streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 2:51 pm on May 10, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Hardie Karges ( 276 ), history ( 42 ), Rome ( 2 ), Twitter   

  Tweeting and Finger-Snapping and the Laugh-Track to Life 

  I tried to pay the market vendor in Tweets for his veggies, but he’s not buying it. So I offered him FB ‘likes’, but still no sale. Whazzup with that? Don’t they know that social media is currency in every major developed country?

  Too bad the country folk tend to lag behind the city-dwellers. They’re probably skeptical after the Beat Generation’s finger-snapping applause failed to catch on. They won’t get fooled again…

  Did you know that finger-snapping applause originated with the Romans? You heard it here first. They stomped their feet, too. Toga-flapping worked, anything to make a show of approval. Early French opera and theaters hired clappers to form a ‘clap-track’ accompaniment of sorts.

  In Boulder in 1980, Gregory Corso lived in the apartment next door, drunk ranting raving and howling at the moon almost every night, but finger-snapping was long gone by then, though ‘digging it’ and ‘hipness’ still survive today.

  “Many “Beat Poet” fans of the period now suffer from severe arthritic inflammation of the thumb and middle finger”- Urban Dictionary. Now that I did not know. What will Tweeters suffer from in the remote future?

   

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  hardie karges 9:41 am on May 4, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: EVOLUTION ( 21 ), Hardie Karges ( 276 )   

  Ever noticed how so many Hollywood starlets have dimples? I guess that’s the ticket. In Thai they’re called ‘stolen smiles’. Meanwhile in the US ‘laugh lines’ are an insult to be corrected by ‘anti-aging formulas.’ If I smile a lot, will my progeny have dimples? Too bad. It’s a pleasant thought, but evolutionary heresy, the Lamarckian ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics,’ notwithstanding Darwin’s many shortcomings, not least of which is any positive adaptation traceable to random mutation. I guess the only acquired characteristic is money…
   
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  hardie karges 3:58 pm on April 27, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Hardie Karges ( 276 ), Tsarnaev ( 2 )   

  What kind of mother names their son Tamerlan? Why not something nice, like Attila, or Genghis? Oh right, that kind…

   
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  hardie karges 10:22 am on April 26, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Castaneda ( 6 ), Hardie Karges ( 276 ), huichol, shamanism   

  Castaneda, Modern Shamanism, and the Huicholes 

  

  Castaneda 1962

  “Shamans have unmasked self-importance and found that it is self-pity masquerading as something else”– Carlos Castaneda, ‘The Power of Silence’  

  I just finished reading my first Castaneda book in probably thirty years, ‘The Wheel of Time’–a collection of quotes from all the others–and find it surprisingly compelling.  I know it’s

  

  Huichol yarn art

  not real anthropology, much less real philosophy or even real shamanism… but still I find that it frequently resonates with me, just like it did long ago.  I read all of the first half of his ouevre way back when, dropping out sometime around the ‘Power of Silence’ or ‘The Art of Dreaming,’ can’t remember, but I’d never even heard of ‘Magical Passes’ or “The Active Side of Infinity’… until now.  I’d never heard of Amy Wallace or her expose’ of the Castaneda cult, either, nor would I care.  Where a guy parks his penis is none of my business, nor interest.  I do care care about enlightenment, though, and the possibilities for a better life on this earth in this dimension of biological reality.  (More …)

   
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  hardie karges 11:51 am on April 22, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Hardie Karges ( 276 )   

  A moment of silence, please… and now we need to ask ourselves WHY. Why do so many people around the world hate Americans? Yes, they do; maybe not as many as in the Bush years, but still… I doubt that Dzokhar & Tamerlan did this just to piss off their jerk uncle…

   
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  hardie karges 1:00 pm on April 21, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Hardie Karges ( 276 ), non-fiction   

  R.I.P. 3 victims of Boston bombing last week, others in aftermath; 14 victims of plant explosion in Texas; 30 dead in Mexican drug cartel violence; over 300 dead in Thailand’s New Year celebrations, only God knows how many in Syria; he ain’t tellin’…

   
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  hardie karges 1:07 pm on March 28, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: backpackers ( 2 ), flashpackers, Hardie Karges ( 276 ), hypertravel ( 12 ), sequestration   

  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Seques… Sequestra… Sequestering 

  Someone once said, “Politics loves a vacuum. It sucks.” I heartily and hardily agree. I swore I’d give up any interest in politics after Obama got elected, the triumph over racism and “the politics of stupid” (B. Jindal) more important than any specific details of policy. A law is only as good as the interpretation of it and the ability to enforce it anyway. The politics of the last four years have certainly brought out the worst of the US, but that’s not Obama’s fault. He’s done what’s needed, for the most part. It’s not his fault that half the country is racist. Blaming him for racism is like blaming doctors for AIDS. Republicans have no monopoly on that aspect of the human condition, though, and Americans are hardly the worst of the lot, anyway, and possibly the best, a country without any racial diversity hardly in a position to judge, and some European states otherwise the most liberal of the lot, suddenly quite intolerant when skin color is the issue.

  Misogyny and homophobia are other ‘hate’ issues and must be fought to the death, the suppression of females my only beef (no pork) with Islam, in fact, which otherwise stands head and shoulders with the best of the world’s religions, maybe even better in that it has aspects of them all and doesn’t insult scientific knowledge by reducing its figureheads to figureheads. Human images for worship are prohibited by Islamic law, and anthropomorphic images of an Islamic God do not exist. Maybe they help provide focus for prayer, but then people carry the premise to its logical conclusion that God must be a person, yeah right. Islamic fundamentalists are hideous, certainly, but then so are Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, also. And they all have the same God! Yes they do, Mr. Baptist, monotheistic Religions 101. (More …)

   
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  hardie karges 3:53 pm on March 11, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: backpackers ( 2 ), flashpckers, Hardie Karges ( 276 ), hypertrvel   

  Time Travel: In Search of the Ultimate Sunrise 

   

  Probably the most beautiful sunrise I ever experienced was my first morning in Flagstaff, Arizona, back in February, 1987… first morning as a resident, that is. Lupita and I had visited before, naturally (I usually do that before making a move, though not always), but this was the Big Move.

  Of course if you’re a Flagstaffian, then you already know I was a neophyte or I wouldn’t have been doing it in February, not in Flagstaff. February in Flagstaff is risky, by definition. We made the trip from Berkeley almost without incident, too—almost, I reiterate—the California central valley, the Tehachapis, Barstool, the Desert of Death, the Big Ditch, Bullhead City, etc. Then came the Big Climb, almost sea level to 7000 feet in the course of less than 200 miles, about three hours, if you’re lucky. We weren’t…

  After ten straight hours of travel, fully loaded like the Beverly Hillbillies in sesarch of finery after striking it rich with crude, and making any stopover problematic, we decided to push on through the night, Flagstaff by morning hopefully, not so easy on the best of vehicles in the best of times, but this was a 20-year-old pickup strained to the limits of its endurance. It was a trooper, no doubt, having been to Guatemala twice and Mexico again only the year before, but still, this was Flagstaff in February…

  We almost made it, but that old pickup truck just died when it saw the city limit sign, five miles out of town. Just died. Wouldn’t start. Turn the key. Nothing. The rest is silence. Lupita pulled up behind me in her little cream-puff of a car.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.” When stressed out, I can be a real smart-ass.

  Then I looked up and saw that sunrise, purples and oranges in random profusion, clouds splotched around as vehicles for the color—oil not water—and that only, apparently. (More …)

  hardie karges and 13Studio are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    13Studio 8:44 pm on April 18, 2013 Permalink | Reply

    That was a fun read Hardie… I like knowing the story of your first sunrise in Flag.

    Hope all’s going well in your world.

    Chris

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    hardie karges 8:49 pm on April 18, 2013 Permalink | Reply

    Thanx; you have a blog?

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  hardie karges 11:11 am on January 30, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: backpacker ( 4 ), flashpacker ( 2 ), Hardie Karges ( 276 ), hypertravel ( 12 ), Mississippi ( 3 )   

  INSOMNIA, POETIC LICENSE, & MAO’S LITTLE NOT-SO-RED CABIN IN THE MISSISSIPPI WOODS 

  

  I haven’t had a really good night’s sleep in thirty years, or thereabouts anyway, not since my last paid job as a carpenter, back in my seminal youth (accent on my little seamen, with their voyages of discovery), and defined by the sweet smells of patchouli, herbal essence, and decay, honeysuckle and slowly rotting newsprint, antique pickup trucks and low technology, the lower the better in fact, living in five-quarter-inch plank-wood cabin, rough-cut and left un-planed in makeshift sawmills, and toted by the truckload to the lower forty acres of uncut forest, lain fallow by then for at least two generations while the world went on without it, until I saw value where others saw only clear-cut profit, like my father before me, and so proceeded to put permanent erections in temporary top soils, me and quarter-sawed antique heartwood and wood-burning stoves and kerosene lamps and nature-lust and heartache, back when Coors was currency and non-conformity was criminal and planets were small and getting smaller every day.

    (More …)

   
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  hardie karges 10:35 am on January 18, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: backpacker ( 4 ), flashpacker ( 2 ), Hardie Karges ( 276 ), hypertravel ( 12 ), prostate cancer   

  PROSTATES & POLITICS… and 2012 in the rear-view mirror… 

  Dec. 29, 2011, approximately 4:30 p.m:

   “You tested positive for prostate cancer.”

              I tried to remember the old Seinfeld episode, but couldn’t remember the ending, so I was still positive (pun).  “That means I don’t have it, right?”

              The doctor smiles thinly.  “Next we’ll need to do a bone scan to see the extent of spread.  After that you can meet with the oncologist…”

              The words gradually sank in.  “Wait a minute; you mean I’ve got cancer (heavy on the reverb)?”

  The doctor nodded, then continued talking, but I was no longer listening.

  The say at the moment of your impending death your life will pass before your eyes, presumably in fast-motion if you’ve done very much, though anybody who’s ever used an old-fashioned crank-up 16mm film camera knows it’s just the opposite: to play back fast, you shoot slow, and vice versa. Think about it.  But I didn’t see any flashbacks, either fast or slow. All I saw were dollar signs, flashing before my eyes and out the window.  My life itself was like a frame of old-fashioned film stuck in an old-fashioned projector gate, starting to burn and tear, starting to smell to all Hell.  I’d just been told that I’m dying, the dreaded ‘C’ word.  But wait a minute.  Aren’t we all dying?  It’s just a question of when, and how… (More …)

  hardie karges, ANNE KARGES, and kc are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    kc 12:54 pm on January 18, 2013 Permalink | Reply

    not too funny. you are lucky as can be. surprised they did’nt laproscropically do that thing. i do hope you made it through your treatments ok. do you have a clean bill of health? Can’t wait to get my book then get packing….

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      hardie karges 1:23 pm on January 18, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Actually, “lucky” is not the first adjective that came to mind…

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    kc 12:55 pm on January 18, 2013 Permalink | Reply

    you are brave and i am happy for you

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    hardie karges 1:25 pm on January 18, 2013 Permalink | Reply

    “Brave” is not the first adjective that came to mind, either… so far, so good, will know more in a couple weeks…

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    ANNE KARGES 3:24 pm on January 18, 2013 Permalink | Reply

    glad you are still around to give me something new to read. come home sometime.

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      hardie karges 3:37 pm on January 18, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      When is Millsaps homecoming 2013?