Archive for May, 2008

This is a very well done video.

Amazing video about Abu Dhabi’s urban planning decisions

This is a thought provoking article about our food and how it is made. It discusses the dairy industry..

It does not require a Harper’s magazine subscription to read. Enjoy. Dex and I have had a very busy few weeks but we plan to feature more original art, news and ideas soon. This blog is just for fun anyways.

Cameron

It’s been almost 6 weeks since the accident, and my wife is still on high alert. She is still having lots of nightmares, and what I can only describe as flashbacks. Every interaction on the road leaps out at her like a high definition instant replay, in a thousand variations. She isn’t driving yet, and is seeing a therapist, who seems sincere. The therapist has her sitting behind the wheel of a safely parked vehicle, and doing breathing exercises, and that seems to help a bit, but it is a slow process. How can I describe to you what she is going through? I barely understand it myself. Her reptile brain has taken over, and she is in a constant state of agitation; the fight or flight reflex that for most comes only in small doses when really needed. For her it has come to stay and this heightened sense of alert magnifies her pain and keeps her in a shadowy half life that I am seemingly powerless to rescue her from. So as you can imagine I am constantly looking for ways to help her through this and get her “back on the horse” as they say.

To that end I discovered and recommended a kind of distraction that allows her to experience horrific car crashes in a safe and dare I say it? — “fun” setting. I turned her on to Grand Theft Auto 4. At first she was mortified by the violence of the car crashes in game, but over the course of a few hours she has definitely begin to enjoy it. I see a smile creep across her face that resembles my wife before the accident. She is learning to enjoy the interaction of twisted metal in first person, from the relative safety of the couch. I am thinking I may be on to something here.

It is probably to early to give a definite answer as we just started playing last night. She slept well though, and seemed to ride well today as we ran around town on several “real-life” errands. She is not behind the wheel herself yet, but the little changes are a welcome difference. She is still tense, to be sure. Tonight she leaned over to hug our daughter and turned her neck in an odd way that caused her to lock up — head and shoulders — for 20 – 30 minutes until we could massage the spasm out. I am certain that her pain was both real and distressing, but it seemed to pass quickly compared to previous days.

“One can only hope, and remain open to new ideas…” has become my only motto.

Here we stand

At the center of a circle

where the weak

Are sheltered in the eye of a storm

And the sins of our previous selves

Whip around

and the death of our future

selves is born

And the voices of the billions cry out for justice

And the blood of the small rains down from above

And the screams of the wicked are shrill for the vengeance

And the blame is passed down from one to another

That life is a circle

Is a foregone conclusion

That the circle is endless

Is an obvious illusion

That the cycle of violence which began when Cain

Killed his brother with a rock

Is the path we’ve made

Here we stand

At the center of a circle where the

voices of the meek

Are drowned out by the roar

And the cries of the dead and the dying rise up

To damn us with their howling for

A love, reborn

At the foot of the mountains

Like the spine of a rotting hump backed whale

Jockeying for position

The air a riot of radio waves, horns honking and people shouting

We sip flavored coffee from 55 gallon drums in 4/4

These are the rituals that sustain the great beast as it rises from its slumber

It takes a long time to get the line moving, and even longer to stop

Today it shrieks and drops to all fours

Toothy forced smiles lit amber and ruby glow

Eyes shining ahead through impenetrable terrain

Deep in a Mayan sweat

I cut across Louisianna like the right hand of god

I was thirsty

Yet — there is a kind of beauty here I think

It reveals itself in the half waking state between past and present tension

white knuckles cracking on the wheel at the end of the world

And the beginning of the next one grins and raises a flag

Letting me pass on through the outer gates just as the great beast dips its massive head

And disappears beneath the waves of cream

Rolling in from somewhere beyond this horizon

George knelt down and extended his rough heavy hand to help me to my feet. I stood upright and breathed in deeply, letting the thin and icy air awaken my senses. Time seemed to slow to a stop and then tentatively move forward again at half pace. Beside me, George’s breath came in abrupt gasps, in through his nose, and out through narrow pursed lips. The sun was setting and it reflected in his goggles, a soft milky orange glow, slowly fading. This was the summit of Mt. Shasta, Washington state, and my best friend and I had climbed all the way to the top, because it was still there.

I threw my arms wide to catch the last of its light, and inside I was singing at the top of my lungs. “HEEEEELLLLLLOOOOoooooo!”

I was 39 years old when they came for us at last. I was surprised that I was as surprised as I was, to be completely honest. I had always half expected we weren’t the only ones in the neighborhood, but it was still a powerful jolt to the nervous system when they revealed themselves to us en masse. It wasn’t so much the “invasion fleet” if that’s what they called it. The mobile phone video of their appearance in our atmosphere had spread rapidly, and we were all in shock, but that was nothing compared to the moment their friends on the ground revealed themselves to us simultaneously, in every human language, over every radio and TV station we had. That’s when we all started to realize that this was more then just an invasion; it was a coup.

Now much has been made of their appearance in the time since the first wave revealed itself to the world 5 years ago. It was almost as if years of bad science fiction had conditioned us to expect bug eyed reptiles with hybrid bumble bee DNA, when what we got was almost exactly the same as us, only “better” somehow. Each a near perfect humanoid specimen, strong and tall, with shining blue eyes and golden hair. Their bright smiles both mesmerized and terrified me. I know I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

The thing is: their arrival signaled a lot of things to a lot of different people. On one hand you had the “Heavens Door”; a cargo cult that worshiped a piece of aluminum foil supposedly found at the wreckage of the crash at Roswell. They were mild mannered, and mostly harmless, which – in a saner universe – might have been a compliment, but in my world it served as more of an indictment. They tended to cluster together in loose communal groups of 10-20 people, and rarely had much contact with outsiders, beyond work. They were technos and coders, and preferred short to medium term contracts with very large corporations. Outsiders weren’t shunned really, but it wasn’t easy to get them to open up about anything – especially when it came to the esoteric beliefs of the inner door.

On the flip side you had the militias. The “Sons of Thunder” and the “Ghosts of the Dawns Early Light” were two of the most well known in the months and years following first contact. They were both splinter groups formed chiefly of ex-soldiers and mercs. Many were politically well connected and held security clearances. They were friendly with the “Lupus Group”; a highly organized private army during the Iraqi Occupation and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Terrodyne Corporation, which seemed to own just about everything else already.

The Sons of Thunder didn’t care for them, any more then I did, the Ghosts of Dawns Early Light were probably working for the bastards before most of us even knew what to call our new “friends”. The human population of the planet fell into a nod for several months. Most people were zombies. There was a lot of booze and a lot of dope used up in the first year. A lot of people stopped going to work. A lot of kids basically dropped out of school. You probably think there was anarchy in the streets, and maybe there was. If it was anarchy, it was the slow motion anarchy of the blockbuster car chase. People were going through some of the motions, but there seemed to be a lot of resistance between “us” and everything we thought we had to “do” to function as a member of society.

It wasn’t long before things started to change politically. They had to, you know?  Nothing was getting done any more, and everyone was doped to the rafters on Plexo and cheap Canadian Whiskey. It took 10 months for beer to jump ahead of bottled water and soda pop on the North American top 3 beverages list. Barnhaus never had such a year before or since, I’ll wager.