made it through the holidays with this strange division. time of cheer should be clearly labeled as the entire year, not bottled up into one week of panic during the darkest time of the year. celebrated chanukah for the first time, enjoyed the meaning behind it, light as many candles as you can and bring the family together to make it through the darkness. good story too. Celebrated the soltice in my own way, feeling more inward than anything else, trying to find what it is within me that keeps me burning year round. missed christmas, or should I say sat in bed and read about real anarchy and enjoyed the hum of my little space heater that costs seven cents an hour to run (It alternates on and off though, and its actually 10.5 cents because we switched to wind power).
beeen enjoying my break from regimented education and slowly adapting to new complexities and the personal possibility of freedom from any sort of schedule. whatever that means. you sure do have to give up a lot to be free. funny. but I'm lining up to graduate and it looks like things might go my way. I'm not sure what I'm planning, keeping in mind that I still shun plans, as they set us up for expectations, which breed fear, and, well, you can see where that gets us. But I do have many things that I would like to do, so, I'll no doubt be busy when I graduate.
I hung out with our buddy coy yesterday and helped him get his bus packed for the road. its a converted county bus from the sixties that he has built a kitchen, a wood stove, a shower, a peat toilet, a queen size sleeping platform and four twin platforms, and a recording studio into. Our project yesterday was sawing down the cedar from 16' to 8' lengths so they could fit into his bus for the trip. he'll be building the deck on the top with that wood. plan is to go live in california, where he installs solar panels in wineries, huge multi-million dollar jobs that leech off the solar industry's economics; banks give low interest rate loans to financially successful wineries, which turn around and get government grants and rebates for installing renewable energy, then they turn around and sell the excess power during the day back to the grid for high, and at night, they buy power from the grid for low, giving them the means of producing their own power and actually standing to make some change off it too. Coy installs the huge systems into the wineries and gripes about the terrible innefficancies that the beraucracy enables.
After a good season of panel installation all around the Napa valley, its summer and we head to burning man in the bus. we're working on at least one dome here in eugene, plus a potential inflateable on wheels that can move us around the playa at night. our camp will meet up with the portland crew, who are also working on a dome, and then we will have a big happy campe iwth a bus, two domes and many smiling faces. we're thinking about offering a breakfast service, something like donuts and coffee, and projecting cartoons, old movies, or bman community animations onto a screen for "saturday morning cartoons".
The roman new year is approaching. celebrate it if you want, I probably will be. but I think I prefer to come in and go out of a year during the brightest, warmest part, with the hot sun on my back and the little blackfoot running over my feet. I choose my own new year and I put it in the middle if the summer because I don't care what time you think it is. But the 1st of january is bound to hold good friends, so you probably won't find me sitting at home too long.
western thought
