EVEN 2.2 
Kombucha Heaven

What was his worth then? As perfect and pacific as it seemed, this had been arranged. He was not here by accident––he would have hazarded that the algorithm had let him in, but that was yesterday. As Xit described it, facial recognition was nothing without knowledge infill,  curation instead of culling. 

It was not his flute, that was too low key and off-the-grid for even the hippest to grasp. It was not his baby blue eyes, which contrasted intensely with a beard going grey. It was not even his semi-pure thoughts, as long as he unplugged from the insidiously debasing feed. How had John Bucket put it in "Slowly Learning?"

What would you tell me, you tell me
if I confessed that you were not my type
what would you sell me, you sell me
that algorithms make a like

chemistry drives evolution,
bots break that down to the level of vice––
institutions make bot-theft solutions,
theft of humanity through a device.

He took another sip of kombucha. Ah yes, it was that which he carried with him, the one brew he allowed himself in this traveling game. Layer and layer of teas, fruits, honey, coconut sugar, seeds even, nuts, built up over time, distilled, smoothed over, tasted, until what he got was often a sip of perfection––though it varied from day to day, hour to hour. 

​They wanted his kombucha. They said it was part of of the fabric. And who was to say it wasn't?

Art funds the creative projects. Avocado Sun is for sale here. 

I had a dream last night and a new chapter of EVEN came to me. With 3-4 novels ongoing (in my head, intermittently on paper) and not yet arranged on the new personal site, the start of chapter one EVEN 1.1 — The Writer Who Ignored the Feed can currently be accessed on Medium. 

EVEN 2.1 
​12 months earlier

Est sat at the wood cafe, bar, hangout, coffee shop––place that was about something other than making money––though they nominally did that on the side. It was not about drugs, as some trolls would certainly claim, two sentences into the chapter. Some of the people smoked weed and hell, he was not adverse to a little kind. 

Mary Jane was not legal here and he respected that. No high was worth police state paranoia and possible intervention. His thing was currently yoga, walks on the trail, and a bitter mixture of kratom and tea, once every three days. 
​
The six varieties of live beer on tap were bracing, but then so was the kombucha they had 15 varieties of. As the proprietor had explained, some were green tea base, some English breakfast, some genmai cha. Add whatever fruits were predominately available, a little every day, like a chef carefully pinching herbs and tasting. This one was predominately Darjeeling/papaya/mangosteen and would go head to head with any fine wine in everything but the alcohol category. There was no signage, no price list. By sitting down you contributed and if  you had not contributed enough, your time was up.

Mildly satisfied in a way that lasted, having reached some epiphany, he was not sure if he had that straight. But he was more sure that he had something now than he had ever been, since the dream of UC Santa Cruz and its state-enabled happy edifice came tumbling down upon the reality that all sojourns in the sun were temporary. 

In yesterday’s distractified world, ruled by a feed-informed dark hole of Internet algorithms and Insta-mobs (fundamental user flaw he had identified 20 years ago), he was kept never quite sure of anything. The way that years of work could be devalued to less than free. Trollable. It no longer mattered, at least in this little beta corner of reality that fabric had changed and, he was confident, would continue to alter in ways in line with what people, and the earth, could afford.

On a nameless island, I was immersed in Margaret Atwood's Blind Assassin for weeks. Immersed is the word, though the ending was... sketched. As are the endings of most novels, where the groundwork of the early pages rarely pays off. That said, I was immersed. You can't fake that kind of way with words... whatever genres Atwood was bending, she meant what she wrote. Conviction, that's something.

Standing firm against the current,
life itself a big deterrent. 

The album Station 2 Station is tentatively finished, lacking a few embellishments. It's original if nothing else. A CONCEPT, once again.

Now have a backlog of three albums completed since the year begun, none of them mastered or released. I don't know, I enjoy puzzles. Realized that capturing and arranging sound is a  complex endeavor that has very little to do with having people listen to it.

Real instruments. People playing something in their bones. When I get these sounds in my bones I try and transfer it in ways that others may draw something from. What is art? Its about influencing the right people. Person. Could be a single listener. 

In this age of wrong information. Depth.

​#endwriter

•The Fabric - Chasing Sun album is up. It sounds great to me each day as a listen-straight-through experience. Like everyone I have have doubts and I relapse, but music takes me back to the mindful place. 

• yin and yang tho:

"Trump simply threw away the single most valuable tool America had for shaping the geo-economic future of the region our way and for pressuring China to open its markets. Trump is now trying to negotiate trade openings with China alone — as opposed to negotiating with China as the head of a 12-nation TPP trading bloc that was based on U.S. values and interests and that controlled 40 percent of the global economy."

ah Ipanema
I just listen again
to strike the delicate balance

is this trumpets or violins,
is it the sound the heart makes
every time...

Subverting the truth is a fine art. Never forget that the Art of the Deal was ghostwritten. 

Namida is progressing... one listener mentioned Brian Eno, which I take as a compliment, though I have never been fond of studio washes. 

Cowachunga waits in the wings, for when Fabric - Chasing Sun comes out. 

Salt Lake City - I saw women  in their early 20s reading thin-paged books, instead of playing with devices.

The Colorado thing is a bold vision that an entire state could be like Santa Cruz in the 1970s. Oh no, it's business... 

The news is getting more cryptic, thinking of Damon Arvid as a good nom-de-plume.

The experiences I have had these past three months, I cannot make up or write at this moment.

Highlights:

Storm coming into Reno over the Sierras.

Godzilla or sum'ink in the Nevada clouds.

LV Playboy Mansion timewarp.

11th Street Records flute stop-ins to accompany Tom Waits. 

Becoming the Fremont Street Experience.

Lobbying on State Street with The London Souls and The Sextones.

Experiencing Cowachunga first hand in the mystic west.

Finding Jerry Garcia's visage in my honey and Baja gruel. 

Oh, yeah, and I dictated several chapters of Cowachunga, Invisible Man style.

Slideshow explains everything. ​

#endwriter

True to form, some writing from left field. Here a first draft, (non-researched or scientifically vetted) of a section somewhere halfway through Cowachunga. I guess it gives away a bit of the plot to astute readers, but what the hey. And oh yeah I am claiming IP for an LV sustainability project workup. Hello Musk, are you out there?

The beauty of the plan was that it was designed to solve the one issue that solar engineers had struggled with for generations. How to store energy at night, a necessity in a place that would never quite shed its reputation as Sin City. The solution was simple enough––a system of turbines from the solar arrays (skipping the battery stage altogether) that travelled 35 miles underground through —— substratum, to higher elevation Hoover Dam. 

Excess energy relative to grid needs would be transferred through a turbine motor system during the day to be released within the largest reservoir in North America, creating vast potential electricity in the form of stored energy associated with water level increase. 

As evening fell and direct sunlight ceased, the differential between rapidly cooling night temperatures and the relative heat of Lake Mead would start the turbines spinning in reverse, with the energy used to power nightlife activities. The Las Vegas energy substation was located in the shell of half-built Resort’s World, with 65 percent allocated for the Strip and 35 percent for residential needs.

The beauty of the system was that it offered predictability. The energy dissipation rates of Lake Mead could be controlled over extended periods, as the turbine-driven energy it stored was well in excess of that used for civic power over the course of any given month.

Even the rare occasion of several cloud covered days in a row, an outlier month––an increasing concern as global warming accelerated––would not deplete the system’s energy. It was a perfectly contained recipe for a sustainability as long as Las Vegas remained under 3 million people, with projected conservation-friendly water usage  in place lotuswide. 

Now Rose was out of her urban element, stationed at a stamen in an impenetrable part of the Baja desert spine. The dry-farm hydroponics project was on autopilot, the perimeter system had been completely off the grid for five years. There were further efficiencies to be gained no doubt, but not worth the effort when the Las Vegas project needed all available resources and hands to make this happen in the next six months. 

There was important research being conducted here of course… onanitech, vital to –––‘s economic feasibility, not her thing. Ditto yonitech, which was making breakthroughs that Shayla described in breathless detail each night in the lounge. She was intrigued intellectually, but it all left her dry. The environmental imperative, that of survival on an out-of-whack planet, far outweighed other aspects of her identity.

Having fine-tuned the solar array systems weeks ago, Rose had been frustrated, alone with her thoughts more than usual, trying to fathom this place and what it represented. Just when she was about to request a return to Las Vegas, Sister Agatha had dropped a sheaf of pdfs on her laptop and told her to complete a literature review in the next few days, before going out in the field to Goodall perimeter camp 10 miles south. 

Rose yawned and stretched in bed, ready to turn out the light, onanitech’s latest gizmo untouched and in original wrapping on her bedstand next to a pile of well-thumbed books. Just what was so critical about using her intellectual capacities to decipher chemical reactions and phosphate expansion patterns in meteoric turquoise over the past 15 million years?

Have just been having some revelations about writing and the blog experience. Nothing good.

1) Writing or not writing a blog on a daily basis seems not to matter a whit, as regards readership numbers. This does not mean Weebly's metrics lie. Simply the search engine nature of it all. Hey 12-15k views is pretty good, for no gossip, few pictures, and little of interest beyond actual words. I'll take it.

2) Getting paid matters. Not making money off the creative writing... over centralized publishing world and diminishing attention spans mean that I simply do not write creatively much. There is enough written work out there to last scholars several millennia on remote outposts in the cosmos. I do not need to add more, from compulsion or duty.

3) Music is more gratifying. Not because I am paid, but because I do not have to focus on it to do a good job. It flows like water, I am the instrument of its conveyance. I listen, I think, I play by ear. I arrange a million sounds and somehow it comes out ok. 

4) I am thinking to write Cowachunga and not put it out at all. In this age of everything shared and nothing paid, why not hold back? If any money accrues from the project in the long term I will make damn sure it does not go to the feedmeisters and the pub-congloms.

5) I have not forgotten the faithful.  I have committed to the Arisugawa cloud novel project (no shirking there, though it may take 10 more years).