101403

 

     Arcata, CA

Tuesday October 14, 2003    

     8:20am  Wow, we have a lot of new people at the barn. A lot of people took off before I could take a picture. Like three people have already left. I'm going to see if I can get people together for a big group picture at the barn.

     8:26am  I just took a picture of the other side of the barn with the a tent and stuff.

     8:37am  I just finished the ramp. See, before they had this big unsupported piece towards the top. I took it upon myself to ferry logs to the edge and fill in the gap. 

     9:45am  We're leaving the barn. Me, Cocapelli, Randi and this other dude. Man, there were like twenty people at the barn last night. Crazy. Everybody camped there. I did a lot of work on the ramp. Now, it's strong.

     10:04am  I'm at the donut shop. I'm going to get a donut before I go to The Endeavor and see about my glasses.

     10:06am  Melody hooked me up with some change. Thank you, sister.

                      Sweet, got me a chocolate buttermilk.

     10:20am  I got to The Endeavor. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands. They were all dirty from all those logs this morning. Even though I had gloves on. The dirt went through them. They were just simple wool gloves.

     10:25am  Be sure to include the whole section The Scientific Trajectory starting on page 185. It's good.

                     "The Scientific Trajectory

                     We are creating a new society. Not a changed society. Not an extended, larger-than-life version of our present society. But a new society.
                     This simple premise has not yet begun to tincture our consciousness. Yet unless we understand this, we shall destroy ourselves in trying to cope with tomorrow.
                     A revolution shatters institutions and power relationships. This is precisely what is happening today in all the high-technology nations. Students in Berlin and New York, in Turin and Tokyo, capture their deans and chancellors, bring great clanking education factories to a grinding halt, and even threaten to topple governments. Police stand aside in the ghettosof New York, Washington and Chicago as ancient property laws are openly violated. Sexual standards are overthrown. Great cities are paralyzed by strikes, power failures, riots. International power alliances are shaken. Financial and political leaders secretly tremble - not out of fear that communist(or capitalist) revolutionaries will oust them, but that the entire system is somehow flying out of control.
                     These are indisputable signs of a sick social structure, a society that can no longer perform even its most basic functions in the accustomed ways. It is a society caught in the agony revolutionary change. In the 1920's and 1930's, communists used to speak of the "general crisis of capitalism." It is now clear that they were thinking small. What is occuring now is not a crisis of capitalism, but of industrial society itself, regardless of its political form. We are simultaneously experiencing a youth revolution, a sexual revolution, a racial revolution, a colonial revolution, an economic revolution, and the most rapid and deep-going technological revolution in history. We are living through the general crisis of industrialism. In a word, we are in the midst of the super-industrial revolution.
                     If failure to grasp this fact impairs one's ability to understand the present, it also leads otherwise intelligent men into total stupidity when they talk about the future. It encourages tghem to think in simple-minded straight lines. Seeing evidence of bureaucracy today, they naively assume there will be more bureaucracy tomorrow. Such linear projections characterize most of what is said or written about the future. And it causes us to worry about precisely the wrong things.
                     One needs imagination to confront a revolution. For revolution does not move in straight lines alone. It jerks, twists and backtracks. It arrives in the form of quantum jumps and dialectical reversals. Only by accepting the premise that we are racing toward a wholly new stage of eco-technological development - the super industrial stage - can we make sense of our era. Only by accepting the revolutionary premise can we free our imaginations to grapple with the future.
                     Revolution implies novelty. It sends a flood of newness into the lives of countless individuals, confronting them with unfamiliar institutions and first-time situations. Reaching deep into our personal lives, the enormous changes ahead will transform traditional family structure and sexual attitudes. They will smash conventional relationships between old and young. They will overthrow our values with respect to money and success. They will alter work, play and education beyond recognition. And they will do all this in a context of spectacular, elegant, yet frightening scientific advance.
                     If transience is the first key to understanding the new society, therefore, novelty is the second. The future will unfold as an unending succession of bizarre incidents, sensational discoveries, implausible conflicts, and wildly novel dilemmas. This means that many members of the super-industrial society will never "feel at home" in it. Like the voyager who takes up residence in an alien country, only to find, once adjusted, that he must move on to another, and yet another, we shall come to feel like "strangers in a strange land."
                     The super-industrial revolution can erase hunger, disease, ignorance and brutality. Moreover, despite the pessimistic prophecies of the straight-line thinkers, super-industrialism will not restrict man, will not crush him into bleak and painful uniformity. In contrast, it will radiate new opportunities for personal growth, adventure and delight. It will be vividly colorful and amazingly open to individuality. The problem is not whether man can survive regimentation and standardization. The problem, as we shall see, is whether he can survive freedom.
                     Yet for all this, man has never truly inhabited a novelty-filled environment before. Having to live at an accelerating pace is one thing when life situations are more or less familiar. Having to do so when faced by unfamiliar, strange or unprecedented situations is distinctly another. By unleashing the forces of novelty, we slam men up against the non-routine, the unpredicted. ANd, by so doing, we escalate the problems of adaptation to a new and dangerous level. For transience and novelty are an explosive mix.
                     If all this seems doubtful, let us contemplate some of the novelties that lie in store for us. Combining rational intelligence with all the imagination we can command, let us project ourselves forcefully into the future. In doing so, let us not fear occasional error - the imagination is only free when fear of error is temporarily laid aside. Moreover, in thinking about the future, is is better to err on the side of daring, than the side of caution.
                     One sees why the moment one begins listening to the men who are even now creating that future. Listen, as they describe some of the developments waiting to burst from their laboratories and factories."

                     Once again, this book, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, was published in 1970. This guy had it figured out then . . . but when will we ever learn?

     10:47am  I just had my vitals taken here at The Endeavor. Bryn Corryel(think I spelled that wrong) from the Mobile Medical Office was nice enough to check me out. Temperature 100 degrees, I don't feel sick or nothing. Blood pressure is 110/60. He said that was pretty mellow. 84 pulse.

     10:54am  Rosendo took me to his office in the back. He told me, "Yeah, the check is here for sure. It's in Sandy's office. I just gotta find it. I already have the place to send you at Bayshore Mall."
                     Oh yeah, when I noticed those Mobile Medical Office people were there, I asked them if I could somehow receive an eye exam . . . since I'm supposed to get glasses soon.

     10:57am  I came outside to smoke a cigarette and this girl tells me, "Hey! I saw you at the Rainbow Gathering!" Some girl named Thorne who I talked to at the gathering. Wow, she recognized me. I asked her, "Did I tell you what I was doing?" She said, "Yeah, yeah." I told her I was still working on it.

     11:05am   I'm getting my eye exam at the Mobile Medical Office.

     11:17am  I just got my eye exam. My right eye is 20/140 and my left eye is 20/100. Which means my right eye is worse.

                     They told me that to get glasses I still would have to have my eyes checked by an optician and get a real exam. I'm hoping next to the place they sell glasses at in the mall they will have an eye exam place.

     12:33pm  I am taking a shit at The Endeavor.

     12:37pm  I gotta wait until one to talk to Rosendo again. I walked over to the library, which is over by the police station and it's closed.

     1:20pm  I'm still here waiting for Rosendo. I'm out here reading my book.

                   Chapter 10 on 219:

                   "The year 2000 is closer to us in time than the great depression, yet the world's economists, traumatized by that historic disaster, remain frozen in the attitudes of the past. Economists, even those who talk the language of revolution, are peculiarly conservative creatures. If it were possible to pry from their brains their collective image of the economy of, say, the year 2025, it would look very much like that on 1970 - only more so.
                   Conditioned to think in straight lines, economists have great difficulty imagining alternatives to communism and capitalism. They see in the growth of large-scale organization nothing more than a linear expansion of old-fashioned bureaucracy. They see technological advance as a simple, non-revolutionary extension of the known. Born of scarcity, trained to think in terms of limited resources, they can hardly conceive of a society in which man's basic material wants have been satisfied.
                   One reason for their lack of imagination is that when they think about technological advance, they concentrate solely on the MEANS of economic activity. Yet, the super-industrial revolution challenges the ENDS as well. It threatens to alter not merely the "how" of production but they "why". It will, in short, transform the very purposes of economic activity.
                   Before such an upheaval, even the most sophisticated tools of today's economists are helpless. Input-output tables, econometric models - the whole paraphernalia of analysis that economists employ simply do not come to grips with the external forces - political, social and ethical - that will transform economic life in the decades before us. What does "productivity" or "efficiency" mean in a society that places a high value on psychic fulfillment? What happens to an economy when, as is likely, the entire concept of property is reduced to meaninglessness? How are economies likely to be affected by the rise of supra-national planning, taxing and regulatory agencies or by a kind of dialectical return to "cottage industry" based on the most advanced cybernetic technologies? Most important, what happens when "no growth" replaces "growth" as an economic objective, when GNP ceases to be the holy grail?
                   Only by stepping outside the framework of orthodox economic thought and examining these possibilities can we begin to prepare for tomorrow. And among these, none is more central than the shift in values that is likely to accompany the super-industrial revolution.
                   Under conditions of scarcity, men struggle to meet their immediate material needs. Today under more affluent conditions, we are reorganizing the economy to deal with a new level of human needs. From a system designed to provide material satisfaction, we are rapidly creating an economy geared to the provision of psychic gratification. This process of "psychologization," one of the central themes of the super-industrial revolution, has been all but overlooked by the economists. That it will result in a novel, surprise-filled economy unlike any man has ever experienced. The issues raised by it will reduce the great conflict of the twentieth century, the conflict between capitalism and communism, to comparative insignificance. For those issues sweep far beyond economic or political dogma. They involve, as we shall see, nothing less than sanity, the human organism's ability to distinguish illusion from reality."

     2:38pm  I just talked to Rosendo and he couldn't find the stupid check. Damnit. He told me to try again tomorrow. Man, it's been like a whole month that I've been waiting now.

     3:22pm  I got the urge to smoke some weed. I went in the plaza and asked these kids, "Anyone got any weed to smoke?" They told me, "Yeah, if you've got something to smoke out of." I told them I had my one-hitter so we came over to that construction area close to the Co-op, over by where the tree is(which we can't smoke there anymore, because they cleaned it up). That elder, who was in the barn that one morning and smoked everyone out, was there. With the use of his pipe, we're all smoking weed here. Badass.

                  What are your names, by the way? Matt, Null, Ill Odor. Ahh, forget it.

     3:35pm  I just took a picture of the gang here smoking out. I just recorded their names, I think.

     3:41pm  I think I'm going to spange up a donut before I go to school. Wait, I'm not going to school. I'm going back to the barn to get my scarf I left there.

     3:42pm  James just hooked me up with some change for a donut. I appreciate it, brother.

                  Man, that was awesome! That guy totally agreed with everything I said. He didn't interrupt me one time! And, he hooked me up with change for a donut.

     4:07pm  When I got to the barn there was all these people already here. I came back for my scarf. Cool, Cocapelli just gave me a couple swigs of chocolate milk. It hit the spot. Mark also hooked me up with a bagel with peanut butter. Awesome. Thanks, man.

     4:41pm  I just took a picture of the library, which I just rearranged.

     4:52pm  I'm sitting here at the barn, not wanting to walk back into town. I'm sitting here on my bed I put together already. I took a picture of all my stuff. All my shit. I left my stick out, though. Damnit, I brought the stick over here to put it in the picture. I left it out. Anyway, I took a picture of all I have to worry about.

                   The blue Adidas bag, that's my mission-bag. It's got my rain poncho in it, my plastic folder with all the papers and stuff I'm going to scan, bus tickets and everything, like eight disposable cameras that need to be developed, it's got my utensil-kit, my book, if I lost that bag I would lose so much.

     9:35pm  I just realized I wasn't making many entries. I walked up to the barn, got my scarf and just didn't go back. I laid down and took a nap. Now, there's tons of people here. I'm going back to sleep.

Next day..