park benches, bus stations, ecosocialist philosopher, outdoor nudity, No Gods No Masters except my wife who is a Master now I guess

Let us begin with a word of praise for park benches. 

The spirituality of capitalist hegemony would have you believe that your worth is tied to how much value you produce for capitalists or, if you’re a capitalist, how much value you have extracted from workers. In fact you are like a blooming flower in an unexplored forest: beautiful and majestic irregardless of what you have produced. The capitalists do not want you to know this. The capitalists hate park benches because they represent the core truth of an anarchist spirituality: rest is for the weary.

Loitering is practicing the art of coping with unending grace. Linger! Loaf! Dilly-dally! That's what you're here for!

Park benches are cathedrals. Park benches are the commons. 

Are you an oppressed creature that needs to let out a sigh? Is the world heartless? Are conditions soulless? Maybe a park bench can be your opium and maybe that's A-OK.

!i!i!i!i!i!i

I first arrived in this fine city via the Greyhound bus terminal. I did a lot of Greyhound Bus riding in those days.

I have a fondness for many cities' Greyhound stations. I've spent so many miserable hours in the Buffalo NY Greyhound station. I used to hitch-hike to there to get the bus to Toronto to see Naomi. If I went the hour South to Pittsburgh to Greyhound the whole way I'd typically get a few hours less time with her.

The city of Philadelphia, run by nincompoops, closed that station and made people experiencing the indignity of riding this country’s disgraceful public-sector intercity bus network instead stand outside shivering in the cold and rain while the buses blocked the bike lane at 2nd and Spring Garden. Bad move. They finally fixed it. The bus station is back, baby. 

I've got union wages now and I'm a choo choo train boy mostly. Actually I'm mostly a don't-go-more-than-five-miles-from-home boy. If a bicycle or the el doesn't get me there is it really worth going?

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I enjoyed this article.

It was good to read a zoomed-out narrative of how so many normie liberals have become meaningful committed allies in the fight against fascism. 

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This article was originally published in French by Andre Gorz in Le Sauvage September-October 1973. This translation by Patsy Vigderman was printed in Ecology as Politics (Black Rose Books, 1980).

Look at this cute picture of him with his wife. Grabbed it from his Wikipedia page.

André Gorz was a philosopher/journalist/writer known as one of the first ecosocialists and political ecologists. 

The spread of the private car has displaced mass transportation and altered city planning and housing in such a way that it transfers to the car functions which its own spread has made necessary.

[...]

one important aspect of the automobile myth is that for the first time people were riding in private vehicles whose operating mechanisms were completely unknown to them and whose maintenance and feeding they had to entrust to specialists. Here is the paradox of the automobile: it appears to confer on its owners limitless freedom, allowing them to travel when and where they choose at a speed equal to or greater than that of the train. But actually, this seeming independence has for its underside a radical dependency. Unlike the horse rider, the wagon driver, or the cyclist, the motorist was going to depend for the fuel supply, as well as for the smallest kind of repair, on dealers and specialists in engines, lubrication, and ignition, and on the interchangeability of parts. Unlike all previous owners of a means of locomotion, the motorist’s relationship to his or her vehicle was to be that of user and consumer-and not owner and master.

Motor vehicles rob people of the thrill of competency and autonomy. I get that people have different needs, different personalities, etc. but for me one of the most unpleasant feelings is when I perceive I am trapped and dependent. 

In the final analysis, the car wastes more time than it saves and creates more distance than it overcomes. Of course, you can get yourself to work doing 60 mph, but that’s because you live 30 miles from your job and are willing to give half an hour to the last 6 miles.

From the final paragraph:

Above all, never make transportation an issue by itself. Always connect it to the problem of the city, of the social division of labour, and to the way this compartmentalizes the many dimensions of life. One place for work, another for “living,” a third for shopping, a fourth for learning, a fifth for entertainment. The way our space is arranged carries on the disintegration of people that begins with the division of labour in the factory. It cuts a person into slices, it cuts our time, our life, into separate slices so that in each one you are a passive consumer at the mercy of the merchants, so that it never occurs to you that work, culture, communication, pleasure, satisfaction of needs, and personal life can and should be one and the same thing: a unified life, sustained by the social fabric of the community.

I’m always on anti-car rants and enjoy being sung to by my own choir but am also often pleasantly surprised by new notes in the familiar tunes. I like this piece’s utopian vision. Cars stand in the way of the kind of place I want my children to inherit. I love my hyperlocal life. Not having a car is a blessing. My community is a place I get to learn the nooks and crannies of intimately. To pay attention to a place is to love it. My neighborhood is not an inconvenient expanse to be bypassed. The land over which highways are built is resented, meant to be sped past in a blur, wished out of existence as a place between me and a big box store. That’s no kind of world to build. What if we loved and revered this one and only habitable fragile blue-green space rock we've got? 

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Grant Peterson’s most recent blog post is an ode to 1960s and 1970s outdoor equipment catalogs. Without having read that I would not have known about the Stephenson’s Warmlite catalog featuring nude models. It’s a funny gimmick and an OK catalog. (1974 catalog linked, haven’t perused any others.) A little wordy but who am I to throw stones from this glass bloghouse?

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Olufemi Taiwo on elite impunity.

It’s not just that the rich don’t see that they’re in the same coal mine as the dead canary; They think the canary dies so they don’t have to. They can’t see the suffering of the reviled underclass as a sign of the same looming catastrophe coming for them because they don’t believe they exist in the same reality as the underclass. Arundhati Roy uses the term “vertical secession” to describe the way the rich don’t just leave a nation but leave the network of mutuality of human-scale communities and markets.

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I only stumbled upon this video because someone wrote Matthew Gabrielle a complaint about the print hanging beside him which was carved by yours truly. It’s worth watching. Hegseth is evil! He’s motivated by stupid apocalyptic genocidal ideologies and it’s good people are talking about that.

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I’m sick of thinking about Graham Platner, but I’m thinking about him nonetheless so here is another thought: he is not working class. Farmers are coded working class because they are rural and White. That is not what working class is. Farm workers are workers. Farm owners own means of production. They vote like people who have land and money because they do have land and money. Ooh look at me, I’m just a humble oyster farmer. Dude, you inherited a hobby farm from your wealthy parents. Farmers are in general conservative because they profit from conservative capitalist policies. They exploit undocumented migrant labor. They extract resources from the land without thought for future generations, workers, or those downstream. Big agribusiness is a business of exploitation, and we are all fed this pro rural propaganda that says Oh out in the country life is wholesome. it is not. There is a reason that minorities flee rural communities for cities. Equating white rural America with wholesomeness is bad for your politics! Who is profiting off whom? Who is demanding their freedom from whom? Ask questions about power; don’t just do vibes-based classification of who is and isn’t working class. You’re a worker if you have to sell your labor to a boss. You’re a capitalist if you suck the life blood out of workers to enrich yourself. You’re a class traitor if you earn wages by protecting capitalist interests by hurting workers (cops, soldiers, scabs). If you memorize the previous three sentences you’ll have better class analysis than the whole pundit class. Being sunburnt and bearded doesn't make you  a worker! A hoodie and ball cap doesn't make you a worker!

Another Graham Platner thought: have you said anything in defense of his past behavior that Brett Kavanaugh supporters said in defense of Kavanaugh’s past behavior? Not a good look! 

I don’t live in Maine so not my circus. There’s no viable alternative to him as near as I can tell. Harm reduction and making compromises to defeat Republican fascism is the right move but we don’t have to pretend it’s a morally clean move. 

No more Platner-posting. 

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I’ve come to believe the reason there’s more infighting on the left than the right is because the left has principles and convictions. The right is a broad coalition of people united only by their desire to dominate a wretched underclass. A rapist President is not a compromise for a typical Republican. 

Not sure what to do with that. 

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I stumbled upon Horses.land youtube channel recently. The Internet remains weird. That’s good!

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Ad on the radio advertises that this station “makes the day go by fast.” What a bleak world where the best we can imagine for our day is for it to go by quickly. What do we need to do to our days and workplaces to make them something we enjoy instead of seek to escape? It’s assumed we are all barely tolerating serving eight hour jail sentence after eight hour jail sentence five days in a row followed by a brief reprieve before the whole damn thing starts again in hopes that one day we can amass enough wealth to die comfortably. Muzak makes the day go by!

What would it look like to demand a joyful life?

What would a day savored feel like?

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Naomi is officially a Master of Social Work. The many people who are housed because of her could be forgiven for thinking she had already mastered social work. She now has an official paper saying so. I am grateful to be doing less of the household drudgery and getting more time with the love of my life in this next chapter of life. Naomi put in a lot of hours and energy working a paying job and an internship placement while taking classes and parenting two rambunctious children. Here’s a nice picture of Francis proud of his mom.

Like any happy photo, there’s unhappiness out of frame. Mary was miserable and seems to have been popping out a molar. She (and therefore I) slept maybe three hours the night before. I was stressing and trying to calm down an exhausted ailing baby in a crowded space. She fell asleep on the bike ride home.

The day she took and passed her licensing exam our neighbor Grant watched the kids while we went on a bike ride and got tacos. It rained then rainbowed.

In the evening we threw a big party with lots of friends/neighbors. We partied past midnight. Mary’s Motrin kicked in and she fell asleep happy. Francis fell asleep in my arms in a camp chair by the camp fire hours after his bedtime. We slept in, ate leftover cupcakes for breakfast and skipped church.

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Why must our mouth bones be birthed through our gums in a feverish sweat? Reality is a horror story. 

^v^v^v^

Can you believe I’ve ever been frustrated with this perfect being?

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Here’s a 2010 article from Men’s Journal about how to exercise. I don’t work out. This article made me think I can and maybe even will. Lots of weird gender talk but I guess that’s to be expected from a magazine called something like Manly Magazine For Men. So if you can tolerate reading the phrase “weak like a little girl” this might be an intriguing read for readers of any gender. 

It’s about working out but also about not falling for sales pitches and trends. And also about cis-man gender performance. Eat the meat and spit out the bones. It now occurs to me that’s not a great idiom for an herbivore to use. Also lots of bones are fine to eat. I’ve eaten tons of fish bones and chicken bones. When I say “fine to eat” I obviously mean for me and not the chickens and fishes. All the chickens and fishes whose bones I’ve eaten died on account of my killing and eating them. I have ceased and desisted such practices of animal-slaughtering and bone-chomping for the past half of my lifetime. Except I do on occasion eat half a bag of candy before noticing it contains gelatin which is ground up bones. Generally I keep eating it but I feel bad for the victims of the bone-crusher and don’t buy the same sour candy again. 

Any sour candy manufacturers reading this, please consider removing the bone-crushers and crushed bones from your manufacturing processes. 

Don’t like everything on this blog? Eat the seeds and spit out the shells. This blog is meat-free but not nut-free. 

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A lot of your dreams are achievable. 

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Most of the standards you hold yourself to are impossible.

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Consider resting in public. A good sit on a park bench is probably a good move. 

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Some photos without context: