it's hard to think about life without the energy sources we currently use. just last night I drove 25 minutes alone in my car to a remote point break to surf powerful overhead waves at sunset. I love surfing and would not be able to do it without a car.
I ride my bike to work everyday. the reasons for it have more to do with pleasure and convenience than wanting to avoid using fossil fuels. riding my bike is not enough.
when will shit hit the fan? how much longer will our ecosystem sustain us before it starts to sputter in fits of exhaustion?
the video below highlights how Canada is managing its oil sands and water resources. the management style is that old one where maximizing profit trumps any other considerations -as opposed to valuing profit, people and environment equally.
I've said this before and I reckon most of you who come here would agree, that we as people are not separate from environment. we must come to terms with this fact and act accordingly.
the environmental movement has been painted with a green brush and many people see that colour and disassociate themselves, thinking that they are not green, that their values are red or blue.
but the environment is where we live.
it is our food, shelter and comforter. without it we won't survive, nor will our children. my son included.
bailed work yesterday after JB confirmed my suspicions that a certain spot would be working. it was a high tide day yesterday so likely it wouldn't be as good as it coulda been. but the water and air are still warm so whose counting?
took out the fish for its first frontside session. damn I love that board. the waves were small but clean and fast with a mini hollow section on the inside. sat next to the kelp covered rock and picked off the smaller ones that were swinging wide. with the high tide the wave peels really close to shore on top of round topped boulders so that when you kick out you have to go over the back of the wave or risk a broken fin or worse.
Blacks was there pullin into little closeouts with ease. made one or two I think. we traded waves for a while. out on the horizon a deep azure sky skirted the ocean surface and then faded from a dark to light grey. the heavy fog diffused the remaing light casting a surreal glow across the viewscape. the red faced headland and remaining greenery on the shoreline added to the amazing colours.
what I love about surfing is how it motivates me to notice things around me. how it gets me out there and allows me to experience the moods and shifts of days and seasons. Blacks and I have over the past three years shared so many amazing sunrises, so many different skies and winds. we've seen seals -alive and dead. we've paddled out in minus insanely cold temperatures to surf knee high waves and on blustery victory at sea days to surf huge storm surf. always stoked.
"A human being is part of the whole called by us universe ... We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us."Albert Einstein
I would take this idea into a smaller arena in the sense of how we think of ourselves in terms of body and mind. our culture tends to see body and mind as two separate forms, dependent on each other only for the basics of oxygenated blood flow. but is this really so? can our mind function at its peak analytics if our bodies too are not at their peak?
there's no Utopian movement. there will be no critical mass towards a humanizing of our race. there can be however individual and independent change. each and everyone can choose how to move through the space and time in which he finds himself. I am only now learning that and only daily work will allow me to discover more.
I squandered my twenties in drink and inaction, actions that were a cause or perhaps caused, my dysthimic downs. and it is only in the last few months that I am beginning to see what is possible. I am not referring to social achievements or feats of strength. I am referring to a refining of my own skills and abilities. whether it be striking keys or riding waves or even riding my bike to work. the more I realize the interconnectedness within me and with our greater ecosystem the more I reduce the friction with which I move through time and space.
early bird went hungry this morning. solitary drive keepin an eye out for deer in the headlights -coffee in hand to sharpen vision. at the coast the fog still thick and milky. a southwest wind pushing through the fog with surprising stealth and the high tide making a dribbling weak mess out of secret sandbar plain sight number sevens.
alone on the boardwalk I admire the handsome Atlantic. her sands slowly gaining momentum in the less turbulent summer months as if we were on different clocks. in winter we swimmers get fat for warmth and perhaps from less movement while she slims, spitting her sands out with each long period swell that rocks her skirts. the icy cold brine like a tonic for making beaches turn to stone for months only to magically appear sandy in August.
standing there I relish sleep and so after looking over the dunes and admiring the sword thin grasses swaying at ten knots I got back in the car drove home peacefully. no music in the car for over a year now -a fact that seems to escape my attention but also provides solitude on drives to visit Maritime shores.
now I will turn my attention to other matters. bacon sizzling and later back yard shenanigans and if I'm motivated a run around the peninsula to see what Sunday people do with mid-days.
evenin edit:
got a call from Picaso 'round mid day -says he's gonna take a gander. I catch a ride and we score low tide grinders with two others at secret sandbar plain sight number seventeens. a surfy day after all.
as times change and one generation's seeming demise shifts into the next generations pop culture emblems one thing remains constant. humanity is not humanist. humanism is nothing but a construct of our romantic ideals of peace and love. humans are in fact animals (duh)who live by the basic code of survival using intrinsic instinct. where's the hope? self reliance. it is our nature.
classic Junior Delgado tune with Lee Perry production
what am I doing for earth day? well I rode my bike to work in the pissing spring rain. please hold your applause. riding my bike to work is not going to "save our planet."
this may get a little ranty so cool your boots.
We’ve been getting duped for a long time with this earth day bullshit. Now everyone is “green” and every company offers a “green” product line. You can pledge monthly tithing’s to save: whales, wolves, hawks, beaches, frogs and trees. Hell you can even pledge to send some poor belly full of worms kid in a developing country to school. You can put their picture on your fridge and smile each time you go for your next beer. But really what it all boils down to is saving our own asses.
Before I get too cynical let I re-direct.
We are animals. Unlike other animals like iguanas in the Galapagos Islands, we do not speciate. This means that we are not limited by geographic location as we can adapt to live in any part of our earth. Like the iguana, we have a habitat which needs a basic level of natural functioning to support the life of the iguana. Any radical changes in the Galapagos sea iguanas’ environment and it will die. This is the same for us. However, because we can adapt so easily, and we can eat and digest just about anything, our habitat is not as easily derailed as say that of a really specialized animals like the marine iguana of the Galapagos.
All I’m saying through the above obvious statement is that we need to be honest with ourselves and with the language we use. We are destroying our own habitats. Some have destroyed theirs so completely that it doesn’t support them any longer and they must rely on aid. Haiti is the perfect example. I won’t waste any virtual ink on the blaming game as to who is responsible for the most damage to our habitat (we all know it’s the developed countries). The bottom line is that if you shit in your cage then you gotta sleep in your shit.
So what is the answer? How do we fix things? According to some it may be too late but perhaps the most powerful thing anyone in a developed country can do to help preserve their “own” habitat is to radically cut down on their total consumption of resources. I will leave it that as I intended this to be more linguistic discussion than an ethical argument about consumerism environmentalism.
faaack. we're getting hammered by a fucking snowstorm. I busted my ass preparing everything for a DP this morning. woke up after restless sleep - [I dreamed that B was gut shot in a war and refused to get treatment] - I checked the weather and the roads were sketchy as fuck and the offshores gusting to 50 knots! back to bed. then I got up again had coffee and checked the work email and by boss is mad. then I shoveled for about a half hour, showered and rode my bike in. the ride was OK 'cause it was snowy and not icy. I had to get on a main road towards the centre of town and got fucking sprayed with dirty salty diarrhea like snow all over my jeans -why I didn't wear my rain pants is beyond me. I get to work and realize that both sets of car keys are in me jacket which means B and her visiting parents are stuck at home which in turn means that it's unlikely that I'll be able to go for an evening surf as they'll need the car. foiled again. skunked. office working is for people whose passion in life is not dependent on the weather."
on my way in to work this morning I was thinking about the ghetto boys. I felt like my mind was playin tricks on me and I was wrestling my way out. what kinda tricks? dirty ones. ones that make you feel like you know where you stand when in fact you’re about to sink in quicksand.
“I fear people are seeking community here at the expense of real community, taking social risks 'online' but barely able to have meaningful interactions with their neighbors. It is going to catch up to us. There's nothing better than going a way from computers, cell phones and all that shit and having to actually interact with real live physical people.”
the internet gives us a false sense of community. I say false because although we do create some sort of community through our blogs or forums or the scourge that is social networking sites such as fecalbook, it is all based on words and images which may or may not reflect anything about our individual day to day lives. knowingly or not we build these virtual persona and social groups which exist primarily in our heads and fingertips.
you may ask what is wrong with that. isn’t it the way of the future?
remember that sci-fi film a while back when the guy goes into the future and meets a girl. he thinks that they are about to have sex when suddenly she sits him down and hands him some sorta helmet with which they will make a virtual romantic experience. the irony of course being that they are in a room, alone, sitting mere inches from each other –the perfect conditions for a true intimate experience.
the point I’m trying to make is that we are already separated enough from the natural world tucked away in our offices and cars and malls. and now with our “internet communities” we are separating ourselves even farther from a natural experience. humanity separated itself from nature a long time ago with its “taming” of nature and creation of the scientific method. this intellectual separation from nature has had many ill side effects which have been written about and documented by the same said scientists. however, this current separation that is taking place from natural human relationships is still new and can have massive potential downfalls.
in the immediate I write these words as a didactic self exercise –exorcism. I want to remind myself that what gives me meaning is making dinner with B each night, or meeting a certain dark one at the crack of dawn for a dip in the turbulent north Atlantic, or making lots of double shot espressos with my co-worker all day long to see if we can hallucinate from too much caffeine.
this space is no more than a sounding board for my ego, a way for me to learn to express myself with the ultimately ineffectual written word (more on this topic some other time).
I leave with the classic from Bushwick Bill and crew.
Brothers and coal miners in Nova Scotia, Cecil and Charlie are eating lunch about 4 km out under the Atlantic, 244 m below the ocean floor. photo by John F. Mailer.
"All of the approximately 1.4 million tonnes of coal we imported from Colombia last year came from one infamous mine in the northwest: Cerrejon. It is the largest open pit mine in the world..."
"Cerrejon has a 20-year history of violently displacing indigenous and Afro-Colombian farming communities, including Manantial, Caracoli and, most notoriously, Tabaco. Arsenault has written that "the village of Tabaco, a sustainable farming community populated primarily by Afro-Colombians, was destroyed by Cerrejon's bulldozers in 2001 to make way for more coal exports."
The bike commute over the past few months has been mostly uneventful. Don’t get me wrong though, the burning morning skies are still breathtaking. Feeling the change of seasons on a daily basis helps to keep me connected to planet earth as I spend most of my waking time in an office.
Today the ride was a bit brutal due to minus 10 C. air temps. I could feel the moisture from my labored breathing settling on my beard and moustache and quickly solidifying into ice. My fingertips hurt like someone was sticking needles into them. Aside from that I had to be careful for black ice –easily identifiable this morning as the road is stained bone white by salting. But at just three miles my ride is short and easy and I was soon warm again.
I love riding my bike and sometimes I forget because it’s a daily occurrence. As I’ve said before, I have these bones and tendons and muscle and I aim to use ‘em.
I snagged this photo from flickr to show what the first day of the year looked like around here. the storm started new year's eve around 8 PM and ended about the same time new year's day. I shoveled multiple times and enjoyed the peace and quiet of a snowy day with B and Peta.
My good friend Crusty B has been quietly developing a thoughtful collection of posts on a blog titled Pelagic Lovin. Surfically trained on the heavy waves of Kauai, Crusty has more style than attitude and paddles out every time. Check out this post-air re-entry on his futuristic swallow tailed quad sled. Shoots.
lately I've been questioning my personal meat consumption for environmental and ethical reasons -which I won't go into here. some things are best dealt with on an individual level. it's funny though because it seems that the world conspires so that we see coincidences everywhere (I realize some may call these coincidences smart marketing). regardless, Banksy's latest art project poses the meat consumption question in a new and darkly humored way in the form of a pet store in New York City. Check out the clip.
the Atlantic is in full form right now. Storms churn off the coast of the Dark Continent and make their way west. I hope for safety for those in the Caribbean and lower East mainland. I hope for long period lines and offshore winds for us. Gotta dream no?
Yesterday I arrived at the trail with heavy head from the previous days’ revelries. What had been an afternoon of watching the opening match of the Euro Cup with my cousin Eduardo and B turned into an all night affair complete with B making Vietnamese salad rolls and I BBQ’ing some chops for the hungry mouths. Needless to say the first half hour of pedaling felt tougher than it should have.
The forest is alive and vibrant right now. As I entered the woods I was greeted with a forest floor covered in ferns. I love ferns. Large areas covered in ferns have a shimmery look as the leaves sway with the breeze and create a fuzzy landscape. Dotting the ferns were some of the most amazing orchids I’ve ever seen. Called the Showy Lady Slipper they are “Nova Scotia's most impressive orchid, the Showy Lady Slipper, Cypripedium reginae blooms in July. We only have a few isolated populations in Intervale ferns and bogs.” I had no idea that orchids grew here.
Riding a bike through the forest is one of my favourite things to do. At first I think it was because of the bike and the adrenaline brought on by flying along narrow trails through trees and over everything in my path. But as the years go by I have learned to love the feeling of simply being in the forest, under my own volition, sweating and pushing the one geared bike through the terrain and watching as the forest goes through it’s stages. Yesterday I was lucky to be alone. I saw one racy couple blow past me as I was exciting a nasty little trail called The Skull. I dismounted and held my bike off the trail so they could go by. Then I made it out to the clearing and drank some water and took a needed rest before plunging into the next loop.
I dropped into a new trail that I had somehow missed before. It was fast and swoopy with banked turns. As I crested some of the hills I pushed down on the backside and gained speed with out spin. Generating speed through taking advantage of momentum is one of my favourite parts of wheeled fun. When I lived in Oregon I learned how to pump the transitions at Newberg skate park. Pumping transitions on the bike is similar but with two wheels instead of four. The combination of using your muscles and attention to navigate such off camber terrain is an incredible human feat- it's amazing how our brains and bodies can work in unison so well.
I just checked the Navy wave analysis models for the week. It looks like it will be flat. I haven’t surfed in over a month now and it’s beginning to feel like I don’t surf.
feeling a bit of cabin fever. we awoke this morning to an ice storm -post snow storm. I took Peta out for a slippery stroll and then shoveled the sidewalk in the freezing rain. B and I have been stuck in the house ever since. She worked on her oil painting and helped me to hem my new wool trousers. I messed around the house, made curry chicken and rice for lunch and did some calisthenics.
There's a big swell with a slight east bent to it. I sure hope the roads are clear enough to make the drive out tomorrow to a left that I've only surfed once but works wonders with some east in it and favourable tide.
hope the rest of you out there are doing well. I will leave unno with this lickle Ras Michael ting here.
This week I have somehow managed to read several different pieces about a new form of public participatory culture happening across the globe. The idea is basically that everyday people, like you reading this, and me typing while at work, are coming together without leadership or hidden agendas to share information, ideas, dreams and even practical information. This has been quite evident as a movement with the internet and things like blogging and Wikipedia. But it is not limited to cyberspace. One of the articles I read was in Ode Magazine and it talked about the G8 summit protests, which brought together thousands of people who were there to represent a myriad of ideologies, from environmental issues to religion, human rights and business.
There has always been a sort of strange relationship to the idea of "the man” controlling society. Some people refer to the man with a sense of dread; while others laugh at the thought that there is some hidden power out there controlling everything, or at least watching. Whether or not the “man” exists or not may soon become irrelevant because technology and communications are allowing normal people to share ideas and create community like never before.
Take this blog her for example. I started writing on Ku Yah! about a year ago. My intention was to practice my writing and have a way to get it out of my head and notebooks. What it’s really done is caused me to write. You see I’ve come realize that, having the desire to write and actually writing are two different things. In the span of a year I have certainly grown in my own sensibilities as a writer, I have come closer to understanding where my skills and strengths are and perhaps even where I may want to move with my writing in the future. But those are consequences which I set out to achieve.
What I hadn’t expected was to be absorbed into an international community with other bloggers. We link each other, read each others ideas, follow each others links to far flung cyberspace reaches and learn about new ideas. And blogging is only scratching the surface. Participatory projects like , Flickr, Wikipedia and WiserEarth are changing the way information is valued. If you ever had the Encyclopedia Britannica sales guy come to your house and make his pitch to your parents, using you as an excuse for the exorbitant amount of dough they had to lay out for this printed knowledge, then you have seen what kind of pressure this can have on a person.
What is exciting now is that knowledge which is free to the end user, and was created for free, will tend to have less of an agenda than knowledge created for profit. Maybe we will see history books 30 years from now being written based on blog archives and not by historians working for massive publishers with huge lobbying power. And maybe then history will be a bit more objective and inclusive of all people.
So as I close down the workday I feel excited about the possibilities. I feel that the future is not all Global Warming and wars. Of course the key is participation, and participation is the corner stone of democracy, and George Bush is not democracy. So I plan to get out there and conitinue reading, linking, writing, and more importantly –doing.
Here's a new free read for all of you boys and girls who don't mind rollin up yer right pants leg to get around town. Check it out. It comes from one of the coldest bike culture cities in North America -so you know these guys are not weekender fancy pants.
Had a secret swell session yesterday. The forecast didn't see it coming. Lucky for me, Hi-T's much better half saw some phat lines rolling in at the point on her way home. We were in the water by 4 p.m. Water temp is .1 Celsius (32 degrees F.). When you get a good solid flush of cold water inside your wetsuit hood you are suddenly stunned. It takes a few seconds to regain some sort of vital functions. The waves were good -head high with bigger sets and clean as you wanna be.
T and I enjoyed a few rare lefts at the right point. Luckily there was enough time in between sets that you didn't have to worry about getting pinned on the rocks in front of the headland. Chuck (aka Connor, aka Law Man, aka Dr. Longboard) was catching the nicy outside mackers and cruizin through to the inside. A snapped leash only sidelined him for about 15 minutes while he fetched another.
The photos below are from today's hike at Crescent Beach. It reminded me of Hawaii's Big Island, exept that instead of lava fields there were ice fields. Peta got into a porcupine den and got a mouth full of quills. Her lower lip looked like she was more punk rock than you. She had about 40 to 50 piercings. Walked about 8 miles and experienced Nova Scotia beauty at it's best.
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