My trip to Conneaut Township Beach for the solar eclipse.
Pardon me for being late, but here we are one week after the total solar eclipse of 2024, as seen from Conneaut Township Park, aka Conneaut Beach, Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie.
I ended up in Ohio to mitigate the risk of cloud cover. I brought my main camera and one old GoPro. I should have brought my proper tripod, but I guess I was feeling casual about it at the time that I packed the car. It was a rough shoot, mostly for posterity.
I was hitched to the wagon of a fine lady that I have been seeing for a couple of months. Her name is Phaedra. She was fine companionship.
The evening prior was cold with clear skies. We crashed in the Allegheny National Forest with a quick camp set up, just in and out. My sleep suffered from it, but the breakfast in Missy’s Arcade Restaurant in Titusville, PA, was good.
We carried on toward Erie, but we started to worry about the sky, as it was very cloudy. We rerouted on the fly based on the cloud radar forecasts, and shifted toward Ohio.
I joked to her (in all seriousness) that the geo-engineers would be in the skies today to make sure it was a good experience for all the tourists and cameras.
We got as far as we could before it was transit time for the moon, and Conneaut Township seemed like the best option.
Parking was easy. There was a parking lot designated to host all the visitors, but they were empty. We got our spot at the beach and found ourselves quite by accident immediately next to some kind of short term monument to the sun. I don’t know who the artist was.
People have a way of milling about and acting blasé in the face of rare life moments, especially children. We posted up next to a big family. I believed that we’d find scores of branded eclipse glasses or even hawkers, but there were none, and when Phaedra lost her glasses right there on the beach, the family had surplus and shared two with us.
Sure enough, tell-tale geo-engineering airplanes were criss-crossing in the sky, producing those long straight cloud lines. When you watch those evolve, they typically thin out into a haze that I always believed was meant to reduce solar radiation. It’s weird to me how infrequently average people are willing to acknowledge that these airplanes are differentiated at all from the typical exhaust you’ll see that evaporates momentarily, not leaving a flight path.
I witnessed several jets box in the sun during the lunar transit phase, and given how clear the sky looks through my camera, it sure seems like they had an effect of clearing the skies rather than seeding cloud cover.
We watched patiently through the process. I mostly watched over the camera. As the clouds dispersed, I realized that the photo exposure would always be saturated with any clear shot. I could not close the aperture and speed the shutter enough to cut out all of the natural light.
The tools in my camera kit were barely sufficient — a solar eclipse-rated lens filter is quite niche and I don’t have one. I had a lightly tinted lens plus a purple filter, so I slapped them both on. It looked kind of rad.
At the same time, I was in a race against the moon as the GoPro camera charged on a backup battery, even though I had believed it to be charged. I wanted to capture the whole sunset effect against the sands of the beach.
The beach scene, taken by the GoPro, represents approximately 11 minutes of time, as it plays at 300% of normal speed through the majority of the sequence. With exception to the fadeout split screen, all solar video is played at normal speed. The correlation between what is happening in the sky rapidly tightens and then loosens again.
The music does the same. This piece is called “Remediated,” and it is available on my BandCamp in its entirety. It is also an overlay of different points in time within the same audio file, and it comes into synchronicity only briefly, which I matched to the eclipse.
The traffic returning was out of hand, largely due to a construction project on I-80. Google Maps didn’t sufficiently warn of it, and as we waded through the interstate for a full hour, spanning maybe 3 miles, the map kept saying we were only 18 minutes delayed.
We got home around 2am, myself jacked on coffee and adrenaline, and I was quite exhausted the next day. Travel for me is rarely a vacation. In this case, it was worth it.
I couldn’t help but think about The Watchmaker Analogy while observing the eclipse, even leading up to the observation, ruminating on the idea of a total solar eclipse as something we take for granted. We have a very unique moon, in reality.
I truly cannot believe that we have a moon that was — as taught in my college Astronomy class — likely created by a chaotic meteor impact that resulted in the moon taking its shape in a perfect angular diameter compared to the observable sun from Earth. Nope. Not a coincidence. I don’t care if it’s God, a simulation, or aliens. It’s intelligent design, and it’s awesome.
Photos and reflections of my first visit in five years to the city that meant everything to me.
The Reformative Years
Early September 2003, I was in Tucson, Arizona, visiting my parents. There was a TV show on Comedy Central called Insomniac with Dave Attell, it was about life in the city at night, wherever Dave Attell was doing comedy. We watched as a family this rerun episode based in Portland, Oregon, just days before I would embark on my journey northbound, with my destination to be Portland.
Things like this could be a minor coincidence or a fractal revelation of your future.
Portland is still the only major city between San Francisco and Seattle on Interstate 5, and at the time it was little known. I grew up listening to “the Seattle sound,” bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Portland was never on the mainstream radar. In 2002, however, when the indie music revolution reached its peak, I began to notice that Portland was a new nexus for rock music.
I was in Los Angeles, a global epicenter for art and music, the region of the world in which I grew up and a good place to make a career of it. I was only twenty years old. I was managing a struggling coffee shop in Northridge called The Liquid Cube. The owner shut it down mid-summer, was laid off, so I filed for unemployment.
This was followed by my roommates deciding they wanted new arrangements. We lived like freshmen in college, sharing bedrooms. We were four dudes in a two bedroom apartment. We were not friends, we just lived together by happenstance.
These events set the stage to switch things up. I could either move deeper into LA, where the action was happening, or I could start a new life.
There was a decision made to roll the dice on Portland and it was all based on feeling and synchronicity. There was a belief that something really special was waiting for me there.
Common for a young man, I took for granted my community ties reaching back to childhood that I had around Los Angeles. Sticking around could have led to a more stable future.
Here is the thing. If I really play that out, I am positive that I would have ended up in Portland at one time or another, because countercultural communities are small and networked very well along the I-5 corridor. My tastes and inclinations would not have differed greatly, there are friends in life you are meant to meet.
My parents moved to California with no family anywhere close, so California lacked blood roots, and soil is only so much dirt. So in actuality, I was following in my parents’ footsteps, leaving behind all ties.
The life that I found in Portland was special, it could never have been planned the way it rolled out. It was not the product of carefully controlling outcomes.
Over more than fourteen years, from age twenty to thirty-five, within Portland, I went to college, performed hundreds of music shows in various bands, hosted FM radio shows, was a stand-up comic, produced seven music and arts festivals, worked a wide range of jobs, learned life skills, lived in a penthouse, lived in a tent, created and dissolved a 501c(3) and an LLC, delivered the paper, made the news, camped on mountains, swam in clean cold streams on hot days, partied on sweaty dance floors, made hundreds of friends and dozens of enemies, built and burned bridges, was broke, felt rich, and never accepted a day of boredom.
I really believe there is a life for you no matter where you are, no matter what your starting point is, and all you have to do is put yourself out there.
Returning to Portland with nine days between flights, I wanted to run around and see everything and everyone, but I soon realized that it wouldn’t be possible. There was a motivation to relive things and bring them back to life. Even in memory of the good times, it can be a grotesque corpse of happiness that you’re trying to revive.
I waited until the last minute to reach out to people and didn’t really plan anything. Played every day by ear. Part of me regrets not putting more energy into planning, but we reap exactly what we sow.
The primary reason for this visit was to celebrate the memory of Steven Schneider, the dude we called Shane. Everyone in Portland knew him as Shane. Everyone that knew him from elsewhere knew him as Steven. He was deeply embedded into the experimental art and music scene, and when he entered my life in 2006, he plugged me into it. I was beginning to outgrow the indie rock sound and he schooled me on deep improvisation. He was a founding member of my avant-garde group Death Worth Living.
Shane, Joe, and Myself (left to right) in a DWL band Portrait, Sacramento, 2007.
My mood going into the trip was a bit dampened because I had no spare money. That was almost my whole life in Portland. I had extra money in Philly for some time, most of the time in fact, because I moved back east with thousands in the bank, then worked a full-time job and bought a house, something I never achieved in Portland.
It’s challenging right now: market conditions, self-financing a start-up, declining job market, inflation, recession, tax hikes. Right now I’m balancing four different income hustles and digging out of debt.
I found myself crashing on the couch for a full week at the same place that I crashed every time I was in need from 2010 until now, a place called “The Alice Coltrane Memorial Colosseum and Wazoo.” It’s a run down apartment with a retail front, full of dudes who could not give a shit about orderliness, nor the opportunity of having a retail front on a busy street. I love em though. Don’t get me wrong. It’s great to have a place like this that I can just assume a couch position. Free is free. Of course, I’d rather have money to rent a car with full coverage and book an Airbnb from which I can host friends, and throw a party.
The first two nights, I stayed with my friend Rachel. She and her family have an Airbnb outside of town in Happy Valley that they offered me for a couple of nights. Plus she offered a spare car that she wanted to sell, a 2006 Ford Focus hatchback. If I cleaned it up, I could use it, so that was helpful. And I did.
A lot of time was spent walking alone through the city and seeing neighborhoods and specific places that I haunted, lived at or around. There is a full range of joys and traumas embedded into the scenery of that city, in part because a piece of my identity was truly wrapped into the place.
The photos that I have selected here are limited. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time shooting pictures, and when hanging out with people, myself and my friends rarely bust out phones for selfies and things like that. Toward the end, I became more purposeful about taking selfies with people. I never enjoy taking lone selfies. It is a mix of high quality pics from the Panasonic Lumix professional camera, others are from my iPhone 7. Each photo includes a caption with basic descriptions.
More context is needed to understand the personal significance each photo has to me, so if you are curious, you can read on below the photos. They are laid out in chronological order, in the sequence I took the photos.
About the Photos
The first two are from the plane heading northbound, looking east. You see Crater Lake, a place that I never got to visit and knew I wouldn’t be on this trip, so I was glad to at least get this view of the place. The next one is Three Sisters, around the city of Bend.
One of the first places I needed to visit was St. Johns. The bar historically known as Dad’s, adjacent to the historic clock in the town square that hosted the main stage for No.Fest, was replaced with a place called Central Lofts. The architecture is cheap futurism and totally clashes with the area.
The square overlooks the St. Johns Bridge, an architectural treasure and infrastructural mainline, connected to the area via Philadelphia Avenue. This is also the street where Held Gear kept a retail shop, near the corner of Ivanhoe, for a few years. Now the brand is in Philadelphia.
Below the bridge is where the Cathedral Park Jazz Festival took place. I noticed that the original poles that were used for mounting a massive canopy, built in the 1980’s, for summer concerts had been removed. My non-profit InterArts owned the canopy and I was the only person in the city that could mount it, so I was paid by the television production of Portlandia to do that, for the “Bahama Knights (Two Bananas)” sketch. I should have asked for a producer credit and another hundred bucks.
From there, I walked around industrial Southeast. Graffiti had gone nuts down there. It really is high quality, however. It is interesting because in 2003 when the city was poor, there wasn’t very much graffiti. The same with regards to homelessness.
Industrial southeast has been an epicenter for homelessness for a while. I noticed a lot of established dwellings. People rigging up plywood boxes, trailers, and other things to make a semblance of a home, all over the city.
One of the funniest bits of graffiti was “you have five days” in plain style. It’s the kind of thing that can trip you out, make you think, I only have five days!When is my flight? I think it’s a little bit of chaos magic.
Not just graffiti but murals have really exploded everywhere too. I saw this mural on Division Street by Fin Dac, depicting a woman in standing prayer position — it features a living wall taking her hair out of the 2nd dimension — when I pulled over to take a photo of an encampment with a full drum kit by the train tracks.
The night that I turned 21, I had lived in Portland for just a few weeks. The place I ended up that night was the Reel’m Inn Tavern. For several months after that, the tavern was a refuge, a place to make friends from strangers, to stave off the loneliness of being new to a city.
I started talking with this dude and I was sure I recognized his eyes. His face was familiar, but eyes don’t change as much as faces after 19 years. His name was Mike.
We got to talking about his sketchy sounding job installing microwave communication towers all over the map, something he was doing back when I drank there. We played pool. He started saying things like “You’re my new best friend.” We weren’t really drunk yet. I had said before that I wanted to go to Mt. Tabor for sunset, so he offered to take a drive up there. I looked into his eyes for signs of madness before accepting.
In no time, he went mad, loading up his rubber bullet gun and showing it to me. He pulled into a dispensary, handed me cash to grab a joint. He then drove by certain houses telling me about the people who lived there. He was nutty, but I wasn’t worried in the least.
When we got to the mountain, he brought the gun, concealing it in his waistband. I sparked the joint as we walked up the hill, coming upon the dusk view over the reservoir. He couldn’t hold still, so I let him keep walking. I was mesmerized, staring directly into the solar disk as it rolled behind the horizon, and when it had fully disappeared behind the horizon I turned around and he was gone.
It dawned on me that he could have shot me in the back of the head. Seemed like the best idea to let that situation go and enjoy a long sobering walk back to the car. It was about 40 blocks plus the hike out of the park.
The next day was Friday and I knew I had to help prepare the house for the memorial for Shane. I hadn’t yet seen inside, but the plan was to meet Todd, JP, and Jay.
The memorial was low key. I got to see a lot of people at one time. We played music, we looked at photos, recalled his stories, talked about ways to keep his work alive. That was nice, but not as many friends came as I had hoped would.
On Sunday, the four of us met up with Alice, his daughter, and rifled through a few of his things, some photos, CD’s, various small instruments and trinkets. Including a tryptic of film prints, as well as a doll from Philadelphia born artist Salihah Moore, who stayed on the farm with us for about a week, in 2007.
Scanned copies of photos from ShaneSalihah Moore “Lion of the Sea”
Monday, Memorial Day, I walked about downtown Portland, grabbed coffee and looked at a book at Powell’s. The zoo bomber installation across the street is a reminder of Portland’s anarchist bicycle culture. People would lock up a pile of ridiculous bicycles and meet weekly to ride up to the Oregon Zoo by train, then “bomb” down the hill. I never zoo bombed but I appreciate these kinds of things a lot.
On Tuesday, I headed back to St. Johns, specifically to walk the bridge and take photos. It is a photographer’s rite of passage. There is a place on the hillside that offers a clear view, so I walked there and back from Philadelphia Avenue, where I parked the car.
That night, I played music with Jerry and Pete at Jerry’s house. They are former Death Worth Living members.
I caught up at Holocene for Moritz Von Oswald, to experience what felt and sounded like the very best house music set in my life. The set was performed from Ableton Live and entirely without headphones. He’s an old timer and comes from the Berlin scene. He helped pioneer dub house.
Anything that happened that is not involved with these photos, anyone I saw or whatever else I did, is not narrated here.
The final full day, I arranged for friends Doug, Richard, and Sarah to meet me at Kenton Station, as it was a convenient location for everyone. There was a NASCAR event taking place there and I offered to submit photos to the St. Johns Review.
I was supposed to go from there to Mississippi Pizza’s Atlantis Lounge for the Live In The Depths experimental electronic music night, but instead I had one too many whiskeys followed by a 2014 Oregon pinot noir, swigged straight from the bottle, with Sarah. I swear there was some kind of time warp fermented in the spirits. It was a disorienting drunk that came on suddenly. She drove me home.
The next day was another lazy one, just hanging out.
I flew out at 6pm, so I was on a bus with time to spare at 4pm. You have to love Portland’s train to the airport. For $2.50 you can get on a bus anywhere on the system map and transfer your way to the airport from one ticket.
It was a tough flight, flying overnight and losing three hours from the clock. It was so late, but I packed a couple of whiskeys to ease the mood. After dosing off a little bit, I got to see a sunrise from the sky, just before landing.
I began to process a lot about Portland and my whole strange life, full of joys and traumas. If I was able to see everyone that I had a meaningful experience with in Portland at one time and place, it would be like a high school reunion, with tons of mutual friends, and perhaps some long standing feuds. I’d love to squash whatever shit might be leftover, and to bond again with everyone I care about. Or maybe I’m too attached to all of it.
I suppose it is a new dawn for me in Philadelphia, in life, and coming back from that trip is a reminder that building and keeping a community is a long haul and a journey.
I guess I can go back more frequently than every five years, and experience the great vacation destination that it is, plan to see people in larger gatherings maybe.
After getting back to Philly, I worked my ass off. I’m trying to work as much as possible, pay down some debts, and invest into this life I have now. Things slowed down enough for me to compile these images and write this blog, but I’m still catching up.
We have all heard this notion that anyone who actually wants to be President of the United States has to be insane, and therefore unfit for office. I believe most people agree with that.
So what if that candidate’s platform is to dissolve the federal government? Which candidate is crazier, the one that wants the job or the one that wants to make the job go away?
This is Adam Kokesh. He is a bona fide madman, but I would trust him with power because he doesn’t want it, and ran for President in 2020 with the Libertarian Party on this platform.
Whether or not I agree with his position to destroy all federal power, we share the same anarchistic ethos.
Kokesh calls himself a voluntaryist. Personally, I relate, as I have always considered volunteering an important part of my life. Ten years ago, I had no space in life for a job because everything I did was volunteered. I still basically live that way, but I make money.
The Libertarian Party is no less statist than the Green Party, when it comes down to it. Can you call yourself an anarchist and be involved with a political party? I certainly think you can tolerate political parties, as it is not your responsibility to ban them. I just don’t see how it works the other way around.
The characters attracted to and involved with Libertarianism have always varied from anti-federalists like Kokesh to corporatist millionaires simply out to protect their wealth by leveraging federal power to skirt regulations that actually protect communities and individual rights. The resulting policy platform becomes, like the Green Party, off-center but far from any radical change.
Adam Versus The Man was a very big YouTube show. Kokesh sat down with Joe Rogan in the early years of his podcast. Adam is a combat veteran that became an anti-war activist, but I haven’t frankly researched much further than our direct contact.
Today, he is damn near cancelled. Last week, he was beefing with Spotify and Rogan for removing his episode from the platform, even though the JRE video is up on his own YouTube page. His Twitter profile remains intact, and that is how we got in touch.
Marcus from Aquarian Anarchy podcast was his press secretary during the campaign. I was on that podcast in January, and before that, two of the hosts were on my own livestream. Maybe that is why Adam’s girlfriend The Commander in Kief followed me back on Twitter.
Shortly after that, Kokesh was arrested for possession of federally regulated drugs, in Saguache County, Colorado, even though they have been legalized in Denver County. His core supporters mobilized to get him out, launching the hashtag #FreeKokesh.
Kief began showing pictures of her relationship with Adam. This was a clear PR move, but whatever, that’s how I learned they were connected. I followed him and he followed back.
The chargers against him were eventually dismissed, due probably to his purposeful lack of cooperation, and public support.
I contacted Kief, saying that I’d like to visit their compound in Ash Fork, Arizona. I make the annual trip to visit family in Tucson, but this was an extra destination.
I am about to make a life-changing transition from urban to country, I am considering leaving Pennsylvania to come back out west. Alternatively, I could try for two properties — this really is a dream to own at least two places where I love to be.
When I arrived in Phoenix early Friday morning, I picked up my rental car and made my way north to Ash Fork. I cruised around the region to scope out some parcels.
Much of the area is just not acceptable for my needs, from topography to land values. Pretty much, the sweet spot is Ash Fork. I know a good investment when I see it.
The town is dilapidated and scary, on an irrelevant stretch of Route 66. The motels look dangerous, there is very little commerce. All of this spells opportunity to me.
Adam assured me that if I texted him, he’d be available. That’s why I got nervous when he didn’t answer. After a few hours, I figured I might as well walk about the main street and get to know the community by sitting in a bar.
The Oasis Lounge lured me like a mirage on the sand.
I walked in, immediately I was invited into the community. I met an engineer and builder couple with seven children who had given up their careers for a free lifestyle. They worked in the Portland area the last year I lived there. They bought me a round. Their daughter was the bartender, aged 19 and still wearing braces. The regulars ambled about like it was their living room.
That’s when I got the text back from Kokesh. I invited him down for a beer, he accepted, as he was on his way to the Family Dollar down the street.
When Adam walked through the door, it was obvious, with his wild hair and beard, the ill-fitting work clothes, and the intensity of his gaze. I jumped up from my stool, extending my handshake to say, “Mr. Kokesh!”
“Hey! Sean…” he replied.
“Nice to meet you, glad you made it — have a seat!” showing him the beer selection.
“I’m sorry man, I forgot you were coming. I’m a dick.” He conceded.
Shrugging it off, just happy I wasn’t stood up, I said, “It’s all good.”
“I’m on mushrooms too.” He wanted me to know.
Sadly that was the end of his stash. I had my hopes set to shroom that night.
He already wanted to know what my plans for Ash Fork were, looking to see whether or not I had some role to play in his community. I told him I still needed to feel it out.
He downed his cider and we boogied, following him home through miles of unpaved road. He wanted to work alone until sunset, so I walked about the perimeter, hung out with the dogs, Thelma and Louise.
The compound is powered by wind, solar, and locally harvested wood. Structures made from natural, recycled, and reusable materials are scattered over ten acres.
Adam is 40 years old and I am 39. We are both fixed on starting families, supporting them with self-sufficient properties, and a community of creative freedom-oriented people.
After finishing his work, he set up my bunk in the sound studio. There was a plaque on the wall from YouTube representing his achievement of acquiring more than 100K subscribers, around a decade ago. I asked him, “Has YouTube cancelled you yet?”
“Oh Yeah,” he replied.
He cannot post new content, although there are 263K subscribers to his channel today.
“Too bad you don’t get a trophy for being cancelled too,” I said.
“Yeah they should,” he said, laughing.
We retired to his cabin and proceeded to drink his rum and fruit juice concoction. He offered me food, but I declined, as my metabolism had already settled on booze that afternoon at the Oasis. You can feel it when that happens. We smoked.
We argued about government.
My argument is that we are not culturally prepared for that level of responsibility. The federal government might be the necessary component to maintain liberties across the fifty states.
“You’re familiar enough with my body of work that I don’t have to explain…” Feeling out my level of fandom.
I interrupted him, “No, I’m not!”
I had only heard his one appearance on Aquarian Anarchy, after his candidacy was over. I told him exactly what I thought about him then, I literally just thought, “I could hang out with this guy.” It was never my ambition to do so. It kind of just happened.
Adam’s position is that the federal government can be eliminated in relatively short order. All programs can be carried out by the states. This means each state would become an independent nation.
He called me out as ADD because I was, at that point, impatiently jumping in a lot. He demanded that I articulate my purpose and vision for my life. Every moment was friendly and good natured, but challenging. Friends should challenge each other like this, without accompanying judgement.
“I see your skills. I see your potential,” but he was trying to discover if there was some reason that I was in his life suddenly, as we were truly strangers getting drunk together in his house.
I came to the conclusion that my vision and purpose has been clear to me for many years. The problem at this point is confidence.
“The fact that I am here with you right now is an expression of my purpose,” I insisted.
“I am so grateful and excited about twenty more years of hardcore work ahead of me,” explaining that I blew my purpose-driven life once already by letting insecurities hold the wheel.
I started feeling emotional, carrying on that He and I were in the upper percentile of people that even try to follow their purpose and vision outside of what is prescribed for them by institutions. I began tearing up because I know from experience how most people give up before they even start, driven by fear, doubt, and insecurities, and those who pursue their vision without handling those issues, like myself, inevitably crash and burn, or they burn everyone around them to maintain control.
Conversation had crescendo’d. He ushered me to my bunk. “Thank You for your hospitality,” I said, ready to sleep off the red eye flight.
It was eight degrees when I woke up, but I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans by the afternoon. Immediately east of Ash Fork toward Flagstaff, it becomes forested desert, ski lodges and tourism, while immediately west, you’re back in pure desert.
My purpose, in the morning, was breakfast, for which I drove thirty miles to the nearest diner. It was a good opportunity to ruminate on our talk.
The truth is that I continue to struggle with the idea of individual purpose. I don’t believe anyone’s purpose is fixed. For example, I believe my technical purpose in life is to produce media and music, however, the real purpose behind that is to connect people into community, to open consciousness. This has always been the effect of my most successful projects.
Everyone’s God-given purpose connects along the same principles, regardless of how specific you get into someone’s individual situation, because our realm truly operates on base principles.
When I got back, ready to work, I found Adam cutting lower limbs off trees. I was smoking a joint. He said, “Hey! You should know I dropped two tabs of acid. Do you want one?”
I cracked up, “No!” I worried about driving home. That, and I never really lifted my personal rule to only do naturally growing drugs.
He asked, “What do you want to do with your day, man?”
“I told you I would put in some work and I’m going to do that,” reassuring him.
We grabbed some gloves, a rake, and loppers, to go about clearing area for camping. I volunteered to rake the tumbleweed.
He went back to his work and I went to mine. I sought the martial arts in the work. Pulling the rake by leveraging my body weight, I was able to reduce the stress on my body and clear a big area in a fairly short time.
“Thanks for you work, man, it’s already looking great,” he said.
“You’re welcome. I’m here to learn about this land, to discover what it means to manage this kind of property,” I said. I mean it truly, you have to feel it before investing.
“I’m glad you see it that way,” he said.
His neighbors came over and they continued the tasks just about when I had to go.
Now I wished I had taken the acid. I realized, there was a headspace that I should have shared with this guy, to fully embrace my visit. I’m a psychonaut too! I really had enough time to peak, come down, and drive. I know I can handle my psyche. I am not afraid of it. One tab was not going to make me nuts. Truly, the universe was trying to say that it was time to try acid.
When I got home and he retweeted our selfie, that’s when I realized how much this guy means to people, how legendary he is to so many. I was like, “Oh damn, he’s huge!” I don’t care if someone is famous or rich or whatever, so long as they are genuine people who live well.
This, Adam is, for sure. He is a balanced man with masculine energy, a fighter, that is also concerned with beauty, love and truth, applying artistic creativity to his property, bringing a range of open-minded people together in community for the purpose of mutual empowerment. He generously offers of himself and wants the same.
The best has yet to come, for both of us. He’s coming to a place where I believe if he runs again, he’ll be much more prepared, not just for the fact that he owns the tour bus and stuff like that, but because he is growing as a man. He was only 38 in his candidacy.
The only problem I see in his message breaking through is his image. Not his personality, but for how the media will characterize him. How to get ahead of that is pretty darn hard, except, he hides nothing. The currency of the corrupt is secrecy. I don’t know if he has a secret.
I see an absurdly transparent man, building his property out, preparing for a family. I could see him semi-retired from the public eye to enjoy the fruits of his labor, but the problem with that is, his purpose might be tied to public life. I am not sure if he can resist it.
I know I cannot.
Myself smokin’ a J in front of his tour bus.My preferred area has this clay soil.Beautiful moon over one of the domes.
My Christmas Vacation in the Era of the Quarantine
When the first stimulus checks were cut, I decided to buy a car. There were, not by coincidence, lots of cars listing for exactly the amount of the check: $1,200. Many of them were fake listings. Some were just overpriced.
I figured I would find something high mileage but good running in that price range, so I treaded lightly into the market.
Ended up finding a 16-year old Volkswagen Passat in non-starting condition. The owner, I could tell, was a stand up gentleman. He was only getting low balls for $350. I offered $400 and he countered with $350. I sent a tow truck and had it delivered for $100. Didn’t even look at the car, I trusted the guy.
I like to point out that the Volkswagen Passat has always been the Audi base model, mechanically speaking, since 1974. This model would be the A4 but with downgraded interior and body styles.
I’m a dirt bag. It’s the nicest car I have ever owned. I had to fix it, that was the whole gamble.
I put in a lot of time fixing it, and money, but it’s also a hobby, and even though I go nuts when repairs get complex, there is intrinsic and compounding value to the experience and education from it.
This car drove me from Philadelphia to Tucson in the most direct route possible, through Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, and New Mexico. I made this leg of the trip in three nights.
Since moving to Philly, I missed every Christmas dinner in Arizona. I didn’t want to miss another one. I checked in advance to see if they were following gathering limit guidelines. They said no, and dinner was on as usual for whoever would show up. If you’re horrified by this, then I am sorry, but none of us got sick afterward.
I made it at the last minute, in the middle of the meal. I would have made it to say grace but I stopped because I wanted to bring something — wine, pie, anything — but all I could actually shop for in the end was beer at a gas station.
Hauling Through Texas
My whole time in Arizona lasted just more than a week. I spent that week working on my car, hanging out with my parents, and visiting Ajo, where I spent New Year’s Day tripping on San Pedro juice.
When I left, I tried to hug the southern coast through central Florida and up the East coast back to Philly.
I wanted to do this road trip long before covid. I love road trips, but I also don’t want to fly right now.
I hate wearing masks. I hate seeing people in masks. I think it is scientifically illiterate to enforce masks on people who are not sick. So when airlines say I’ll be put on a no fly list for life if the mask falls below my nose, I just can’t risk that.
Two major differences between my hoped for road trip and the reality: I did not drive into Mexico and I did not want to visit California.
California is only good for the friends I get to connect with, the live music and comedy scenes. With all that closed, then I would still see friends, but the atmosphere would suck.
Lot’s of people that I contacted seemed paranoid about visiting with me in person, either because I was traveling or because they were enforcing a bubble for themselves. My counter cultural friends obey the government. My conservative relatives don’t.
It’s square to be hip, I guess.
My 2020 new years resolution is carrying over to 2021. It was to obtain my first passport and at minimum drive through Canada along my way to Detroit, and into Mexico from Tucson. I applied for the passport in February, as flight restrictions were already underway. I had seen SARS and Ebola — even the anthrax scare — never did I predict something like this could happen.
Canada extended their border restrictions when I was in Michigan this fall, so that screwed that. I was getting mixed messages about Mexico.
Visiting a friend in Ajo, less than an hour from the Mexican border, I was told it was essential travel only, like Canada, but also that Puerto Peñasco, just another hour from there, was operating like normal, accepting tourists. I decided not to risk it, so I stayed in Ajo at a friend’s house and we took a trip with mescaline via the San Pedro cactus on New Year’s Day.
The fact that we have fifty states where I can cross all of those borders freely from coast to coast is something that I cherish about being American. The privilege of an American passport for world travel might never be what it once was, but it is something we should care about as Americans.
Even so, traveling our great country offers historic value and natural beauty. The laws and cultures between those fifty states can change pretty radically even as we share a national identity and powerful federal government.
How each population responds to top down authority is revealing of the culture. Driving across 16 states over the holidays in the height of quarantine round two, it became perplexing to me. It changed all the time. The illusion of a scientific approach by economic restrictions is easier to see when you cross three state borders in a single day.
If there is a scientific approach, it is in the very discontinuity of policy. I mean, eventually we can take all of the data and find correlations between outbreaks and public policy, and cultural attitudes. There remains a great deal of uncertainty about the efficacy of Florida’s strategy toward herd immunity versus the California lock down mentality.
The data will tell us the truth around 2022. Only the analysis will probably differ wildly and further divide us socially.
At the time of leaving Philadelphia, and in places like Baltimore, you still could not sit at a counter to have a drink or eat a meal. You must be in a booth or at a table.
Thankfully, in Knoxville, Tennessee, where I landed after my first long driving day, I was able to belly up and talk to a stranger at the bar. When you go to a bar and you have to stay at a table, you cannot meet strangers. That is what they are trying to prevent, random contact with strangers.
At a bar in Knoxville, TN.
The stranger turned out to be a pilot. I probed him on the economic fallout of his industry and the pilot lifestyle broadly. He told me that the hours are difficult because the layovers are so brief. I joked that it encourages cocaine use, to which he confirmed that to be true.
He had been furloughed. Work was picking back up, but he admitted that many pilots were taking shifts outside of the major airlines to get by.
In Texas, the mask is largely optional, although urban centers always differ from country towns. In most big cities, even when the science says outdoor transmission is statistically zero, I find a majority of people wearing them outdoors, or while driving, alone.
There is also a low-income correlation that follows the rural urban divide. In my neighborhood in North Philly, masked people are the minority, but as you approach the wealthier liberal neighborhoods, masks become ubiquitous. Almost everyone wears designer masks there, not disposables, like in the hood. When the CDC said double mask, they did that too.
Crossing the imaginary line we call a legal border between New Mexico and Texas, it is like stepping from one world into another, like you would in The Twilight Zone.
In Roswell, New Mexico, a denser town than I had believed it to be, all restaurants were delivery and no-contact pick up only. Closures were rampant, things like, “Thanks for the 25 years in business,” were on marquees everywhere. It was the only state in which filling my own water and coffee container was banned. The sense of quarantining in a motel and getting the F out was real to me. I moved as swiftly as I could.
There was no motel that I stayed anywhere that served any kind of continental breakfast, even though they advertised it every time. It is something that could easily be converted into pre-packaged foods, like small cereal boxes, wrapped muffins, fruits, and so on. I can give up the waffle maker, even though I love that. Nope, they are just too cheap to do it.
The motels are not competing anymore. Most of the discount brands you know are consolidated under Wyndham. Motel 6 has survived as an independent entity since 1962. Respect. But the idea of competition has largely fallen away in favor of consolidation, so nobody is incentivized to work out a solution to their breakfast. They just charge the same rate anyway.
New Mexico strangled its economy while Texas let it breath. Arizona took the exact middle between those two extremes and yet there were restaurant closures all over Tucson. I always go dancing at Club Congress, but I could not this year. I haven’t been dancing in more than a year. Most businesses cannot survive, even with a stimulus, throughout all this.
I went to Bourbon Street in New Orleans hoping for a party. It was pretty chill. Bars were ordered to close before midnight. There was live music though — something that has become a rarity. I found myself talking with these dudes from Austin. I was wearing an Austin t-shirt at the time because I had driven in from Texas that day, and it freaked them out. I am sure they were stoned. So was I, but my paranoia wasn’t in effect.
I slept in my car in New Orleans. I had breakfast at sunrise at a diner, then walked around the French Quarter waiting for Congo Square to open up. This was a life goal, to visit the place where jazz was born. My second coming of age to music was jazz. It was rock and roll high school to jazz college. This site is a pilgrimage for many musicians.
Myself in Congo Square, New Orleans
I was also doing a bit of a conspiracy pilgrimage. I had already visited the grassy knoll and examined the angles from which Oswald allegedly fired the two shots that killed President Kennedy. The place is called Dealey Plaza, the “gateway to Dallas,” an historic site long preceding this unfortunate coup.
While I was driving through Texas to New Orleans, on January 6, I was not glued to social media or television like most people. The capital was under so-called insurrection, but I was driving. I got some headlines but I didn’t need to stay up to the minute on it. That again goes to show how you can just live your life and all the hype in the news is sub-background noise. However, the response from the government could have far-reaching impacts, as they keep ramping up fears of biosecurity and domestic terrorism.
Remember, governments do not exist to protect you. Free governments only exist to protect your rights.
Grassy Knol, Book Depository, Locations of Shots Fired
When I was in New Orleans, I neglected to recall the Garrison investigation into the JFK assassination. Oswald worked in that old voodoo town just preceding his time in Dallas. In fact, I had a book in my trunk that my Dad, who is not prone to conspiracy, gave me to read called Dr. Mary’s Monkey. If I had started reading that on the trip, I’d have checked out the other places that Oswald worked, in New Orleans, like the coffee plant. He also worked on a covert bioweapon lab in a small French Quarter apartment.
In New Orleans, the monkey viruses that contaminated the polio vaccine leading to uncountable untimely deaths and disease were tied to covert cancer research projects that reveal just how sloppy and insane things are in the deep layers of government, and how its actions do everything but protect us.
Following the death of Kennedy, there was a national effort by the Johnson Administration to develop a vaccine for the “cancer virus,” which turned out to be nonsensical. There is no cancer virus. I believe it was a smoke screen to vaccinate against these monkey viruses.
In fact, there is no single cause, or remedy, for cancer. The trillion dollar research industry has generated extraordinary other results, including the DNA sequence, but no cure. I recommend watching Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh by Adam Curtis.
I stayed on a coastal route as much as I could, seeing Biloxi and Mobile.
Pascagoula, Mississippi
Beaches are different everywhere you go. For swimming, most of the West coast is bitterly cold. Oregon, for example, is gorgeous pristine and natural, it’s wonderful to spend time there, but not to swim. It was the start of winter so I wasn’t about to swim or lay out a towel. The wind was piercing and chilly. It was cloudy. Much warmer however than the high deserts that I had just travelled through. The overnight temperatures in New Mexico in the winter can be brutal.
Throughout Florida, masking up was not required. I did not visit any big cities there. People were relaxed and there wasn’t this air of impending doom. While many states were closing public rest areas, or shut off basics like water fountains, Florida rest areas are marvelous facilities. The first stop in the state has information kiosks showing just how far and wide Florida is and how much there is to do. I have an uncle that lives in the center of the state and I had my first visit with him in decades.
Growing up in California with parents raised in the Northeast, I am trying to discover these people for the first time, even though many of them knew me as a boy.
Despite the maskless, despite the gatherings, I didn’t see paramedics all over, I didn’t see people coughing and wheezing like the plague is nigh. I saw a thriving society.
It’s like being in the South when there was a supposed insurrection at the capital. I was finding no connection to it with the people around me, yet some folks would depict Florida as some derelict infectious place. Similarly, the depiction in media of the insurrection is that we now have a domestic terrorism threat across the land.
The reality is that wherever economies locked down, homelessness is going up, retail is shuttering, murders are up, trash is littering the streets, and it is truly dystopian.
Florida has quarantined itself culturally and won’t allow the kind of behavior taking place in Canada, California, and Philadelphia to take root in their state. It’s clean, happening, and happy.
If you’re in a place where they lock you down, the fear is born from the act. You participate in the idea that you should lock down, so you have embraced the fear. As soon as masks are normalized, you’ll begin to fear the anomaly, the breathing mouth with a face.
Even the speakeasy hipster punk dance club in the hood that I used to go to locked down. They were already illegal. They started doing DJ sets on Instagram, the most corporate imaginable solution to this problem. There are no anarchists, just fashion gurus, on the left.
Left, Daytona Beach, Right, Memphis TN
I have been aligned with Noam Chomsky ever since I started smoking pot. That has not changed, neither the pot nor my core principles. What changed was everything around me. Pro-war, pro-debt, pro-discrimination, pro-censorship, pro-pharma, pro-GMO, these are all positions that are becoming normal among the Democrats. Chomsky is now a Tucson professor, in his nineties, and still the left hasn’t caught up with him.
The left is going right and the right is becoming left. The infamous classical anarchist rainbow coalition former democratic party presidential nominee, Vermin Supreme, ran for President under the Libertarian ticket this time around. Although he lost the primary, his campaign manager, Spike Cohen, ended up the Vice Presidential nominee, running as a self-described anarchist.
My views are aligning now with the supposed right wing, the Libertarian contingent that I observe turning liberal. In Chomsky’s youth, it was normal to hyphenate Libertarian-Anarchist. The union is making a comeback and it won’t surprise me if the Democratic Party becomes the right wing party, again, while proper left third parties rise up and challenge two party rule. It is a hopeful sentiment.
There will be a liberal Republican who appeals to anti-war and free speech sentiments that will beat a conservative Democrat. Both will run on legalizing cannabis and limiting police. The Republican will celebrate the social equity we have achieved in the last thirty years. You’ll see.
Anti-war, free speech, anti-discrimination, anti-GMO, anti-pharma, these are positions that are taking root in the new Republican mindset, a kind of people’s conservative. A majority of them already have homosexuals and people of color in their families. It is normal now.
If I’m against taking an experimental vaccine by Pfizer, who is buying ads on the news networks from which I’m getting the coronavirus narrative, then I’m considered anti-science, when in fact, I am waiting for the science to come out.
During the presidential primaries, Bernie Sanders pointed out that big pharma would be running ads on the news network carrying the debate, and that explained why the topics that affect them are not going to be considered by the moderators.
Now Bernie Sanders supporters are begging for their freedom at the behest of Pfizer.
So really, for me, it has always been about core principles and my political positions have to honor those.
Maybe the solution is a free market health system, but the people are subsidized, not the industries. The Obamacare approach is typically oligarchic and while it helped me get free health care in Oregon, it doesn’t help the average person. Health costs went up while health outcomes went down. Life expectancy decreased following the enactment of The Affordable Care Act.
Driving across the country could not have made it more clear to me how easily you can bend the will of the people with government policy and social pressure. It is because of these fifty states that our federal government cannot bend the whole population from coast to coast into a unified behavior. Someone accustomed to lockdowns and distancing in New Mexico might be appalled by the normalcy that is Florida. Many have fled the two big lock down cities, Los Angeles and New York, for Florida and Texas, to be free again.
I genuinely used to believe that most people were good people, that people were doing their best. There is some evidence for it. I like to point to traffic. That we are all driving kinetic weapons in an orderly fashion and that most of us are following the rules demonstrates that we can work together to be safe.
I don’t believe that anymore.
The problem is what is in our hearts. Most of us are only behaving out of self-interest, and that is why you see all kinds of idiotic drivers, self-absorbed and hazardous. They demand that you put your trust in them, not the rules, to prevent accidents. Philly is straight up lawless.
Martin Luther King Jr. Monument in Washington D.C.
What history bears out and what is more easily observed every day is that people are mostly looking out for themselves, and they are inherently corruptible. That is the truth.
It takes special people to snap out of ego and join consciousness. It takes a real rebel to evaluate every narrative according to their own instincts and research.
It takes strength to accept uncertainty. Our corruptibility is a mirror of our insecurity. It is easy to corrupt someone by appealing to their fears. You can manipulate someone’s behavior just that easily.
This is why the old argument that a widespread conspiracy like faking the moon landing would be impossible. Too many people would have to maintain the secret.
I don’t think so. All you have to do is work with the corruptible, then dupe the honest people. Then there are those who know but have no proof, they play along, to protect themselves. That is also corrupt, but in that self-protective way, they aren’t in on it.
I’m not saying the moon landing was faked. I have waffled on that theory. Even if it was faked, that doesn’t determine whether or not we landed on the moon. Both can happen for their own reasons. Behind smoke screens there are mirrors, behind those there are doors. It gets nuts. But for me, it could not be more obvious that covid is exactly that. A maze of uncertainty whereupon the honest can corrupt themselves by playing along, because they can’t see the illusion. They believe it. This appeals to the idea that we are once again mostly good people, trying to do the right thing.
It was a chance I had to take, driving across the country with my Volkswagen, in the middle of a supposed pandemic. The reality I learned was that there are no laws absolutely prohibiting free movement. I think some people believe that if you check into a motel in a state with a quarantine order then you’re obligated to stay there or something. No, this is all nonsense. The borders are open and people can move. This was always the case.
Spring Equinox passed this Saturday, and we’re all looking forward to the post-covid world. Things are reopening and the vaccines are being jabbed into people.
If all continues as it is, jobs will be created at record pace. The event industry employs millions of people. This alone will prop up the economy for a minute. However, there are bubbles and problems that cannot be ignored.
Election Day is today. Fears are at an all-time high. Tensions are raised but nobody is sure if the call to war is going to find movement. The present feeling of ideological tension just needing a little spark to flame a civil war has been expressed by millions of Americans — as though this is the only thing that we can all agree on.
With this in mind, I decided that I couldn’t wait until after the election to put myself square in the presence of the great monuments of our great country. I have countless indictments against our government, nonetheless, I want to defend it and take a wide view to see its history and its greatness.
I felt on Friday morning that I needed to take that drive to Washington DC. I debated with myself about it over breakfast, but I truly just saw myself there and thought, this is happening. I started working my way out the door around 10am. It was impulsive, so the things I lacked became self-evident later. I didn’t brush my teeth for 36 hours, for example.
I drove more than 400 miles, from my home in North Philadelphia, to Washington DC, back to Baltimore, then to Gettysburg, then Harrisburg. The drive to a destination, for me, always needs much more time than the GPS tells me. I like stopping. I like knowing what there is on the road. I like to master my routes.
I can drive from Seattle to San Diego without a map, and I could take three routes doing it. The East Coast is my new frontier. Part of the excitement of living in Philadelphia is the positioning: The great historic cities are all a day’s drive from home.
The American history of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, they all began long before Washington DC. Philadelphia was founded as a British colony 108 years before DC, in 1682. It was the city that served as the nation’s capital in the beginning.
Living in Philly as a transplant from the West coast I think helps me appreciate the deep history of this nation with Philadelphia as the real epicenter of it. Before DC, this is where laws were written. This is where stocks were traded. This is where currency was minted (and still is). It was the manufacturing and distribution hub of the country well into the Twentieth Century.
As long ago as the battle at Gettysburg may be, it is relatively modern history. The revolutionary war could be viewed as a civil war, as the ties to Europe were much stronger and there was no national identity to speak of. They had to finally break with the kingdoms that ruled the colonies in order to set a course for self-governance.
The Americas were first colonized in the Fifteenth Century. Global positions of domination change over time. Portugal is quite the example, having pioneered much of the New World and seafaring power of Europe in those pivotal year, it is today considered almost third world. It’s like comparing Yahoo to Google.
Declaring independence from the dictatorship of those kingdoms was a revolutionary act that set Europe on a course toward self-governance. I have never seen a time when I am more concerned that this course could be going in reverse from Europe and Asia toward America.
This country does in fact have a long period of evolution to look at, some excellent accomplishments that have lasting positive effects for the world. The contradictions lie all over the place too. The whole displacement of indigenous peoples, the protracted dominance of slavery as an economic model, the subjugation of the will of the people in other nations to satisfy the needs of private corporations, and the abuse of intelligence agencies in the name of national security. This is the kind of stuff that was in the back of my mind as I did my tour. This government has essentially become what it was founded to protect itself from. This ironically happened just as we unified as a people toward universal voting rights and ended the era of the state-regulated second-class citizen.
The truth of this only evolved to reinforce that I care deeply about maintaining our union with the embrace of that darkness as part of the growth and our character as a people. It is the only way to heal and carry ourselves in the light of the best intentions of the people, which is self-governance.
Getting to D.C.
The intention of this trip was just to see those monumental sites in DC at the National Mall. Once I hit the road, however, I just wanted to keep moving. It was a solo road trip for peace, trying to find appreciation for the United States of America in my heart, to embrace whatever outcome there may be this week, then take the fight back to the power, not the people.
I like driving. I like thinking on the road. I like taking a break from my home life, taking hours at the wheel to compress my thoughts. I like highways and small towns and counters at diners and bars. I like synchronicity and meeting random people.
I arrived in DC a bit late, I knew I had to hustle to make the most of the sunlight. When I travel, it’s about walking. If I drive into a place, I find free street parking, typically, and walk through neighborhoods to get to the destination. Not every city works like this, but that is the spirit of it: Walking through the place to get a sense of its genuine character.
I underestimated that city in many ways. It is much more dense and bustling than I expected of it. It has very recently gentrified. Her bad neighborhoods are pretty much wiped out, and that means displaced and relocated, ie gentrified. The trend to colonize and displace those of lesser means continues as a tradition in this country.
There is no avoiding the fact that everything we have built in DC is a monument to genocide. That is the only way that it could have been constructed. The symbolism of conquest becomes more apparent when you are standing at the World War II monument in relation to the reflective pool in relation to Abraham Lincoln looking on toward the Capitol buildings with his massive shoe extending just slightly over the lip of the pedestal, as you stand below it.
Walking from Mt. Vernon through Chinatown and then Georgetown University law campus, there was a totally empty outdoor Covid-19 testing and lab station setup. I checked online, it was supposed to be open until 4pm, but it was only 3:30. I spotted the capitol building down New Jersey Avenue. I headed straight for it.
The United States Capitol and Supreme Court are across the street from one another. They are massive structures. It’s a lot of walking. The Supreme Court is at the east end of the National Mall, so I turned around and headed for the Washington Monument. You can enjoy a lot of views along the way. The Smithsonian building is a tremendous walking experience.
Pushing on while trying not to spend much time on any of the wonders surrounding me all the time, I had the treat of walking through a marital engagement, a man proposing to a woman with the Washington Monument in the backdrop. I breezed passed them saying, “It looks like you two just got engaged!” He replied, “Thanks!” because was nervous as hell. He was barely present but at the same time totally exhilarated. I tagged that with, “Good luck!” I wish to hell that I never said that. Congratulations were in order!
I was engaged to Kate exactly four years ago. I realized immediately that I had a twinge of bitterness in my heart, as I am a single man today. Love isn’t luck. It is careful work.
There is dimensionality to the Washington Monument that doesn’t come across on television or in photos. There is a vast field between the monument and the reflecting pool, which is designed to reflect the monument. There is even another monument between them that I never really noticed on TV or photos, because it disappears below the line of sight from Lincoln’s steps.
That monument is the World War II pool at the east end of the pool. There are dual structures, one is labeled Atlantic, the other is Pacific. On a side note, I realized upon seeing these columns that the Atlantic ocean refers to Atlantis. Weird. How did I miss that? Anyway, this monument is a huge structure and would be a site independent of the whole. In the whole, it is merely an adornment.
What clicked more meaningfully to me was the connection of these structures to the reflecting pool and Abraham Lincoln and how these huge spaces shrink and become a unified image under the gaze of Lincoln at his monument. I haven’t researched enough of the symbolism of it to say what it’s all about, but for me, it feels powerful, meant to continuously reinforce the power of the United States.
Lincoln is revered, I think, because we were in the midst of intense westward expansion during his time. The steadfast belief that took hold was the so-called manifest destiny of the American people to command both oceans. With the grandeur and purpose of spreading democracy and Christianity, the destiny was manifested under brute force, in an ends defeats means kind of philosophy. I would observe that this belief remains to this day and ultimately represents the same trend line all the way to Iraq and beyond.
Lincoln essentially became the sole founding father of our modern nation. This is why he is so greatly revered, and it’s all in that pool. You may feel the energy of the triumph in the conflict in these monuments but it cannot be separated from the suffering. Lincoln caused extraordinary suffering and destruction by maintaining the Union. It could have been a peaceful secession, but his rule of law and force set a direction for this country that amounts to a single nation controlling all of the waterways of the world by the end of World War II.
The Capitol Building
Me with Capitol Behind Me
Washington Monument
Me with Washington Monument at Reflecting Pool
Under the Boot of Lincoln
Looking East from the Lincoln Monument
DC Fortified
Pitting Power Against Progress
There is beauty in this ugliness. First of all: We have this incredible land. We have this vast connectivity from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and Abraham Lincoln was the man that held it all together. This shit was on his shoulders. That deserves some respect.
I’m troubled by the brutality of war and power. I have always been a peace activist. We do not have enough anti-war rallies anymore. We lost our steam in 2003 and never got it back.
Standing under the boot of Lincoln in that moment feels like that of the boot of executive power. It feels violent in this whole context. Now, I can look at it other ways. I would say also that his foot extending off the pedestal brings him back to the level of a Man, from the position of idol. The National Park Service says that the monument depicts Fasces as a continuum of leaders that work toward the liberation, not subjugation, of their people. Funny how it is also the root word for fascist. And funny how Lincoln had to use brutal fascistic force to maintain the union.
Leading to this moment of reflection with Lincoln, I have firmly decided that I want to maintain our union. I don’t want Texas or California or any other State to secede. Despite all of our brutal past, there is verifiable evolution toward justice. It gets tricky every step of the way. It definitely feels like we’re at the breaking point of another major step in the wrong direction.
Without trying to be precise about it, this nation was stitched together largely by Christian zealots and the only people participating in democracy were property owners, and pretty much the only property owners were white men. The civil war forced the people to take a side, even if Lincoln used slaves as his pawn to win the union, which has economic interests at heart just the same, he still took that step versus the maintenance of slavery.
The following hundred years were marked with continuous upsets to the white male status quo until finally, universal voting rights were established. The period that has followed looks like the gradual disentanglement of white maleness from the elite power hierarchy. There are absolutely more wealthy and powerful non-white non-male people in the country than ever.
The conflicts in society fomenting and mounting up today are totally connected to the same thread of oppression that also tells the story of progress. The specific goals are getting looser and the demands more confusing. For example, non-whites in the 1960s were advocating for equal access to goods and services, the end to segregation, and the assurance of voting rights. That is a clearcut goal. Self-governance is meant to pick up from there. Today, it’s a little different. The system is unfair today due to classist structures that were waged against racial groups, but were redirected entirely to income-based groups. Racist structures are still haunting communities post-segregation, so the problems overlap between racial groups.
The goals of the Black Lives Matter movement are shared with a huge level of support with whites. The obvious thing is police brutality, a scourge that takes all kinds of lives. Disproportionate it may be, it is still a shared problem. What people don’t understand, there are factions amidst that protest movement that are ideologically marxist, they don’t agree with classic liberalism, and would be willing to rewrite the constitution.
At one time, all whites were better off than all non-whites. That is absolutely not true today. When slavery gave way and black folks entered the same status as the Irish, there were race riots over competition for work and land. Famously in South Philadelphia, after the Civil War, the Irish waged war on freed slaves, even though they shared a common systemic oppressor. They did not come together to fight against the same forces, they fought each other. Not having equal rights and protection under the law, they took their frustrations on each other. We are not doing well to avoid this cycle today.
If whites and non-whites are fighting amongst each other about the same class struggles, then the fascists have already won. They don’t want us getting together to solve shared problems.
Leaving the Lincoln memorial, I continued onto the White House. I had just enough sunlight to catch it. Much to my dismay, I began to see an alarming degree of fortification happening across DC. I really wanted to look across the lawn and wonder if Trump or any “important” figures were in there. But there is a barrier running all along the fence line of the White House right now. You can only see the upper half of the building.
This was a sad end to my walking tour. As I headed back toward Mount Vernon, enjoying the old architecture splitting up contemporary glass jawns along the way, I noticed that everyone was boarding up their restaurants, hotels, and retail shops. Generally, the police presence in DC is high, but I could sense it was elevated, the giveaway being that for a substantial radius surrounding the White House, businesses are digging in and sealing up.
If only I had known, I would have launched boardupyourbusiness.com in February. I could have made a killing on this pandemic and civil unrest, specializing in boarding up shit.
I wandered around DC looking for a good bar and food. I was annoyed with everything. It’s like Portland, it’s all designer with either chic patina or bold glossy finishes. I don’t like that. I like diners and old Irish pubs. So I pressed back to Baltimore. I ate fast food.
Camping in Gettysburg
Baltimore is a jaunt away from DC. I parked right at the peak of their central monument at Mount Vernon. I then walked up and down Charles looking for action. I go on intuition. Turns out this is a major connective nightlife street. There was live music going on, something I hadn’t seen since March. For a Halloween Weekend, however, it was very quiet. I had one beer and decided it would be smart to get a room between there and Gettysburg so I could have a good start that morning.
I did what I often do, which is to drive around being dissatisfied with rates, then I sleep in my car or stay up all night. Or both, I stay up trying to sleep. That’s what happened. I rested my eyes in the freezing cold of my car in Gettysburg. I couldn’t bring myself to spend $80 and up. We’re talking about cheap motels. They weren’t cutting me any deals, because they were all well booked. I was happy to see that, just for the sake of economic activity. I wondered if people were traveling out of the cities in fear of riots, especially from places like DC.
It was cold. It was dumb, attempting this without a blanket. My mom always told me to keep a blanket in the car. I laid there imagining the hardships of soldiers in Gettysburg. I imagined them weary and freezing in their encampments. Then I saw that the battle lasted for three days in July. Their hardships were, at the least, warm at night.
At 6am, I headed for the nearest open diner. Covid hours have down stepped the 24/7 joints to more standard hours. The second diner of choice, in Hunterstown, was the one that was actually open. But it was top choice in retrospect. Perfect for sitting at the counter and listening to the locals yak, joining in a bit myself, as I like to do in diners. The food was good. The banter was ridiculous.
Everything about Gettysburg challenged my expectations. I never researched the town, I just imagined it to be a tiny, old time boring place, crafted for tourist expectations. The battlefield, I imagined to be a relatively small field by modern scope, that you could easily survey from a single position. And at that point there would be a plaque, a monument, and the standard informational presentations you would expect from an historical site.
Gettysburg is a modern little college city, dense at its center, but it becomes rural very quickly. This town has the most Biden/Harris signs I have seen per capita. The place is full of those little artsy boutiques and coffee shops. I doubt anyone in that diner voted for Biden, just a few miles outside town. The television ran Fox News. But none of them talked about politics.
I can feel the national tension today in the City of Gettysburg. It is a microcosm of our urban and rural divide like I have never seen, because it is such a compact urban area that the same people passionately opposed to one another are also forced to cooperate. The people of Philadelphia don’t have to deal with the rural folk, and likewise. It’s a matter of scale.
Gettysburg National Military Park is a sprawling area larger than the town itself. There are positions that can survey large areas, but even the highest points, like Little Round Top and Culp’s Hill, cannot take the whole area into view.
The constancy of military units occupying this area and the intense clashes unfolding there is effectively realized by the seeming endless trail of inscribed grand monuments to represent each battalion and squadron and individual leaders in the war. The vastness of death is clear, imagining instead of these stone blocks, a horrifying pile of bodies that would involve a reconnaissance and burial effort that would easily outlast the length of the battle. Lincoln’s famous “Gettysburg Address” happened at the dedication of the national cemetery that November, four months after the battle.
Panorama of Little Round Top
View from Little Round Top
View from Little Round Top
Pennsylvania Monument at Gettysburg
See the cannabis flag at Pennsylvania State Capitol
Cocoa Diner in Hershey, PA
To imagine a contemporary civil war given the number of assault rifles in this country, the amount of ammo, the kind of house-to-house fighting that would result in constant quagmires in cities like Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, where territories can easily be fragmented up into factions, is to imagine the devastation of these historic sites. The same way that Syria became a proxy war of terrorist groups funded by governments, the conflicts here would be tied to outcomes desired by other nations like China and Russia.
We are certainly in a make or break moment in this country. With or without a President Trump to worry about, the leadership and the political body that is meant to serve us has become so totally corrupted that most people are not excited with whoever wins the election. There is some extraordinary enthusiasm for Trump and I would rather tap into that than fight it.
When I was protesting the George W. Bush administration with as much intensity that people have for Trump today, I remember this girl I liked that I was trying to date who was hippyish and going to Cal Arts suggested that a more effective way to reach him might be to send some flowers. I thought that was dumb. I get that now.
People believe they are fighting with Trump for all kinds of liberties that are directly under attack by people like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The exact same thing can be said of those who feel attacked by Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Everybody is correct about this. None of them have our best interests at heart. Choosing a side and defending one piece of shit against another is not the solution.
There are values to both the right and left that make this country a very special place. The crisis in our whole social system is leading to the collateral damage of this nation’s spirit, its purpose, its economic power, and will ultimately lead to the failure of our military power. Public morale is a national crisis. People feel used, and lied to, and they point the finger at one another.
The project of self-governance, allowing ourselves to love who we love, worship how we worship, speak what we believe, and defend these rights and our property against the tyranny of a corrupt state, by force, is what is at stake when we turn against one another.
In the same way that I could never have understood the vastness of the battle at Gettysburg without going to the battlefield, we are going to sorely underestimate the despair and destruction that will come with a contemporary civil war.
If that occurs, there is no way that The United States will survive and continue the progress it has made in terms of bringing about a nation of civil rights and liberties, economic mobility, and peacemaking in the world. Most likely, Europe and Asia will interfere in our domestic matters and prolong the civil war until staggering lives are lost, and at least they can come out on top and negotiate a reconstruction deal that would divide us into Eurasia. China would probably dominate the West Coast. Canada would move into the heartland. The Northeast and parts of the South would go to Europe. America would move into Texas, absorbing parts of the South.
To me, preserving the manifestation of this nation’s culture from coast to coast is a worthwhile act of peace and democracy. It is the only way we can maintain that continuity.
From a simple, selfish point of view, I love being able to drive from coast to coast as an American. I don’t want to need my passport to visit California. It would break my heart.
Today, the nation will be tested. I hope that I don’t have to flee the city. I hope nobody riots. I hope it comes to pass and we learn to elect better leaders and challenge whoever is in power. War is not inevitable. If we choose to, we can evolve yet again.
Regardless of who is in the White House, we have unfathomable challenges to deal with. This nation cannot be so belligerent in its foreign policy. We need the kind of diplomacy that brings about mutually beneficial trade deals that can lead to lasting peace and economic prowess. The people of this country cannot survive with endless debt from health and education costs. Police forces cannot go on with this oppositional relationship to the community they are sworn to protect. Inherently classist structures cannot remain standing lest we continue a kind of economic racial segregation that leads again back to the entanglement of education and policing that leads to ignorance which leads to the enabling of globally tyrannical behavior.
The knot is indeed badly tangled. But I’m one of those people that takes the cord and straightens it out, then I coil it up correctly so that it won’t knot up again. That’s what democracy is supposed to be: routine maintenance.
We have no real honest choice but to accept the results of this election and get back to work on correcting the course of this country. In theory, that is what our constitution, the basis for our system, is meant to do: self-correct.
I truly just skimmed the surface of Gettysburg because I wanted to get home by the evening and it would be a long drive. I also wanted to see Harrisburg again, almost just to complete the patriotic ritual, to visit the capitol city of Pennsylvania, a state that is today considered a battleground for the White House, a state that I have deep ancestral ties to, a state that cradled the birth of this nation and has contributed incredibly to the social and economic progress of this country. It also acts as a conservative point of resistance. It is a diverse place.
The media is telling us that Pennsylvania is the battleground state of 2020. I would believe it. I hope we do not host another Gettysburg. Businesses are boarding up all over Philly, partly out of fears of riots related to the shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. last week. Not a great lead-in to the election for Philly, but the police just keep blasting rounds off at the wrong time.
I believe that if we can avoid civil war, then we can become a much stronger people. I fear that violent clashes across major cities would mark the end of the tradition of self-governance forever in this country, as we have already given up civil liberties in the name of national security. Such clashes would make it permanent.
