flames, plastic, cloth

and a couple charity auctions

globe situation:

The fires lately have been scarier than usual, don’t you think? From up on the hill the smoke is smellable again. The stories on the radio from Maui and Kelowna and Northwest Territories and everywhere else are just spiraling in terror and loss. The forest even out the front door here is crispy and feels like walking on eggshells, careful not to even think of a spark.

It probably doesn’t help to be reading this book about the obliteration of the vast ancient redwood forests of the west coast. Maniacal capitalistic thieves stole and then logged almost all of it in a few short decades. Though this crime was executed by particularly devious people, it was in service of the greater forces of modern imperialism and “growth” that we still live within and suffer from. Reading this book while in a thick cloud layer of global warming forest fire smoke leaves me with a renewed feeling that we humans have totally beefed our time here on earth, with no silver lining. Ouch.

It’s on my mind to send money and I decided that, zooming out, I’d like to donate to a more comprehensive effort to strengthen Native communities here in the Northwest. The Potlatch Fund is doing excellent work on this. This may seem not quite related to fires in Hawaii or BC or Yellowknife but actually a huge proportion of affected people in those fire disaster places are Native people, people already dealing with the compounded effects of colonization. I really appreciate Potlatch Fund and NDN Collective and many other organizations working toward deeper well being and decolonization.

So for my weird little contribution I put some gnarly old Mount Eerie shirts on ebay to see if we could get a strange overblown bidding war going for charitable purposes..

SONGS AT NIGHT IN THE MOUNTAINS shirt on eBay
(This is my old favorite shirt for the last almost 20 years. Totally full of holes. It’s also used as background cloth on the cover of “Foghorn Tape” by the Microphones.)

EERIE ore hex (Catan) shirt on eBay
(This is a rare Mount Eerie shirt from when we were playing a lot of Settlers of Catan and I made a shirt of the ore hex.)

All the money (if any) will be donated to The Potlatch Fund.

---

fallen tree report:

One of my first memories, maybe the actual first one, is of being at the lake where I grew up and looking up at the sky and the tall trees poking up into it. Tall fir trees and alders surrounding the lake moving slightly in summer air with a clattering leaf serenity noise. There was always one weird taller tree that stuck out higher. It was a red cedar that was dead on top, branchless and needle-tipped. It stuck sharp into the blue sky like a spear, always. It’s in my baby-self memory, it’s in all the other memories of being in that place, this specific spear tree taller than the others spearing the blue void.

Earlier this summer I returned there to jump in the water and noticed, unconsciously glancing up, that it was gone. No needle. I walked down the path a little and found that it had finally fallen over into the lake and was being bucked up. Maybe someone’s making firewood or shingles. I never realized how actually huge of a tree it was, I never paid any attention to the whole rest of the trunk. A rare old growth western red cedar, the main cultural building block of life around here from pre-colonization. These trees are central to existing in this place. This one is central to my personal brain for all of life so far, and now it fell down, its time was up.

No big point here, just that a tree fell down. What’s up with you?

---

screen time:

I watched Barbie last night. Not that I want to wade into the wide trench of interesting conversation on the internet about this movie, but here’s my one thought:

It reminded me of Twin Peaks: Season 3, “The Return”. There are probably some other deep heads online talking about this, how could there not be? The doppelgangers, the real/fake, dark/light counterparts parallel existing in dream world/real world. Dark Cooper/Agent Cooper, Doll Barbie/Human Barbie Owner, the portal opening between worlds, demonic transformative manifestation of inter-generational trauma, etc. The end of Barbie when she’s in a featureless void space contemplating becoming an “uncomfortable” mortal human reminded me of this part where Cooper is floating on a dream satellite thing between realms. The vast dark sea where ideas come from. And something about the ending of Twin Peaks, returning to Laura’s house, “what year is this?”, the scream of half-recognition, it felt somehow the same as when Barbie Pinocchios into a human and walks into the doctors’ office. That’s my little blip of an observation.

---

personal news:

I got to go backpacking alone for one night in the North Cascades recently. I was thrilled. I went pretty hard and actually got sick and pretty worked over, muscle-wise. It took a week or so to recover. I think I’m finally mostly back to normal.

But coming down the mountain the next day, after dipping in the freezing stream and drinking tons of water from the jug in the back of the truck, I went straight to delirious band practice with Black Belt Eagle Scout. We’re going to New Zealand and Australia together and are taking the opportunity to make a loud band version of Mount Eerie. It’s so fun. Black scout wooden belt eagle opening ceiling.

Despite all my global warming catastrophic headbanging above, it has been an excellent summer. Swimming and working and cooking and reading and time passing in a peaceful and deliberate way. I put another coat of black pine tar on the exterior of the new studio building. When the weather changes a few degrees colder I’ll move my focus indoors and set up the recording stuff again and resume work on the ongoing collection of new ideas. The ideas notebook has some cracked open possibilities in it waiting. But now while the ground is still dry I’m still filling the days with dusty outdoor work. The woodpile is not quite tall enough yet.

---

reading/read:
The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods by Greg King (order it)

Flames by Robbie Arnott (order it)

What Water Holds by Tele Aadsen (order it)

Zen Roots: The First Thousand Years translated and Commentary by Red Pine

---

listening to:
Sonic Youth on cassette, 1982 - 1992, from the ancestral collection

I like imagining the sound of whatever Lee’s acoustic guitar is doing right here. And is Kim tuning?

---

that’s all for now.
thanks everyone, bye,
Phil