Dangermond.org

This Sunday marks the annual Poboy Festival on Oak Street and Carrollton – the festival says it is dedicated to the preservation of the poboy – should we be worried? I mean how could a poboy go away? It’s like eating a duraflame log but there is nothing more delicious than a shrimp or catfish poboy, or depending on where a roast beef poboy with gravy dripping down your forearms, or perhaps a old time poboy made of french fries and roast beef debris with gravy.

Oh god why is it hard to keep my girlish figure here in this town? She wondered aloud.

November 09, 2010

1. Taurus (4/20-5/20)

   Reach out to coworkers or fellow students and ask them for their thoughts on your current situation. They’ll be flattered you asked, and they’ll be prepared with answers. You’ve got a good idea about what to do next, but it will be helpful to get confirmation. Once you do, your stress level will drop and your energy will be free to focus on getting the job done. Look for a huge rise in your reputation — more people in powerful positions want to see what you’re all about.

There is so much going on in my life right now that is impossible to jot down in a blog but suffice to say you are seeing the strains in the tone of my blog as of the last few weeks. More will be revealed is all I can say. For right now, I’ve been gorging on other people’s writings and thinkings about complex issues and one blog in particular that I would highly recommend is Clay Shirky’s. Here is an excerpt from a recent entry:

In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of those groups had rich traditions, complex social structures, advanced technology, but despite their sophistication, they collapsed, impoverishing and scattering their citizens and leaving little but future archeological sites as evidence of previous greatness. Tainter asked himself whether there was some explanation common to these sudden dissolutions.

The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.

Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.

Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.

The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.

Feeling Sorry for Myself While Standing Before the
Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum in London

Oh yes my friend, I’ve been there: the insects battering at the armored lids of your yellowish eyes

the moment you pecked your way out of that rotten shell and dug out from your sandpit nest …

And I’ve experienced the thud thud thud of your days, the indigestible monotony

of everything’s spiny orangy-green husk. How the sun gets daily whiter and hotter and just

a little bit closer. The week spent gobbling down your

own weight’s worth of whatever. One stumpy footprint after another, tracking the trackless, squelching

across last night’s marsh into a volcano-spattered today hip-deep in ash and yawning

a muzzleful of sulfur. Swishing through stiff fronds,

we drag an unbearable load of tombstones on our back and a fat lugubrious tail, shit-smutched and

spiked. The flattening of the razor grass. The forgotten clutch of eggs. Our shrill yaps

and groans. That tiny gray walnut for a brain and the fat black tongue tough as a bootsole …

They’ve explained us away a dozen times: some passing meteorite or another, the rat-like mammals

eating our pitiful young, all kinds of new weather. Issueless, but far too stupid to be forlorn,

we trundle along the pink quartz shore to sip at the lukewarm edge of yet another evaporating sea.

MICHAEL DERRICK HUDSON

New Ohio Review Fall 2010

I went for a very long walk on the beach early in the morning with the dogs – a last scamper for them and another journey into my thoughts for me. For one thing, I found out those fish on the shore are redfish and they are being left there by fishermen who take their big hunk of filet and leave the carcass behind – seems pretty savage to me.

And the jellies washed ashore are part of the normal process for jelly fish, so this too is not unusual.

And the micro tar balls on the beach well my neighbor insists they have been around since the Pleistocene era.

So only the oil slicks remain as a reminder of BP’s screw up. The fish are all right.

One thing I noticed as we walked this morning is that we do have power over our mind and right now my mind seems to be in pretty good shape but it’s my emotions that are out of control. Truly. When I think of all the things in my life that could make me drop down on my knees and offer a resounding thank you, well I have way too many reasons to do that than not. But emotionally I’m behaving like a five year old and taking each thing that happens and giving it enormous power and weight and thinking in end of the world terms.

So I have a correction to make, I’m thankful for all I have but even so, I’m tripping on wild and weird emotional energy that has me weak at the knees. I’m going to have to do the heavy lifting to deactivate the panic button. The house has been smudged. Oshun is coming when our nanny gets back (she got ill while she was away – sigh – another person to worry about). And pretty soon the one year anniversary of my mother’s death will be behind me instead of hovering over like a dark cloud.

One day several years ago a friend took a photograph of Tatjana and I and we looked so ridiculous that we called ourselves the Shmooko Family. Since Tin came to join us, he seems to have some of those Shmooko characteristics, so he is now a bonafide Shmooko.

He loves to put Ele the Elephant on his head as well as other toys – we don’t know why but he does look like a Shmooko when he does this:

Here are two Shmookos stopping at the gas station for a snack of apples and rice crackers.

Knowing we were leaving the beach the next day brought on that old familiar sleepless night – it’s restless mind syndrome and I want to make it stop. T and I had had a good soulful talk the night before about how to deal with this avalanche that I feel all around me starting with the smallest detail to the largest one. It’s like my mind welcomes the changes around me but emotionally I’m blocked from riding the wave, instead, I find myself crouched down on the surf board with my hands over my eyes going oh no, oh no, oh no. I’m in a blender right now and someone is just this close from pushing the eviscerate button and a part of me is like PUSH IT, and the other part of me is like oh no, oh no, oh no.

My horoscope today because as always it is perfectly in tuned even though all of this is hocus pocus, I couldn’t have said it better:

November 08, 2010

1. Taurus (4/20-5/20)

   If there’s something you really, really want to happen at work, there’s a good chance that you’ll begin to see progress in that direction. Sure, it’s no guarantee that it will work, but then there are no guarantees in these things. And, in fact, that’s part of what makes the whole prospect so exciting: You never know what’s going to happen. So cross your fingers and send a few emails and wait and see what course it all takes. Maybe you should make a few phone calls too, though.

In beach combing, I seek the perfect shell, the one that the turning waves have not crushed or left indistinguishable from its origin. The first time I beach combed with Tatjana she picked up shells that had me scratching my head – they were undefinable, smooth, pearl-like stones. She loves them because they show that they have been through a lot to get to the shore – so much the edges have been smoothed to round, the color bleached to opulescent white, and the origins are definitely unknown.

While I’m seeking perfection, she is finding hers.

In numerology the number 11 is considered a master number and unlike other numbers you don’t add the digits to get to the whole, it is whole. The number 11 signifies unparalleled spiritual awareness. So today when I was considering that a special person is turning eleven, I thought what a happy day to be turning 11.

The time changed last night and it’s earlier than you think – and that my dear is the metaphor for the upcoming new year. There is still plenty of time to reinvent yourself and have yet a more interesting life than the one you have already had, which is interesting enough for most people. I am watching the sunrise from the beach house window and thinking to myself that I’ve been on the spin cycle for long enough – it seems as if perhaps six months of this churn has been going on – but we are wringing out the old and gradually everything that looked like it was something to cling to is now looking more like yesterday’s detritus.

My horoscope today – appropriate as usual:

November 07, 2010

1. Taurus (4/20-5/20)

   When you least expect it, the world as you know it will come to a rapid-fire close. Not an end, exactly, and certainly not an unpleasant one, regardless, but you may wake up today tapping your heels together with the vague realization that you’re definitely not in Kansas anymore. This time, even though you’re not ordinarily fond of change, climbing into the balloon with the Wizard won’t bother you, mostly because you’ve been planning this for a while.