Books

minding your own business

20 Apr 2020 Dana Smith1 Comment

Man and Mind

I tend to listen to my inner voice and believe every single word. I trust that voice. It’s my voice.

I know that it is just a shameless mind speaking to me. Minds have no pride, they’ll say anything, and never stop talking to you even when they have nothing new to tell you, then they’ll worry, or repeat the same worn out gossip they’ve told you a thousand times before.

I think vacations are more about getting our mind out and about in the world. Keeping a mind confined to one place tends to trigger the onset of idle chatter and then the mind will start yammering on and on about the usual matters often described as having to do with our insecurities.

My mind has enjoyed sleep. We go early so we can get up early. My mind has decided with so much less socializing there really is no reason to remain up until all hours of the night. My mind has been treating me to performing dreams. We suffer engine failures, windstorms, no audiences, funny stuff that is so funny that it has to be a dream because the funny stuff can’t be that funny. Maybe, dreams are funny even without a joke.

Certified Head to Toe

There have been mental apparitions. I’ve been seeing things. It’s all about having the right mentality when you begin hallucinating. I think my mind is concerned about how long this new simple life is going to last and if I did have some sort of mental breakdown it might get us out of the house for an adventure. The lengthy isolation is beginning to take a mental toll.

I’m luckier than most. I have a spouse. I have a spouse I like to talk with. My mind I’ve noticed thinks variety is missing. Every now and again things happen, complaining starts in, there’s this grumbling about not getting out enough, that they’d like to go somewhere and do something. I take my wife along and my mind finds being out and about more soothing to have her company.

On television there is this funny show with this odd man, and he’s got a mind too. You can tell. When he talks, he can’t help giving his audience a piece of his mind. It is funny because when his mind is on display you can tell his mind is kind of different than most minds.

More important to me than demanding optimism from my mind is getting my mind ready, ready mind means I am prepared to pounce upon the next moment and willing to go wherever that next moment may take me. Being in self isolation mode makes this a pretty nifty free ride to the nearest new shiny object my mind might wish to dance with.

My mind reminds me of a yappy chihuahua. Small, noisy and ready to bite your hand. This is what has come of my mind.

Books

Patagonia Whisperer

22 Feb 2020 Dana Smith1 Comment

I traveled down to Tucson. Stopped in Quartzite slept in the back of the Volvo. Renting a room from midnight to early morning isn’t any fun. Sleeping in the back of a station wagon suits me fine.

As success and money have found their way into my life so has travel by air, hotels and rental cars. Air travel passes over the ordinary people and places I find matter. I don’t want to just come and go on a trip. I want to be with what I find in between.

An isolated high desert town with fifty miles of uninhabited highway between what comes next riles up the pangs unavailable to a citizen living in a megalopolis.

Driving down a main street with every parking place empty is an opportunity. Crawling along heading the other way on this street is an old man and a big dog in a pickup truck.

I get out and walk a few blocks. The pace of life is apparent. Living within a mile of a twelve lane freeway choked all day with traffic wears a nervous system thin.

Setting aside time to feel lonesome will revive the sagging spirits. There is a medicinal quality to an aimless walkabout in the middle of a town that’s been grinding along at a slow crawl. You can hear your own footsteps. A thought in your mind gets the attention it deserves.

By the time you have circled back to where you started you’ve got a fresh list of changes you want to make. There are recipes you’ll want to try, friends you put on your list to call and a promise to take better care of your spouse.

Keeping a ready mind open for an ordinary day is no mean feat. If you can hear the chirp of a sparrow clear as a bell you’re on the path. You might use the position of the sun to locate your own sense of place. Clouds sweeping past above will be noticeable in such circumstances.

A walk through Patagonia won’t be anything fancy. Won’t be any high priced homes, won’t see any new cars, but there will be a chance to hear from a crowded out piece of who you are.

Uncategorized

April 3rd, ’18

3 Apr 2018 Dana Smith1 Comment

In transit from Patagonia, Arizona today. Destination San Francisco Bay Area, think Emeryville via downtown Los Angeles. As ever buy a book, book a show and if you are so inclined surf around this site and find out more. More is good.

Oak Bar Ranch, Patagonia, Arizona

In terms of restoration of the mental and spiritual faculties I spent the last few days hiking trails where I might take measure of where I find the state of my inner ship.

This is the game of eat a little-hike alot. Stomach, feet, hips, eyes and open the mind. Most of the ruts I found were more to do with the interior landscape than those I found at my boot.

Transformation Abounding

Taking in the lonely outpost of Santa Cruz County’s one and truly only … Patagonia is tonic and elixir. You put the time in and you get the less tangled up mind out.

I continue to put more time into the Desert Harvester’s organization based in Tucson and dedicated to eating all things Sonoran Desert. This entire idea of making available the micronutrients of an ecosystem by ingestion makes all kinds of common Sense. That’s a rut I want to climb out of. I’d like a broader understanding of what we can find right here unpackaged, unprocessed and fresh and edible. I know little and would like to understand more. Cornflakes are nice enough but what about all these other wonders of the natural world?

Books

Time is Slow-Eternity is Long

31 Oct 201731 Oct 2017 Dana SmithLeave a comment

Five hundred miles later I arrived in Ajo, Arizona pitching my tent first- answering questions later.

My RV pull-through host didn’t disappoint packing a small sidearm while collecting my site use fee.

“You’ll want to pack the tent and be out of here by 8.” His tone of voice allowed me to crawl inside my own personal spaghetti western.

Sizing the hombre up I met his bid. “Partner, if I’m still here likely you best call the sheriff. Tell him another camper didn’t survive the night.”

He almost smiled, almost.

I found a town crawling with tarantulas, sun faded storefronts and bargain made in the basement tacos. I found much to recommend or not.

There exists in this frontier outpost an accelerant, a built into the equation escape velocity only to be impeded by highways blocked by checkpoints manned by Border Patrol Agents urging me to exercise my mother tongue before reluctantly waving the native born liberal mercenary through.

From the spoils of this southern quagmire I rolled into the Santa Catalina Mountains where at 8000’ I’d go hike by day and hole up in a cabin by night squaring a few circles with a stubborn yet still quirky open-minded friend.

The circumstances of my being on sabbatical and quarantine were mostly prose-induced and ‘civilization closing in on me’ fed. You heard of Eat-Sleep-Pray, this was more akin to Drink-Brag-Bray.

Fresh air and cheap whiskey possess medicinal qualities. My doctor urged me not put a lot of faith in one half of that equation.

In some quarters even possessing half a heart is better than none. I mean by shopworn insincerity you are in worse shape than me if that sorry half-heart is a winning hand.

But, whether I vent my spleen, spit out a lung, or bust my ass sometimes even the better of us mixed in with the rest of the rot have to belly up and fight off the demon slothful misery of self-pity and get back to the barricades.

If you are not feeling the vital juices of rejuvenation too damn bad, we are all on aching notice from the ticking clock that time goes slow and that soon enough we’ll all learn that eternity is long.

KOLD-TV Antenna for Tucson, Arizona

My Broadcasting Career and Welcome to Work Sign

Books

He is our Shame, Our Agony

1 Jun 2017 Dana SmithLeave a comment

To the Barricades

Pulling out of the Paris Agreement pisses me off. I’m furious with the titans of industry extorting our representatives into taking this outrageous action. We are the rogue nation with a blighted unhealable soul. Any semblance of our being that shining beacon on a hill just got tossed into the dustbin of history. A seventy year old manic-twitter-addicted Trump just picked a fight he’s going to lose. No matter how this decision turns out he’s going to lose. Most of the oil business is located in the South. Once before in our history we were forced to confront a region of our country intent upon profiting by means of a capitalism based upon the profits earned by use of slaves. All these many decades later we are again confronted by a belligerent malignant form of capitalism that this time insists must be allowed to profit from the oil they want to bring to market and sell. Like the slaves of past the oil they want to profit from is poisoning the only planet we have. It is against this insult to reason and without regard to capacity of our world to tolerate our carbon waste we will lash out and strike back. The fossil fuel industry is in decline. It is the past not the future. Our cause is right and what I stand up for is the future generations yet to come here. We must find the means to resist those pieces of our humanity that remain broken and beyond our ability to bring under control. Trump is a failure of our electoral system. He is a venial man of inconsequential imagination and intellect. He is our shame, brought our democracy to agony, his and those like him and all their venom need to be bound and sent packing into the history books of failed Presidency’s.

Books

Paid Well Enough to Not See it Coming…

29 May 201729 May 2017 Dana SmithLeave a comment

For 25 years, I have written about the social and natural evolution of Napa, a diverse county that includes rare and valuable biological “hotspots” and 140,000 people, most of whom are associated with what’s now referred to as the wine “industry.” During that time, I have learned something about developers.

Foremost is the fact that inside all of them is a 6-year-old kid dying to get out and dig a really deep hole. When they finally do get to do so, they fill the hole up with something that wasn’t there before and then repeat the experience with minor variations ad infinitum.

More disturbing, with far-reaching ramifications for all Americans, is the other fact: developers deeply, irrationally, and often vindictively resent anyone who objects to their plans, for whatever reason. This includes neighbors, citizens, scientists, clergy, and elected officials. But none receive more opprobrium than “environmentalists.”

James Conaway, Opinion Piece in Napa Register Guard May 26, 2017

http://napavalleyregister.com/wine/land-use-wine-and-trump/article_e093b513-692f-5da9-ae76-d908161b6e5f.html

Beyond the Present

Napa County’s 140,000 citizen’s can’t halt the torrential rain of developers arriving here with plans to build. If you are keeping score at home the developers remain unbeaten. Among the wealthiest among us a trophy property in this famed wine region is an essential element to any property portfolio. Government is controlled by Big Ag. You may want to be on the Board of Supervisor’s only if the wine industry deems your vote as sympathetic to the cause and your spine sufficiently pliant.

The velocity of the pillaging has only increased with land prices. Ordinary folk are squeezed out. The wealthiest among us grouse about not being able to land helicopters at “our” vineyards. They are crestfallen to learn their original 20,000 square foot chateau’s are going to be needlessly scaled back.

All this desecration is taking place before a numb and distracted public. Big money drowns the popular will. Getting in the way of the juggernaut risks personal ruin. Fish extinction events are in the history books now. Childhood cancer rates are the worst in the state and remain under study while astute players continue to spray pesticides and resist regulation. Water tables are fragile and any slowdown in pumping of groundwater is deemed unnecessary. With the valley built out what remains is now under threat.

That’s the score. This is the truth beneath the veneer. The barons of big business can’t help themselves and the ordinary citizens are so far unable to organize and stop them. The denial is soon to come to a bitter ecosystem induced end that nobody paid well enough to look the other way ever saw coming.

Books · Uncategorized

Finding Patagonia’s Better Nature

27 Mar 201630 Mar 2016 Dana SmithLeave a comment

You Can Get Anything You Want

I arrived in Patagonia, Arizona for the very first time in 1993. The bitty place along the southern border met spring that year with a spectacular bloom. The tallest cottonwoods in North America make their home along Sonoita Creek. That they are that much larger, in a town that is just that much smaller, exaggerates the terms of being smitten with this treasured place.

By all accounts what work a hearty new arrival might find Patagonia is less than none. Santa Cruz County has been drying up for decades. Patagonia for all its rural majesty requires that you come prepared to bet on yourself. I’d met a biologist that had wagered his life. He was sent by the Smithsonian to study the rarest and tiniest of birds… the elf owl. He had found a grand total 37 individuals scattered over thousands of square miles both near and far along the southern Sonoran Desert. Elf owl hunting is convenient to nothing. It came up in our whittled conversation that once his research was completed he’d likely remain here instead of moving on. That’s how the town grows.

Former Residents Doing Eternity

No two people are alike. Patagonia tends to attract the oddest lot. The binding that glues souls together here is quirkiness. One thing everyone should understand is that big bugs become a part of your daily awareness. Then there are the venomous creatures you’ll share Patagonia with. Then, there are the many different types of hummingbirds that make their home here. You’ve got drug smugglers and Border Patrol Agents playing cat and mouse. All this in a town you can walk end to end in less than ten minutes if it’s not too hot and your not too addled by drink.

There is nothing really you can do in Patagonia. Not on your own. If you stick it out your life fills up with time spent sharing mutual circumstances with neighbors. You’ll borrow sugar, have a cup of coffee, barbecue steak on mesquite wood and knock tequila down then chase it with as ordinary a can of beer as the least amount of money will buy.

Last Century Fixer-Upper Just Came on the Market

Weather is a good topic to talk to death. Maybe a friend has four wheeled off the mountain, where they homestead, to come argue at the Wagon Wheel over the political Armageddon the legislature is the fault of in Phoenix. The dang urban refugees that have made home here have brought their permissive and decidedly progressive ideas with them. Patagonia’s problems do not require ideology. You can toss that there narrow mindedness into the septic tank.

A random cross section of humanity has been littered throughout the town. The spiritually awakened are cheek to jowl with the atheists. What remains of the ranchers holding on here bellies right up with the radical environmental activists. Everyone aims to improve Patagonia so long as it does not involve pavement. There is little use for improvement. Dirt and dust are preferred. If that seems a bit contrary that’s the whole point of the thing. You will find that a dirt road self selects a new arrival. If they can see the beauty in dirt that is a sure sign that they will be best suited to fitting in here.

Four wheel driving nowhere to spend time doing nothing

About now, in spring, is glory in Patagonia, Arizona. It’s the time to come. As soon as you are ready. Many of the migratory birds are moving through. The mesquite is blooming and Sonoita Creek is running. Get off the pavement, park that rig, take a hike. Think about things. Be available for nothing. If you are lucky enough you might just find the biggest prize of all, the chance to be in intimate rural contact with yourself.

San Rafael Valley Southeast of Patagonia with the Huachuca’s Yonder…

Books · Uncategorized

Fairer Trade… Looks Like This

12 Mar 2016 Dana SmithLeave a comment

Congress one

Where the Ploys Are…

“Income distribution characteristics” is a term to describe how a free trade agreement alters how and where money flows in an economy.

It may be true that a new trade deal increases the total amount of money being exchanged between two trade partners, but it may also be true that more of that money ends up distributed to fewer people not more.

During negotiations there are rules and agreements written into the trade deals. What has happened is that regardless of what is promised the profits of free trade have not been distributed back down to the workers. Most of the profits have been diverted to the executives and shareholders.

So we are smeared with terms like protectionists, anti-free trade etc.… when that isn’t true. What is true is this. A trade deal should be good for workers too. They have to distribute the profits accordingly. Then, we have fair trade and a reason to support such agreements.

Our democracy thrives with a healthy middle class. It is in all of our interests to do what it takes to make that middle class as big and as robust and as prosperous as is possible. Enlightened fair trade agreements that have provably enlightened income distribution characteristics good for our country would go a long way toward that goal.

Books · Performances · Uncategorized

The Lunch Bucket Card Carrying Men in My Family

9 Mar 2016 Dana SmithLeave a comment

lunch bucket

Card Carrying Sandal Wearing Lunch Bucket Raised Man-Boy

I grew up in a lunch bucket household. The men I knew carried union cards. They drank beer, smoked cigarettes and loved Kenny Stablers stylish Oakland Raider leadership. They voted straight D ticket right on down the line.

Oakland wasn’t much of a port unless you call the Army Depot a port, but that was for the boys in Viet Nam. The Warehousemen, Longshoremen, Teamsters, Stevedores… they were on the Embarcadero in the City moving cargo in and out of town by truck, train and ship.

Then, the world changed. We got lots of stuff. Boy did we get stuff. We also got NAFTA, we got China into the WTO, we got stuff happening around the world while we hollowed out the working stiffs world here.

Arugula eating Whole Foods shopping people working at the highest high tech companies within the confines of some of the sweetest zip codes in North America were thought the wave of the future, not just the future they were the ever present stakeholders in our go-go everybody’s an investor economy.

Then, the thud and dud of the financial sector, the end of retiring on selling houses to each other, and the reality that those lunch bucket friends of ours are pissed off. I thought it spot on that R’s discussing cuts to capital gains taxes and inheritance taxes had to be blowing it out of their …. Lunch bucket workers want jobs, wages, benefits, and paid vacation. Few if any of us need capital gains tax relief.

So, here is my bottom line. Fair trade right? Not free trade. We need to set policy so that the lunch bucket types get a living wage, some medical, dental, and a school that doesn’t cost them an arm and a leg and their first born donated to the bank they got their student loans from.

Not so difficult to grip hold of is it? Clean streets, decent infrastructure, good schools, get on with the renewable energy revolution, stay the hell out of foreign wars, and could we cut the crap out of beating up on women? Right? Simple enough…

Those of us with the lunch bucket history? We drink less whiskey than our ancestors and we don’t smoke anymore. We drink wine. We watch our cholesterol. We like football but are worried about the concussion thing. And if the people in Washington don’t snap out of it and start doing the lunch bucket crowds business we’ll go there and bang a few heads together until they remember who we truly are.

Books

Pass the Beer Nuts… Or How I Learned to Love the End

1 Jun 2015 Dana SmithLeave a comment

The Mayan People as Example

Our globalized interconnected world was sold as a cure all for every kind of inefficiency of free enterprise. Free markets were going to spread democracy to every corner of the earth.

Something went wrong. I know it, you know it; we all know that something is wrong. We are simply that much more talented at making a mess of the whole project called civilization.

Everything feels like propaganda. Facts go contested while opinion metastases. Every enterprise has a public relations spokesman. Turkey, China and Iran curtail access to the internet for obvious reasons. Internet providers in so called free countries search our search terms for nefarious advantage.

It was hotter in Anchorage, Alaska than in Phoenix last week. Our attention span on that one fact hasn’t even outlasted this last sentence. Down the memory hole the impending disaster vanishes while enterprise of every kind continues to plunge humanity into the corner we find ourselves.

Still, we get that there are some very big players doing everything in their power to remain in power so they may continue to do everything that their balance sheet compels them to do. Individual conscience is irrelevant.

News outlets go rogue. Owned by huge conglomerates our present day journalist is constrained by ownership to exercise self-survival and restraint in criticizing the hand that feeds them. You want to work in Russia? You dance to that tune. How about China? You sing in concert with the power elite there as well. We are all under threat. All the bases have been covered. You step out of line and you are gone.

What we have is a juggernaut where the wealthy the world over have by every means available foisted the best political stalemate money can buy. Ideology and religion is a sideshow. That is so last century. Money is first, last, and always where power actually resides.

China’s pollution isn’t totalitarian. Climate change isn’t a theory. The latest round of free trade talks has not a word in it designed to save us from ourselves.

The most powerful military force in the world can’t win a war. We have not won in Viet Nam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine or Israel; each is an intractable problem left unresolved draining us our need to focus on earth’s most urgent problem-global climate change.

With the invention of the shipping container, the standardization of shipping every kind of product across seas was supposed to fix what ailed the world. Prosperity would be shared they promised.

There was plenty of money to be made that ended up in the pockets of the few. That is what is called a global head fake. At the top our elites play a good game of keep away. You think the Cayman Islands are for vacation? Food stamps are for suckers. Unemployment benefits are for slackers. Social security is socialism and national health care is an abomination.

Climate change is not a game. It is a problem that touches every single person in the world. It is about the survival of the human species. Every other issue is subordinated to what we can do to prevent the world going into an irreversible climatic crisis that could trigger the end human life.

We have been conned into transforming our financial system into a worldwide mechanism for amplifying our least moral impulses. We are left scratching our capitalistic heads. The best minds wonder how we can repair the economic and political system before it destroys us all.

WTF is voter suppression about? Somebody please explain why the denial of reproductive health care services for women is a virtue? How about building more nuclear power plants? Why have the police in the United States shot and killed over 400 of us in just the last five months? Who are the sycophants that argue cutting taxes on the wealthiest citizens in the world is the best way to solve every problem we face? Where does this come from?

I speak to not a soul in my daily life that isn’t aware of how off the rails our international system has gone. There are no more winnable wars. There is not a corporation that can be stopped. The climate crisis isn’t coming. It is here.

Can we respond? Can we save ourselves from ourselves? We will know soon enough…

What a Pair.......That is Sunshine with her Partner — What a Pair…….That is Sunshine with her Partner

Seriously Comedy Requires A Lot of Laughter…