Talkin' Old Truck Blues

It's a strange thing. Here I just wrote about the burden of possessions, and then I go and dump over $1500 into my truck's front end. Ouch. At the same time, I'm reading Grapes of Wrath, about the Great Depression, the masses of people suffering through hard times, with Steinbeck's musings on what might be when those distressed and angry people all get together... and as I'm sitting in the mechanic's lobby, thinking not only of my times on the trails with only what was on my back, but also about the times this country and world is facing now, the Occupy protests being shut down, unemployment up and no end in sight... I'm a bit conflicted, and stirred up inside.

On the one hand, I know the pain of being stuck, the difficulty in staying ahead of bills and costs, and though I resent it at times, I know I'm not getting rid of my truck any time soon. But ah, how nice it would be to not need it, if public transit existed or could exist in these diffuse, scattered cities of single-family housing, cities with no real centers, just sprawls of development on the cheap and cheapened land. I'm as stuck as anyone else in a system that I requires I dump money into the suck-hole that is a vehicle, which I need for getting to work, where I have to work all the harder for it, and for less of a wage than I should be making. Wages always fall behind inflation; even when we get raises, we're still getting pay cuts every year.

On the other hand, I've lived the truth of simple living, I've walked that path and found it good. How we value things, and how little those things mean in the end! Yes, you need some gear to get by, be it hiking gear on a trail or the accouterments of daily life. We make so much of nothing: the owners on the one hand obsessed with owning, those without always trying to become owners themselves, and always failing and being miserable about it. Everybody always looking up, and trying to climb there, never happy where they are. I say, the less you need, the less you need to work-- and then look how much more free time you have! Time for what matters, and less stuff to worry about, and less stress about "getting ahead."

We should have let the banks fail, should have let this system crash, and from the ashes built something more sensible. So, I have an idea that it would be better to opt out. Of all of it. Let's get local currencies going, let's barter among ourselves, get black markets going, and cut the banks out of it. Why should they, or for that matter the government, profit because you and I make a private transaction of goods and services? We use the banks' money, Federal Reserve Notes, and we are taxed by the government to do it. Then the banks fuck around with interest rates and push inflation on us, constantly devaluing the money we have to use, so it gets harder and harder to live. Why do we go in for these shenanigans?

It just seems we are all working so hard to stay in the same place, though more often falling behind, and all because we can't see outside the box, can't see that this system is not set up for our benefit, can't see that there are other options, other perspectives. I'm not saying that all of our woes fall on us, the lower classes. In fact, it is my adamant belief that this system was built not by us, and that is why it fucks us every time; it is of, by, and for the rich and powerful. But I am saying that we have a responsibility and a right to do something else that is in our own interest. But first one has to see other possibilities, other ways of looking at it.

That's why this Occupy movement seems so cool to me. I like that people are talking about this stuff, in living rooms, in diners, in mechanics' lobbies, in bars. I'm disheartened a bit that the green movement seems dead, since all anyone cares about now is jobs (growth), but maybe if this system really gets the shaking up it needs, that will be part of the new order. And I know it's hard to live against the grain, to find a new way to order your life; so much easier to just go along.

But one thing is for sure, something has got to change. We're so inflexible, so unable to act responsibly in everyone's interest, that we're heading for environmental disaster. I know I've been talking economics mainly, but these two things are deeply connected. The insane lust for profits (growth) is killing our planet, but we can't stop the killing without somehow fundamentally altering our economy. I'll leave you with this: I heard the other day that there's a 1 in 10 chance now that by the end of the century, global temperatures will go up 7 degrees Celcius, effectively ending life on Earth as we know it. You like those odds?

Time in the Tropics

Well it's getting towards Halloween here in the subtropics of Florida. Driving around you see a few people who have decorated their houses with Halloween paraphanalia; the pumpkins, hay bales, chinsy ghosts and witches hung from the palm trees. It's too weird. What meaning can a fall holiday that marked the final harvests mean in a place that has no real autumn, no real harvests (Florida is for cows and citrus, and little else, and what other crops are planted, they're still being planted now), and a bunch of suburbanites that don't have any real connection to the seasons anyway? We get the same food in winter that we get in summer, only the prices change some. I figure most of the people decorating for the holiday are transplants from up north.

Which got me to thinking. Holidays like this are how we mark the year and its seasonal changes. Here in the subtropics, there isn't much of that kind of change: it cools down in the "winter," maybe even getting some frosts for a few weeks in December and January, but it's sandals-and-shorts weather most of the time, and the seasons are more about rainy season and dry season than anything else. So the old holidays, while observed out of tradition, mean even less down here than they did in the northern cities, where people are still divorced from the land but at least still have the seasons.

I was wondering how people in the tropics proper mark the year-- do the tribes in the Amazon or the South Pacific have holidays in any way reminiscent of those of northern Europe? I wonder if they don't mark the year at all, and whether their sense of time is moreso one of constancy than change. I can't even get my head around it. And could this be why paradise is so often associated with the tropics, a place of seemingly no change? The prefect weather the same every day, the sun always high in the sky, never seeming to "die" or leave for the south.

If this is the case, that they don't see the world as going through a life and a death or dormancy, than it must greatly affect their cosmology. A people who know winter will end up with a cosmology of salvation, a sun god who dies and returns. Such a cosmology would probably be largely unintelligible to a tropical people, who don't see the world in this life and death struggle that needs saving.

I say this because you can look at the religions of the Middle East, clearly shaped by the empty desert and it's single, austere, harsh god, and compare it to the lush and fertile India, with its endless count of gods, its cyclical, constantly returning cosmos of no end, Brahman's dream. And then to China, a temperate land of seasons, summer and winter, with a strongly dual concept of yin and yang. Where people live can really affect their understanding of the world. Not that it's the only thing, and let's not get carried away here, but it's an interesting thing to think about. I don't know much about tropical peoples and their basic beliefs, I wonder if this is true.

Is this why I'm so uncomfortable here in Florida? I mean besides the awful heat and oppressively strong sun, of course. I keep expecting, subconsciously, a shift that never comes, a cool down, a time of rest and silence that is winter, and it never arrives. I'm a man of the North, so that makes sense. But I wonder what it'd be like to be a man of the South, or more precisely and less Northern-Hemispherecentric, a man of the Equator.