Month: February 2026

The suggestion that there should be any resuscitation, cultivation, or continuation of the industrial processes that have been in practice during the industrial revolution is, in one person’s view, totally absurd. The trajectory of the results which are following in the wake of this kind of progress look devastating. A simple search of a quick random three brief subjects regarding the current state of nature came back punctually and hard. Bird population, insect population, and ocean dead zones were the three searches. In order, Nearly 3 Billion Birds Gone, A new study finds deep, long-term losses across virtually all groups of birds in the U.S. and Canada, CornellLab, The Collapse of Insects, The most diverse group of organisms on the planet are in trouble, with recent research suggesting insect populations are declining at an unprecedented rate, Reuters, Ocean Dead Zones: A Growing Crisis Beneath the Waves, oceansresearch.com. Each of these, and more, reports become more dire the deeper you dive. There is handwriting all over the wall. Look! Where is this reality really going? Where in the heck do we think this is going?

The Industrial Age has been a securities and bankers bonanza of exploitation and abuse. It doesn’t matter how many unfulfilled promises turn to ashes. Bombardment of the masses with intense propaganda over generations has crippled discernment, quarantined effective criticism, and compounded cognitive dissonance. It looks like outrage or apathy for much of today’s citizenry. Outrage is a barrier against understanding. Apathy is just this side of doom. The modern malaise of the human mind is a graphic demonstration sense corrosion. We’re collectively being herded off a cliff, don’t see it and don’t care. To say that this entire paradigm requires some severe re-evaluation is a goofy understatement. To go on like this, however, seems like little more than suicide on an installment plan. You wanna talk about asleep at the wheel!? We’re all walking around commenting on gaslit global warming, political idiocy, sports games, terrorism, and the weather for crying out loud. All the while, we are in a severe civilizational place in which we not just depend on exhausted resources, we demand them. At this rate there will be no way to make an emergency crash landing. It’s just going to be a crash.

Maybe a kind of controlled fall can happen, so that something other than dead everything may result. The hope here is that there may be some quantum relief associated with the fact that not everyone has a “grind it up till it’s gone” attitude. The people making real sacrifices of their own consumption, and not dismissing the ideas of free energy suppressed technologies may burgeon a consciousness which can serve as an exit avenue from this carbon based fuel insistence. The masters of the Industrial Age paradigm are always using the petroleum standard of living lever to hold general society over a barrel (No pun intended) They are not going to yield. So, pumping oil, and banking the loot, will not screech to halt, but the demand for the current standards might. Sooner or later, this has to become a people’s choice on balance with the natural disaster that, right now, is all but impossible to miss.

Speaking of impossible to miss. There are modern world events happening that seriously challenge the boundaries of sanity. The glaring incoherence that societal leaders are demonstrating right now is stunning. For example, in the United States there is a recent executive order to push the production and distribution of glyphosate. This order is being supported by a person, also working in the federal government, that previously sued the companies that produce glyphosate over the illnesses the product causes. That suit resulted in the companies paying out like $270 million in damages. Not only do these mutually exclusive facts exist simultaneously, the companies that produce glyphosate are publicly preparing for future compensations costing in the billions. Talk about in your face!? Anyone, really anyone, paying any attention to this announcement, and making any kind of connection of one and the other, would be hard pressed to not scratch their head. Would it rally matter how brainwashed, or braindead, you were? The now advanced evolution of the Industrial Age is falling on its face. It’s impossible to miss. These puppet people in positions of modern world political favor are apologists for the brutally failed industrial world living standard.

Thanks to the technological age overlapping the industrial, a complexity of confusion has gone exponential. Thankfully leaders are failing as fast as the system they are trying to perpetuate. The train of modern society has run out of track. It’s off the tracks, but still rumbling. A discursive of the wizardry the draconian overlords that have insisted on running the world into ruin can wait. For now, suffice it to say that there is no more question, really, where the modern industrial, technological, world is going. It has fallen like Chicken Little’s sky. It is dire. Every end is a new beginning. Moving on.

Things are changing a bit; quite a bit. The daily race pace is slowing. Stopping one morning after completing some ordinary task, like taking out the garbage, I sat. A sense of settling was happening while sitting in a chair by the cellar door in this quiet old home. It was calm and quiet. The floor, walls, windows, ceiling, and doors all appear comfortably familiar. There’s a resting. Without any notice or signal the shoulders relax. The entire body soothes a fluid sensation at rest. Novel comfort. No motion. No need. The air becomes sense-able. The air is touching me with an amiable pressure. I can feel it. It is still. There is a stillness. I get the sense that the stillness is intentional. Everything is at rest in it. I arrived in a place I did not know existed. I’ve heard about the still point. I understand it to be a fundamental feature and fixture of reality. Everything feels whole, complete. Is this an immovable something in which things are grounded? It has me. The sense of okay ness sky rockets. Nothing is out of place. Random sounds break the silence, but nothing disturbs it. Could this is be the transcendental extension of the Eternal; the stillness of the still? There’s no reason to move at this point. A type of involuntary meditation carried the moment. Without losing coherence or context of the verities of my own existence, facts of life didn’t seem right, wrong, unnecessary, in, or out of place. What I would now refer to as a relationship with awareness of is and isn’t comes on. Without disturbance my now comfortable body stands. The intentional standing and subsequent motion is involved with, and in, a stillness field of capacities that make me wonder. The return is awesome in that there doesn’t appear to be resistance inside me to getting right with what is.

Reconciliation of confusion and chaos can be challenging. Discerning what is the next thing to do and/or say can be confounding. Knowing/caring whether or not something is helpful or hurtful is often an unconscious guess. Guarding my own self interest without considering a balance with the greater good is a difficult attitude to escape. There’s an unconsciousness component about life and living that may very well have a life of its own. Some unconscious mindless reactions to existential stimuli that are based on programming, both genetic and installed, that has never been critically evaluated. How does one begin to account for that? How often it seems like a very common response to fixing, gaining, achieving anything is too hurry up. “We’ve got to get to this right away.” Hence an accelerating pace of reaction time, internet speed, gratification, response, answers, and the subsequent activity to bring get results. Heaven forbid that the results are not satisfactory. Now this situation needs to be straightened out even quicker. A manifestation of this may be the oft surprisingly long Amazon return line down at the local Staples. How long before I’m failing on a George Jetson high speed dog walking treadmill that sucks me under, and reduces me to chasing my one tail as fast as possible with no relief in sight? The metaphor for the modern age might as well be Ritalin. The only stillness in this equation may very well be a full stop at the end of a dead end.

“The faster we go, the rounder we get.” – That’s it for the Other One, Grateful Dead. How spun out would I like to get? It has never been a primary objective of trying to keep up with the rat race, and with that said it still gets mad hectic. With a novel calling for calm, I think I’ve heard the no call calling from stillness. With a motionless move towards a rumored eternal ground, everything freezes. Gong… Slow down. You’ll get there faster.

There? Where? I wonder…

The Atomic Cafe is a gripping film and a gruesome comedy. The documentary is a compilation of artifacts that have been used to allay national fears of apocalyptic doomsday devices. The Atomic Cafe may not provide the same satirical grin that Dr. Strangelove does, however, it does initiate ponderous wonder of how determined some are too anesthetize the masses into consenting to their own demise. The legend, and evolution, of pro nuke propaganda has effectively, and successfully, brought about an almost universal tacit consent, not to mention, malaise of “who cares” that objectively dismisses the radical toxicity of the entire nuclear option. Perhaps the preeminent metaphor for terrestrial termination, the nuclear bomb.

Joseph Campbell pointed out the destructive, technological, and impersonal power represented by the nuclear weapon has an antidote. The Grateful Dead, and the community of fans are “the answer to the atom bomb”. In this, the culture phenomenon of music enthusiasts that dedicate themselves to staying involved with the roots and rituals of together life / living performance art becomes its own metaphor. The Grateful Dead experience runs deep with connectivity. American and world musical heritage permeates the material. The diversity, universality, and intimacy of the songs, structures, and organically free forms tug at personal and collective DNA in ways that are perpetually novel to discover. One may likely find themselves in the music that is finding itself in us. We do this together collectively alone and together. It is no wonder that the Dead musical catalogue is among the most played, most referenced, and most relied on. The Grateful Dead’s founders came from different parts of American musical tradition. The amalgam, that is us, may get sensed and felt. In it is a connection the Bomb can’t blow apart. It is constructive, organic, and personal with resonant frequencies that transcend apparent differences. Mystically, community is spawned with memories we don’t know we have, spontaneities that defy restriction, liberties rooted in justice, and freedoms that can’t be contained.

The modern world has its fair share of high profile public figures telling us either what we need to do, or what they are doing in our name. Despicable reprobates running around talking about ‘what’s right” while making casual references to termination devices and nuclear weapons; not to mention covering up secretive savage depravity. The uneasy feeling associated with riding on a bus being driven by blind drunk madmen racing to doom keeps intensifying. Ya know what? What if you’re not the kind of person that’s willing to sign off on this modern insistence of impersonal hostility? It wouldn’t so serious, perhaps, if all the vulgar order givers were quarantined into a cell in which they feed on each other. These heads of modern world governments and corporations, however, are exercising some bizarre expanse of their own permission to mess with us. This corporate industrial insistence that technology is the path to higher living standards is a paradigm that can crack, for whatever that’s worth. Transcend the device of doom.

In a sense, the atomic age has served a real purpose. It has shown in stark relief what may, very well, be the last thing to do. Since the genie is out of the bottle, there’s no choice but to work with it. Hence, the ritual, the dance, the Dionysian creativity crack, and the Grateful Dead. Music matters in a myriad of sources and forms. This Dead vintage is thankfully widespread. The tunes are serving, fracturing time, and creating bubbles of space in which disorder blown apart and reassembled in present tense. Members of societies and communities are like cells in a body. Who’s to say there can’t be a healthy cell in a sick body? The choice of illness and wellness can be quite tricky. Yet, there’s nothing too tricky about streaming roots American music, or heading down the path of world heritage music chasing out a lead. It is out there to be found.

• Maybe you’ll find direction / Around some corner where it’s been waiting to meet you -Box of Rain