Waiting For The Hundredth Monkey

A symphony that love between humans only sings the pop songs from & transcendental experience more deeply taps into
EVERYTHING IS A VIBRATION
A carrier wave that allows forest critters to move into groups where they act with one brain, an energy the Tai Chi master can send across space

That unites subatomic particles across space AND time

That the medicine man plugs in to when rolled up and nearly suffocated in blankets in the sweat lodge until he can make lights come on the lodge and call eagles to the medicine pole outside

TO: Sy Safranski, Editor
The Sun
107 N. Roberson St.
Chapel Hill, NC 27516


Stupid Design, Intelligent Design Or No Design?



Intelligent Design or Stupid Design? Both of them cop an attitude. Stupid Design just flips the arrogance To say a certain butterfly doesn’t live "long enough" or that a horse’s leg isn’t strong enough or to say Henslow’s Sparrow’s vocalizations are "one of the poorest vocal effects of any bird" is to assume, no less than the intelligent designers, that we understand what the purpose of life is or should be. Who do we think we are, anyhow?

George Burns, playing God, talks about the Avocado and says, "I made the pit too big." (Yeah, I know it’s a joke but) too big for what or who? The Avocado plant is doing fine as far as survival goes. Like horses, dogs & cats, it may be "dumb" but it’s teaching us to cultivate and serve it—how stupid is that?

I’d need a little more esthetic distance to get excited about the beauty of prostate cancer but it does beg the question of why have death at all? Or back problems? Or wisdom teeth and pain? And AIDS? These are all mistakes from the point of view that we’re the center & penultimate end result of the universe and deserve or should be able to live forever pain free or else something is wrong with evolution

The caddis fly, like the rain forest butterfly, also doesn’t live long, but it provides food for fish, birds, crayfish, insects, salamanders, and is stupid, sad or pitiful only if we judge it as thing instead of process and part of a larger process. The same logic is even more transparently absurd & one dimensional if we use it to criticize a human invention. What caliber of engineer would call "The Gossamer Albatross" stupid because it’s too "flimsy" or "not sturdy" (these are not engineering terms). The plane was made to be light enough for a human being to pedal it across a certain distance. Like many biological anomalies, it was made to do just one job, to fit into one specific niche in a competition. If we want to criticize it we need to know what the dialogue was for that competition. Weakness? or flamboyant delicacy? Neither, or both, or something else? Who are we to say?

True random selection. would be incredibly messy and ineffective. Beaks would grow out of backs, or tails. All the beautiful progressive symmetry, British Biologist, Gregory Bateson so patiently catalogued, would be turned to a plasma soup like the cancer I read about that grew a hair and a tooth. True survival of the fittest would understand the idea that being fittest is often "learning" to fit into a special niche. Using any machine or tool for some task for which it is not fitted doesn’t reflect on a lack in it so much as the user. How should we presume to know what the day of a rain forest butterfly is like for the forest or the butterfly? Who are we to assign and value one form of life over another? Lemmings may fall off cliffs, so may migrating Wildebeasts; but it’s because they, like Goat Sucker birds, have the feet or senses they needed (or didn’t need) for a particular circumstance. It seems equally simplistic to say God or some intelligence made them that way as to say they were designs arrived at by random or natural selection or survival of the fittest.

Stupid or intelligent, random or synchronistic, waves or particles, with us or against us, mistake words for realities. Everything we try to say, as Korzybski, Wittgenstein, and Bertrand Russell have tried to warn us, is in some sense metaphor or a leap of faith between speaker and listener. The best metaphor I have found for what is going on in evolution is there is an on-going conversation between the DNA and the environment, or a proprioception on the part of the organism as to what is required to be part of the process called the natural community and to survive within it.

How do the bait fish and the baitcrab "learn" (or just happen) to grow bait fish on their bodies with which to catch other fish? How does a plant "learn" to (or randomly) make its flowers stink like rotting meat in the center and turn its stamens, pistils and stem into a stomach and its petals into opposable claws and jaws? First how do mycelium fungi “learn” to throw digestive juices out into their environment, second, how do you get the stench-bait (= purpose or interaction) unless there’s a sense of what’s out there to stink for? How does a forest insect turn its proboscis into an "ovipostor" capable of sensing an insect buried 1 ½ " into a tree trunk? How does a corn plant get to the stage where when a corn eating caterpillar invades it, it sends out a smell that attracts a parasitic wasp which burrows into the caterpillar and deposits its eggs in its abdomen. The eggs hatch and eat and kill the caterpillar. What is the mechanism by which the blind mole rat of Africa developed a connection from sensor hairs on its nose to the cerebral cortex in such a way that the cortex devotes all its neurons---that would “normally” be dedicated to visual stimulation---to sensory data, to such an extent that it has sensory maps of all its tunnels? Similarly how do Aborigines learn to sing "song lines" that are topographical maps of the territory of a clan or moiety? How do chameleons, insects that look like twigs and leaves, and transparent frogs learn each in their own separate ways how to make do with the world they are given?

Look in the natural world at things that try to look like other things, try to look bigger, or smaller, or deader than they are, (possums, chameleons, the preying mantis), look at the mapping dances of bees, and the territorial dances of various tribes, and another term for the process comes to mind along with conversation, and dialogue, and that term is mimesis, or mimicry. It’s as if the entire natural and human world is engaged in it. Mimicry is a well documented natural phenomena but not as a working factor in the evolutionary dialogue.

Bertrand Russell, in a work called, "What is Philosophy For?" writes that philosophy, historically, often precedes science, that it asks questions and speculates about answers that science is not yet equipped to deal with, that science may NEVER be equipped to answer. Many such questions exist, not only in the religious and spiritual realms. The so-called "soft sciences" produce many questions to which science can't give definitive answers but nonetheless needs to hear them argued in a disciplined way.

The last time I saw Robert Creeley, at a dinner a year before he died, I mentioned all the forms and examples of various intelligences in nature I had been collecting (among them whales, chimps, apes, Bonobos, Dolphins, Elephants and Parrots). I said it appeared to me that nature has already created and could create any number of new intelligences, equal to or better in some ways than ours, and do it over & over again. He looked at me seriously and said, "It would be a shame if ours was the only form of intelligence, seeing what a mess we’ve made of things."

We can’t squander our habitat for the momentary payoffs of willful stupidity and then turn around and say we’re smart enough to characterize evolution as an either/or proposition of being divinely inspired or randomly arrived at, or just a bad idea. We can say the human foot is unnecessarily fragile or stupid, but it saves 70% of the energy an ape uses in walking.

The ankle and the arch of the foot:

Strength out of weakness. Intelligence out of stupidity

May it ever be thus. Why is the natural world so fragile? Maybe there are some things we can only learn by dying.
























I know you think I’m awful but I did the best I could. I know anybody can say that, but I also know how hard I tried, how tired I was coming home at night, how insane, depressing and hopeful at the same time, the situation always was. I wish I could have been kinder, smarter, stronger, have known then what I know now, but that’s all too easy to say. I thought I could remain outside the insanity and direct it toward a good end. That was my worst mistake, assuming we wouldn’t all be driven crazy. How could I have been so stupid? The seeds of our destruction were always so obvious from the beginning…..

that May afternoon with false promises of rain in the air when you gave me a ride in your VW bus to a little motel café beside the highway. The new managers for the arts center, The Reverend Brown and his daughter Kathy were going to treat us to lunch and also feed us some other stuff. They were going to tell us in more ways than we could hear, how our lives were about to change.

“We’re going to hit this project,” Kathy said, smashing her little fist into her other hand, “and hit it hard.”

That’s funny, now I need to hit a lot of things and people real hard, this great energy sucking black hole we call air conditioning and refrigeration, this blind banal horror we call art anymore, this stupid government, the energy problem….but fuck that, all I can do is try to make a living. .

Paul had argued with Roger that putting the Browns in charge would be the death of The International Arts Center, but Roger was desperate. He owed his wife too much money. Too many of her paychecks from her social work in foreign countries had been snatched up by Larry while she was out of the country and gone into the account for the LLC that owned the building.

“She will have my guts.” He said.

So many things could have been different. I might have been stronger and better able to deal with my attraction to June, might not have been seated next to her wondering what the hell I was doing. Dear June, I wrote, I appreciate your honesty…..and it went on from there, an attempt at earnestness that tried so hard it ignored desire as a motive. I can’t read the whole letter now it’s too embarrassing. You can’t try to do good this way.

Then Reverend Brown came in, moving slowly like a large ship coming into harbor with the assistance of invisible tugboats, a tall, pear shaped man in a brown suit, his lips pursed as if he was about to speak. He sat beside Kathy, took his napkin and stuffed it in his collar like a bib, and started eating. He ate a steak as big as his plate, potatoes and gravy, pie and then he stopped, put his napkin away and started talking.

“I started working when I was thirteen years old and I haven’t stopped since. I became a contractor. I treat all my employees right. I tell them you show me a way to make more money for the company, I’ll pay you more. I’m a minister. You can call me Reverend G
Brown. I do feel at my age I’m owed some kind of respect. I’m not going to censor anybody but if I found a crucifix in a jar of urine and accidentally tipped it over I wouldn’t bother to pick it up. (Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” his effort to bring Christ down from the all powerful position radio preachers had put him, to the level of a living breathing human being with body fluids and problems, because if he was never there, where’s the relevance?) My daughter here, Kathy, will be in charge. She’s run all my businesses. You see I didn’t have a son.”

I bit into a tomato a little too hard and it squirted seeds and pulp all over June’s bare brown shoulder. I felt sick. Rev. Brown got up abruptly and left.





hot sun beating down on scattered appliances, buildings stark white with nothing around them, lucky there’s any shelter at all much less and overhang, a porch or trees or shade. Nothing grows here except the big white boxes you gotta have more of. Victor’s aging, harried, has kidney stones, candida, worn out & getting fat from chasing the yankee dollar, people from Mexico come by wanting to buy anything, huge trailers with appliances hanging over the top and rear edge like fat on their bellies, their faces brown parchment full of lumps and wrinkles, walking carefree in the certainty of total corruption and doom without redemption, no more disappointments now that everything is totally fucked. How they get to the border much less into the interior, nobody knows.

Victor says,

“I need to ask your forgiveness.” It’s the third or fourth damn time he’s broken his promise to deliver the stackable washer dryer to the apartment I manage. I’m not surprised, he’s so not in control he can’t even promise himself anything. Always another big deal, the dreams put off to another day, shit piles up, can’t sort it, can’t get rid of it, the blistering hot legacy of appliance white in the sun and oil washed dirt. The hell of words not kept, things not seen beyond the guts of the machine.

“Bless you my son,” I say making the cross & shaking the imaginary holy-water wand, “go and sin no more.”


A tall pot bellied Mexican man struts around in his ironed, creased jeans, pointy toed high heeled cowboy boots, Stetson straw with the perfect crown, sunglasses, stone washed denim shirt. Wish I had a nickle for every hour I’ve spent waiting for some deal to go down in Spanish.

Bright phosphorescent nylon tie downs splitting face in two. Neil Young on the radio singing Broken Arrow and then Hoagey Carmichael with Old Buttermilk Sky.

“Because of you,” I say, “I cleaned out the bed of my truck.”

“O you making me feel GUILTEEEEE.” He whined.

“What guilt?” I said, “without you I NEVER would have a clean bed to haul stuff in.”

Victor told me the first time he didn’t show, “Just tell them Victor’s no good.” He said, then it’s all my fault.

“O he’s thinking about ME!” I said sarcastically, “such a nice guy!” He laughed like a kid caught in a silly lie. One of his many helpers rolls out the washer dryer, which is what I’m trading for the units that broke down after I sold them to a customer and had to take them back.

“We have a good relationship.” Victor says, “Sometimes I take advantage, sometimes you…..”

“Sounds like SOMEBODY’S getting fucked.” I say. He and his friends laugh. We load it up.

Everytime my hernia hurts just a little I get this image back in my mind of Native women who are given captives to torture at the stake by the warriors. The women slit open the captives’ stomachs and scatter their guts on the ground and then release them and let them try to pick them up. Why? What am I scared of? I ask myself. That surgeons have those same motives? Or is it a metaphor for love, having your guts turned inside out and seeing every ugly part of you in broad daylight. Is there that drive in women to poke and prod into every nook and cranny of a man until she has a death grip on every tender and needy part of him, after, of course, rendering him helpless and almost dead with too much sweetness? A friend used to tell me when I’d start talking about black widows eating their mates:

“It’s very dangerous and irresponsible to give scientific facts like that to anyone with your imagination.” And laughed.

As I head over the railroad bridge with my new load, a freight train pulls out as if out of me, at an angle from beneath me heading toward the vast beautiful wasteland between here and El Paso. I can smell the Chaparral, feel the hot dry wind and the sandy dirt out there. I need to just go, out into that sky but I’ve got work to do.

“Got a strong back.” My tenant’s “guest” (of two weeks now) says.














WAITING FOR THE HUNDREDTH MONKEY

WIKIPEDIA: The "Hundredth Monkey Effect" is a supposed phenomenon in which a learned behaviour spreads instantaneously from one group of monkeys to all related monkeys once a critical number was reached. The story behind this supposed phenomenon originated with Lyall Watson, who claimed that it was the observation of Japanese scientists. Such an observation did not exist (e.g. Myers 1985, Amundsen 1985, 1991).




Parked in the dirt beside highway drive, lightning causes the radio to continuously change stations, and cold drops of the coming rain hit my skin. Beyond the squalor of junk cars and scattered little service businesses the sky is getting grayer and darker over the tiny hills that are the only relief from the flat desert landscape on the way to Phoenix. A bay opens up in the garage across the street and I drive the van/ambulance in to have the toe-in adjusted. It’s a huge garage with 24 ft ceilings, 4 bays, a parts shop, a dynamometer/engine rebuild space, and a large office where Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings of inventions are animated on the computer space savers. It’s all dark and dirty inside. Like 80% of garages its main purpose is to subsidize the owner’s racing habit. Don Hall sent me here to his brother’s alignment shop, from Just For Fun Auto Repair, a title whose irony could not be any deeper. Don works from seven to seven, his knees and feet are blown out, he’s fat, balding, worried and tired all the time, but it pays for his race cars. He’s cheap & brilliant & compassionate & Mormon. There’s a framed credo in his greasy office defending the sanctity of marriage against enemies that in my opinion are about as real as Elmer Fudd’s shotgun or the dwatted wabbit he can never hit.

Everybody else has got religion it seems, what about me? What can I believe? I sent my friend an email copy of my essay for NPR’s This I Believe. It begins, “I believe in the intelligence of nature”. She wrote back,

“What difference does it make if nature is intelligent, if we die and cockroaches take over? Belief is baloney.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but it’s GOOD baloney.” My brother’s belief takes him down to the county jail to rob people’s souls to save them, and the pisser is, it works. You really can substitute intellectual dope for cocaine, because, I think, they’re the same thing. People who think they’re being given marijuana actually get high. Dr. Weil says the placebo effect is as good or better than the best meds. Martin Luther King turned an ancient anthology full of myths, fables, gossip, historical inaccuracies and inherent contradictions into an instrument for guiding acts of courage and compassion. Al Quaeda turned the Quran into a weapon of murder/suicide and the ultimate intellectual cowardice of black and white, good and evil. Go figure. I wish I could stop because it’s a constant mental irritation.

My essay says I feel a common sympathy running thru all nature. Species and their immediate environments are engaged in a dance/dialogue based on proprioception and mimicry. In all the moments of the world, and all the sad stories the punch line is they ARE stories, and nature is capable of developing any number of intelligences besides ours, and greater than ours, and we can plug into that potential if we want, if we make up our minds to work with instead of against whatever portion of nature we are given to cultivate.

But nothing pisses people off more than being offered the wrong kind of salvation. Guess it’s kind of a sore subject.

I too am tired of grumpy old men with stringy white beards mistaking their irritability for inspiration, their prejudices & crochets for the word of god. How do you believe in anything after seeing these abuses of belief? But even belief in nothing is a belief. Only the completely catatonic and suicidally depressed have lost all faith But every time I think I’m getting somewhere I’m surrounded by conundrums.

In principle I believe we and all our technological traps are part of nature, and working on community and communication is a better strategy for survival than survivalism, but why is human governance so self destructive? And why would an intelligent nature create it that way?

But I feel a sympathy that runs thru all nature & I would be more joyful. The facts, themselves, have become liminal to me….like…the way we respond to other people in emergencies, the way children and animals and even plants respond to us, the way subatomic particles can affect each other across thousands of miles. Yeah, religion knows less than it says, but there’s more to this than you’re telling me in science class. Species evolve to fit niches like the key understood exactly what the lock was like, and was in love with it and imitating it and playing it and the whole scene beforehand. Why not just believe in the sympathy itself as the connective tissue of the universe? Or if the brains we think with are just atoms & molecules from the big bang become self reflexive, doesn’t whatever happens HAVE to be OK? Except for this little ego problem death always posits. We’ll work that out in no time.

Both these brothers who are working on my vehicles take better care of their customers than any other mechanics I know, and the customers thank them profusely, shake their hands and pat them on the back. That dividend is something we can’t measure. It may be all that’s keeping us alive.

But at the moment, I’ve lost all faith in everything because it’s getting darker and colder and windier outside and the rain is now roaring on the sheet metal roof like the end of the world and blowing in, in sporadic sheets. One of the five mechanics there walks over and puts a red blanket over the Snap On tool cabinet by the roll up door. As a joke somebody has pasted a sticker beside the Snap On logo showing a woman wearing a dildo that says “Strap On Tools”. Another mechanic comes in drenched and laughing rapidly like a machine gun. The others, usually as solemn as coronors, talk excitedly about the rain. A greasy German Shepherd with broken feet from walking on concrete all his life, comes over to me where I’m hunkered against a pillar where I can watch the alignment procedure. He sticks his head under my hand. His eyelids have opened wider and wider over the years and he has black tear runnels running down his jaw. It’s almost comforting to pet him, but I have a hernia that hurts with a dull ache that matches the drab surroundings, and I’m scared---of dying, or of living but not ever really being alive.

I left the roof hatch to my camper open and left a manuscript under it. I figure I’ll get home and find that and all my bedcovers soaked. Not much to worry about unless you have a long string of bad sense memories and associated disasters for other times when it rained, and not unless almost everything you have is at risk to one natural disaster or another. Outside of that, no worries. Cold, stinging sheets of rain are blowing over on me thirty five feet from the bay door now, and I get up to seek shelter. The garage space has darkened but the pin up girl on the calendar on the tool box by the door is somehow lit up like a projection and is flapping in the wind like an intentionally clumsy South Park animation. I believe this is hell.

After driving the van, which still pulls to the right because it needs new tires, just a few blocks from the garage, the rain stops, the ground dries out and the summer heat starts to come back. It was just a microburst. My mood flips and my belief in life improves dramatically.. Weather here in Southern Arizona is sudden and violent and people, likewise, switch from hot to cold and wet to dry without notice.

I call my artist friend, just back from England, to catch up on the news, and the latest in our mutual struggle against old age,

“I have to go get a goddam hernia belt.” I say.
“Well, don’t go to the doctor.” He says, sarcastically. I say I bought this ambulance on Ebay to use when my Isuzu NPR utility bed truck breaks down.
“Why?” he asked.
“O I thought I might need to drive myself to the hospital some time. And so I can have a second truck so I can keep working the business when the Isuzu needs work.”
“Of course you couldn’t just rent something.” He says.
“No”, I’m like that guy in Faulkner’s story who can’t stop buying horses.”

Yeah, right, you be Frank and I’ll be Stupid, I think, if we’re that hard up for entertainment, but there’s more to it than that, and it’s integral to another joke, which is the way all of us are forced to live these days. Which is so crazy we can’t talk about it because we don’t have time.

I don’t know of anyplace I can rent a truck with parts bins, cabinets, freon bottle and ladder racks, and it couldn’t be cheap if it existed. And working without those organizational amenities is the misery of always turning a pile of crap over to get what you want from the bottom. It will take a week to get the Isuzu alternator rebuilt and two weeks to get back a remanufactured brake booster after I send my core in. Or it will cost a thousand dollars just to get those two parts from the factory. But if I can put the truck down awhile, I’ve already bought the parts to get it converted to run on waste vegetable oil from the restaurants I service. Meanwhile I work on the Van to get it set up so it’s not hauling a pile of chaos theory. And he’d say, “And that’s cheaper than just buying something already set up that way?” It is cheaper, by at least five thousand dollars, but whether it’s me or somebody else, and however they choose to do it, this is a miniscule part of the absurdity of the technological dance that puts food on the table. Anybody who thinks they’re outside that joke, snickering and looking down on the rest of us, is sadly mistaken. The joke gets especially rich when you take your friends and business acquaintances out to eat.

I need a week to work on modifying the existing compartments and making new ones. Meanwhile, even though I’m in business for myself (with a tyrant for a boss) I’m working for Ford, Isuzu, Dupont, Monsanto, BP, and god knows what corporations exploiting the politics and agriculture of god knows what third world country. And that’s better than just being a writer and artist? No, it’s hell, but it’s the way I’m set up, and it’s the way a lot of us are set up. We don’t all get patrons and grants, and all good work doesn’t get recognized or accepted. That was my job in the first place, to understand when good work was coming out of me and to value and save it. But it just wasn’t as obvious then, as it is now, how stupid people are, how everybody, including editors whose judgment I once trusted, is in the system that’s heading for the wall at 500 miles per hour He’s right, and I’m right. I really do need a new “vehicle”.

If even that would help. Why can’t we, why can’t I, think more clearly? Why would an intelligent nature create us with foggy brains and a language center blind as a bat to motive? But stupid as we are, dogs and cats still at least pretend to love us and birds can talk and apes can sign and gangs of dolphins can plan stunts together in five seconds that Congress and the Bolshoi Ballet couldn’t get done in five years.

It’s sunset. I’ve been working all day on a problem on the condensing unit for the walk-in at Yuki’s Sushi, a problem I can’t solve, so I can’t charge for it. I could charge for it if I was a doctor, but a serviceman can only charge for results. As I’m taking down my ladder. Mr. Kim, a Korean who rents this Japanese Sushi Restaurant, comes up. He says he hates his walk-in cooler. I say I hate it too. Every time I try to take a shower he calls up and the walk-in has another problem. I give him a printed estimate and offer him a list of other companies who might be able to put in a new coil cheaper than I can. I hold out the paper. I say these guys can beat my estimates sometimes because they get stuff in volume. He brushes the list aside. He says, no, you’re the man. Everything you touch here, you fixed, fix this. I don’t feel competent. The system makes some messes nobody can fix. I’m surprised he doesn’t want to farm the job out. Guess he’d rather bitch, and argue and jack me around.

I leave, and a day later he calls again, I reset the high side cutout. He’s scared and exasperated. It’s illogical I say. I’ve talked to other refrigeration people about it. They don’t know what to do either. I install several new controls and ports so I can more accurately read the pressures that are actually going to the controls and discover a drier is clogging up with crap from a previous compressor job. So it’s not my fault, but I spent more hours on this than I can charge. He will still need thirteen hundred dollars worth of work installing a new coil. He doesn’t know why this is taking so long and there’s no way to explain it even if there were no language barrier. His ignorance is his defense. Even if it wasn’t, there’s a limit to what he can afford. And there’s a limit to what I can do without compensation. We’re both locked into the industrial food chain. We both, and don’t we all, stand harried by contradictions on common ground that’s sinking.

The farmer’s against the wall, the seed companies are against the quarterly earnings report to the shareholders, the scientists have to develop where the money goes, the seeds they develop require fertilizer and pesticide, topsoil is being lost by inches every year from irrigation runoff, produce has to be refrigerated, injected with gas and trucked, the food has fewer nutrients and more residual poison so we need more of it and also need supplements. Freon creates a bigger ozone hole, CO2 from suns of centuries past raises the temperature, people turn on more Air conditioning which pumps out more CO2, creating its own feedback loop. All the feedback loops combined, according to some scientists, support and exacerbate each other to the point of irreversibility. And speaking of feedback loops what happened to communication feedback?

I get no answers from Congress or from NPR Science Friday and a lot of other media outlets. Why aren’t they even mentioning either the most dire data and predictions, or the latest technological developments? I don’t care what your conclusion is, I want to know why the debate itself is so ill informed and unstructured. Al Gore was writing a heavy book on the problem before he ran (and knew he won) in ’00, but he gets hammered ad hominem by jealous talk show hosts and even far left outlets like Adbusters. Using that thousand year old strategy of manipulating the poor to take their misery out on each other instead of the rich they say, Look at his lifestyle. He’s just trying to take away your SUVs. Petty jealousy wins, Global Warming is a myth and there’s nothing to worry about. Such nice bars of soap they give us as they lead us to the showers. But I’m screaming into the speaker of my radio again.

In 1990 I covered myself with newspapers about the first gulf war and set them on fire at the Federal Building. “Why?” The firemen asked and I said, “The hotter it gets the faster it gets hotter.” They laughed at me. Maybe I should try stand up. I’ve worked with ice and ice machines and closed circuit refrigeration systems enough that I look at the ice caps and say to myself, once the inertia of the thermal mass is in motion, they only seem to be half gone. They ‘re freakin gone. . Sometimes I allow myself to hope and dream that the hundredth monkey wakes up and solutions are invented and a mass mobilization occurs like in WW II where everybody works on the problem because everybody realizes Jimmy Carter was right in the 80s when he said “Energy conservation is the moral equivalent of war”. And the quarterly earnings report will be naked in its temporary perspective.

But I might as well face facts. Right now, in more ways than I can count, we’re all empty and starving because we have nothing left to eat except fear itself.

I stop at a park and sling a hammock from the rack of the truck. I have to go in to Sushi Garden and clean their condensers from 10:30 P.M to 2 A.M. so I need some sleep. Sushi used to seem so natural and exotic before I started making my own. And until I started seeing how hard it is to keep a restaurant clean, what the stuff we use to clean ice machines & kill slime mold does to the taste of the water, the food that accumulates under the counters, the gas that vegetables produce in refrigerated spaces that eats copper and aluminum & changes the taste of the food. And then there’s the monetary and physical cost of producing and shipping and trucking exotic ingredients thousands of miles. I think my sushi is as good or better than a lot of the dishes you get in restaurants, but I offered Mr. Kim some and he just laughed at me. I guess I’m still doing stand-up. Thanks, you’ve been a great audience tonight, and I really mean that, really.

When I come in, Chun the owner, is just leaving, and Greg, the in-house carpenter is taking over, putting wainscoting on the hall to the restroom. We work without talking for an hour or so, then we talk tools, how you buy one and then need another one, how cheap you can get them from China if you don’t count the cost of doing a lot of product testing for free, and we talk vehicles, what it takes to have adequate transportation whether you buy another one for backup or not. And we look at the food on the floor and the grease in the condensers and we laugh at how insane the whole game has to be. Then we give up trying to make sense of anything and go back to work.

I woke up this morning staring at a mesquite branch just outside the roof hatch of my camper, brown branches, green leaves, yellow crested birds and yellow pollen clusters in the slant rays of the rising sun, infinite gradations of color, shadow and form…

tree lightning bolt, river bed, tree branch, spiderweb, broken glass, cracked mud, lines in a face, bird, fish, dog, on & on, branchings, symmetries, pattern after pattern after…. random?

and now, driving home at 2:30 A.M., the absence of people is very powerful and mysterious. After all the lies, there aren’t many common terms left except to do the best job you can, charge a fair price for your work and just be here with other people, but sometimes I like people a whole lot better when they’re gone. Watching their faces in traffic during the day, they didn’t seem to be all that happy, anyhow. At least the potential that produced them, which feels like an intelligence to me, is definitely here, now, everywhere. Out of this emptiness I think most of our creativity, possibly all of creation came screaming

“Well, here goes nothing!”

And I’m OK with just driving into that darkness, sorry if it doesn’t work for you. It’s especially comforting this last hour before giving up on the adventure of consciousness---permanently---for all we know at the moment of letting go.















WAITING FOR THE HUNDREDTH MONKEY

WIKIPEDIA: The "Hundredth Monkey Effect" is a supposed phenomenon in which a learned behaviour spreads instantaneously from one group of monkeys to all related monkeys once a critical number was reached. The story behind this supposed phenomenon originated with Lyall Watson, who claimed that it was the observation of Japanese scientists. Such an observation did not exist (e.g. Myers 1985, Amundsen 1985, 1991).




Parked in the dirt beside highway drive, lightning causes the radio to continuously change stations, and cold drops of the coming rain hit my skin. Beyond the squalor of junk cars and scattered little service businesses the sky is getting grayer and darker over the tiny hills that are the only relief from the flat desert landscape on the way to Phoenix. A bay opens up in the garage across the street and I drive the van/ambulance in to have the toe-in adjusted. It’s a huge garage with 24 ft ceilings, 4 bays, a parts shop, a dynamometer/engine rebuild space, and a large office where Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings of inventions are animated on the computer space savers. It’s all dark and dirty inside. Like 80% of garages its main purpose is to subsidize the owner’s racing habit. Don Hall sent me here to his brother’s alignment shop, from Just For Fun Auto Repair, a title whose irony could not be any deeper. Don works from seven to seven, his knees and feet are blown out, he’s fat, balding, worried and tired all the time, but it pays for his race cars. He’s cheap & brilliant & compassionate & Mormon. There’s a framed credo in his greasy office defending the sanctity of marriage against enemies that in my opinion are about as real as Elmer Fudd’s shotgun or the dwatted wabbit he can never hit.

Everybody else has got religion it seems, what about me? What can I believe? I sent my friend an email copy of my essay for NPR’s This I Believe. It begins, “I believe in the intelligence of nature”. She wrote back,

“What difference does it make if nature is intelligent, if we die and cockroaches take over? Belief is baloney.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but it’s GOOD baloney.” My brother’s belief takes him down to the county jail to rob people’s souls to save them, and the pisser is, it works. You really can substitute intellectual dope for cocaine, because, I think, they’re the same thing. People who think they’re being given marijuana actually get high. Dr. Weil says the placebo effect is as good or better than the best meds. Martin Luther King turned an ancient anthology full of myths, fables, gossip, historical inaccuracies and inherent contradictions into an instrument for guiding acts of courage and compassion. Al Quaeda turned the Quran into a weapon of murder/suicide and the ultimate intellectual cowardice of black and white, good and evil. Go figure. I wish I could stop because it’s a constant mental irritation.

My essay says I feel a common sympathy running thru all nature. Species and their immediate environments are engaged in a dance/dialogue based on proprioception and mimicry. In all the moments of the world, and all the sad stories the punch line is they ARE stories, and nature is capable of developing any number of intelligences besides ours, and greater than ours, and we can plug into that potential if we want, if we make up our minds to work with instead of against whatever portion of nature we are given to cultivate.

But nothing pisses people off more than being offered the wrong kind of salvation. Guess it’s kind of a sore subject.

I too am tired of grumpy old men with stringy white beards mistaking their irritability for inspiration, their prejudices & crochets for the word of god. How do you believe in anything after seeing these abuses of belief? But even belief in nothing is a belief. Only the completely catatonic and suicidally depressed have lost all faith But every time I think I’m getting somewhere I’m surrounded by conundrums.

In principle I believe we and all our technological traps are part of nature, and working on community and communication is a better strategy for survival than survivalism, but why is human governance so self destructive? And why would an intelligent nature create it that way?

But I feel a sympathy that runs thru all nature & I would be more joyful. The facts, themselves, have become liminal to me….like…the way we respond to other people in emergencies, the way children and animals and even plants respond to us, the way subatomic particles can affect each other across thousands of miles. Yeah, religion knows less than it says, but there’s more to this than you’re telling me in science class. Species evolve to fit niches like the key understood exactly what the lock was like, and was in love with it and imitating it and playing it and the whole scene beforehand. Why not just believe in the sympathy itself as the connective tissue of the universe? Or if the brains we think with are just atoms & molecules from the big bang become self reflexive, doesn’t whatever happens HAVE to be OK? Except for this little ego problem death always posits. We’ll work that out in no time.

Both these brothers who are working on my vehicles take better care of their customers than any other mechanics I know, and the customers thank them profusely, shake their hands and pat them on the back. That dividend is something we can’t measure. It may be all that’s keeping us alive.

But at the moment, I’ve lost all faith in everything because it’s getting darker and colder and windier outside and the rain is now roaring on the sheet metal roof like the end of the world and blowing in, in sporadic sheets. One of the five mechanics there walks over and puts a red blanket over the Snap On tool cabinet by the roll up door. As a joke somebody has pasted a sticker beside the Snap On logo showing a woman wearing a dildo that says “Strap On Tools”. Another mechanic comes in drenched and laughing rapidly like a machine gun. The others, usually as solemn as coronors, talk excitedly about the rain. A greasy German Shepherd with broken feet from walking on concrete all his life, comes over to me where I’m hunkered against a pillar where I can watch the alignment procedure. He sticks his head under my hand. His eyelids have opened wider and wider over the years and he has black tear runnels running down his jaw. It’s almost comforting to pet him, but I have a hernia that hurts with a dull ache that matches the drab surroundings, and I’m scared---of dying, or of living but not ever really being alive.

I left the roof hatch to my camper open and left a manuscript under it. I figure I’ll get home and find that and all my bedcovers soaked. Not much to worry about unless you have a long string of bad sense memories and associated disasters for other times when it rained, and not unless almost everything you have is at risk to one natural disaster or another. Outside of that, no worries. Cold, stinging sheets of rain are blowing over on me thirty five feet from the bay door now, and I get up to seek shelter. The garage space has darkened but the pin up girl on the calendar on the tool box by the door is somehow lit up like a projection and is flapping in the wind like an intentionally clumsy South Park animation. I believe this is hell.

After driving the van, which still pulls to the right because it needs new tires, just a few blocks from the garage, the rain stops, the ground dries out and the summer heat starts to come back. It was just a microburst. My mood flips and my belief in life improves dramatically.. Weather here in Southern Arizona is sudden and violent and people, likewise, switch from hot to cold and wet to dry without notice.

I call my artist friend, just back from England, to catch up on the news, and the latest in our mutual struggle against old age,

“I have to go get a goddam hernia belt.” I say.
“Well, don’t go to the doctor.” He says, sarcastically. I say I bought this ambulance on Ebay to use when my Isuzu NPR utility bed truck breaks down.
“Why?” he asked.
“O I thought I might need to drive myself to the hospital some time. And so I can have a second truck so I can keep working the business when the Isuzu needs work.”
“Of course you couldn’t just rent something.” He says.
“No”, I’m like that guy in Faulkner’s story who can’t stop buying horses.”

Yeah, right, you be Frank and I’ll be Stupid, I think, if we’re that hard up for entertainment, but there’s more to it than that, and it’s integral to another joke, which is the way all of us are forced to live these days. Which is so crazy we can’t talk about it because we don’t have time.

I don’t know of anyplace I can rent a truck with parts bins, cabinets, freon bottle and ladder racks, and it couldn’t be cheap if it existed. And working without those organizational amenities is the misery of always turning a pile of crap over to get what you want from the bottom. It will take a week to get the Isuzu alternator rebuilt and two weeks to get back a remanufactured brake booster after I send my core in. Or it will cost a thousand dollars just to get those two parts from the factory. But if I can put the truck down awhile, I’ve already bought the parts to get it converted to run on waste vegetable oil from the restaurants I service. Meanwhile I work on the Van to get it set up so it’s not hauling a pile of chaos theory. And he’d say, “And that’s cheaper than just buying something already set up that way?” It is cheaper, by at least five thousand dollars, but whether it’s me or somebody else, and however they choose to do it, this is a miniscule part of the absurdity of the technological dance that puts food on the table. Anybody who thinks they’re outside that joke, snickering and looking down on the rest of us, is sadly mistaken. The joke gets especially rich when you take your friends and business acquaintances out to eat.

I need a week to work on modifying the existing compartments and making new ones. Meanwhile, even though I’m in business for myself (with a tyrant for a boss) I’m working for Ford, Isuzu, Dupont, Monsanto, BP, and god knows what corporations exploiting the politics and agriculture of god knows what third world country. And that’s better than just being a writer and artist? No, it’s hell, but it’s the way I’m set up, and it’s the way a lot of us are set up. We don’t all get patrons and grants, and all good work doesn’t get recognized or accepted. That was my job in the first place, to understand when good work was coming out of me and to value and save it. But it just wasn’t as obvious then, as it is now, how stupid people are, how everybody, including editors whose judgment I once trusted, is in the system that’s heading for the wall at 500 miles per hour He’s right, and I’m right. I really do need a new “vehicle”.

If even that would help. Why can’t we, why can’t I, think more clearly? Why would an intelligent nature create us with foggy brains and a language center blind as a bat to motive? But stupid as we are, dogs and cats still at least pretend to love us and birds can talk and apes can sign and gangs of dolphins can plan stunts together in five seconds that Congress and the Bolshoi Ballet couldn’t get done in five years.

It’s sunset. I’ve been working all day on a problem on the condensing unit for the walk-in at Yuki’s Sushi, a problem I can’t solve, so I can’t charge for it. I could charge for it if I was a doctor, but a serviceman can only charge for results. As I’m taking down my ladder. Mr. Kim, a Korean who rents this Japanese Sushi Restaurant, comes up. He says he hates his walk-in cooler. I say I hate it too. Every time I try to take a shower he calls up and the walk-in has another problem. I give him a printed estimate and offer him a list of other companies who might be able to put in a new coil cheaper than I can. I hold out the paper. I say these guys can beat my estimates sometimes because they get stuff in volume. He brushes the list aside. He says, no, you’re the man. Everything you touch here, you fixed, fix this. I don’t feel competent. The system makes some messes nobody can fix. I’m surprised he doesn’t want to farm the job out. Guess he’d rather bitch, and argue and jack me around.

I leave, and a day later he calls again, I reset the high side cutout. He’s scared and exasperated. It’s illogical I say. I’ve talked to other refrigeration people about it. They don’t know what to do either. I install several new controls and ports so I can more accurately read the pressures that are actually going to the controls and discover a drier is clogging up with crap from a previous compressor job. So it’s not my fault, but I spent more hours on this than I can charge. He will still need thirteen hundred dollars worth of work installing a new coil. He doesn’t know why this is taking so long and there’s no way to explain it even if there were no language barrier. His ignorance is his defense. Even if it wasn’t, there’s a limit to what he can afford. And there’s a limit to what I can do without compensation. We’re both locked into the industrial food chain. We both, and don’t we all, stand harried by contradictions on common ground that’s sinking.

The farmer’s against the wall, the seed companies are against the quarterly earnings report to the shareholders, the scientists have to develop where the money goes, the seeds they develop require fertilizer and pesticide, topsoil is being lost by inches every year from irrigation runoff, produce has to be refrigerated, injected with gas and trucked, the food has fewer nutrients and more residual poison so we need more of it and also need supplements. Freon creates a bigger ozone hole, CO2 from suns of centuries past raises the temperature, people turn on more Air conditioning which pumps out more CO2, creating its own feedback loop. All the feedback loops combined, according to some scientists, support and exacerbate each other to the point of irreversibility. And speaking of feedback loops what happened to communication feedback?

I get no answers from Congress or from NPR Science Friday and a lot of other media outlets. Why aren’t they even mentioning either the most dire data and predictions, or the latest technological developments? I don’t care what your conclusion is, I want to know why the debate itself is so ill informed and unstructured. Al Gore was writing a heavy book on the problem before he ran (and knew he won) in ’00, but he gets hammered ad hominem by jealous talk show hosts and even far left outlets like Adbusters. Using that thousand year old strategy of manipulating the poor to take their misery out on each other instead of the rich they say, Look at his lifestyle. He’s just trying to take away your SUVs. Petty jealousy wins, Global Warming is a myth and there’s nothing to worry about. Such nice bars of soap they give us as they lead us to the showers. But I’m screaming into the speaker of my radio again.

In 1990 I covered myself with newspapers about the first gulf war and set them on fire at the Federal Building. “Why?” The firemen asked and I said, “The hotter it gets the faster it gets hotter.” They laughed at me. Maybe I should try stand up. I’ve worked with ice and ice machines and closed circuit refrigeration systems enough that I look at the ice caps and say to myself, once the inertia of the thermal mass is in motion, they only seem to be half gone. They ‘re freakin gone. . Sometimes I allow myself to hope and dream that the hundredth monkey wakes up and solutions are invented and a mass mobilization occurs like in WW II where everybody works on the problem because everybody realizes Jimmy Carter was right in the 80s when he said “Energy conservation is the moral equivalent of war”. And the quarterly earnings report will be naked in its temporary perspective.

But I might as well face facts. Right now, in more ways than I can count, we’re all empty and starving because we have nothing left to eat except fear itself.

I stop at a park and sling a hammock from the rack of the truck. I have to go in to Sushi Garden and clean their condensers from 10:30 P.M to 2 A.M. so I need some sleep. Sushi used to seem so natural and exotic before I started making my own. And until I started seeing how hard it is to keep a restaurant clean, what the stuff we use to clean ice machines & kill slime mold does to the taste of the water, the food that accumulates under the counters, the gas that vegetables produce in refrigerated spaces that eats copper and aluminum & changes the taste of the food. And then there’s the monetary and physical cost of producing and shipping and trucking exotic ingredients thousands of miles. I think my sushi is as good or better than a lot of the dishes you get in restaurants, but I offered Mr. Kim some and he just laughed at me. I guess I’m still doing stand-up. Thanks, you’ve been a great audience tonight, and I really mean that, really.

When I come in, Chun the owner, is just leaving, and Greg, the in-house carpenter is taking over, putting wainscoting on the hall to the restroom. We work without talking for an hour or so, then we talk tools, how you buy one and then need another one, how cheap you can get them from China if you don’t count the cost of doing a lot of product testing for free, and we talk vehicles, what it takes to have adequate transportation whether you buy another one for backup or not. And we look at the food on the floor and the grease in the condensers and we laugh at how insane the whole game has to be. Then we give up trying to make sense of anything and go back to work.

driving home at 2:30 A.M., the absence of people is very powerful and mysterious. After all the lies, there aren’t many common terms left except to do the best job you can, charge a fair price for your work and just be here with other people, but sometimes I like people a whole lot better when they’re gone. Watching their faces in traffic during the day, they didn’t seem to be all that happy, anyhow. At least the potential that produced them, which feels like an intelligence to me, is definitely here, now, everywhere. Out of this emptiness I think most of our creativity, possibly all of creation came screaming

“Well, here goes nothing!”

And I’m OK with just driving into that darkness, sorry if it doesn’t work for you. It’s especially comforting this last hour before giving up on the adventure of consciousness---permanently---for all we know at the moment of letting go.