Arcata, CA
Friday October 17, 2003
Email with Cay4
5:45am I just woke up in the barn. Everyone is still asleep. It's still all dark, so I lit the candles on my shrine. It's been colder other nights. I'm going to wait until the sun comes up and dries up the field so I can walk through it.
7:35am I'm up again. I fell back asleep. The sun is out and people are up.
8:45am I am leaving into town. Hopefully I'll get my glasses today.
9:07am I walked over to the Cash Oil and took a shit. I'm going to walk to The Endeavor and see if I get my glasses.
9:22am I got to The Endeavor and asked, "Is Rosendo here?" They told me he was gone until Monday. Shit! I asked if Sandy was there and they told me, "No, she's not here. She's supposed to come in sometime today, though." I told them how I had gotten an email from Kit Boisvert telling me that they had found the check for my glasses. They told me Sandy would be there within an hour, maybe. So, I'm going to go buy me a donut. I got some change in my pocket. I'll come back and wait around for Sandy. Damnit! This is really trying my nerves.
I'm going to go check at that clinic and see if I left my rainbow beanie there.
I walked up to that clinic . . . and they didn't have my rainbow beanie. :[
On page 249 the section The Odds Against Love.
"Minorities experiment; majorities cling to the forms of the past. It is safe to say that large numbers of people will refuse to jettison the conventional idea of marriage or the familiar family forms. They will, no doubt, continue searching for happiness within the orthodox format. Yet, even they will be forced to innovate in the end, for the odds against success may prove overwhelming.
The orthodox format presupposes that two young people will "find" one another and marry. It presupposes that the two will fulfill certain psychological needs in one another, and that the two personalities will develop over the years, more or less in tandem, so that they continue to fulfill each other's needs. It further presupposes that this process will last "until death do us part."
These expectations are built deeply into our culture. Is it no longer respectable, as it once was, to marry for anything but love. Love has changed from a peripheral concern of the family into its primary justification. Indeed, the pursuit of love through family life has become, for many, the very purpose of life itself.
Love, however, is defined in terms of this notion of shared growth. It is seen as a beautiful mesh of complementary needs, flowing into and out of one another, fulfilling the loved ones, and producing feelings of warmth, tenderness and devotion. Unhappy husbands often complain that they have "left their wives behind" in terms of social, educational, or intellectual growth. Partners in successful marriages are said to "grow together."
This "parallel development" theory of love carries endorsement from marriage counsellors, psychologists and sociologists. Thus, says sociologist Nelson Foote, a specialist on the family, the quality of the relationship between husband and wife is dependent upon "the degree of matching in their phases of distinct but comparable development."
If love is a product of shared growth, however, and we are to measure success in marriage by the degree to which matched development actually occurs, it becomes possible to make a strong and ominous pediction about the future.
It is possible to demonstrate that, even in a relatively stagnant society, the mathematical odds are heavily stacked against any couple achieving this ideal of parallel growth. The odds for success positively plummet, however, when the rate of change in society accelerates, as it is now doing. In a fast-moving society, in which many things change, not once, but repeatedly, in which the husband moves up and down a variety of economic and social scales, in which the family is again and again torn loose from home and community, in which individuals move further from their parents, further from the religion of origin, and further from traditional values, it is almost miraculous if two people develop at anything like comparable rates.
If, at the same time, average life expectancy rises from, say fifty to seventy years, thereby lengthening the term during which this acrobatic feat of matched development is supposed to be maintained, the odds against success become absolutely astronomical. Thus, Nelson Foote writes with wry understatement: "To expect marriage to last indefinitely under modern conditions is to expect a lot." To ask love to last indefinitely is to expect even more. Transience and novelty are both in league against it."
Page 256
"The Demands of Freedom
A world in which marriage is temporary rather than permanent, in which family arrangements are diverse and colorful, in which homosexuals may be acceptable parents and retirees start raising children - such a world is vastly different from our own. Today, all boys and girls are expected to find life-long partners. In tomorrow's world, being single will be no crime. Nor will couples be forced to remain imprisoned, as so many still are today, in marriages that have turned rancid. Divorce will be easy to arrange, so long as the responsible provision is made for children. In fact, the very introduction of professional parenthood could touch off a great liberating wave of divorces by making it easier for adults to discharge their parental responsibilities without necessarily remaining in the cage of a hateful marriage. With this powerful external pressure removed, those who stay together would be those who wish to stay together, those for whom marriage is actively fulfilling - those, in short, who are in love.
We are also likely to see, under this looser, more variegated family system, many more marriages involving partners of unequal age. Increasingly, older men will marry young girls or vice versa. What will count will not be chronological age, but complementary values and interests and, above all, the level of personal development. To put it another way, partners will be interested not in age, but in stage.
Children in this super-industrial society will grow up with an ever enlarging circle of what might be called "semi-siblings" - a whole clan of boys and girls brought into the world by their successive sets of parents. What becomes of such "aggregate" families will be fascinating to observe. Semi-sibs may turn out to be like cousins, today. They may help one another professionally or in time of need. But they will also present the society with novel problems. Should semi-sibs marry, for example?
Surely, the whole relationship of the child to the family will be dramatically altered. Except perhaps in communal groupings, the family will lose what little remains of its power to transmit values to the younger generation. This will further accelerate the pace of change and intensify the problems that go with it.
Looming over all such changes, however, and even dwarfing them in significance is something far more subtle. Seldom discussed, there is a hidden rhythm in human affairs that until now has served as one of the key stabilizing forces in society: the family cycle.
We begin as children; we mature; we leave the parental nest; we give birth to children who, in turn, grow up, leave and begin the process all over again. This cycle has been operating so long, so automatically, and with such implacable regularity, that men have taken it for granted. It is part of the human landscape. Long before they reach puberty, children learn the part they are expected to play in keeping this great cycle turning. This predictable succession of family events has provided all men, of whatever tribe or society, with a sense of continuity, a place in the temporal scheme of things. The family cycle has been one of the sanity-preserving constants in human existence.
Today this cycle is accelerating. We grow up sooner, leave home sooner, marry sooner, have children sooner. We space them more closely together and complete the period of parenthood more quickly. In the words of Dr. Bernice Neugarten, a University of Chicago specialist on family development, "The trend is toward a more rapid rhythm of events through most of the family cycle."
But if industrialism, with its faster pace of life, has accelerated the family cycle, super-industrialism now threatens to smash it altogether. With the fantasies that the birth scientists are hammering into reality, with the colorful familial experimentation that innovative minorities will perform, with the likely development of such institutions as professional parenthood, with the increasing movement toward temporary and serial marriage, we shall not merely run the cycle more rapidly; we shall introduce irregularity, suspense, unpredictability - in a word, novelty - into what was once as regular and certain as the seasons.
When a "mother" can compress the process of birth into a brief visit to an embryo emporium, when by transferring embryos from womb to womb we can destroy even the ancient certainty that childbearing took nine months, children will grow up into a world in which the family cycle, once so smooth and sure, will be jerkily arrhythmic. Another crucial stabilizer will have been removed from the wreckage of the old order, another pillar of sanity broken.
There is, of course, nothing inevitable about the developments traced in the preceding pages. We have it in our power to shape change. We may choose one future over another. We cannot, however, maintain the past. In our family forms, as in our economics, science, technology and social relationships, we shall be forced to deal with the new.
The Super-industrial Revolution will liberate men from many of the barbarisms that grew out of the restrictive, relatively choiceless family patterns of the past and present. It will offer to each a degree of freedom hitherto unknown. But it will exact a steep price for that freedom.
As we hurtle into tomorrow, millions of ordinary men and women will face emotion-packed options so unfamiliar, so untested, that past experience will offer little clue to wisdom. In their family ties, as in all other aspects of their lives, they will be compelled to cope not merely with transience, but with the added problem of novelty as well.
Thus, in matters both large and small, in the most public of conflicts and the most private of conditions, the balance between routine and non-routine, predictable and non-predictable, the known and the unknown, will be altered. The novelty ratio will rise.
In such an environment, fast-changing and unfamiliar, we shall be forced, as we wend our way through life, to make our personal choices from a diverse array of options. And it is to the third central characteristic of tomorrow, diversity - that sets the stage for the historic crisis of adaptation that is the subject of this book: future shock.
Part Four - Diversity
Chapter 12
THE ORIGINS OF OVERCHOICE
The Super-Industrial Revolution will consign to the archives of ignorance most of what we now believe about democracy and the future of human choice.
Today, in the techno-societies there is an almost ironclad consensus about the future of freedom. Maximum individual choice is regarded as the democratic ideal. Yet most writers predict that we shall move further and further from this ideal. They conjure up a dark vision of the future, in which people appear as mindless conumer-creatures, surrounded by standardized goods, educated in standardized schools, fed a diet standardized mass culture, and forced to adopt standardized styles of life.
Such predictions have spawned a generation of future-haters and technophobes, as one might expect. One of the most extreme of these is a French religious mystic, Jacques Ellul, whose books are enjoying a campus vogue. According to Ellul, man far freer in the past when "Choice was a real possibility for him." By contrast, today, "The human being is no longer in any sense the agent of choice." And, as for tomorrow: "In the future, man will apparently be confined to the role of a recording device." Robbed of choice, he will be acted upon, not active. He will live, Ellul warns, in a totalitarian state run by a velvet-gloved Gestapo.
This same theme - the loss of choice - runs through much of the work of Arnold Toynbee. It is repeated by everyone from hippie gurus to Supreme Court justices, tabloid editorialists and existentailist philosophers. Put in its simplest form, this Theory of Vanishing Choice rests on a crude syllogism: Science and technology have fostered standardization. Science and technology will advance, making the future even more standardized than than the present. Ergo: Man will progressively lose his freedom of choice.
If instead of blindly accepting this syllogism, we stop to analyze it, however, we make an extraordinary discovery. For not only is the logic itself faulty, the entire idea is premised on sheer factual ignorance about the nature, the meaning and the direction of the Super-industrial Revolution.
Ironically, the people of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice, but from a paralyzing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice."
10:32am Phil gave me a Camel Wide. Thank you.
Page 273, the paragraph that starts with, "Long before the year 2000.."
"Long before the year 2000, the entire antiquated structure of degrees, majors, and credits will be a shambles. No two students will move along exactly the same educational track. For the students now pressuring higher education to destandardize, to move toward super-industrial diversity, will win their battle."
11:22am Argh, I am frustrated. I don't know what to do. See, I want to go to The Raven House in Eureka. They're open 12-6 today. I'll do my laundry and take a shower. Also, I'm waiting for Sandy, but I'm not even sure if Sandy shows up that she'll have the check for my glasses. Kit Boisvert sent me an email saying they found it. Also, I need to go to the library and look through their lost-and-found for my rainbow beanie. Arghhhh, I am so frustrated. This sucks. I am really getting tired of Arcata already. I need to go. I need to go back home. Why must I stay where I don't belong? This pisses me off. I might have an STD. I don't know what the hell is going on.
I'm sick still. I just feel like total shit right now. My throat still hurts.
12:50pm Man, I can't believe I lost my rainbow beanie. Man, I'm losing all my shit. Umm, I asked Lori if she had the authority to enter Rosendo's office. I was hoping the check would be in plain sight, but it wasn't. She checked. I walked outside and saw these kids waiting for a bus. I asked them if they were waiting for the bus to Eureka and they said yeah, that it came at 1:20pm, in like half an hour. I guess I'll go check my email at the public library. I'll email Kit and see what she tells me.
1:57pm I spent way too much time on the computer at the library. I was busy reading my logs. Man, I've got a good book.
Oh yeah, since I'm sick and not up for the walk to Samoa, where I can hitch to Eureka easily, I am going to catch the bus there. Next bus comes at 2:45pm. That sucks. Oh man, my throat hurts.
2:33pm Josh, from Riverside, Cyndi's boyfriend had a cool story about a cop and road flares. I asked him to repeat the story into my recorder and he did:
"We were going to Santa Nella(I think that's what he said), off of I5. A California highway patrolman stops us. He pulls up and tells us that we can't be hitch hiking and blah, blah, blah. He ends up giving us a ride to Santa Nella. So we get all the way to Santa Nella. We get our stuff out of his trunk and all of a sudden I told the cop, "Oh dude, those road flares are like the shit! They're so huge! I've never seen them like that!" So, the cop's like, "You want one?" I looked at him like hold on, what did he just say? I tell him, "Yeah, of course I want one!" So I get one and my buddy Josh is like, "I want one too!" Then, after he gets on, by buddy Alien's like, "Oh, if they're getting one I gotta have one, too." So, he hooked us up and now all of us have big fatty road flares."
2:44pm I'm over here waiting for the bus to Eureka. I was standing there in the sun missing my rainbow beanie. The sun was in my eyes, it sucked. Well, my rainbow beanie didn't really keep the sun out of my eyes, but it blocked the rays from my scalp. Just then I went, "Oh yeah! I have my Natural Balance hat! I don't really much need my rainbow beanie now. I got a hat.
Also, everyone keeps telling me about some skate park that's nearby. I want to go take pictures of that and take pictures of kids doing tricks on skateboards. It's on Sunset Avenue, I think. I'll walk down there, maybe when I'm not sick anymore.
2:48pm I'm on the bus.
3:01pm I'm in Eureka. I just got off the bus. I'm going to walk to The Raven House.
6:00pm I am leaving The Raven House. I got everything I needed done today. I did my laundry, I took a shower and that's about all I needed to do. It sucks that I have to wait two more fucking days for my glasses.
Shit, I forgot I left my thick Structure shirt in the dryer. I'm going back for it.
6:08pm I am at the hitchhiking spot back to Arcata. I'm going to take a picture of it, just in case I haven't.
6:11pm Amber was nice enough to pick me up in her Suzuki Sidekick. Amber, who works at The Raven House gave me a ride last time, I think.
6:22pm Back in Arcata, in the plaza.
7:02pm Todd is hooking me up with a cigarette. I appreciate it, brother.
7:06pm It's Friday night and I'm already heading out to the barn. I'm bored. I hate the night-life on Friday nights.
7:25pm I'm at the barn. I'm going to go to bed.
8:50pm Remember I had come out to the barn? Well, before I knew it all these other people came. Well, Charlie was already here when I got here. They brought like a family!
This lady with four kids and a husband and stuff. Paul Coon is here, too. I took a shot of whiskey. Just one shot, though. And we're smoking weed. Oh yeah, this twelve year old girl smokes weed and her mom doesn't care! Her mom told me, "I tell her the truth and let her decide, you know." That's crazy. And, I'm going to tell my story to them in the morning. Kids love my shit. It's going to be cool. Now, I'm thinking I'm kind of hungry, so I might just walk back into town and spange up a donut.
Whoa, and this brother just showed up with two spacebags! Party at the barn!
9:03pm I've been walking back. I walked over the field and am on the railroad tracks. I just saw Cocapelli and he asked me if I had seen Randi. I told him, "No, did you lose her?" He said, "Kind of. If you see her can you tell her to go to the barn, please . . . and tell her I'm sorry." In case I don't see you Randi, Cocapelli is sorry.
Man, I'm so stupid. I'm always saying how it's bad to drink alcohol, but I go and take a swig. The minute it hit my stomach it started hurting. It happens every time and every time I say I won't drink ever again. It was just one shot of liquor and I had an empty stomach, so it's hurting pretty bad. I desperately need some food. Oh yeah, and I'm sick.
9:27pm Iris just gave me a quarter.
9:29pm Man, this really cool dude just hooked me up with three dollars! Just like that! It sucks because I couldn't make his name out on the recording, but he knows who he is. If you want credit, email me.
Sweet, that guy just bought me an apple fritter and a milk. This should help my stomach immensely.
9:52pm I'm back at the barn.
They're having a little party at the barn. I just took a picture.
Dude, this sucks. It's the 18th and I'm typing this up at the library. It's 4:30pm and I've been here since it opened at 11pm. The batteries on my recorder just went out. I think they sell 2 AA's for three dollars at the liquor store. I'll go buy some more. Later on. I got a lot done today. It was cool that they ran out right when I was finishing this day up. Peace.
From: "Siobhan O' Shea" <indra@neteze.com> [Save Address] [Block Sender]
To: "'Victor Antonio'" <rightprotect@linuxmail.org>
Cc:
Subject: RE: WORLD PEACE VICTOR WITH WALKING STICK
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 13:16:10 -0700
As AttachmentInline Text Previous | Next
Keep up the good work brother!
Siobhan, a friend from Arcata
From: Jeffery Drury <jefferyamin@yahoo.com> [Save Address] [Block Sender]
To: Victor Antonio <rightprotect@linuxmail.org>,cookie_m_e@yahoo.com, lawoftheheart@yahoo.com,mikaela_holmes@brown.edu, oscarcatoz@hotmail.com, indra@neteze.com,janahagner@hotmail.com, tam25@humboldt.edu, svanella2003@asis.com,zglascoe@hotmail.com, jdphaflich@yahoo.com, pd186@hotmail.com
Subject: Man Who Talks Softly And Walks Strongly
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 10:43:42 -0700 (PDT)
Very Good Victor!!
Jeffery here...remember Me? THC THC THC
donut shop...THC THC hey, get me a copy of that photo!! THC THC
barn wake and bake was so cool... Get on down south...
Sequoia...
Lake Isabella Rainbow Family...smiles...LSD
Jeffery
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