Revisionist History

 The way it never was…

Quaker Heritage

CrowTown Art

Urban Adventures

I’m gonna need to get the brakes tightened on this Cannondale. It’s a hand-me-down, a nice one, and I’ve been using it a lot, adding wear and tear. There’s a bike shop quite nearby so rather than go down rabbit holes on YouTube, I’m gonna get some training, and maybe buy a tool or two, directly from the pros.

Before this morning’s bike adventure, was the meetup with raccoons, a family, migrating willy-nilly across property lines, like a band of roaming gypsies that never bought in to the property lines game. I had them staring into my flashlight, half way up the tree. Would I be able to take some flash pictures? No dice.

My route this morning took me north from OMSI, along the Vera Katz Eastbank Esplanade and over the Steel, south along the west side to Tilikum Crossing and the FX2. I didn’t leave my helmet behind this time, even though I took it off to insert my earbuds (I’ve got an off-brand pair with ear hooks and don’t use them when riding). Some of my slowings were taking too long. First Person Physics.

Last night was a last ceremonial outdoor BBQ. It’s still crazy warm in October, in the 70s, or it least that seems above average to me. All in all, it was a mild summer but for the forest fires. That’s speaking as a Portlander. 

Now it seems like a mild Fall, but with the winds starting to kick up, blowing the leaves around. The crows’ migration path may have shifted from overhead. We’d see lots of em, directly over the backyard. Maybe that season is still ahead.

Yesterday my multi-modal Wanderers path took me along NE Alberta, from where the 75 dropped me, to where the 6 picked me up, on MLK. I took the Red Line (headed to the airport) back to Hollywood and might’ve gone in Trader Joe’s if the return 75 weren’t arriving so soon. That was all walking activity, no bicycle in the picture. I closed my green Exercise ring per Apple Watch, which is one of my goals.

Company Towns (EPCOTs)

I am sympathetic to the concept that if companies wanna test stuff they should pool with other testers to build EPCOT like company towns, where the people who live there do so on an opt in basis, and the reason they’re there is they wanna be testers.

Already populated cities are not an appropriate testing ground for experimental prototypes. EPCOT = experimental prototype community of tomorrow, remember? The lawyers changed it to Epcot (meaningless) cuz they wanted you to forget the original vision (which was smart).

Invite peeps to select from a catalog what prototype towns and/or cities they wanna go live in. Maybe they dress like in Space 1999 (BBC) and everyone has a robo-slave. You want that for yourself? Apply.

Blue Line Blues

:: from the Blue Line going over the Steel ::

I did not award myself a smooth operator badge (stored mentally) for the most recent bicycle loop, although I did give myself an honorary E for Effort i.e. Energy (E/acc). 

I went for longer than usual: instead of boarding the Orange Line at the Sellwood station (my usual routine), I kept going along Springwater Corridor along Johnson Creek to the Flavel station next to I-205, where I caught the Green Line to Gateway, where I transferred to Blue.

Shades of training for S2P (Seattle to Portland) — that was my old cycling route, or at least half of it (I’d continue north and return home across the base of Mt. Tabor — more recently I stay on Division, newly paved and with a bike lane added).

So why not a smooth operator badge? Because after I caught the Blue Line to downtown (going over the Steel), I switched to the Orange (southbound) at Pioneer Square, and left my bike helmet in the seat next to mine. That’s why.

I could visualize said helmet continuing without me, all the way to Hillsboro. Would it end up in Lost and Found? I’ve had good luck with that at least once before. 

This time I had the presence of mind to proactively phone the L&F number, to explain about my helmet, leaving my name (they already had my number, using caller ID). Maybe someone at the end of the line checks all the cars? Probably not routinely.

And now, a day later, I’m even questioning if I left the helmet on the Blue Line or the Green. I only discovered it was missing while awaiting the Orange. Did I take it off after Flavel and leave it at Gateway? Memory fades. Sometimes too fast.

On the brighter side, I have a second, backup helmet just like this one I’ve lost, with a “Bob” Dobbs sticker on the back. The straps may need some adjustment, but I’m confident it’ll work fine. I plan to continue doing loops without investing in a new helmet. I’m trying to save my pennies. Property tax is coming up.

On my way through Sellwood on Linn, I stopped at the substation to take a selfie and show off my new Esoterica T-shirt. I’ve learned quite a bit from Professor Sledge, the channel’s anchor, and still hope to learn more. I’m into esoterica. He’s pretty generous with his scholarship. I’m happy to tag myself his fan.

Graphing the Network

I just completed another circuit, one I've navigated before: Smith Rock area, Santiam Pass, Hwy 126 down the mountains into the Springfield area. This was neither camping nor glamping. I stayed with peeps I know, may even be related to. Sydney, my old dog, came along.

On the curriculum front, I'm following Dr. Rorty's model in bridging to the Eurasian continent, in terms of readings, taking Cascadian Pragmatism back to its sources, through William James to Wittgenstein's critique thereof. 

The phenomenology of spirituality aka psychological development, might be mapped in various ways, ala the M4W schemata. I tend to favor an Active Inference informed namespace, which has a thermodynamic flavor.

However, I don't need to exclusively follow the Logical Positivist thread back to the Vienna Circle of the early Wittgenstein (Schopenhauer et al). I've long embedded Mark Fisher in my School of Tomorrow matrix, and through him we get to an important node: the CCRU, a kind of think tank that interpreted developments in philosophy (e.g. Deleuze & Guattari) since Freud and Hegel to an anglophonic BBC-informed audience, around the same time the personal computer was taking off.

We might think of the CCRU as a particle accelerator sending entangled particles every which way. We're not talking about uniformity of thought so much as polarities, counter spins. Mark "liminal spaces" Fisher did not take the same party line as Nick "capitalism is AI" Land (admittedly an anachronistic telling, as AI was but a gleam in Alan Turing's eye back in those days).

As recently as last night I was lolling about taking in comparisons of Mark "weird and eerie" Fisher with David Foster "Infinite Jest" Wallace. I'm still very much in the process of assembling the puzzle pieces, from a curriculum developer's point of view. How might one connect the dots in an efficient synergetic manner?

Speaking of curriculum developers and family relationships, my Springfield stop brought me in proximity to the Fitzgeralds of Great Gatsby fame, leading me to prompt Perplexity this morning regarding some gender studies questions I have. 

I was happy to see Perplexity pushing back on what appeared to be my misconceptions: 

(a) the Gilded Age (late 1800s) was not the Golden Age (early 1900s), which latter Perplexity prefers to call the Jazz Age and 

(b) the Betty Boop stuff is only partially free of copyrights.

Why am I connecting to the CCRU in the first place? Recall Applewhite's tagline for Grunch of Giants: more subversive than anything since Karl Marx. He was clearly calling out the Marxists to check it out. 

One might suggest I'm seeking to answer the question: why are the Marxists so slow to pick up on our narratives? But that'd simply be to privilege my own coordinate system versus keeping it all more realistically relativistic. 

Subcultures abound (and partially overlap), and we each encounter the puzzle pieces in different orders and assemble different parts of the puzzle in our own good time. Rushed work tends to not hold up, has a shorter half life. 

Certainly Infinite Jest is hard to read (I've only sampled it) and yet Hannah Smart said she'd read it nine times, wow. Shades of Finnegans Wake (in the sense of "hard reading" that is).