The Diamond Island

I was musing over the decline of fossil fuels the other day, and what it might mean for the future. Demand for oil is out pacing the available supply. China and India are reaching for the same mobility and prosperity enjoyed by the United States, and they are growing by a fantastic amount in both population and industry.

Meanwhile, the oil infrastructure is rusting away because of insufficient investment in the next generation of rigs and technicians. To top it off, the oil companies have picked all the low hanging fruit off the tree, so to speak. All the easy-to-find oil has been located, and all the light, sweet crude (the easiest to refine) is disappearing fast.

What we have left are declining field discoveries, aging wells going into production collapse, and a steadily shrinking supply of heavy, sour crude oil that is increasingly hard to extract and refine.

In layman’s terms, this means that the era of cheap, abundant energy, which fueled an unprecedented industrial age of manufacturing and transportation, is over. From here on out, cheap oil is replaced by expensive oil, and the price of everything this industrial age of cards was built on collapses.

This does not mean the end of oil. We will never run out of oil. It means energy prices go through the roof to reflect the increase in scarcity. A price of 100 dollars a barrel of oil is about eighteen cents a cup. Think about how far a cup of gasoline will get your automobile. Now, imagine paying a group of people in today’s market eighteen cents to push your vehicle the same distance. The commodity is cheap compared to how much it can accomplish.

Nothing can replace oil. Oil is used to make fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics. It can be turned into fuels that power farm machinery, aircraft, ships, factories, power plants, and most of all, trucks. Transportation is 75% of the use of modern energy. Food production and modern manufacturing as we know it couldn’t exist without oil. Cheap energy created the modern world.

The alternative energy sources we have now won’t keep things going the same way. Solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels, coal, tar sands, and so on all have problems that oil doesn’t have. None of them are as versatile as oil. You can’t turn sunlight or wind into plastics. Biofuels don’t scale to industrial levels and take over food producing land. Tar sands are too energy intensive and waste too much water. Nuclear takes too long to build to stave off the energy crunch. Coal won’t power airplanes. Technology isn’t going to save us in time because we’ve run out the clock.

Is this doomsday? No one can predict the future, though it seems like I am by reciting the litany of doom above. It’s a comforting illusion to hope for the end of days and a release from this crummy world we call Planet Earth. I don’t buy it. The decline of oil is real, and changes are coming to the industrialized world that technology won’t be able to save. But what comes after is anyone’s guess.

I speculate that we will continue to have electricity. That’s what I keep thinking about. I’m skeptical of batteries on any scale, since I’m not sure the resources exist to replace the fleet of vehicles we have now, with the kinds we have now. But I see a renaissance in rail and canal travel. Food, power, and components will have to be generated locally because the energy to transport them great distances will be too expensive.

I wonder about the resurgence of the laboring class, and of animal transport. The transition would have to include that in some great numbers because as fuel prices go up, it might become too costly to build a road with machinery, and cheaper to use laborers. The social implications of this blow me away, because it won’t be like the “good old days”. It’ll be a different context with different attitudes.

Corporations will have to change the way they do business. They won’t be able to easily relocate to a country where they can pay cheaper wages anymore, because the cost of shipping the parts is no longer cheap. If they decide to go with cheaper steamers or sailboats, the travel time increases.

There will be conflicts as the various owners of the countries fight for the remaining, poor quality oil fields. As food production plummets, there will be starvation. There will be less travel for the average person, and less goods. I shudder to think what people in the “prosperous” countries might do, with their sense of entitlement and shock at the end of the party.

Yet electricity will still be there. The focus will be the grid, the power lines, the telephone wires, the “line” itself. The level of energy will be smaller, and less instantaneous. We’ll all have to withdraw, pull back and reexamine the old ways of crafting, building and farming on smaller scales. Communities will be interconnected by the line, but physically constrained by lack of cheap energy. This is the age of lightning, of individual development through the development of ideas and an acknowledgement that you, the person reading this, are your own means of production.

The stroke of lightning illuminates, and sets you free. In the tarot card of The Tower, lightning (from the heavens) strikes the tower of Babel and throws the king and pope into the swirling waters and thorns below, along with the top of the tower. The current order of hierarchy and power has been struck down for its hubris. Yet the figures, robbed of their hats of authority, are human again. They seem to flail, yet if you turn the card upside down, they are dancing!

We will be humbled, and brought down to earth from our lofty heights. Our lives will come under scrutiny and require contemplation. The chances are good that humanity will come out of the fall with a new sense of purpose and a greater sense of community than before. Problems will emerge, of course, as the quest continues. Conflicts will be more personal than before, and of a more immediate kind. The danger is that individuals can emerge to infect the group with psychic contagions more easily. We might find new advances in individualized repression more terrifying than anything we’ve seen yet. And countering that, cooperative groups of democratic nodes more stable and humanizing than what we could possibly imagine.

No doubt, things are going to tilt on their axis in unpredictable ways.

Now that I understand I’m not the host of this show, I’m confident that the search will come to its conclusion. I’ve said my one line, in a manner of speaking, and done whatever it was my mirage couldn’t or wouldn’t do. About all I have to do is be prepared for the inevitable meeting with UFO girl.

I think about what might be useful for an encounter with an ultra-terrestrial being about a contact encounter with a mirage. Being a real world guy, I need to accommodate a non-real world request for a hookup with two imaginary beings that I consider no less true just because they don’t occupy space and time as any physicist would describe it.

I’ve been trained in the old school of fifties science fiction films as to what to expect as far as outcomes. The last thing I want to do is end up a helpless victim of an ultra-terrestrial being. At least, if I have a say in things. Somebody has to be the victim or there’s no pathos, and one never knows one’s role in any new encounter until the whip comes down.

So, against death rays, I’m packing a sign that says “Don’t Shoot I Am A Human”, which identifies me as a person not to be atomized. In case of abduction, I carry a Black Sabbath tape. No UFO can take off for butt probe land when you are equipped with sounds so heavy they’re iron, dude.

I read rumors that UFO girl has interchangeable heads. She’s been known to lose her rational head and have it replaced with a monstrous maw of titanium teeth and high fructose acid spittle. For that, I’m taking a plastic bag with some poppers in sawdust. Nothing confuses alien monsters with force fields more than random noises or clouds of thrown crud. Hey, all I need is a diversion so I can book.

Finally, in case of alien possession and injection of nasty DNA, I gots me a used handkerchief of my recent flu virus days. Just hold that puppy up and it’s like a crucifix to vampires. As we all well know, alien beings with advanced technology are helpless against the common earthling diseases.

I gather my goods, not knowing if they will be of help. Hey, maybe I’ll get lucky. I need to stay alive long enough to pass along my mirage’s offer and escape to safety so I can make a report. My pass’s life clock is blinking, yo.

In garden news, the potatoes are coming up nicely. The tomatoes need a lot of care, so it’s touch and go with them. Onions and chives are on target. The lettuce, contrary to last year, is being really difficult. It looks like it might surge forward soon. I hope so, it’s been a long spring.

The basil croaked, which really surprised me. The other herbs are doing well and spreading rapidly. I’m psyched because our cooking gets so much mileage now out of them, and we now know the power of saving herbs for later in the winter. The garden is teeming with earthworms, which it wasn’t last year. I guess word has gotten around that this plot is active.

K and I have a huge amount of plants in moss packets ready to plant, hopefully this will start the serious attack of garden goodness. Oh yes, and we have a new blue hose with a purple multi spray attachment that rocks the mike. Our major challenge this year is keeping the weeds, which have mounted a massive attack on all fronts. My back is killing me, and the thistles ruined my gloves, requiring me to get a fresh pair. Sheesh!

Frankie has taken to bullying Blink, the older and weaker female cat. It’s gotten to the point where Blink is always hiding and skulking about, and it’s driving K and myself up the wall. In all other ways Frankie is a honeybear, but when she doesn’t get her way (such as wanting to get a walkies outside and we say no because the landscapers sprayed the grass with pesticide today), she acts out on Blink.

We’re really not happy with our vets. We took Frankie in for a respiratory infection, and they decided to give her the latest round of shots because we hadn’t been in to update them. This was in addition to the antibiotics they prescribed. Now, we hate giving Frankie her shots because she becomes weak and sad for three days, and it’s heartbreaking to watch. So for them to give her the shots before we could protest, when she was already feeling crummy because of an infection. Well, the vets are on my poop list. I’m going to go empty my wallet somewhere else. Frankie hid under the bed and sulked for days, and it made me mad.

On the bath front, my aunt gave me an awesome array of bath salts from Pretty Baby, and some cool dude bath bombs from Lush. Alas, I’ve used up the gift boxes and I emptied out my main store of goods the other day. Not having the requisite ability to meditate my cares into valuable cash and prizes at a certain level is of course, intolerable. But understandable, since my stress levels have been off the wall the last month and a half.

Actually, I have a whole stash of bath bombs I’ve been holding onto for karmic reasons, which I’ve been unable to touch. The victims I’ve planned these for will no doubt benefit, but for me it means lean times. So K and I made a brief run and I picked up some more of my faves. There’s this pine-volcanic gravel bomb that does the trick nicely, and I’ve been jonesin’ to make use of that kind again. Stimulates my brainstem nicely, and I’m glad to have it back.

Picked up the third Age of Bronze, titled “Betrayal Part One”. It’s as good as always, and I read through it so quickly it’s sad. The Trojan War is finally starting to heat up, as both sides start to maneuver their pieces into position, while the personal stories of the characters continue to develop in interesting ways.

Of particular interest to me is the diplomatic mission to Troy to regain Helen and avert the war, where several people reveal their character in really cool ways. I never get tired of Odysseus’s trickery, and I have to say Palamede’s honesty is starting to win me over. Paris’s cowardice, arrogance and treachery are really going too far. Troy is doomed.

K has been getting the hiking bug, and after a long search she finally found a pair of boots she could deal with. REI had nothing but high priced, weird and poorly manufactured junk. That surprised me. LL Bean just didn’t pass the muster. So we hit the local Ranger Surplus, because I needed a new pair of jungle boots and a new pair of fatigues. K was skeptical, but she found exactly what she was looking for there. Durable, support, reasonably priced, and not made cheaply.

I swear by my army boots and fatigues. My old desert storm boots and fatigues have been slowly falling apart this last year, despite my best efforts to milk them further. I’ve worn the fatigues for twenty-one years, and the boots for eleven. The service, when it comes to the basics, knows how to make long-lasting, hardy equipment and that’s no joke.

The boots breathe and stand up to anything while giving you support and protection. The fatigues cover your legs with cool/warm air as necessary, and they protect you from terrain, foliage and insects like nobody’s business. Plus the pockets are awesome. I’ve carried empty beer bottles in all four at the 9:30 Club, saving my friends and me the hassle of throwing them out while the music is raging. It’s good to have a new set. I feel it’s appropriate, in a way, with the way my life is going.

I’ve got a dream for a clue, a hall pass that’s feeling close to the due date, and a whole lot of personal drama driving me crazy. Ordinary life and its chores are hard enough without battle cruisers patrolling the streets for human heads.

Spontaneously, I get out some of my illustration materials and tools. I continue work on one of my personal enrichment projects. I have four blank certificates of accomplishment on ditto paper from the fourth grade that I’ve been copying and adapting onto poster board. So far I’ve only done the first one.

I like giving artistic creations to people, where time and energy allow. These modified certificates are something different and neat I can give people to pump them up. It’s nice to get a bonus round every now and then.

In no time at all, I’ve got my second certificate done, and I’m satisfied to have a new goodie at my disposal. I wonder where the motivation to do this came from, since I haven’t been at full power for a few months now. I imagine it must have come as a token of kindness, as after all that’s what it’s supposed to be used for. What might I have done that was noteworthy, I wonder?

I recall my dream, and how I saved Important Woman from the snipers. Maybe the motivation comes from her as a form of recognition. Perhaps that’s where a lot of artistic inspiration comes from. It’s granted us through our dreams, and the figures of our dreams are the messengers. Sometimes we remember the dream where that inspiration springs, and sometimes we don’t. I think this sort of thing must be going on all the time, asleep or not.

K makes me a nice, delicious, hot cup of tea from her special recipe. She can tell I need a boost. A rooibus peach/blueberry bliss combo with fresh crushed blackberries and a big spoonful of honey in the raw (that unprocessed stuff with the pollen on top). It must work, because not only do I recover health points, but I have a Mr. Spock moment.

If I assume this inner dialogue is always going on, then I have to admit I’m not always participating overtly and that it’s not always about me. Things could be going on that are moving this search forward that I’m not aware of, and perhaps all I need to do is wait for my turn to do something. That, to me, seems to be the crux of the matter – the need for patience and for the various other storylines to catch up – whatever they may be. My brain is a secondary organ after all!

Nobody wants to discover they are a supporting character. Such an admission wounds one’s pride. I’ve put out the message, and I’m just being egotistic in thinking there’s more to it than that.

Suddenly, a light bulb in the chandelier above burns out with a flash and a snap. I take that as an agreement.

My big hope to meet the UFO girl rests on a crummy sound file attached to the Internet probability antenna. All I get in the way of clues is a dream.

In the dream I’m in a museum/international center. There’s this important woman moving from one location to another. She’s got about a dozen bodyguards about her for protection, plus a personal assistant and two administrative assistants. There’s a small amount of pedestrians milling about. Nobody recognizes the woman and her entourage. They just give her searching glances as they go about their business. I’m there too, part of the crowd and probably there for the art, but for some reason I get the feeling everyone knows who I am.

A bunch of snipers appear on the second floor balconies and aim for the woman. I jump to her side and somehow by waving my arms and moving in front of her at strategically important moments the snipers are only able to hit the bodyguards, and a few of the passers-by. I pull out this weird plastic submachine gun and blow away a few of the snipers. The rest take cover and I try to get the woman and her shrinking entourage to a waiting car.

The woman takes a grazing shot to the head, and I have to stop shooting so I can carry her the rest of the way to the car. The bodyguards are totally useless, and I know somehow that I’m the only one who can do the job and keep her alive. I have to put her down, shoot at the snipers some more to make them dive for cover, and open the car door. The driver, the personal assistant, and the two administrative assistants just stand there gawking at me, ducking bullets and doing nothing helpful.

I get the woman into the car and we all leave the scene of carnage behind. I perform emergency first aid, and for a moment it’s close, but I stabilize the woman. I notice the driver making the telltale suspicious glance at us. I pick up on something fishy about the personal assistant’s behavior, and the way the two administrative assistants look guilty. I realize they’re all working for the snipers and the woman’s been totally betrayed.

The driver gets wise to my suspicions. He locks the doors and puts up the privacy window. I know he’s driving us into a trap, so I start smashing the privacy window between us with a battering ram glass breaker I happen to be carrying around. Before I can shoot the driver he books and leaves us behind. I take over the car and drive away, just in time to dodge a rocket attack lock-on.

Keeping an eye on the remaining traitors, who do nothing because anyone with a battering ram in their pocket is clearly out of their mind, I drive to an underground parking lot. Waiting for me is a limousine being driven by Lurch from the Addams Family. In the back seat is a sexy nurse with mad doctor skills. I park the car and make the three assistants back off and turn around. I warn them that if they try to see where we go, or look at our license plate, I’ll blow them away.

I carry the woman to the back seat and the nurse takes over. I know she’ll be okay now. I cover the three traitors from the window of the limo with my plastic gun. Lurch shakes his head and makes his distinctive “I don’t believe this” groan before he gets in the car and drives us away. We drive off through downtown to a secret hideaway.

The cats wake me up with demands for food, and I return to the real world with a clue that makes no sense to me. I don’t know how much time I’ve got left on my haunted house pass, but I’m getting the growing feeling that my library books are coming due soon, and the ghosts there collect late fees in something other than cash, check or charge.

As I’ve mentioned before here, I don’t much care for the movies that are released in theaters. I believe the entertainment industry is incapable of making good movies except by accident. It’s the medieval printing press formula of spitballing. That is, mass production of a large number of products in the hope that something will stick and make enough money to make up for the tremendous losses of everything else that bombed.

You see it books, television shows, video games, and popular music. A whole lot of garbage, and a few lucky shots. Yet the industry, with its medieval guild system of cutting off free markets via the control of distribution, refuses to diversify for its own financial survival. All I see is consolidation into large, inefficient corporations that struggle to make the margins. It seems like in the news the only game to play is buyouts.

Without the propaganda machine known as the entertainment public relations industry whipping up public interest, the struggling entertainment industry (again, that term, which suggests craft, but conjures up images of sweatshop smokestacks) might be in worse shape. The mantra is always that it takes “the big boys” to make quality, and since they take all the risks, they deserve all the profits.

Well, hey, if that’s true, how come I’m not entertained? Where’s the “quality” I keep hearing about? All one has to do is read the first sentence of The Da Vinci Code, listen to ten seconds of Britney Spears’ “Gimmie More”, or watch a minute of any show on the SciFi Channel to know this doesn’t pass the laugh test.

The decline comes not just from a longstanding contempt for the public and what it wants, or the exploitation of artists and craftsmen desperate to make a buck, but also from an emerging sense by a new generation of people trained in the computer. These young people are growing up with tools not available even ten years ago that are cooperative, creatively open, and allow you to do work that used to take entire studios of people to produce.

It’s entirely possible now, for example, for a group of people to put together an original, entertaining show, if not better than a mainstream one, using a computer. Sound, video, special effects, and the portability, along with a massive distributor called the Internet, you can do it. You can even set up a website and charge for it if you want, or just post it on YouTube for people to enjoy simply for the love of sharing. It’s all about creating, passing it along, and getting involved.

The iron hand of oligarchy may yet crush this sentiment of the unwashed masses as they evolve towards freedom from coercion. It wouldn’t be the first time. If you look back through the centuries at the history of newspapers, pamphlets, and hootenannies, you’ll see how the owners seized control of popular culture. But as always, one can never tell how things will turn out, it’s anyone’s guess.

But I digress.

I saw a movie called “300”, which is a story about a battle between a small group of Spartans (the good guys) and a gargantuan army of Persians (the bad guys). The battle decides whether the last stand of the good guys inspires their allies to band together and have a chance at remaining free, or they fail and the leader of the Persian army conquers everyone (this is bad). That’s the movie in a nutshell, and it’s been lauded as a macho man story of serious butt kicking and decried as a historically inaccurate appeal to patriotism.

I think both sides are completely wrong. It’s just a really, really bad movie that people are throwing their own projections upon, either because they feel powerless and want to watch some pump up, or they expect disappointment in today’s movies and this one grants them the opportunity to complain.

To the people expecting “quality”, “historical accuracy”, or even things like “realism” or “authenticity”, you are deluding yourselves. This is a fantasy, adapted from a trade paperback taking liberties with history to start with. All you have to do is look at the cinematography, with it’s green-screen generated landscapes and phony-baloney colors stolen from every music video filter of the nineties, to know this is an internal story, not an external one.

The characters move and speak like figures from a daydream or an idle fancy. The outrageous wolves with glowing eyes or rhinos decked out in battle armor are exaggerated monsters of the unconscious with no relation to real world animals. The crazy maneuvers during the fight scenes have nothing to do with physics and everything to do with how adolescents play with action figures.

I’m not knocking this approach. I’m just saying you can’t expect such an overt disregard for reality to hold up under anything more than a loose, subjective viewing. You can say such a shallow presentation neither nourishes the soul hungry for art nor makes for fascinating intellectual analysis, and I’d agree. See that industry treadmill spewing out offal? Yes, it’s gross, and it’s useful to consider the ways in which it falls short (ahh, that sulphurous, rotten egg smell of a group of men pushing an armored elephant right off a cliff). After all that, it’s time to start talking about alternatives.

To the people who think there’s a lot of kicking of butts, I think you need a reality check from Patton: “Now I want you to remember that no *#&!#%$ ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb *#&!#%$ die for his country.”

Sure, there’s a lot of awesome battle moves going on, the Spartans inflict huge losses against an outlandish array of revved up opponents, and they all die fighting. That’s not kicking butt, that’s losing with a flourish.

Yes, their heroic sacrifice inspires the wimp allies to stand up to the invaders, but we never see if that final battle leads to victory. Without final victory, you lose. Yes, you can say we know what happened in history, but remember this is a fantasy. If it isn’t on screen, we can’t imply anything. It’s a complete let down.

You want butt kicking? After a long movie of fighting down to the bitter end, the superhero leader of the good guys gets a chance to spear the bad guy leader — and clips the bad guys ear. He missed (if the guy’s not dead, you failed). Since the movie is a shallow fantasy, the symbolic effect of such an act in real history means nothing (but having a Man Who Would Be King scene would negate the movie’s premise and ending).

This pathetic miss occurs in an interesting context. There’s an earlier scene in which a lesser character performs an amazing feat of throwing ability.  His spear lands dead on against a huge, armored rhino at least a hundred feet away, exactly enough to kill the creature so that it slides to a stop inches from the guy.

And it’s strongly implied that this lesser character’s weakness of “needing his father’s approval” is what leads to his horrible death. The movie’s implied moral statement is “anything that makes you weak makes you worthless”. Things like feelings other than murderous rage, not being a Spartan, and having a disability.

The leader of the Spartans, who embodies the butt kicking principle to the utmost, should at least be able to duplicate the dead loser’s killing shot from what, twenty feet? Right? This is for the win, leader dies, army falls apart.

Failure = 100%

I don’t watch “butt kicking” movies to watch the heroes lose. I watch to see the good guys inflict major hate and discontent. That’s what my subconscious primitive is paying to see.

I’m riding high on a tide of musical euphoria. My new, favorite band is suddenly the hottest, coolest thing around. I see them in TIME magazine while I’m waiting for a haircut at my family barbershop. Their videos are playing on MTV a lot. Friends at college are blasting tunes from the Joshua Tree at night while we all hang out and just nod our heads to the riffs of the Edge playing his stuff. My girlfriend at the time gets a copy and we play it in her car while we’re driving around. There are states of mind that even to this day, songs like “Running to Stand Still” and “Mothers of the Disappeared” can conjure in me, taking me back to feelings and memories that resonate deep in my pond.

Along comes “Rattle and Hum”. This is an album that garnered some critical backlash, and rightly so to a certain extent. U2 was seen as trying to ingratiate themselves with other great musical performers, and perhaps acting too big for their britches. Bono’s soap boxing comments on the album during certain songs come to mind. This is where I started to hear complaints about Bono’s sanctimonious attitude, which at the time I felt was correct, but a lot of times I felt the people expressing those opinions were also motivated by jealousy. I saw the album as simply another U2 live album, about which I had a theory I believed at the time.

Looking back, it was pure delusion, but at the time I honestly believed that U2 came out with a “live” album between all their normal, regular albums. They used the “live” albums as an in-between artistic arch-stone. After Boy, October and War you had the live album Under A Blood Red Sky. Then They did the awesomely spiritual Unforgettable Fire. After that came Wide Awake In America, another live album. Followed by the supremely stunning masterpiece of Joshua Tree. So Rattle and Hum was just the next, natural “rest stop” album. The next album would, of course, be even more amazing by all logical standards.

So I ignored a lot of the criticism of Rattle and Hum, because in a sense I thought it was an in between project. If they were acting high and mighty, I felt U2 had a certain right to. What rock star wouldn’t want to take their rightful place with all the other legends, now that they’d hit the big time? At least that is how I looked at it. And I thought a lot of the music on Rattle and Hum was pretty good. I’ve never liked covers, so I didn’t care for songs like “Helter Skelter” – I have yet to hear anyone equal the Beatle’s original. But with songs like “All I Want Is You” and “Silver and Gold” sending me to the happy place, it was all I needed to tide me over.

I went through a lot of changes in the years I waited for the next album. I was struggling with my life’s purpose, romantic and academic failures, and I was developing the foundations of the person I would become. A rough time for me, you could say. Into this came Achtung Baby, the dark U2 album. At first, it was so different from anything U2 had ever done I was stunned. There’s a point in some great albums where you keep listening and the magic shoots you into space. You realize you’ve redeemed some unknown part of your soul from ignorance. It’s tough, though, because that moment is the same as the heartbreaker albums that you listen to, hoping the pieces will click together. And instead you give up and never listen to that album again.

With Achtung Baby, I discovered sonic secret doors and multiple meanings in every listen (and still do, to this day, though not as often). Being in the depths of despair, this album got me through some troubled periods just because it was so exhilarating to hurt and listen to music that hurt with you, or twisted with you through the grinder. There would be other “dark albums” in my life, but none so mysterious and elusive, loud and cool, or right to the core as this one would end up being for me. It’s very likely the album played a part in helping me graduate from college.

I’ll concede that Joshua Tree is the better album, but I’ll choose Achtung Baby every time. It’s associated with personal moments and inner depths in a way that can never be repeated or experienced again. It’s unique to me and I never get tired of listening to it. People who have experienced this kind of bonding with an album are fortunate (or cursed, depending on how you look at it) to have lived life like this, even for a short time. You could tell me Achtung Baby stinks, is overrated, and lacking talent and I couldn’t agree or disagree with you. When it’s this personal, there’s no right or wrong answer.

This album sustained me for a long time. Before I knew it, the time had come for the next “in-between” album. Zooropa came into my life during a moment of transition that was particularly tough for me. I found the occurrence a meaningful one because I considered this an interim album, even though it wasn’t “live”. It worried me that it was an actual regular album, but as a lot of the material came out of the dense creativity of the previous one, I looked at it as the standard “in-between” fare. A good one, mind you, as I enjoyed just about every song, and considered my experience of the album a spiritual one. If the “rest stop” album was this good, the next regular album would be even better than the last. Could even such an album exist? What would it be like? For now, I reveled in Zooropa and it sustained me through the beginnings of a dark trial in my life.

The funny thing is, I still hadn’t seen U2 in concert. And I still hadn’t bought and listened to October. There were gaps in my fandom, for various reasons having to do with limited mobility and funds. My maturity level had not developed in certain areas, but that is a tale for another time. For now, I was riding a U2 high.

I had no clue how apocalyptic the next album would be, nor how far my projections would come down.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch I’m nursing my shocked and battered brainstem. I have to work on putting the latest UFO girl investigations a little more, as I had to go to some rough places to gather my evidence. The Klingon patrols seem more aggressive of late, and everywhere I look, the radioactive mutants are shooting sparks at any evidence of human consciousness.

So what I gots is a measely linkdump for this rainy, supercharged non-firey Beltaine kind of day. Rather than focus on May Day labor struggles and history-of-beatdown stuff, I felt I’d be better off meditating on the fun. Always good is an insanity-point inducing musical number from an old classic, a visual journey into humanization, mockery of the drones as stupid as it is possible for a person to be, and reminders that people do stuff for creativity and relax-enjoy free of coercion.

• The landlord’s daughter from the Wicker Man
• Cloud from the anime collection Robot Carnival
• Spot the Loony from Monty Python
• An enjoyable May Day Parade in Minneapolis

Just the other day in the news, I read that the Joshua Tree that was featured in the photo used for the cover of U2’s “The Joshua Tree” fell over and gave up the ghost. I found the item a meaningful coincidence that came my way. For a long time now, U2 has been wobbling downhill musically. To read the tree fall over is a sign from the beyond that my favorite rock group has passed on creatively.

Like the Rolling Stones, REM, and a lot of other big dude groups that have signed huge contracts to keep the meal ticket going, U2 has stopped making good music and is coasting on the sounds that made them famous. I’ve felt that way for a long while now, and it’s been a hard blow to take, to know that the group you identified with as a young man have sold out and lost the ability to make music that sends you to the next level.

Shortly after I read about the demise of the tree, I read a pretty good analysis by a comedian that sums up how I’ve grown to loathe the U2 stance. One day you wake up and realize you can’t look at the artists you looked up to anymore. That’s when you read the stories that reveal your heroes were always that way. You just didn’t know because they had control of the publicity, and they were so good you didn’t notice. Bob Dylan’s “My back pages” plays in the back of my mind on that one.

It just makes me mad. U2’s music was a defining part of my life for a long time. They were the first rock and roll band I found on my own time, that I searched out and bonded with using my own interest. There are other bands that I grew up with: Devo, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Grace Jones, and Bob Marley. U2 was mine, and not my folks.

It started in homeroom class during my freshman year. There was this girl doodling “U2” scrawls on her notebook, and I asked her what that was about. She told me they were her fave group and that she thought they would become hugely famous one day. I took that in and forgot about it for a while.

The next time I heard about them was later that year, with the release of “New Year’s Day”, which I thought was a pretty cool song. There were a lot of one hit wonders during the eighties that still bring me back to certain thought-processes even today. I can remember myself in the backseat of my folk’s car, listening to that song and thinking it had all the right sounds to make me like myself and what I was doing.

Later on, I heard a song called “Bad” that was performed live. This was during the Live Aid era, which I didn’t really get into, but the singer sounded familiar, and I liked listening to the song on the radio when it played. I thought it was really cool.

Enter 1987. I’m on the bus, and this dude who never liked me, for some reason we start to talk more. One day his attitude changes and I get the feeling he’s gone through some kind of personal change. He asks me if I’ve ever listened to U2, and I say not really. He loans me his copy of “War”, and says I’ll like it.

I listen to it that night, and it makes a huge impression on me. I listen to it over and over all night. I don’t get any sleep that night (and it’s a school night), I just keep listening and marveling at how the music seems to get me in the right place. I’ve found my favorite band, and it’s my favorite band.

The next day I give it back to my bus buddy, and say it was awesome. He nods and says he knew I would like it. I tell him I stayed up all night and listened to it, and I have to get my own copy. The school day is tough without sleep, but all I can think of is getting my own copy and hunting down any other albums U2 might have.

I pester my folks and eventually end up with copies of “War”, “The Unforgettable Fire”, “Under a Blood Red Sky”, and then “Boy”. I can’t get enough of the stuff, and U2 music becomes my newfound friend. It’s passionate, larger than life, and atmospheric in the way it gets into every crevice of my soul.

A lot of my friends don’t share my interest, and I encounter more than a few people who sneer at my devotion to such a “bunch of posing losers”, but I don’t care. I like the music, it speaks to me in this time and place. My musical interest doesn’t stick with U2, but it marks my first serious exploration, and from there I investigate other sounds. Sometimes I find good stuff, and sometimes I strike out. I can always fall back on old faithful.

I get posters, and I even want to be Bono. It’s an idolization, and that leads nowhere ultimately. For now, I have a short duration personal savior in the form of some famous dude who appears to embody what I don’t recognize in myself.

Right about this time, “The Joshua Tree” gets released. I remember listening to a Christian radio station, where the DJ went over each song on the album, and gave what I thought was a pretty good, non-denominational analysis of each song. The album is unbelievable because it seems to me so different from the stuff I’ve been listening to. I graduate from high school and get ready to go to college during the summer that my new favorite group hits the big jackpot and become rock and roll legends. It’s a good time to be a fan.

I acquire “The Joshua Tree”, and it just seems like I’m accumulating an arsenal of good music to send me to the happy place wherever I go. This is in the days of walkmans the size of tricorders that took four double A batteries and came with a strap for hot, over the shoulder action. Later on, I’d borrow a dorm mate’s copy of “Wide Awake In America” and go nuts listening to it. Just about anything U2 did I could listen to and identify with easily. Yeah, I’m hooked. Little did I know just how great it would get for me.

• Bye bye, Joshua Tree
• The sock is not impressed
• The first wave of goods
• I get serious about my interest

Sheesh, talk about landing on the “total beatdown” square.  The flu put me out for a while, then kept me coughing for a good three and a half weeks.  My old friend Dr. C told me it’d be about that long.  I have to say that without the tea and honey remedy (and I mean heavy on the honey, enough to make me an addict now), my cough would have been a lot more uncomfortable.  Next on the random encounters table, an “all-monsters-attack” project at the paycheck factory.  No sleep till Brooklin!  To top it off, major drama at K’s work which meant I had to put all emergency power still remaining into keeping her sane until the matter resolved itself.

I’ve managed to keep plugging away at my red lines, and working on my appointed psychological task (update soon to come).  I’ve been letting some friends take the first ten pages home to read, and give me feedback over lunch.  So far, the feedback has been positive, which has me both pleased and nervous.  The consensus has been that they wanted more, and that’s good, but really impatient for me to finish so they can read the whole thing.  I’m getting closer, and making great strides, but the thing isn’t baked yet.  Getting to that point where people can smell something good, I suppose.

The garden is requiring attention now, which has me worried because it’s going to need some serious long term work very soon.  Stuff is planted, and the layout is almost complete, but the weeds are getting ready to attack for the kill.  This year’s focus is going to be potatoes instead of tomatoes.  I have a line of tomato cages ready to receive this year’s candidates, and last year’s jalapeno seeds are growing in their moss pills sucking up the water and sun of spring’s dawning beauty.  Totally intense dude!