Several Hours Before Trump is President

1/7/2017

Slippery Slime. That's how I'd sum up the collective vibe of the Earth right now. It's almost 3 in the morning. I just opened the first beer I've had since leaving San Francisco a couple of months ago. My buddy and I considered loading into his multi-color Saturn automobile, leaving on a mission to Washington D.C. to go witness the Donald Trump's inauguration in person, but ultimately we decided to stay here on the Cumberland Plateau, and just watch the live televised coverage over the internet. The same friend and I took an impromptu road trip to Baltimore from Florida the day after the Freddie Gray riots broke out. We lost 99% of the video footage from that trip, but one clip survived. Here's a link to the surviving video for your viewing pleasure, but that's all one more story for another day. Halfway through this beer, I'm reminded of another time, months ago. I was in Olympia, Washington. I had been there a few days, sleeping in the alcove of the back door of a mechanic shop, on the concrete in my sleeping bag. The city had already impressed me as one of the strangest in the United States. There was lots of good beer there along with an abundance of a sort of raw live music I was really digging on. I woke up early that morning to go get free breakfast from the Salvation Army.

Current Affairs: #NoDAPL and the Media

Here we are, in the now.
The world is always scrambling to figure out just what the hell is going on, in the local realm, the national realm, the global realm, and the intergalactic realm (regarding the wingnuts). Today, the news is addressing the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. The headlines say the Army Corps of Engineers has denied granting the necessary permits to finish constructing the now infamous section of pipeline that was planned to be installed beneath the Missouri River. These reports have led way to everything between celebration and skepticism for anyone who is emotional or financial investment stake impacted by the pipeline and the protests. As a person who is interested in media and social trends, I produced this video as a social commentary:

Weird In & Weird Out, Still

I arrived in Tennessee two days ago. I tried to produce posts to float in a rapid flow of publications, however after my first post from Hallow's Eve's Eve, I found limited energy to use the plentiful resources available on the streets of San Francisco, and  kept my writing from transcending paper to the screen. Even what I was able to put on paper came in small blips and lacked a sense of completion. Nonetheless, I will pull the words off the pages and put them here, now:

Within twelve hours of publishing my first post on this blog, I traded my laptop for an ounce and a half of chronic pot and sixty federal reserve notes. Looks like I'm back to pen and paper for a little while, but now I've got coffee and cigarette money in my pocket.

Experiments in Progress

I've been on the streets and in the parks of San Fran for almost all of a few days. It's been a wild ride. I left Florida nearly four months ago. I was only in Florida three months, coming from an eight months stent of adventuring in Tennessee with my motorcycle. I think Sheryl Crow said it best: “Every day is a winding road.”
I'm making a lot of eye contact with hundreds, possibly thousands, of unique and sometimes intense windows to the soul each day in this city. I catch a lot of people looking at me already by the time my eyes meet theirs. Sometimes they give me some sort of coy facial greeting from afar, and some times they shift their ocular focus away from me, which is a kinetic expression in itself. Some people intentionally keep from making eye contact with me, although I can tell they're watching me from their peripheral. The most interesting people, to me, are the ones who engage in mutual eyeball exchanges in synchronicity with our existential rhythm, despite our total non-relationship. Its these people that seem to me to be most genuine, regardless whether they are kind or predatory, or perhaps a little of both.