short notes:
will brady's ruminations
drought
Alright, we are not completely without water. The picture to the left attests to the fact that we have some water at the bottom of the well. But we can't drink it. The shallow layer of water att he bottom aloowing for my reflection lets me know just exactly where the water table rests.
This has driven Bruce to absolute distraction. The other day he went on about getting somebody out here to drill down some 150 feet [or more] so we can have a steady supply, only this just isn't gonna happen overnight.
One night, we got bold, and ran some 250 feet of garden hose from another neighbor's well head [again, another drilled well] and ran water into our pached dried out aquifer from the confines of the well. We filled up the well by a third [over 10 feet deep]. The effort took awhile, starting from around 9 pm and going until a little after midnight, but within 6 hours, when I opened up the cover, the water level was almost back down to where we'd started from.
So we fill up the ash hod with a couple of gallons of precious H2O, obtained from a friendly neighbor's much deeper well, just to flush the crapper once a day. We've gone back to dropping off the laundry on the way to work. We shower at the gym in Middletown [only 20 miles away] and compete with who knows how many anonymous others ransacking the bottled water shelves at the supermarket. Actually, [
truth in packaging time here] I've only done this once. After that, we stock up with water from work [chlorinated! Gaack! awful tasting!] and other spots.
We're making do.
It's supposed to rain this weekend. The
idiota bitch about it ruining their weekend plans for late season sunburns and garden parties. But I look forward to the rain. Let's just pray it comes sooner rather than later.
borders
There is a falsity to borders that the contingent rabidly in favor of them forever denies. Borders hinder free trade and fair trade [
two different things, but I'm not getting into that right now]. Borders help maintain the dramatic economic disparities that presently exist not only in the USA but the entire world. Borders help sustain and continue race hatred and bigotry. Borders inhibit the planet's spiritual growth.
Borders ought to be weakend and, eventually, abolished.
Mind you, I recognize this isn't going to happen overnight, or even practically speaking, in the next decade. But it has to happen, and it shall. So we might as well get accustomed to the idea of it.
The weblog
Delete the Borders recognizes this. They recognize and assert that for some ~ the wealthy and those of material privilege, living in a borderless society and culture is already real. "
-Borders only exist for the poor. For foreign elites it is relatively easy to migrate to the US. For poor people the country is off limits.
"It is for the rest of us to pull the metaphorical burlap sack from off our eyes, and make borderlessness work for all, not just for the high rollers to enjoy the benefits for a border free world.
THANKS TO: Angry White Kid for bringing this site's existence to my attention.
conceptual art / earthworks
The premise of controlling the elements is inherent in the Salmon River
Conceptual Art Project. This, together with the design team's fascination with the confluence of intriguing
facets of ancient geologic history made the Salmon River site for the project particularly appealing. When completed later this year, components of the project will, it is said, "
...allow for the exploration of Nature's destructive yet cleansing forces upon the human experience."
Ice floe visionary Andrew M. Tuthill has been working with transitory materials such as ice at least since 1992. His projects combine natural materials with man-made structures to create a "
paleoecopsychodynamic"
between humans and the forces of nature.
"
While we enter into this endeavor without any expectations, we envision that people coming to the site can reflect upon the awesome power of nature and its inexorable wear upon human-created barriers"
Unlike
Robert Smithson's Floating Island or Christo's
Gates, this project is intended to rmain
in situ for a number of years. When last discussed, Tuthill was anticipating constructing a series of huge monoliths and "islands" of boulders mid-river approximately 200 feet east of the Salmon River Dam.
Once completed high-pass filtering of non-climatic influences which represent variation in deposition due to change from ice-proximal to ice-distal environment of a glacial lake.
This then, metaphorically speaking, would serve as a symbolic representation of the neck of water that broke out through a thick schist ridge freeing the melted waters of a pliestocene glacial lake that once sat on this very location. The eroded "neck" is on the ridge above the Salmon River Dam.
More to come as this project evolves.