts political upheaval in the future. Yet this dangerous polarization is hardly inevitable.
In fact, one can imagine considerable equality of access in the emerging society, not because of compassion or political good sense on the part of the affluent elites, but because of the workings of what might be called the Law of Ubiquity.
This law holds that strong commercial, as well as political, incentives will arise for making the new electronic infrastructure inclusive, rather than exclusive.
In its infancy the telephone was regarded as a luxury. The idea that everyone would someday have a phone was simply mystifying. Why on earth would everybody want one?
The fact that almost everyone in the high-tech nations now has a phone, rich and poor alike, did not stem from altruism but from the fact that the more people plugged into a system, the more valuable it became for all users and especially for commercial purposes.
The same proved true, as we've seen, in the early development of postal services. The industrial economy needed a way to send bills to, or advertise to, or sell newspapers and magazines to everyone, not just the rich. And today, once more, as fax machines begin to replace the industrial-era post office, similar pressures are accelerating the spread of the new technology.
There were 2.5 million fax machines in the United States in 1989, churning out billions of pages of faxed documents per year. The fax population was doubling yearly, partly because early users were importuning friends, customers, clients, and family to buy a fax quickly, so that the early users could speed messages to them. The more faxes out there, the greater the value of the system to all concerned.
It is, therefore, in the distinct self-interest of the affluent to find ways of extending the new systems to include, rather than exclude, the less affluent.
Like phones and VCRs, faxes will begin to appear in even the humblest homes, driven by the Law of Ubiquity. And so will fiber optic cables and other advanced technologies, whether paid for by the individual, the public, or by other users whose fees will subsidize service to those who can't afford it.
The widest diffusion of communication capabilities is an inseparable part of the new system of wealth creation. The direction is almost inevitably toward what the old Bell phone company called "universal service"—i.e., ubiquity— combined with interactivity, mobility, convertibility, and connectibility.
Finally, the new infrastructure is global in scope. As capital flows electronically across national borders, zipping back and forth from Zurich to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Norway, Norway to Tokyo, Tokyo to Wall Street in milliseconds, information traces equally complex pathways. A change in U.S. T-bill rates or the yen-deutsche mark ratio is instantly known around the world, and the morning after the big event in Los Angeles, youngsters in Ho Chi Minh City discuss the latest Grammy winners. The mental borders of the state become as permeable as its financial frontiers.
The combination of these six principles produces a revolutionary nervous system for the planet, capable of handling vastly enlarged quantities of data, information, and knowledge at much faster transmission and processing rates. It is a far more adaptable, intelligent, and complex nervous system for the human race than ever before imagined. "
5:00pm I am in Española.
5:03pm I just got off the bus in Española. I'm going to walk to Main Street.
5:14pm I'm going to stop in the public library and see if they have burners.
I ended up walking the wrong way and this pretty girl gave me directions at the Shell station. I asked her where the Little Caesar's was. Aiming for Riverside Drive. I'm going to see if I can score some food there.
6:04pm I just saw a sign that said Chimayo is only seven miles. I'm going to walk there and crash at the Santuario again. Just like last year(7-26-04).
6:06pm Rudy is hooking me up with some breadsticks at the Little Caesar's, just like last year. I appreciate it, brother. Everybody gets credit, thanks.
6:28pm Les pedi y me dieron en Leo's. Te lo agradezco, senor. Todo el mundo recibe crédito, gracias.
Those breadsticks didn't fill me up, so I hit up this Mexican food place and scored. The guy didn't even let me finish giving him my line and he was nodding his head yes. I have seven miles to walk to Chimayo. I'm going to see if I can score some weed somehow.
7:19pm What were your names? These kids I walked by on the road to Chimayo. What was your email? payaso_loco@yahoo.com
8:30pm I have a great update to make. I didn't walk that far at all and I saw these Mexican kids hanging out in front of their house. I went up and asked them if they knew where I could score some traveling weed. This dude up and hooked me up with like half a joint! I didn't even have to spend my five bucks. Talk about a manifest. Called that. I tried to tell them my story, but once I pulled out my tape recorder they freaked out and told me to leave. I kept walking and then I spotted these two other dudes in front of their house. I yelled at them, "Hey, can I tell you guys a story?!" This one kid who had a speech impediment listened to my story a lot. He was all interested in my stuff. I feel like I really made a difference to him. He agreed with everything I said. I am really glad I got to stop and talk to him. It seems like I made him feel a lot better. He really believed in me and was really opening up to me. I just love making a difference like that. They hooked me up with a couple snacks and a soda, but then they had to go. I thought the Santuario was only like eight miles away, but they assured me if was more like nine because they used to walk it all the time. I'm up for the walk. Maybe somebody will pick me up. This is just great. I've got weed and I've got cigarettes. I'm having a good night so far.
I had that kid read the Note From the Rich. I don't think he finished it. I even read Fawn's Message to All to him .
8:46pm I stopped at some closed gas station(7-25-04, 7:06pm). I think it was the same place I stopped last year. I ate some stuff and now I'm going to keep walking to the Santuario.
9:55pm I'm going to stop at Tablita Road and rest. I'm going to walk until ten.
I just passed Mile Marker 5. I think I passed 1 when I started walking from Española.
10:12pm I am leaving from my rest.
10:15pm Passing Martinez Carry Out and Cafe. Antiques and collectibles. Mountain View Mortgage.
10:33pm Passing the Asemblas de Dios Templo Salvario Lighthouse of Chimayo.
10:44pm I see a sign that says Santuario Shrine, two miles ahead.
10:46pm Mile marker 7.
10:52pm Passing the O-M Martinez General Store. Chimayo, NM Since 1952.
It started drizzling.
11:11pm Official Scenic Historic Marker for Chimayo. "The Indians who occupied the Chimayo Valley centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards. Those in Chimayo, founded in the early 18th century, after the reconquest of New Mexico, has been a center of the . . . ahh, I can't understand my recording.
Holy shit, it started pouring like crazy!
11:21pm Passing by the Rancho de Chimayo(7-25-04, 8:45pm).
11:38pm I find it really hard to believe. I'm at the Santuario now and I was desperately looking for a dry spot to sleep. It's coming down real hard right now and I was very doubtful. Lo and behold, behind it there's a covered sandbox! I lucked out. I really did. Thank you, Love.
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