update

Weekend has been very relaxing, Friday I did nothing, Saturday I rode forty miles going to Pacific Palisades and back in the afternoon and then to the Smell and back at night. Sunday I woke up around two and tried to be productive but failed miserably. I went on a long walk and enjoyed the anomalously cool weather by wearing a flannel I purchased recently. Today is my brother Joel's birthday, he is going to be 26. Pretty soon almost all of my siblings will be in or past their thirties, it's strange.

Saturday night I was in love with L.A.. L.A. is weird like that. Half the time I am in love with it and half the time I am loathing it. Saturday night was spent doing the former. It started with my now pseudo-routine bike ride downtown. I was full of banana bread and feeling kind of tired when about half way down Venice Blvd. the road was blocked off for a carnival. I walked my bike through and savored it. There are carnies in my family, I think they are the ones that live in Florida.

I am unsure who was throwing the carnival and I didn't get to go on any rides, but i didn't care. There's something about randomly running into something so busy and happy in the middle a usually quiet sober bike ride that cheers me up. Tons of kids, kids that get excited for crappy carnivals. Probably kids that don't get to go to Magic Mountain much. Eight year old Mexican kids in Metallica t-shirts. Random big rigs parked next to rides. White trash carnies. Timeless.

The show I was going to that night was supposedly going to a rave theme so I asked this man wandering about if he was selling the glow sticks he had in his hands, (he had a lot). He asked me directions to the greyhound station and after I told him he gave me a free glow toy. It was a epileptic seizure inducing pacifier on a neon lanyard, (kind of like a chinese jumprope). Too perfect. Although I didn't get to dancing with them at the show because that sort of thing does not come naturally to me.

The rest of the ride went by really quick. Sometimes it doesn't feel like I am from here. Most of the time actually. Westwood practically feels like it could be on a different planet than where I remember being from. The same could probably be said about where I am from. Its important to remember there are differences in respect to location and time. Time is a little harder to pin down, maybe it also boils down to perspective. This is probably closer to the truth but its easier to externalize it all and resent time for taking away what's familiar. This is a logical outcome from adopting the theory that we are all in a steady trajectory towards destruction. I realize the overtly dramatic nature of that statement, but it remains a salient one for a large portion of people. I am in no way meaning to imply that there was a time in the historical record when this wasn't so. The indicators have just evolved in such a way that it all seems more imminent from my perspective.

I can't remember where I heard it. Probably on the radio in connection with a political platform, it was said that people, (probably phrased as Americans), were the least hopeful about the future now than they have been since the great depression. The politician was running on the platform of restoring hope. The concept is ridiculous and as far as I can tell the rising tide of cynicism is not going to ebb anytime soon. Anything else would fall short of confronting reality. I realize that public sentiment is always cyclical and is in no way a definitive characterization of the state of the world so I guess what I am intending to say in all of this is that it should be viewed as just another piece of evidence to be used in the case for the rise of a new dystopia and the approaching population collapse/extinction in the relatively near future (ranging from a few decades to the next few centuries).

The "climate change" discussion is yet another piece of evidence. Recently a group of researchers converged at Harvard to discuss climate mitigation plans. The majority of these plans revolved around the idea that we could counteract any troublesome abrupt changes in climate with elaborate engineering projects. It sounds like science fiction or a rumored soviet plot during the red scare but its not.

It's logical under the assumption that if the earth is under the dominion of humankind, than surely we can have control over all of its processes. This is evidence to a desperation. When this is considered there isn't much to hope for bettering society. Dominion, not stewardship is what the underlying assumption is in all the carbon sequestration regimes celebrities and other millionaires are so keen to. Lately the whole issue just seems to be a sink for a lot of energy that would be better applied to an issue we had some sort of control over. If all this attention were somehow spotlighted on abuses of corporate power, maybe towards abolishment of corporate personhood, (a pipe dream I realize but it's nice to think about), maybe then we might be able to talk about the environment for the environment's sake instead of some dramatized struggle to save mankind. If it were only that, I wouldn't give a fuck and I don't think the world would miss us much. But the fallout of hundreds of years of taking dominion is not an explosive event with respect to human time scales, it's slowly bleeds out but impacting everything. Environmental degradation is just a symptom and dominion is the disease. Exercising control over things that do not belong to us. It goes back to power, its abuse and its limits. Trying to control what doesn't belong to you, whether it be people, animals, or the environment. The sane approach would be to a lessening of this abuse and towards an intentional liberation of that which is under dominion.

My fluid dynamics professor recently quoted Marx, something like: Know necessity and then you can know your freedoms. I would not take on the Marxist label but it makes a lot of sense to me. Needs are loosely defined, increasingly so, with the most recent additions seemingly taking precedence over the core of what we need to exist; food, clean air and water, a sense of purpose, healthy relationships, etc. We seem to be so far away from knowing what necessity is, so far in fact that to state that profit and luxury are not essential to life seems kind of kooky. Of course this all comes at a cost that is hard to realize. Losses in personal freedom, loss of diversity of life, losses in terms of true quality of life.

There must have been some time in western society when a divergence occurred. Thousands of years before kingdoms and serfdom, before territorial borders were established where we (I am referring to westerners because it's the reference i'm familiar) were closer to knowing what it was to know what are true freedoms are. Perhaps this is unintentionally hinting at some primitivist leanings, to which I have little, but from our more primitive stages and through the irreversible progression of history we have arrived at our current state and that much is inescapable. The most that we can possibly do is be aware our distorted sense of necessity, and our contributions towards our growing dominion, not in hope that we can undo any of it but rather in hope it might slow the speed at which we approach its logical outcome.