I thought a status update is in order. Here I am on the streets of an undisclosed city in Germany.

I am about 2 days from heading back to the states. I will be driving around the country through most of September, then in upstate New York for a bit, then to Thailand for a month getting myself set up for a prolonged stay. (One of my requirements for Visa status is to have a bank account with some amount of money in Thailand opened for at least two months, but you can only stay in the country for 30 days. So that is one thing I’l do.)

Some vocations I intend on pursuing while there.
1. Organic, permaculture farming.
2. Expanding and maintaining the family run store of the woman I am going with.
3. Teaching English or computer skills
4. Bamboo harvesting (her family has a lot of land and a bunch of bamboo.)
5. Painting.

I have also since finished writing an online book, which is far more complete than the rough draft form it began appearing in (and I have since pulled) on here. The general theme of it, if there is one, has to do with conscious narrative and self exploration. It sounds fruitier than I think it is. Big Dada.

I have also started writing a second book on anarchism, I have 11 chapters so far, not sure I will have very many more to add to it. I have at least one more in me on the drafting board.

And I am beginning a graphic novel with a writer friend of mine in LA, here is the nascent beginning of that.
He was the man behind the scenes of the dolphin video, here we are again.

Its been a creative time. I look forward to seeing you boys in NY. I also plan on doing some landscape painting while I am there, hopefully to sell it the rich tourists who come through for a little beer money.

Here is the introduction of my latest book project.

I am pretty sure that the quality and quantity of my OTB writing is going to dramatically improve once I am in NY, and that will all be highly dependent on the quality and quantity of the amount of time you boys hang out with me. Start running laps, do some pushups and eat your wheaties, otherwise you won’t be able to keep up.

As I get ready to leave San Francisco, I have become a lot more disciplined in everything I do.

Part of that has been writing and painting, which has continued apace in a regimented way.

Here is an excerpt of something I wrote today with a painting I about polished off for now here,

Long ago (well, early 20s, not so long) I used to fantasize about what it would be like to be considered a great painter, and worked and worked toward realizing that fantasy from a personal perspective. It got to a point where it was increasingly obvious that I was not a great painter, nor would I ever be considered or actually be one, and that deflated my drive to create.Why spend all this time in pursuit of a reality that is pure fantasy? It was when I gave up on this fantasy entirely that I could continue. Then I painted purely from the fantasy of self-fulfillment and that worked for a long time, until it began to dawn on me that painting was a poor means of self-fulfillment. Eventually it became that I paint because I paint, for me to ascribe a narrative meaning to it is fiction. I do it because I really feel I must, I need no explanation beyond that, it is just an extension of myself. When I paint, I relapse any kind of narrative and turn to a dream state. The hardest question I can answer is what something that I painted means. They all start as some kind of idea, but then as I dream over it, it all becomes jumbled. Its sort of like trying to explain how a dream relates to something that happened recently in your life. The subtext of such an explanation is that who cares? and it only makes sense to the dreamer anyway. The Bitter Harmonypiece started as a vision of emergent behavior, but if you look into the shapes now, there are about half a dozen heads, several fish, some crustaceans, a monkey, and insects all meshed together. I didn’t plan any of that, I dreamed it while in the chair, and I didn’t intend on dreaming it. I never thought, I should put a monkey here, the figure emerged. The drawing started as billowing jellyfish like creatures all enmeshed together. And I could still continue dreaming on the marble-earth like sphere, as there are emergent figures within that I can see forming in my minds eye.

Bitter Harmony

 

It gets weirder from there.

Was out surfing yesterday with Kevin, who shot this video. A pod of dolphins were out fishing right near and all around us. At least 8 of them on the surface. Two of them came bounding over a big swell right at us. The video doesn’t quite do it justice as to how this looked in person. It looked liked they were going to leap right into us, but, since they are smart, they went under our boards. You can see me at the end struggling to find the meaning in this. Were they driving fish to the shore? Fucking with us? Surfing? Reminding us that absent our technology and opposable thumbs, we are powerless against them in the water? No one will ever know except for the dolphins. Sometimes dolphins can make people nervous if they are afraid of sharks, but there is an easy way to tell dolphins apart from sharks: dolphins are a lot friendlier.

Also got this image of me surfing a wave right into a nuclear power plant. BONZAI!

What is important to you? Your money? Your life? The quality of your life? And what are the elements of a ‘life of quality?’ What is to be done for a culture in which these have become trivial matters with easy answers, but answers that are finally given to the wrong questions?

I grew up watching a man, a brilliant man, living in the darkness of his answers – such a darkness that he could never reach outside of it, and it was not to be entered; it was a canceling space. I vowed a vow accumulated from a thousand moments of disappointment never to let that space take me over.

It has been my impression that the doors to that darkness are everywhere; always accepting entrants. It captured my father when he was a young man, and my mother until her old age, most of my teachers and many of my friends. Accepting life “as it is,” accepting the realities of our time, has become the saddest and most egregious acquiescence; a world of questions without answers or answers without questions.

-James Keye

I have some personal news. Oh yeah, I am engaged, and will be in New York for a few months, in a few months. Now for the personal news.

A few weeks ago, I was in the London subway and picked up one of the news rags on a seat next to me. In it I found three stories. One was about the E-Coli strain that was sickening Germans, and the article had baffled speculation about where in the supply chain the food was poisoned, or even what food was contaminated. The second was a report by Oxfam stating that food scarcity is expected to rise sharply in the next 20 years as food prices double. The third was an article about the latest, greatest consumer invention; the Cannwhich. A sandwich that comes in a Pringles style can and is loaded with enough preservatives to last for a year.

*rimshot*

*********************
Long story short, I am leaving the United States. I already have a destination, but its possible I could go there and fail, or find the real price of failing to high to bear. But if I end up in the United States without a place to go, I intend on providing as much drag to this system by landing myself in prison, either through tax with-holdings, or whatever else I can do to cost the U.S. government or industrial capitalists money without hurting anyone physically. That is my backup plan, first, I’d rather see if I can withdraw my support for this system and give it to another culture or people I do not have moral issues with in how they exploit poor people, brutalize minorities, and attack other nations for reasons of capital control of the world’s resources. I am beginning the process of de-industrializing and de-imperializing myself, and I am starting in a rural province in Thailand, I know the government there is not perfect either, but I am climbing down a step at a time. We’ll see how low I can go.

Continued…