Posted on by Kevin

Filtered light

The Sun is the source of essentially all color on our planet. Sunlight is full-spectrum, and when you see something that has color, what you see is the reflected color that is not absorbed.  When the sun is at its brightest, the world is over-saturated with color, and we see less definition.  Paradoxically, there is so much color that we actually see less of it as direct sunlight trends to wash out everything. It is only when the sun is filtered that we see nuance and hue. Under a grey overcast day with light rain the solid monolithic green of a forest a becomes a multitude of greens, as well as reds, browns and yellows.  Resurrection Bay, on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, is a deep fiord that accentuates that effect with steep craggy mountains providing depth and texture, shadow and light.  It really is the coastal rainforest at its finest.

Today, I saw the sun through a different filter.  The Alaska Sealife Center includes a delightful aquarium that is a must see if you ever get to Seward.  Every time I visit I discover something new. The first time it was the obvious things, watching birds “flying” through the water, seeing birds in a whole new light, and environment, as they show more grace underwater than one can imagine as they kind of lumber through the air.  I went back, and learned about fish policy, and the attempts at restoring Prince William Sound, and what has our had not recovered from the Exxon Valdez spill. This time my discovery was a new way to look at rain.

The signature piece for the Sea Life Center is the outdoor pen for the rehabilitation of marine mammals, filled with water constantly taken from and returned to Resurrection Bay.  Greater than 2 stories tall, you can stand at the bottom, and look up at the surface of the water.  What I discovered with this trip is that in a rainfall, each drop becomes a pin-prick of light; sunlight refracted to a diamond’s radiance.  As the water hits, it creates circles emanating outwards, each of which creates a mini rainbow, as transient as the raindrop itself.  Filtered light falling on water from the bay, showing a new layer of nature’s beauty.

 

Posted on by Kevin · 3 Comments

So much for dreaming…

I have come to a  fantastic realization; I have finally stopped following my dreams.  I am now following my happiness instead.

I have not given up on my dreams.  If a leprechaun were to grant me a wish (aside from the obvious of simply making for me a good fitting pair of shoes), I would have a band full of strings and harmony, and we would be performing hopeful, lightly political music at Winnipeg this summer.  We would jam on workshop stages with other musicians and share The Craic long into the night.  There are no handy leprechauns,  so getting to Winnipeg (or Carnegie) is not a matter of dreaming but a matter of following a series of choices, and not ones I can make.

A couple of years ago, I went to a workshop at Winnipeg about the economics of the entertainment industry.  In  it, we were given the best possible advice that anyone could give.  We were asked why we wanted to be professional musicians, and then told that there is only one “good” answer.  “That you must.  You can love music, you can love to entertain, you can want to serve, but at the end of the day the only thing that will be worth all of the sacrifices you will need to make is if being a musician is simply what you must do.”

I have spent some time “on the road.”  While I will always love traveling I have come to the conclusion that the “romance of the road” is a myth we tell ourselves so we can enjoy the resulting show.  For the brief time I was on the road following my dreams.  I remember long drives going over in my head what I needed to remember for my part and long drives home categorizing what I needed to fix in my costume or re-living the audience interactions where I should have been brilliant but was not.  I remember waking up in a hotel room, and looking for a phone book to figure out where I was.

I also remember specific nights more than a decade ago on where the craic was good.  Those were amazing nights and I could certainly see how some people must have that lifestyle.  For days after such a night creativity flowed out of me faster than my brain could register.   Poetry, writing, or solutions to stubborn problems would seem to come from nowhere.  There is not a feeling like it, and the best way to get to that feeling is to be with imaginative people who you don’t otherwise spend much time with.  People who have enough in common to share stories, but who have not yet shared their stories with each other.  Travelers who come together for brief periods of time.

I have felt this at festivals, at youth hostels, at conferences, at pub song-circles and in the back of a greyhound bus.  This, as much as the audience interaction, is what I dream about.  This is what the leprechaun would give me, but amazing craic on its own cannot equate to happiness for me.

I wrote some pretty good songs while under the influence of other people’s creativity, but the themes are all of saying goodbye to those people and of meeting again sometime in the future.  They are songs of not being together now.  I was in my early 20’s, and writing music that was essentially re-living the glory days.

Lao Tzu is attributed to saying “If you are depressed you are living in the past, if you are anxious you are living in the future and if you are at peace you are living in the present.”  Following my dreams lead to a few glorious moments of being in the present, surrounded by a a lot of time being either anxious about how I was going to get to a present moment, or depressed about no longer being there.  I was not very often happy, and that is what I have given up by not following my dreams.

Shannon and I are building a family.  Some parts are harder and more complex than we had bargained on, but with her I am not focusing my energy on a few nights of matchless camaraderie, but focusing on building what we have, every single day.  Our short term energy is focused on a fair next week, and the creative outpouring that will entail, but it is a fair we share, and when it is over, we will share in that process as well.  After that, we will share trips to see more of our family, and then the next project we choose to be a part of, together.  Eventually (no, this is not an announcement) we will be sharing projects with our kids in an expanded family.

Not following my dreams is allowing me to be very, very happy.  I won’t need a phone book to tell me where I am; I will be home.

Posted on by Kevin

Time

I probably owe some of you an apology.   I went back through my blog, and I made public much of my old poetry.  Some of it is good, some is not, but although all of it is old, apparently my blog emailed each piece as a new post.  I suppose that everything old is new.

I graduated.  My hope is that I will now have time to devote to writing again, which prompted this excessive in the first place.

The webpage history is split into 4 basic parts.

  • My original website, which had some writing on it, but no room for response,
  • The LiveJournal days, which had some good writing and some real and meaningful responses from a few good friends,
  • The Facebook days, which has a lot of posts shared with a lot of people, taking a lot of time, but ultimately having the depth and breadth of a mud puddle,
  • This page, which we have yet to develop.

Essentially all of my poetry comes from the first two parts.  While a quick reading of the poems would suggest that I wrote only when I was feeling depressed, it was actually rather the opposite.  When I was feeling pretty good, I was feeling creative.  Many of the songs I wrote were actually written or fleshed out at Hostfest, written during breaks from performing as a troll, or on the trip back when my head was still buzzing with excitement and a desire to create.  I just found it easy to write about feeling depressed because it is an easier subject to find a models in art to draw inspiration from.

That desire to create has never gone away.  The difference is that I actually used to give myself the time to do so.  LiveJournal as a format encouraged spending time on posts, and the posts were worth reading.  As I migrated to Facebook, I found myself spending less time on posts, and then wondering why I only got so many likes.  Instead of responding to friends posts, I simply liked them and moved on.  I got in that same habit in real life.  I would walk the dogs, take time and think, and come up with something worth developing.  I would then get home, fire up the computer, and … fill my head with other headlines, other ideas, and all manner of things that would choke the life out of any ideas I could have been developing.

About a year ago, I walked away from Facebook, but I still did not give myself time to create.  The idea of growing ideas itself withered on the vine as I looked to other priorities.  So, I have made public some of my old writings as a reminder to myself of what I want to improve and develop.  The “Songs” tag has a list of much of that work.  Some of it good, some of it not, all of which comes to a conspicuous end as I became more addicted to Facebook.  So, hopefully this will complete my return to the creativity of that time, when I knew the difference, as Kelz so beautifully put it, between being mindFULL and being mindful

Posted on by Kevin

Spring

Sometimes I wonder if the astrologers have a point.  It’s hard to conceive of a planet 50 million miles away having an effect on the goings on in life, but something seems to bundle events.  Something seems to be the catalyst for change, and once it starts, it spreads to parts of your life that are totally unrelated.  Frankly, a planet in retrograde makes just about as much sense as anything else.

The task this year has been to hold on.  The idea of a journal, well intended as it may be, fell to the wayside as I finished my Master of Public Administration, lost an aunt, visited the family, lost a cat, gained a dog, and tried varied in interesting new ways of using health insurance.  Somewhere along the way, the seasons turned.

I can actually tell you exactly when it happened.  Graduation.  The whites and greys of winter had melted, leaving the golden remains of autumn for all to see.  Then, the day I received my Master’s hood, the budding leaves hit critical mass on the mountains behind my house.  Green.  Such lively, vibrant colors.  Shades of green beyond description set off the remaining gold on the ground.  Green and gold.  The school colors for UAA.  It was a fantastic day.

Posted on by Kevin

No answer.

I will get back to writing down my original thoughts soon.  For now, I will redirect you to another blog, and ask that you go read in tribute to a friend who died last week.

Ron played a large role in my childhood, and certainly in my education as to what adulthood was really all about.  Whether his stories were true or not, whether he believed his conspiracy theories or not, he was a brilliant man who taught me to look at things a different way.

My years at Saint Olaf College taught me to frame my thoughts in thesis, antithesis and synthesis, always looking to logically check myself and my assumptions.  Ron was there to remind me that the very mental discipline it takes to check your own work is itself a trap.  You can go over the same problem in your head over and over, but sometimes you just need to take some black-powder up to Castle Hill, fire off the old cannons at 3:00 AM, and see what happens.

As for adequately describing the man himself, words honestly fail me.  For that, I ask you to hop on over to John Straley’s blog, where you can read his much more eloquent hand and meet my departed friend.

 

Posted on by Kevin

A backlight modern shrine.

As we approached the Summer Solstice, I noted that my house was Negrange in reverse, with the morning solstice shining through a passage made my kitchen window and refrigerator, and lighting my television.  Now, as we approach the Winter Solstice, that same sun, as it approaches its Southernmost setting point, is directly behind that same television.

Posted on by Kevin

Small Wonders

There are times when creation absolutely shouts its wonder.  Standing on the Llogara Pass, listening to the storm surge crash against the shore a thousand feet below; drifting through a pod of whales as they breathe, each larger than your boat; dancing through a Midwest storm and then picking up the pieces left behind by the tornado, there is often nothing subtle about the awesome power of nature.  And then, there are nights like tonight.

For lack of a better description, tonight we had an icefall.  Standing on my porch, the ice was not large enough to be felt through my hair, I could barely feel it on my skin, but I could hear it.  It was a cascading sound of water, with a crisp, ringing overtone.  The crisp sound of falling water came out of a clear sky, with stars shining down as if to whisper “be watchful, Kid, wonders are not always shouted.”

 

Posted on by Kevin

First Candle

The inn was full, but the Innkeeper was not happy. This was not the usual crowd, these were dangerous, angry men. The Emperor, for reasons he kept to himself, had decreed that every male in the Empire be registered in the town of their ancestors. No one knew why, some suggested the Emperor was going to raise taxes on the provinces, others talked of a renewed campaign against the Germanic tribes, and Rome’s need to know how many legions were available.

So, men of wealth made the trip to their ancestral homes. They brought with them guards to protect them on the way. Guards who were defying the Emperor’s decree by being in the town of their employer, not their own. Caught between loyalty to their paymaster, and obedience to their Emperor, loyalty won out, but the price was high, and no one was happy. There was nothing left but the waiting. The men waiting to be registered and then their long trip home, the innkeep waiting to have his own home back.

The Innkeeper’s son also did not like these angry men. He kept himself as busy as he could in the stables in the back. The stables were no more than a cave, but the cave was quiet, so the Innkeeper’s son spent his hours in the cave taking care of the beasts.

He, too, was waiting for things to get back to normal. He could hardly have imagined that normal was about to change, and that change was going to happen in the quiet stable where he was finding refuge. The loud and rowdy common room, full as it was with music and stories, was destined to be a footnote in history.

Posted on by Kevin

In color…

One of the benefits of my job is that I work on the 9th floor, overlooking Cook Inlet and the mountains beyond.  This morning, I came to work to see them in pre-dawn shadows.  Just enough light from the moon to reflect off the snow of the mountains, but not enough for much definition.

Then, I watched the alpine-glow descend upon the mountain, early morning pink becoming warmer as the sun rose behind me.

After that round, the sun rose, but direct sunlight was blocked by a cloud, and my mountain disappeared in a shroud of early morning blue.

The next phase was the stark white of daylight, crisp and clean, with the magic optics of temperature inversion bringing the mountains impossibly close.

Then, as the day progressed, the mountains were obscured by haze, to the point of nearly disheartening.

There is really no point to this observation, no higher meaning, just a gratitude that I live in a place where such an ordinary morning is also so spectacular.

“I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

-William Penn

Posted on by Kevin · 2 Comments

The day after…

I’ve decided how I am going to celebrate the end of the campaign season.  While I have commented that this year’s fliers do not burn, with the right tinder anything will catch light.  The night after election day, those flyers will light an effigy of Guy Fawkes.   I have conflicting views of the British government.  I have no conflicting views about a man who would replace a parliament, no matter how imperfect, with a theocracy.

I will light the fire with a torch made up of campaign fliers for both Mark Begich and Dan Sullivan.  No matter who wins the Senate race (and I doubt we will know by Guy Fawkes night), the winner will go to Washington to take part in an elected body deriving its power not from God, or even from the allegedly divine right of a king, but from our Constitution, an imperfect document that can be changed to reflect the will of the people, all of whom it governs equally.

I will burn theocracy in effigy as I reflect on what the Fourteenth Amendment to that Constitution has meant to my friends this year, several of whom are now married.

As I watch theocracy burn, I will say a prayer of thanks to God that I was born into a country where I have never been compelled into professing a religion and therefore have never had cause to wonder whether my religion was, in fact, my own.

Theocracy will burn with paper extolling the virtues of both local and national candidates.   The fire will light up the night with joyous relief.  Relief that this $50 Million campaign is over, but also at a process where people of uncommon background can come together and send representatives to parliaments that are, no matter how imperfect, far better than the alternative.

Posted on by Kevin · 1 Comment

Enough!

So, this is what a $50 Million election looks like.  With the control of the Senate at stake, everyone is throwing in to the point where this race could well cost $200 per vote.  There is nowhere traditional left to spend the money and it makes no sense to have money left over after the campaign.  With no more air time left, with no more newspaper print ads, with the traditional markets saturated money is spent in other ways.  When this election is over, the USPS is probably going to have to replace the shocks on every mail truck in Alaska after having delivered all of the mailers.   You can’t even use the glossy campaign posters as fire starter; much like the campaigns they represent, they don’t burn, they smoulder.

We are being polled.  Oh my, but we are being polled.  We are called nightly to the point where I, a person who LOVES telling everyone what I think, I have respondent fatigue.  I, and just about everyone I have personally talked to, now regularly screen calls to avoid being polled.  I don’t know how a pollster would weight the results to reflect that and so I don’t suspect any poll in Alaska is worth the electrons it takes to post.

The crazy thing is that this is probably the least consequential Senate race of my lifetime.  There are many important local issues that make this a very important election for Alaska, but the Senate race is not one of them.  One of two things will happen.  Either the Democrats retain control of the Senate, the Republicans the House, and the current dysfunctional Congress continues to be the least productive Congress in recant history, or the Republicans gain control of the Senate, but not with enough seats to override a veto.

Look, it’s important, I know it is.  I also know that there are other important things going on in this election as well.  You can’t help but be surrounded by the visceral nature of the campaign and not absorb some of the hate.  They are spending $50 Million dollars to tell us that the candidate from the other party is already bought by evil people and can’t  be dealt with by us good folk.  They are spending $50 Million dollars to tell us that this election is important because if our side does not win THEY will fill Washington with those  bought and paid for candidates and we won’t be able to feed our families.  They are spending $50 Million dollars to teach us to hate the very principles that our Republic were founded on, that in the finest deliberative body we can build, opposing ideas have a chance to develop into workable compromises.  It’s all or nothing.  We must support OUR side (which is good) because there is no compromise to be had with THEIR side (which is evil).   In this election, this relatively inconsequential election, we are told we make a very un-Alaskan decision of who we can work with, and who we can not.

Once the money is gone, I hope we re-find our center.  I hope we can re-build Alaska’s tradition of working with people we don’t agree with.  And once the money is gone, I hope we don’t find ourselves in the position to potentially decide control of the Senate again.

Posted on by Kevin · 3 Comments

Aurora

I have determined, and I am certain that science will someday confirm this, that the aurora have a direct impact on the meteorological conditions of the Anchorage bowl.  If the ADN tells us a Massive Sunspot could lead to aurora displays through the weekend they are telling us, as assuredly as NOAA could, that the weekend will be one of high overcast.

I had tried to find a way to describe the joy of waking up to crisp starlight before going to work.  My front door faces Orion in the mornings, his belt providing the landmark to see other constellations nearby.  Ever since the municipally replaced the street lamps with downward facing LEDs and less light pollution, you can see the Milky Way from my urban front porch.  It is just magical.

Well… unless there is a forecast for aurora.  Then it’s high overcast.

Posted on by Kevin · 1 Comment

A better Constitution, again.

In 1998, the State of Alaska made a horrible mistake.  We adapted into our State Constitution an amendment that restricted the rights of others.  Nothing else in the document singles out a group of people for inferior treatment.  Everything else makes it quite clear that Alaskans should be treated as equals.

Today, the courts have stuck down that injustice we enshrined.

Today is a very good day.

Posted on by Kevin · 1 Comment

The art of memorial.

My father is home from a recent trip Back East.  He’s posted pictures of the New York area, and his posts are worth looking at.  There is one series in particular that I keep going back to. the Irish Hunger Memorial, in Battery Park, NYC.  A cottage in Ireland immigrated to the new world, brought over stone by stone.  There were stones from every county in Ireland incorporated into this memorial, topped by the plants that would inhabit a farm gone fallow during the famine.

One of the pictures has the sky in the background, with nothing to suggest it is in the middle of a town, let alone The City.  Like most good art, the piece takes you out of time and place.  Once you crest that hill, you see the Statue of Liberty lifting her lamp beside the Golden Door of Ellis Island.  The ancient lands and storied pomp of Europe left behind… except that in this case, you are standing on some of that very land, itself a recent immigrant from when the memorial was built in 2002.

Posted on by Kevin

More darkness, more light.

The stars were out as I went to work this morning.  The moon was bright and low on the horizon, throwing enough light to read by.

The moon itself provides no light.  It has about the same reflectivity as concrete.  Sunlight travels 92 million miles, bounces off a rough concrete surface, and still provides me with light enough to read 240 thousand miles away.

Posted on by Kevin · 2 Comments

Darkness and Light

We are coming into the dark part of the year.  The equinox behind us, there is more hours of darkness than hours of light, but light still reigns.  There is no measure for darkness.  We measure darkness by what is not there.  On dark nights, we navigate by the light that remains.  THAT light is constant; sometimes hidden by the stars, but still there.

A modern 747 still has a place in the cockpit to enable the use of a sextant.  It’s now called a “smoke evacuation port,” and the hardware for the sextant is no longer present, but the age of jet still relied on light out of darkness to find the way.  Over an unchanging ocean, it was the best way to find the way.

There is very little point to this rambling.  Mostly I am announcing that my webpage is up and running again, and checking to make sure that everything posts as it should.

Posted on by Kevin · 2 Comments

A carbon tax is coming.

From a cynical point of view, political change comes about when a new group of people find a way to change the rules in such a way that they gain an advantage over previous champions.  The classic example is when once standard practice is deemed to be corruption, and the previous champions are thrown in jail, leaving space for the reformers.  Without calling the previous champions corrupt, I think we are about to see this happen in a big way to big energy.

Renewable energy has come a long way, but until recently, its been a side-show to carbon or nuclear, the fuels of choice for serious work. The idea of a carbon-tax has been (with the exception of the Northeast) somewhat anathema to US politics, and we seem unwilling to underwrite long-term tax incentives for carbon replacement. Too many jobs, too much of our economy is tied into carbon based fuels for a serious change in the value of carbon to take place. I think that is about to change.

Green Car Congress has an article that talks about the potential for a new wind farm in Wyoming to fuel Los Angeles. This proposed wind farm is massive. At 2,100 megawatts, it would be more than 3 times the size of the proposed Susitna-Watana dam. From there, the power would be sent to Utah, where a compressed air battery would stabilize the wind resource, and make it available for peak demand in California.

This is where I see the game start to change. The scope of the project directly affects jobs in 3 states. A fourth state, Texas, is the home to Dresser-Rand, manufactures the equipment for the compressed air batteries, and the turbines will be produced by GE, (Connecticut), meaning this project touches 10% of the Senate districts in the nation. While I am not going to argue that Senators from Texas or Wyoming will become hostile to oil, I do think that such large projects will insure that they become friendlier to the advantages of wind energy (although it must be said that Texas generates more power from wind than the next two states combined).

While fracking still provides a carbon-based fuel, natural gas releases less carbon per kWh than more traditional fuel sources. As more natural gas is used, the overall cost to industry of a carbon tax will decrease.

I predict that between this decrease in overall relative cost of the carbon tax, along with environmental advocates pushing for a carbon tax, will create an opportunity for a new group of people to change the rules to gain an advantage over their predecessors.

A carbon tax would lead the way for energy contractors and developers to profit off of rebuilding our generation infrastructure from the ground up. I suspect this will happen sooner rather than later.

Posted on by Kevin · 1 Comment

Words.

So, we’re going to war again. Congress is full of people who claim concern over which countries will have “boots on the ground.” It’s an interesting linguistic trick. I suppose it’s safer to talk about the equipment we send to war than it is the people.

 The Goat Rope points out that human civilizations are evolving towards less war, not more. Perhaps the next step, especially as war becomes more mechanized, is for us to use humanizing language in the lead up to war.

Solders. Humans. Whose people will be on the ground? Who, solider or civilian, will bear the consequences of our political discussion? I don’t really care about boots.

Posted on by Kevin · 1 Comment

One Warm Line!

NPR had an excellent interview about finding one of the Franklin ships,  and not just excellent because Stan Rogers sang the coda.

This find really makes me redicioulously happy. The search for the Northwest Passage played such a large part of the white settlement of my home.  The logbooks from the Cook expedition (for which Cook Inlet is named), once distributed, shoed the Americans how much the Chinese would pay for furs, doing more than any other book to bring sailing vessels to the North Pacific.  And the Franklin expedition itself?  One of the more complete accounts we have of the early US history of my home town is Lady Franklin Visits Sitka, 1870, an account by Sophia Cracroft of her and her aunt (Lady Jane Franklin) looking for evidence of what happened to the Franklin expedition.

According to one of the many, many articles I have read on this, the British Navy gave the ships to the Canadians about 10 years ago, so there is clear title to the find, and should be very little red tape involved. The ship is fairly well preserved, and it us strongly suspected that much of what was left inside should have remained intact.

Just imagine… just imagine if there were a copy of the logs somehow sealed against the water for 160 years.  I don’t honestly suspect such a treasure, but just imagine if it were there…

Wherever the Canadians end up putting the presumptive museum will very quickly end up on my list of places to visit.

Posted on by Kevin · 1 Comment

7 years.

Today is 7 years that my beloved and I have been married.  They have been quite simply the best years of my life… to date.  I am a very lucky man.

Among other things, she tends the garden that is me.  Not just the flowers that I show the world, but the weeds that I try to hide.  The ugly and unruly, the parts that grow out of control, she helps me find a place and use for it all.

Happy anniversary Shannon.  I love you beyond words.

Posted on by Kevin

On carbon

I underwent surgery yesterday.  All went well, but the anesthesia knocked me on my ass.  Today was a day of recovering, with a mind that was ready to work, and a body that was completely unwilling.  So, it was off to the internet to solve the world’s problems.

In 2005, surface ozone damaged enough of India’s crops to feed 94 million people. What makes this study interesting is that it provides an economic value to the damage done by pollution now ($1.29 Billion for India in in 2005), which is politically easier to deal with than looking to the future.  This study points to a political demographic that is directly harmed by climate change, and gives a specific number to that harm.

That number is only about 0.002% of the GDP of India,* so it’s unreasonable to expect wholesale change based on this report, but a specific price-tag does make policy easier to develop.  Simply put, can India develop regulations that will clean up the air for $1,29 Billion a year or less.?

I am optimistic that the answer is yes. I am also optimistic that the answer is not necessarily telling people what they can not have,  but by improving what they do have.

There is only so far we can go with increasing the fuel efficiency of cars and power plants.  Eventually, in a democracy, leaders will reach a point when they are too far ahead of the people we are leading.  Fortunately, we are developing architectural elements that can improve the air we breathe.

At the Milan Expo in 2015, a canopy over the food court is set to (hopefully) produce as much oxygen as 4 hectares of trees, presumably sequestering carbon in the process.  Meanwhile, microalge street lamps could, in theory, pull 100 tons of carbon a year out of the environment.  Again, not much individually, but it is something that can be done by government in the process of building and rebuilding civic structures, especially if we can set a price at not doing so (in India, say $1.25 Billion a year).

 

 

*In 2005, the GDP of India was $834.2 Billion, so around 0.002% of the total economy,

Posted on by Kevin

A new season.

Nature generally acts on its own schedule.  Season follows season, each in its own time.  That’s why it is so completely startling when the timing so closely follows what “should” happen.  Yesterday was Labor Day, the traditional “end” to summer.  This morning, there were fallen leaves on the ground.

Alaskan summers are short, and we tend to start counting down the days from the very beginning of summer.  It’s the only place in the world I have lived where the radio station gives a daily countdown of the number of minutes of daylight gained or lost.   Even so, we are seldom ready when summer gives way as the seasons turn.

As a consolation prize, there is an absolutely undeniable beauty to fall.  While spring comes with shades of green unimaginable at other times of the year, fall brings in the reds and burgundies.  It’s a fractal of color, where the trees on a distant mountain top mirror the lichen on the nearby rock.  A certain symmetry of repeating patterns, just as season follows season.   The death part of rebirth.  Beautiful, but still the coming darkness.  An excellent time to remember the writings of Gordon Bok.

It’s a pity we don’t know what the little flowers know;
they can’t face the cold November, they can’t take the wind and snow.
They put their glories all behind them, bow their heads and let it go
but you know that they’ll be shining in the morning.

Ah, my Joanie don’t you know that the stars are swinging slow,
the seas are rolling easy as they did so long ago.
If I had a thing to give you, I would tell you one more time
that the world is always turning towards the morning.

Take heart and take care.

 

Cross-posted to Livejournal and kevin.mcclear.net

Posted on by Kevin

The return of the Debtors’ Prison

Sociologists have long talked about the cost of being poor. It’s counter-intuitive on the surface, but it’s as easy to see as the cost of doing laundry in your own machine vs. the cost of going to a Laundromat, both in time and money. If you are well off enough to own a car, it dramatically improves your ability to find work to be well off, and God help you if you get caught in the payday loan trap. When private citizens and corporations make money by providing capitol to those who do not own their own, that’s capitalism. Whether it is right or wrong, it is the system we work under. When it is the government that is preying on the poor, it is just wrong.

The New York Times has an excellent article that details how, in the name of lower taxes, we are giving private corporations license to monitor criminals on probation. Since these corporations don’t charge tax-payers, they do so by charging people out on parole. Constitutionally mandated services that used to be free, now come with a charge. The cost of monitoring parolees, once borne by the State, have been shifted by politicians to a group of people who, conveniently, cannot vote.

It’s not just the convicted who are falling victim to this system. In some jurisdictions, we are charging presumably innocent people for the right to a jury trial. In others, a chronically underfunded public defender system is leaving those who cannot afford private counsel without their constitutionally “guaranteed” right to council, all in the name of saving the country money.

Our national debt to asset ratio is around 7.5%. We are not in the sort of dire financial straits that can forgive forgoing our basic civil liberties.

 

A tip of the hat to The Goat Rope for the NYT article that got me thinking.

Posted on by Kevin · 1 Comment

A new beginning.

Thank you for stopping by.  I know it is an indulgence to drop off of Facebook and expect hope that some of you will follow me, but it is an indulgence I need to take.  I found myself spending way too much time online hitting refresh, or offline wanting to hit refresh, and that’s not who I want to be.  I have an RSS feed, which you are welcome to utilize as I hope this blog is updated frequently, but I don’t expect it to be updated regularly.  In theory, you should be able to comment using your Facebook login if you wish (or WordPress, Twitter and G+)

I have downloaded some 2,100 posts onto this blog between Facebook and Livejournal, which gives me an accidental journal going back to 2001.  Over the next few months, I look forward to going through the backlog, and making the better thoughts and observations pubic, but since a large part of this exercise is to have me spend less time on the computer, we’ll see how that goes.

Thank you all.

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but I have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but I have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body to be abused so that I can boast, but I have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious, boastful, arrogant, or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

                              –1 Corinthians 13:1-7

Posted on by Kevin · 1 Comment

Things a camera can’t see.

There are magic things my camera cannot get.  This morning, the sun was behind the mountains, lighting the higher clouds.  Wisps of fire were floating over a slate blue/grey morning.  Then, one of the clouds erupted in a rainbow of color.  Purple, blue green and red joined the strata of orange.

A very good morning to you all.

Posted on by Kevin

Fixating on fixing the debt

We are told that Government should be more like business.

The average total debt to equity ratio for the S&P 500 is around 0.88. Our national debt to equity ratio is around 0.075.

By rational business standards, if we don’t take on a lot more debt (at 3% interest) to invest in the future, we are not providing a good return for our shareholders.

No good business would let it’s basic infrastructure crumble while worrying about a 0.075 debt to equity ratio. No informed shareholder would stand for it.

Posted on by Kevin

Summertime

We are clever people, we Alaskans. We manage to inject fatalism into even the most glorious of summer days.

I was walking the dogs past a quintessential Alaskan lake. You know the one, shared by people fishing skiffs, paddling kayaks, swimming and landing seaplanes. As I walked around the lake I was admiring the fireweed, some of it up to my shoulder (*gulp*) and I found myself unconsciously counting the number of flowers yet to bloom.

You see, we have this… superstition. You can tell the severalty of the coming winter by the hight of the fireweed, and the winter will start 6 weeks after all of the buds bloom. It’s kind of like a very weird courting candle; once the fireweed blows out, the date is over.

Here’s the thing… we also count the start of summer with the arrival of the fireweed. We have literally created a mythos where the very beginning of summer heralds its end. How cleverly fatalistic is that?

Posted on by Kevin

Alaska…

Last fall, I made a comment about Anchorage being defined by hip-hop in the snow. Walking my dog through Eagle River, the defining soundtrack is seaplanes and bagpipes.

I love Alaska.

Posted on by Kevin

Light on a modern shrine

My house is like Newgrange in inverse. As we approach summer solstice, the light breaking over the mountains in the farthest north extent of the Alaskan summer sunrise floods through the thin passage made by my kitchen window and refrigerator and shines into my living room, bathing the television in a warm glow.

The whole effect is rather less mystical than one might imagine.

Posted on by Kevin

More on privilege.

As a response to George Will’s column, the hashtag #survivorprivilege was born. It is sobering reading. A trigger warning for sexual abuse survivors, a chance for understanding for the rest of us.

You don’t need a Twitter account to read it. Go to Twitter, and put #survivorprivilege in the search window.

Posted on by Kevin

Privilege

I know a thing or two about privilege. I was born white, male and comfortably middle class with a United States passport. All of these things together puts me well within the 1% by any worldwide standard. I am quite used to being privileged, what I am not used to is seeing privilege.

My privilege surrounds me like a castle. I cannot leave the castle, and, I cannot look back upon it. I cannot see it as others can. I imagine what it looks like, but everything is distorted when I look down from the walls.

There are people on the outside. People I love dearly. They can’t come in unless I dismantle the walls, and I can’t dismantle something I can’t understand. So, it’s my responsibility to listen and hear what is said about my castle.

I have been a part of several online discussions about sexism and misogamy since last Friday. Generally it breaks down to women saying “this thing is a thing,” and men saying “it can’t be THAT big of a thing.” It’s the difference between looking up the outside of a wall, and looking down the same wall. The wall looks a lot smaller from the top. From the top, it really does not look like that big a thing.

#yesallwomen and the Everyday Sexism Project gives us the opportunity to look at that castle in a safe environment. You don’t need to respond, just go over there and read. Don’t worry about defending yourself (or us), you don’t need to share your thoughts or have them evaluated, just read the experiences of others.

Posted on by Kevin

Colors

The morning and evening daylight is so weird, with all of the forest fires. Old habits die hard. I got out my gel color swatch book to try and determine what color it would take to replicate this on stage. You know, if I am ever lighting a show that needs some really strange natural light.

I think, before I move from this house, I need to add a dummy 50 amp breaker to the panel and label it “Flux Capacitor.” That should give the next homeowner something to think about.

Posted on by Kevin

To the least of them…

Nobody went into that Sunday expecting miracles. The apostles stayed home while Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and perhaps others went to the tomb with spices. They had intended to provide one last act of kindness and respect to a dead teacher who could not possibly return the favor.

They were the first to witness the miracle. Angles flat out told them about the miracle, but they still could not see it until The Miracle spoke their names. “Mary,” Jesus said, and in that moment, she knew what angles themselves had been unable to convey.

I don’t think we’re that different today. We are surrounded by miracles that we are unable to see, even when they are described to us. Yet, when one of those miracles speaks to us directly, we learn something as if we have known it all our lives.

Happy Easter.