I was going to post this yesterday, but OH WELL.

Before waking:

I’m in the van with some of my Seattle friends. We’re driving down a mountain back road, and it’s snowing, overcast. We get to a little hamlet of sorts, and there are workers waving us off the road. It seems the bridge ahead is out.

So I pull over, into a parking area next to a house. We all get out of the van, and it’s warm, and it’s the beginning of summer. I’m waking up from bed, and I’m in what amounts to a big deck, made of redwood. It has a thatched roof, and huge glass walls on all sides. My little house is perched up on the side of a hollow, maybe a fifty yards long, twenty yards wide. Everything is green and alive. There’s a tiny creek running down the center.

There’s an endless sound of insects and birds chirping, the sound of running water and the wind in the dense tree canopy. Every time I turn around there’s a new plant, and it’s grown more. Just outside my window is a huge trumpetvine tree, and every time I look at it, it has a new set of branches, and more white flowers looking like mouths ready to lure in bees. A flock of geese glide by below my window; I’m looking down on them as they land in the grass and mosses. One perches somehow on the window, and looks at me expectantly.

Other birds flit by, the forest grows denser and denser every time I see it, but not in a threatening way. My deck is in the only spot where the sun shines through the canopy; I’m comfortably warm, and there’s life in the air.

I’m standing there in a bathrobe, and hear my friends approach up the steps. It’s X and M. and D. They look around and X says, “Wow, this is a nice place you’ve got here.”

eFairy mentions MacXangaTools, a little app I wrote to ‘blog via email to Xanga. There’s a link to it in the sidebar.

It’s old and crufty and never was release-quality. It also fell victim
to a hard drive failure that destroyed the source code, so it’ll never
be updated. It’s only through sheer luck that there’s a copy of it to
download.

I wrote it to help alleviate the lack of Mac support on Xanga. Mac
support on Xanga has improved tremendously in the meantime, especially
if you’re using a Mozilla-based browser like Firefox.

Thus, MacXangaTools is wholly vestigial and totally not worth the
effort of downloading, and if you do download it, I can’t promise I’ll
support it.

Many of you out there in xangaland might not know that I run a web site called mile23.com. Well, I do. It’s nothing special, really, just a place where people can download some software I’ve made. I don’t think I’ve updated anything there in a year, since I haven’t been coding very much at all.

But be that as it may… I got this spam just now:

Dear user of Mile23.com,

Our main mailing server will be temporary unavaible for next two days, to continue receiving mail in these days you have to configure our free auto-forwarding service.

For further details see the attach.

Attached file protected with the password for security reasons. Password is 42537.

The Management,
The Mile23.com team

Needless to say, I’m amused at the possibility that someone else runs my website in addition to myself. And little did I know, I have a team! A TEAM!

Of course, the attachment is more than likely a trojan, but it can’t do anything to my Mac.

Ah well. It’s nice to be easily amused by the assholes who are trying to ruin my computer.

Eccles, (Raleigh County) West Virginia Classmates, 1952

Eccles Jr. High Grade 7B 1951-1952.

Top Row: ? , Paul Mitchum

No, that’s not me. Please provide a caption.

Community Unity Meetings: Underground Railroad Discussion by Maxine F. Brown at CU meeting for October 9, 2003

In this area, slaves came from small operations in Kentucky, particularly Meade County. [..] Brown described how her own great-grandfather, Alfred Brown, had apparently killed an overseer to get away from slavery. [..]

The URR is a bright spot in this awful page of history – enslaved people did not want to accept their fate and there was a community who helped them. Another local bright spot is the story of Paul and Susanna Mitchum, who spent a lifetime acquiring slaves in order to free them. They came to Corydon with 100 slaves in 1814. Their adopted son married one of the slaves and turned the oversight of the colony to one of the freed blacks. Brown has a copy of her great-great-greatgrandmother Millie’s and her five children’s deed of emancipation by Paul Mitchum.

Playing John Kerry in the movie will be Harry Dean Stanton:

Sometimes I’m a little… uh… absent. My mind and my body and the rest of the world might as well all be in different time zones.

Like, just a little while ago, I was thinking about how slowly my life progresses. I’m a three-toed sloth in a jungle of leopards and eagles. And I realized that all things move to their own tempo, like the difference between Mozart and Arvo Pärt. Neither more appropriate, neither less so, each simply their own expression.

And when this occurred to me, I said, out loud, “I simply can’t go any faster.” While sitting on the toilet, because that’s where I was. And then I started laughing, because what else is there to do in such a situation?

From most perspectives, the things aren’t connected. But from the perspective of being funny, it all lines up. It’s supposed to be hi-larious. Which means I’m not absent, I’m in perfect synchronization. My timing is on.

I’m going to tell you something really embarassing.

I’ve lived in this house for over a year now, and the whole time I’ve been here, I left a derelict van in front of my last house. And while I was living in that house, the van sat unmoving for over a year even though my housemates dutifully nagged me about it every month or so.

See, I love that van. That van is one of the happiest things in my life. It ferried me across the continent at least three times, to go see people, to visit national parks, and to just go out in the middle of some nowhere and camp out. I remember taking it to Goldmeyer Hot Springs with my housemates, up that long, nasty washed-out road, sleeping next to the river, spending the whole day soaking in a cave eating dates and dried mango slices with two beautiful women.

Or driving across western Wyoming on highway 287 in December, from the clear blue open sky of the Tetons in the virgin morning after a blizzard, through Togwotee pass, and in the afternoon, the last vehicle into the Green Mountains before they closed the road due to blizzard conditions. 40 mph cross-winds, keeping the van going straight by turning the steering wheel 45 degrees into the wind, more like sailing than driving. Chugging to the top of the plateau and it was like being on the moon, if the moon was covered with white cake icing. And the clouds precipitating into snow where Green Mountain itself poked at them. Driving like this for two hours without the radio on, just wakeful-awareness steering zazen. Stopping at the rest area and getting out of the van and climbing on top of a boulder, gazing into the empty infinity of the snowdrift horizon, and thinking, ‘Finally. I’m alone.’

That van. That van should now be on the back of a fladbed truck, being hauled to Whitey’s Auto Auction, who will split the sale’s proceeds with KCTS.

Mourn now with me.

How Would Jesus Vote?

Funny and disturbing comic over at xoverboard.com.