Arizona Summer 2019

Grand Canyon








Sedona









Petrified Forest

















Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why we should end the "war on fire"--for ecological reasons and for human health

Image
    Why We Should End the War on Fire This is a favorite pet issue for me, my primary political concerns are ecological, but as mike davis pointed out in [The Case for Letting  Malibu Burn]( https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/ ), the class aspects are not totally separable from the ecology.  I'm mostly not going to focus on the Mike Davis essay and the class analysis, bc trueanon already did that, and I think that some of the details about the science and wonk stuff from a different piece are worth shining a light on.  But mike Davis' essay is great for tracing some of the bizarre history, geography, and ecology of fire suppression.  It addresses how extremely wealthy homeowners in Malibu have basically gotten protected by the government and in some cases private fire fighting contractors.  the most bizarre part to me was how many homeowners in Malibu actually preemptively spray their shrubs with the commercially used fir...
Read more

Helpless

Image
"Years ago my heart was set/to live, oh/but I've been trying hard/against unbelievable odds"--Big Star, Ballad of El Goodo I shouldn’t be writing this essay. I shouldn’t be doing anything but resting. But things as they are are untenable. And sometimes I write because I literally think if I get my story out into the world, I might find a savior. These days, everything I write (and it doesn’t amount to much) is a literal cry for help. Why have you forsaken me? And by you, I guess I mean the world. I guess I mean anyone who might listen. In the summer of 2016, I was working outside for a small tree nursery business, really just a two-man operation, in central vermont. (I’m native to Northeastern Vermont, but our work took us all over the state). I was young, fit, full of anxieties, ambition, big plans. I wanted to be an artist and a musician, professionally, yes, but also just as a vocation. I wanted to do whatever it takes to “make it”. I just...
Read more

Borderlines, Horizons, Hopes

Image
I remember crossing through the panhandle of Texas during a giant, ominous dust/windstorm this past summer, in the back of a minivan, while listening to this song by Rilo Kiley: https://youtu.be/-zTXFOUvZiw "It's 16 miles/to the promised Land" took on such significance for me, as we neared New Mexico, and i thought about the wonderful, terrifying prospect of having hope for recovering from my illness.  The New Mexico sunsets are strange, unreal, and seem to reveal new dimensions to light itself.  I don't know if New Mexico is the promised Land.  Things haven't gone as easy or as speedily as I once hoped they would.  But the experiment of going to pristine wilderness areas in the West to see what effect it has on my symptoms as a whole has yielded lots of usable data, and tantalizing possibilities for future improvement. I've had so much pain, and probably have so much more to deal with even with treatments that could possibly yield full remission, to ...
Read more