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Speaking of turds, dinosaurs produced a lot of them. I’m sure the Smithsonian has drawers-full of coprolites stashed away in their attic.

The dinosaurs were prolific coprolite generators because there were no toilets in the Mesozoic era. So every turd produced by every dinosaur ever born had a chance to fossilize, sitting out there in the sun like that. You can’t say that about our turds.

In fact, I could almost number the turds I’ve manufactured that have the slightest chance of turning into coprolites. It’s certainly a low number; every one I’ve produced in the wild has been memorable, in that I remember it.

Which is kind of sad, really. Scientists eons from now will have scant chance of deriving any clues from my shit. That gives me pause. And it’s almost impossible that a turd of mine will be fossilized and under glass atop a velvety pedestal one day.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask that one of my turds ends up under glass atop a velvety pedestal.

Even the purest vegan will slap at a mosquito.

“Scientists’ abilities to control the spin of the electron help determine the properties of the photon, which in turn could have implications for the development of optoelectronics and quantum cryptography. Photons could be encoded with secure information, which could serve as the basis for anti-eavesdropping technology, Warburton said.”

Or it might not.

Really, I know why scientists and reporters feel the need to speculate, but can they at least put a disclaimer at the end of the speculation? Something like “This is only speculation,” or “Who knows what the future may bring?” or “We are almost invariably wrong.”

Yes, it could serve as the basis for anti-eavesdropping technology, but it won’t. Yes, it could lead to safer public drinking water or a miracle cancer drug, but it won’t.

I say this, comfortable that I’ll be right 999 times out of a thousand. I don’t mind being wrong that thousandth time, as long as I get to mock reporters and researchers the other 999 times.

I’m a website novice. I have a dim understanding, won only through clicking many many buttons, of how my website works. Therefore, when I noticed that a click on www.mach∏.com led not to my index page, but to a “page cannot be found” page, I had no idea how to fix it. It’s a problem that could’ve happened recently, given the amount of tinkering I’ve had to do to try to straighten out my Blogger fiasco, or it could’ve happened long ago, since I normally click on links that link to particular named pages on the site, not the root. I had no idea. But I like to think of myself as a fairly logical person, so I tackled the problem, thinking that if I clicked enough buttons, carefully enough, I’d eventually click them in the right order to straighten everything out.

That strategy can work for any problem, and it has served me, if not well, then like a slave that at least pretends to work when I’m around. But sometimes there are just too many ways to press too many buttons to possibly arrive at a solution in a reasonable length of time. I sometimes run across problems like that, and this was one of those.

I am not even slightly interested in how websites work, so when mine stops working, I don’t treat it as an adventure, I treat it as a turd that someone left on my doorstep. A fantastically odoriferous turd.

As a disinterested website novice, I have to try all permutations, no matter how weird or ludicrous, because I simply don’t know what I’m doing in any but the most trivial of ways. In fact, the difference between a website expert and myself is that he can recognize what’s impossible and what’s ludicrous, and I cannot. All I have to work with, since I have no real understanding of how websites work, is logic. Logically I know that if I change enough values, carefully enough, in enough different ways, and can remember how to return to the base-state to try other things, eventually I’ll fix the problem. But I have to sift through a ridiculous amount of chaff compared to someone who knows what he’s doing, and that takes time.

Long story short, six days into this problem, I fixed it by renaming my “Index.htm” file to “index.htm”.

That’s one aromatic turd.

I was looking at this post on Jwalk, showing a police sketch of a crook and the actual crook (after he was nabbed) side by side, and I thought “Never in a million years could I describe a face well enough so that it wouldn’t look like just a perturbed stick-man in the end.” Jwalk disparages the sketch, but I think one or two things were caught very well by the artist. The shape of his forehead was caught well, or at least gives off the same vibe. The artist rendered a vibe described by the victim. That’s really wild.

I, on the other hand, can’t describe physical vibes in such a way that an artist can render them. My descriptions don’t work that way, which is odd. “Well, his nose… I can’t really remember his nose. He had one. His ears? His ears made his face collapse. Without those ears his body would be slightly higher off the ground.”

See? That’s no way to get a sketch done.

Privacy fences are a necessary part of suburbia, because few things are more fraught and tedious than feeling obliged to talk to the neighbors. Fences allow people to ignore other people, and that’s healthy. A neighbor who’s out of sight behind a fence, even if he’s slaughtering pigs in his backyard, is better than a neighbor who putters around in a fenceless garden waiting to spring a conversation trap on the unsuspecting.

I wish fences weren’t necessary, but since houses in the suburbs are packed tight, they are. So while I live in the suburbs I’ll always require a fence (I have other plans, though).

There’s a circle around a person that, if someone is outside its radius, there is no obligation for those two people to talk. That’s a pretty good distance. There’s an obligation to wave at the other person, perhaps, or to nod, but not to talk.

Similarly, there’s another circle around a person that defines the limit beyond which one isn’t even obligated to acknowledge someone else, even if he can be seen. At that distance, by convention, it’s okay and proper to pretend your neighbor doesn’t exist. That’s a very good distance. I believe figure 7 clearly illustrates the progression, although you’ll have to enlarge it to see:

Of course, the best circle of all, the circle beyond which neighbors actually can’t be seen, was omitted for reasons of space.

It takes a lot of acreage, probably 3 or 4 acres, to really be confident that all the neighbors lie outside the pretend circle. It’s an actual distance, too, I think: the distance where one can pretend that the neighbor’s image on the retina is no longer an image of a person, but only a collection of unresolved neural firings. And obviously the “pretend radius” is smaller than the actual radius where people’s images can’t be resolved, but that’s okay.

It’s all mostly pretend anyway.

I’ve only recently realized how successful my plan to divorce myself from the popular media has become.

Today in the paper, in the “Buzz” section, there is a story written about the Most Beautiful Person of 2005 (according to Vogue or Esquire or someone). It is written as a false mystery, in which progressively easier hints concerning her identity are given, culminating in a picture.

I have no idea who this person is. I cannot guarantee that I’d know who she is even if her name had been printed, which it wasn’t. But people were supposed to know, and it was supposed to be painfully obvious even before looking at the picture.

The pieces are finally coming together.

David and I have backpacked for twelve years. In the beginning, it wasn’t easy to say whether or not we’d make it a continual thing. The first two expeditions, in fact, if not disastrous, were certainly less than satisfactory in most ways. Ticks and mosquitoes, chafed thighs and blistered feet were only just outweighed by psychological benefits. But it got better, chiefly because we’re tool-using monkeys who realized we had to make backpacking more comfortable in order to justify continuing to do it.

This, then, is a short chronicle of the implements two tool-using monkeys bought to tame the wilderness:

May (?) 1993 (?), the Shenandoah:

Hell. Surplus army backpacks; tarps instead of tents. Steel-toed workboots; I may have well just been wearing nails and broken beer bottles. The tarps, which seemed like such a good idea when I used them in a survival course in eastern Washington in the cold, instead took a small piece of my soul away in the nights, among the night creatures. We were treating water with chemicals before drinking it. After it was over, two days later, Carole discovered a tick behind my ear. I had wounds to lick. If not for the partial solar eclipse on the day we left (enjoyed from a Long John Silver’s parking lot), I fear this trip would have been the last. As it turned out, it was a long time before we did it again.

July 2001, the Hetch Hetchy:

We had the same backpacks, which were ungainly nightmares. Meals Ready to Eat, which was not an innovation but an eventually-recognized dead end. We had Scientific Marvel #Q, a water pump which made chemicals a thing of the past. It opened the door to comfort, just a little.

We might have given up after this one, though, except for one contraption David brought: a hammock. The comfort turned night into day and made angels weep with joy. And it turns out one can skinny-dip in a sun-warmed inlet above a waterfall and find Jesus.

A digital camera chronicled the events, except for the angels and Jesus.

May 2002, the Hetch Hetchy:

Damned if there weren’t bears. Bears. And I brought this tent/hammock thing out which lifted me above the cracked earth into the sky’s sweet embrace, which was cool. MREs made their final, lackluster appearance. Our backpacks were fingered as a cause of mopiness.

Labor Day weekend, 2002, from Tuolumne to the Valley:

We have real backpacks. A brief flirtation with designed and packaged backpacking meals contributes to ennui. But I have my backpacker’s stove, David has his monocular, and they are invaluable in creating hot-food-and-coffee and scenes of the spectacular far-away, respectively.

The major innovation of this trip was trekking poles. It isn’t immediately obvious that sticks are so valuable. After all, they weigh more than nothing, and one has to carry that more-than-nothing miles and miles. But what they lack in lightness, they more than make up for in support and balance. Once the math was run, the choice was obvious: sticks contained 37% more support, 55% less ennui, and yielded 240% more aggregate comfort than no sticks at all.

A junkfood epiphany. Could the slovenly calories consumed by eating tasty junk food and peanut butter and crackers possibly match the tightly-wound but uneaten calories engineered into packaged mountain food? Yes, it goes without saying. A Dorito in the mouth is worth two fortified Cajun Delite powdered meal-packets left in the backpack.

And finally, finally, after two shaky forays into the wilderness, the world had turned enough to envision backpacking as an ongoing thing, something we do periodically. The precarious nature of our wilderness urgings was made stable and sure, as sure as the sun rises and beer is delightful.

July 2003, Ostrander:

Bug repellant is critical, and head nets are fine. Sometimes it rains, though, and rain has to be dealt with, so we did.

July 2004, the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne:

Nearly the whole package. Hammocks, adequate bug fender-offers, sweet, sweet junk food, coffee and tea, comfortable hiking boots, floppy camp shoes, and walking sticks. And the experiences: there is little better in life than to see a force of nature that is as blatantly not-about-us as is a bear. Beyond taking advantage of us if they can, bears just don’t care. To see something so totally unimpressed with people is a miracle.

The primary drawback was in planning. The route meanders generally pleasantly down for the first three quarters, but the last quarter is a three thousand foot climb out of the valley.

But it’s obvious that it had to be done, and I’m ecstatic that we did.

July-August, 2005, Tuolumne to the Valley:

It will be a different route, because there’s no reason to make spectacular scenery mundane. As for me, I’m not leaving any of my necessary and precious things home. And I will take, for the first time, an innovation that has the potential to revolutionize backpacking as I know it: a soft chair. Because it’s fiendishly hard to find a slab of granite cut to my ass’ exact proportions. It’s a sort-of canvas tripod stool-thing, and I have high hopes that it will rock my world.

Let me get this out of the way: I’m not a leader. There is an extra ingredient one has to have on top of being smart and observant and glib, let’s call it Ingredient Q, in order to be a leader. Ingredient Q involves being able to suffer idiots. I don’t possess that ingredient. I never will.

Watching television or listening to politicians or hobnobbing with union reps involves interacting (or at least observing) people who possess Ingredient Q. These people amaze me. How one can transform an idea for how things could be made better into an actual process that proceeds in the face of resistance from idiots is a talent that I have no patience for. I simply cannot suffer idiots for any length of time; it’s my own cross to bear.

So, because I don’t possess Ingredient Q, I can only (like all the Q-less people I know) create ideas, then fall back into the calming waters of cynicism as I watch the buffalo herd rumble off into Idiot Prairie. So I said all that. Now for the rant proper:

I’m getting pretty worked up about what I see happening in Long Beach. I never got this worked up about Vacaville. I didn’t have thirty years of history with the place; I didn’t have emotional buy-in. So what if a little farmland was cleared to make way for a spanking new subdivision? It wasn’t my home, really. I was just passing through.

But it was somebody’s home. Somebody was emotionally invested in the place, I’m sure of it. Vacaville was their home, their backyard, and they had an interest in how their backyard transmogrified.

The term “NIMBY” is used dismissively, to pigeonhole people. “They don’t want a 7-11 constructed in their neighborhood?” NIMBY. The 7-11 must be built; these foolish people just don’t want it in their backyard, they want it in somebody else’s backyard. They’re selfish; they say “let somebody else take the fall” for Progress.

But on the contrary, NIMBY-ism is good and important, and is sometimes the only thing that stands between a neighborhood and the bulldozers. Because if people won’t speak out when something wrong is happening to their own backyard, when will they speak out? Who else will advocate for an area? Who will speak for the trees? The answer is “not a goddamn soul.”

NIMBY-ism should be cultivated, not dismissed. If everybody speaks up for their own backyard, developers will have to tear something crappy down before building something crappy up.

I don’t know the exact mechanisms that allowed northern California and Germany and England to keep Progress from fucking up the countryside, but I do know it wasn’t out of the goodness of developers’ hearts. I do know that. Rules were involved. It would be beneficial to examine law in those places to see how Progress shook out the way it did, but that sounds like a lot of work. Also, even if I found the specific mechanisms that worked in California or Germany, there’s certainly no guarantee that those mechanisms would function the same way here. Here is different; we have a different history and a different problem to fix, since we’ve waited (and are still waiting) so long to do something about it.

Change for the better, when a place is already somewhat degraded, is going to cost someone money. So the argument that it’s too costly isn’t useful. Of course it’ll be costly for some people. The trick is to corner those people who fucked us over by taking advantage of the rules, then make them pay for the change. I don’t care if these people complain. If elected, I’ll counter their arguments with a hearty “Go fuck yourself” before I introduce legislation designed purposely to screw them to the wall. If someone has to pay to fix things–and someone always has to pay–the people who broke the things to begin with should start emptying their pockets. So, in my opinion, which is apparently better than most of the mouth-breathers passing laws down here, here are some rules that would keep Long Beach from becoming Calcutta:

1. Greenbelts. Make it so outlying areas (but still in the city limits) can only be inherited or sold to the government. This will eventually kill off suburban creep.

Won’t happen, but it’s a nice fantasy. A 9 on the masturbation meter.

2. Tax the shit out of businesses that are located outside the central zone of the city. the point of this law would be to get rid of the Jr Food Stores, the Kwikee Marts, the Paul’s Pool & Spas; make them move closer to city center. People such as myself will be forced to order their commerce so that they get things done on calculated downtown trips, instead of popping down to the Jr Food Store for a quart of Old Milwaukee and Cheetos as the impulse strikes them. That bullshit has to stop.

Could happen.

3. The closer a business is to city center (or some similar mechanism), the fewer taxes it has to pay.

Could happen.

4. Demolition insurance. This is the biggie; this is the one that keeps more damage from happening the quickest. Any business that builds, must buy demolition insurance, so that if they go out of business–which they usually do–the box they built on the graves of possums and raccoons and wildebeests and trees must be demolished. Trees must be replanted, and wildebeests must be shipped in from elsewhere to replenish the populations that were killed and displaced. Will the insurance be expensive? You’re damn right, it’ll be expensive. The point is to NOT build the thing in the first place. But if someone is bound and determined to build a dive where it shouldn’t be built, they should insure us that the place will disappear when their business falls apart.

Should happen. A solid 10. I get excited just thinking about it.

5. Only people who’ve lived in a town 5 years or longer will be allowed to vote in local elections. That will keep the transients (such as myself in Vacaville) from being able to trash a place because they know their time there will be limited. This is huge, y’all; it keeps the carpetbaggers and various other assholes from having a voice.

Should happen.

Rules. They separate us from the jerks. And as I said earlier, there’s absolutely no way I’ll ever be in a position to institute rules, since I lack Ingredient Q. I can only rant, and hope that someone who does possess the key ingredient has had the same ideas, or sees these ideas and acts on them.

But I don’t have that hope. What will happen is that, eventually, I’ll move away from here to some place where those rules (or similar ones) have already been enacted. As a Q-less person, that’s really my only option for physical and mental health.

What is it about Southern Progress that makes it suck so? Are the natives just thoughtless idiots? Probably; they probably are. In all probability, they are. Idiots is what they are, probably. You know what I bet? I bet they’re idiots.

Some places do Progress right. California’s pretty good at it; the greenbelts between towns were incredibly farsighted. Germany and most of Europe are good at it. Very good. I lived in Germany, a crowded place, in two different neighborhoods, and in both places I could walk down the road and five minutes later be in dark forest.

Here, I can’t do that. First of all, there’s no walking here; there aren’t any sidewalks. Also, there are no public forests. There are NO public forests here. There’s Desoto, which is all well and good for the people of Wiggins and north Saucier (and greater Bumfuck and east Jesus), but it does me no good. There are woods here, but people own them, and they’re fenced and festooned with “no trespassing” signs.

If California or Germany “progressed” like southern Mississippi, they would be hellholes. Southern Mississippi is not a hellhole yet, but with double the population and no change to the “business friendly” land laws, it will turn into hell.

So it’s not too late to keep this place from becoming Calcutta, but the rules need to change. Also, it would help if the idiots became less idiotic. Hey, you know what would help? The idiots? If there weren’t so many of them, that would help.

The nicest people I know say “I’m all for progress, but…” when confronted with some hard industrial or commercial nut that’s fallen into their backyard. “I’m all for progress, but I don’t see why those condos they’re talking about building on the beach need to be twelve stories tall. I mean, progress is good, and it’ll help with the tax base, and jobs, but why do they need to be twelve stories tall?”

These are nice people. They don’t want to cause a ruckus or anything, but won’t all these condos and Oreck factories and jobs slithering into their backyards make more pollution and traffic? They understand that some pollution and traffic are necessary consequences of progress, and don’t get them wrong, they’re all for Progress, but isn’t an extra eight stories of concrete a bit much? They understand that the enlarged tax base will keep their own taxes down while still allowing the city to afford to improve the roads and upgrade the sewer systems. And with improved roads and upgraded sewer systems, the town will be more attractive to businesses, so that they can have more condos and more people coming in to live in them. They understand that’s Progress, and there’s simply no stopping it.

Yes, these are nice people, who have no idea how they wake up one morning forty years later and are surrounded by desolation.

Progress sucks. “Progress,” when used by local burghers to stampede the citizens into accepting things they shouldn’t accept, means to allow businessmen to do whatever their little hearts desire, with no accountability for their selfish actions. Consider this example of Progress:

the Piggly Wiggly, click pic to embiggen

This is Progress: a strip mall that’s been vacant for at least twenty years, while other strip malls sprouted around it, like weeds. This building does nothing for anybody. But because it’s cheaper for capitalists to throw up another strip mall five hundred yards down the road where once trees were, instead of using this hulking thing (or knocking it down to make their own hulking thing), that’s what’s done. In a clueless, lawless place, that’s what’s done.

Here’s another picture of Progress:

the Beatline Dump, click to embiggen.

This place has been a de facto garbage dump almost as long as I’ve been alive. It used to be a general store, which I vaguely remember, but it burned down. Afterwards, the owner has periodically piled it high with trash; the city periodically cites the owner for it, and some of the trash gets moved around, but then the city moves on to new business, and the owner starts dumping his garbage here again. Currently, the property is in its “semi-cleared” state, but the owner has begun to cocoon the property in a new layer of trash. A year from now a beautiful garbage butterfly will once again emerge in glory.

White Harbor

This is the corner of White Harbor and Highway 90, the beach highway. It looks like these acres have been cleared, and a project is ready to rise. Looks are deceiving. This land was cleared years ago, and a system of broken PVC piping and cracked concrete foundations was put in. The project was apparently declared a success, and the developers have taken several years off to celebrate.

The Dahl House, click to embiggen

This is the Dahl House, a hideous structure on Pineville Road that until last year was home to a thriving, small bakery. The bakery built a new place on Beatline (where trees used to be), and this, their old place, became a shitty dive of a restaurant that lasted four months. I fully expect the building to change hands several times in the next couple of years before it begins the long slide toward final garbagehood.

the old Hancock Bank

This Hancock Bank moved farther away from the city center, to Beatline and Pineville. Meanwhile, the bunker they left behind is up for sale or lease, and has been for at least a year. It will eventually fall apart, despite the “God Bless America” sign jammed in the hedge in front.

Here’s a final, more subtle example of Progress:

the Alamo

This is the former home of the late WJ Quarles, a Long Beach founding father. It is as nearly in the center of town as is possible. It’s been falling apart for decades, although the historic sign that was put out front fifteen years or so ago is a nice touch. Its historical value is nil to anyone but descendants of the Quarles family, yet here it still squats. It’s like our own little Alamo, but without the patina of significance. This would be a great place for a Piggly Wiggly, if a shell of a Piggly Wiggly didn’t already exist two hundred yards to the east. Instead, it rots, while wild places close by and elsewhere are cleared to make way for exciting new potential garbage dumps. Nice sign, though.

There are more examples of Progress in my little town, but decency forbids me to continue taking pictures of them.

Nice people will look at these pictures, sigh, and say, “Well, that’s Progress. You’ve got to take the good with the bad. You know?” Capitalists and businessmen, of course, couldn’t give two shits about it. But nice people will sigh, because they take Progress as a given. It’s above argument. It just is.

The thing is, I’m not very nice, and I’m going to argue against Progress, in the next post.