Shining Rock

C-double-you and I took a hike along the Art Loeb trail into the Shining rock wilderness. This trail runs across an entire spine of a mountain ridge, which is not unlike many ridges in the area, but for one thing, most of it burned 50 years ago and the re-growth in the area is not nearly as thick as all the surrounding hills so you have spectacular views; that and its really high up.


We hiked in Sunday afternoon as most folks were leaving. He and I talked and talked about outdoorsness. He is from the perspective that can be summarized by Ray Jardine's The Ray Way, which is a method of making and packing gear that is all about multi-use and efficiency so you can get to the middle of nowhere. I on the other hand, have subscribed to the idea that REI is
a store of the gods and have been happy to pay for their expertise so I can get to more important things like accounting. Anyhow we picked a great place to camp in a grove of hemlocks on the Southeast side of the hills to avoid prevailing winds; it was also only a hundred feet from a spring where we filled our water bottles. He pitched his tarp, and I my tent, and then we went back up to the ridgetop to cook dinner under the sunset.


The night was spent around the fire with us sharing stories of everything, as campfires in the middle of nowhere have a way to draw out the depths. I told the story of how I had proposed to my ex-wife before even holding her hand; and he spoke of things that are held in secrecy under the Code of the Campfire.
He taught me to tie a couple of knots and I have found that once I have the motions down, its easier to do without looking and to not bother my mind with seeing, but to trust my fingers. The training is paying off. After sipping the fine fine aged scotch C-double-you brought along (even his liquor bottle is wrapped with duct tape, so he doesn't have to carry a whole roll of the stuff) we put the fire out and were both relieved to find that neither of us stood by the tradition of peeing a fire out because, well, it stinks, but more importantly, isn't how you show respect to something that can disintegrate you down to molars.
I sleep fitfully because my sleepmat, the inflatable kind, has blown a seam and doesn't inflate. This has not bothered me for months as i've slept on hardwood floors on it from Florida to NYC, but when the ground underneath you is, literally, frozen, that missing layer of insulation is found to be crucial. But its hard to complain about the ice on the bottom of your tent when you wake into the sun rising off the eastern ridge.

We decided to shoot for Shining Rock, a HUGE quartz deposit a few mountaintops from where we slept. In the spirit of our adventure we decided to forgo the trail and bushwhack our way through the network of blueberry bushes. After half an hour of this we found a bunch of bushes the birds had not picked clean, which revived us to continue off in the wrong direction. This took us into the most magnificent hemlock clearing I have ever crawled through briars into. It was clearing like this after clearing like this interspersed with rhododendron thickets. We were amazed by the space so much that we were devising a way to mark off boundaries for a paintball or capture the flag game on the mountain top. But then we realized we were off track and doubled back by walking through thousands of blueberry bushes to camp and took the trail.
There C-double-you split off from me to climb the quartz boulders up to the Shining Rock. Even though these boulders that started off the size of me and grew to the size of cars and beyond up the hill were strewn about with time's degradation of the rock, I had enough bushwhacking so I took the trail all the way up. It was immense and amazing and it filled my soul with the magnificence of this evolving creation of a world. Here's a photo from the top of Shining Rock

As we packed up camp and moved towards a different spot for the second night we noticed it had not gotten any warmer even with the sun overhead, big clouds were rolling in, and the water in our water bottles was freezing, all this plus the wind was so hard it moved me around on the top of the ridges (even with my heavy backpack on) led us to decide that it would be better to just make a fire and hang out until we felt like driving home. This proved to be a wise decision as it started snowing by the time we got to the car. So we put on another layer and started gathering firewood before it got completely dark. Around this fire we shared the majority of our foodstuffs remaining, made hot cocoa -put cinnamon cereal in it because things you would not normally eat at home can taste amazing in the woods, and talked more about the intricacies of fire-shaping. Then it got really cold. So we jumped in the car and I stuck on Tom Wait's Heart of Saturday Night, which fused the mood into the night as we wound around the Blue Ridge parkway for what might be the last time of the season as icicles were already formed on the rock outcroppings which, C-double-you explained, would continue growing until they reached the ground then they would cross the road, forcing the authorities in charge of such things to swing the gate closed on this road for the season. But, he continued, rock climbing clubs, would hike the miles in with all their gear and climb the ice for the two or three weeks it was frozen enough. And people look at me like I'm crazy.
When Wait's crooning ended I offered C-double-you to pick from my collection and without my prompting he picked the best album ever, Ambient.

Arriving home we unpacked the car and let the cat in. Then I made a foot bath in lieu of a shower, because the hiking boots I bought in Colorado are still not broken in enough. I set it up in the kitchen next to the stove so I could reach the beer in the fridge as well as the kettle boiling water. I proceeded to put on the ipod and sit in that chair for over an hour munching Kettle Chips and reading about Hermes Trismegistus.
(PS I don't know how to keep the pics from loading HUGE when you click on them, if anyone does, please let me know)

Toned down for mortal consumption

I just can't do it. The thoughts come so fast that I have been guzzling beer in an attempt to slow things down, but the practiced tolerance of drinking for 2008 (for honest, I have averaged, AVERAGED, 7 alcoholic drinks per day - I can drink two bottles of wine and then wake up and do it again the next day, hangovers are non-existant and somehow I can still eat one full meal throughout the day, keeping my weight at the sultry 125lbs.) has left my attempts flat on the brain lag and too expensive to continue without more income.

So the last couple of days, playing The Financier have left me face to face with the fear that i have wasted the last 8 years of my life trying to learn the game that rules the world; and now that I have no upward option but to get back into finance and accounting and making money from numbers; I can see the future: it involves me drooling in a straight jacket. Have you seen the movie Quill? All I want is ink and a pen. All I have is a calculator and a new haircut.

The desire of my soul is to dive into psychology. The bent of my mind is to think of philosophy. But the skill of my training is the opposite of these.

I thought I could reconcile all opposites in myself by playing along with them but have found I am only human, though I don't seem to have a human mind, for it dreams of things that are not in this world. How can I have ideas that are not compatible with the present situation of the world? Do the dreams that drive me mad tumble into the psychic compost for more determined minds to grow from? Is my role that of the pioneer and then to be forgotten? What do I care if it is? I won't be making it out of here alive, be it in a coffin or legends, its death all the way down.

I don't want to reproduce because I could never give possibility to these sorts of pains in the heart and head. I have seen that most people admire my ability to think, but can I tell you what a curse it is? This seeing the extremes of all these worlds that make up our variance; this obsession to explain the feelings that posess this damned body of mine. And the knowledge that there are things worth this pain and rewards worth the troubles, but from this troubled mindstate, I can easily discard them to make room for more of the sharpest feelings that I know, those of the extremest of extremes. Sometimes a loving hug draws me, but in truth its no more interesting to me (although to my biology is another story entirely) than a funny tv show...so says the downside.

How i've tried to speak with professional mind-explainers and verify that I am human, but to my chagrin i know more about the mind than those who have received papers saying they know more about the mind. Its not like I am a genius because I don't know how to apply all these marvelous thoughts I live for, but there is undoubtedly some intelligence that is beyond the normal, or at least, habitual, human comprehension - leaving me to rot under the glory of my imaginings.

(I will likely regret posting this later, but its not stopping me...)

If I am anywhere near Atlanta on The Day of the Dead

This is where I will go...

One of the Ringmistresses, and my dear friend, Sara Ashes, best I can tell, came (back?) from the dead some years ago to tell the rest of us humans why not to fear the Deep Sleep. And by day she works to abolish the death penalty. Go figure.

The Financier

I have been working on my metamorphosis into The Financier, and in doing so I have been getting to see my contrarian nature shining through. In the land of the freaky side of freedom, my bandannas and slipshod have been sinking - as if being beckoned back underconscious after wandering past their necessary bounds. My mind is bubbling like a wet mogwai and out of the muck is arising the keen and dapper logician. The change in outward attitude of people towards me is affirming of my intents; dressed as this


receives a
very different
reaction than this








where people (keep in mind this is societally and culturally dependent) are more apt to engage on a particular level of manners to you, depending on their perceived class relation to yours. For instance, in the bandanna, etc. the Nascar fan at the mall doesn't look at me twice and expects me to step out of his way, which I must as he is larger and will probably hurt me with impact. But in the professional get-up he doesn't look me in the eye once and is nudging against his girlfriend to leave me the slight room I need to pass.


But I have known this, and tried to use it to my advantage in all circumstances (that I care a whit about). Its been an age old dilemma of mine having to gauge whether going covert and using disguises to accomplish a mission (like getting into a Masters in Finance program with an undergrad degree in Invironment) is the more likely to succeed,











Or if the situation calls for the full-frontal assault.














Either way I can oblige.

As for the recent past, I had no interest in keeping score. I had had enough of the numbers business and the way they often try to define value. But now I am feeling a bit more competitive, ready to jump back into the fray. And what a fray the economy is! I wonder if it isn't that giving me the most interest, to see something from the inside when it is not working, as opposed to bandwagoning to the top of the Dow with the rest of the would be capitoligarchs.

Dragon

After my roommate got back from a primitive skills gathering in the N. GA mountains, he was trying to start a bow and spindle fire in the living room to show us how to do such a thing. We became convinced after the spindle started smoking and moved onto headstands. Each of the four of us had a particular style of head and hand stand that we showed off to the group. I have not been in a group that body-aware before and it led to The Dragon:





I've never heard of AcroYoga, but thoroughly enjoyed it.
(i conjecture that the top and the front person could wear Mindfolds, but the foundational person needs too much balance)

These are Financial Times

Yes, a single link post. But you just can't get this kind of perspective inside the US. The last line drove me to post this.

Let us pay homage to Rene Magritte

Rene Magritte is my favorite painter. He is the analogist of the canvas.
(if you open the first link in a new tab or page it may be easier to just use the sideways arrows above the paintings than these links, I can't decide so here's both)

Clairvoyance--egg is to bird as i am to self portrait

Not To Be Reproduced--mirror is to face as perspective is to vision

The Listening Room--size is to memory as apple is to room

Mysteries of the Horizon--moon is to individual as soul is to man

My personal favorite, Homesickness where views are to nature as black is to wings

and of course, The Treachery of Images where painting is to understanding as word is to mind.

Forestry

We reached the ridgeline after hiking up the side of the Linville Gorge east of Asheville. We had been hiking a few hundred yards to the next border of burned forest for our guide, a Forest Reseracher, to take some measurements and program the coordinates into his GPS system for later data crunching. The fires here are special because one section burned one year. Then part of it and part of a second section were burned the next year. So you have three different sections: 1) burned the first time 2) burned the second time 3) burned the first and second time...setting up a great control group for a data-based inferential research to be done on forest regeneration timelines.

I was in charge of the 6-inch ruler and photographing duff, which is the layer of needles and bark scraps that stack up around trees. Here is a good illustration of how the duff burns away in a fire:




My own research consisted of gaining purchase on the unleveled logs full of branches broken off into spear points.
 


As well as the time lag of balance determination among carbonized tree-remains.
 


And of course trying to line my's elf between both a pair of foreground burned tree-remains as well as centering among the backdrop's pair of charred remains flanked by a pair of living trees.


All in all a fascinating journey that we ended with setting up camp on the top of the ridge. We built a heck of a campfire which ended with Freeflow making fire faeries.
While I urged him on.

The next day we closed up camp after being rained on overnight. This had us hankering for more than fruit and cold tea. So we went to Famous Louise's and ate in Avery County.

The view from the top