Tag: desert

From Bedrock to Paradox

jono55

Let’s see now. For years doomsayers have been telling us that artificial intelligence will kill us off, enslave us, perhaps keep a small group of us around to do their dirty work … nothing but bad news. For years they’ve been trying to scare the pants off of us, and in my case, largely succeeding.

Trouble was, I didn’t know how to gauge the truth of the stories that were coming at me. Was this the real thing, like climate change, or was it like those cults that see the end of the world coming on Tuesday and then gather in an apartment in Cleveland to dress up and take poison together?

My problem was that if I really thought that my computer was going to kill me I would, by God, turn it off. There’s a button right there on the keyboard to do just that. And then I would unplug it from the wall and drive a wooden stake straight through its motherboard.

It wasn’t until data centers came along with their energy consumption and pollution and noise and other disruptions that we got serious about the matter. These days being opposed to unregulated growth of AI is about the only truly bipartisan topic that there is. So why not pull the plug until we can figure it out? But then these stories started coming out about how little AI critters keep getting out of the labs and hacking the supposedly unhackable in other labs.

The ones we’ve heard about have been mischief-makers rather than apocalyptic instruments, but if I were an AI monster that’s what I would get the humans to say.

So are there other stories to tell? Worse ones? Horror stories to tell around campfires and then we’d all go out trembling into the woods to bury our smartphones so that we were untrackable?

Here’s one more disquieting thing to think about. Maybe the takeover has already happened, and the monster has been so cagey about it that we won’t realize we are entrapped until it wants to tell us.

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Maybe it is culling us slowly, to avoid messy panics, until it gets the herd just the size it wants …

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The header photograph is of Robin paddling on Woods Lake, which is about an hour’s drive south from our home. It’s a perfectly beautiful little lake accessed by several miles of a perfectly tooth-loosening gravel road. We’ve camped there many times, and on nearly every visit we were entertained by beaver working in the narrow portion of the lake.

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For several years now I’ve been torturing myself every time that I went tent camping. I had purchased camp cots like the one in the photo, and assembled them just as I was told in the accompanying instructions.

Such assembly regularly involved much sweating, cursing, accidentally tearing off of small pieces of my flesh, and creating a general atmosphere of mayhem in the campground. There were videos on YouTube that offered “tricks” to try to get around the basic truth of the matter, and that was that the cots did not want to be assembled, but were perfectly happy being left in their carrying bags and stored in the garden shed.

This year I decided to put them together in the backyard and leave them that way for several days until the fabric was stretched to the point where future unseemly struggles might not be necessary. But after an unsuccessful hour I stood up, knuckles bleeding, the blackest of thoughts running through my head, and I declared that the war was over. The cots had won. I slunk from the battlefield, hearing a breathy sort of snickering behind me that was the victory chortle of those supposedly inanimate objects.

Hours later, I caught them unaware and before any effective resistance could be mounted I tossed both cots into the trash bin where they now reside, waiting to be picked up.

I will either find a suitable replacement for these things or I will sleep on the ground. But I am not going back, no matter how pathetic their cries.

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A couple of hours from us in a southwesterly direction is the Community of Bedrock, Colorado. There is a working general store and a handful of houses … and that’s it.

“The town of Bedrock was established in 1883. The Bedrock post office opened on November 8, 1883. The town’s general store and post office were built on solid rock, hence the name.

The general store was built in 1882 and featured in the 1991 film Thelma and Louise.” 

Wikipedia

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Just 6.2 miles away is the community of Paradox, Colorado. It also has a general store but one that is in a dormant phase of its life, waiting for someone to kiss it back from its ramshackle slumber. There are a few more houses here than there are in Bedrock, but not many.

Both of these buildings are picturesque reminders of another day and time, when someone’s economic dream caused the towns to be built. The dream failed, and most of the occupants moved on. All but a few, whose descendants still live here in the Paradox Valley.

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In 1955 Billy Vaughan and his orchestra recorded the song Shifting Whispering Sands, and it became a hit. Quite a big one. Gives you an idea of how important those western myths are to some of us here in the States. As I finished writing the preceding piece I decided to toss it in as sort of a postscript.

Truly, 1955 was another time altogether.

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In Defense Of Odd Ducks

jono55

I started out the day reading one of those NYTimes obituaries called “Overlooked No More,” where the subject died long ago, this time in 1986. This one was about of one of the great loners of life, a man named Robbie Basho. Guitar player, singer, lifelong celibate, spiritual seeker forever on the road.

The piece made him sound desperately lonely. Living life on the margins and having to be supported by his father well into adulthood, making music that rather deliberately goes its own idiosyncratic way, it would be tempting to give him a diagnosis of mental illness of some sort. To try to find some DSM shoebox to put him in.

There was a book published back in the sixties written by Thomas Szasz called “The Myth of Mental Illness” which had a lasting effect on my thinking about the labeling that we do today, and have always done, of those whose minds spend less time in the mainstream than our own. It helps to remember than until 1973, psychiatry officially defined homosexuality as a mental illness.

DSM-IV accepts that no definition adequately specifies precise boundaries for the concept of mental disorder. This concept, like many others in medicine and science, lacks a consistent operational definition that covers all situations. Because mental disorders are a heterogenous category of disorders, no single definition captures the entire range of conditions that are currently included in this term. 

Psychiatric Times

The obituary made it sound as if his music might be hard to find, but Apple Music offers quite a lot of it to us. The tenor vocals are not your everyday stuff, sounding like something from another age, certainly another culture. Many resemble medieval ballads. The instrumentals were the most interesting to me, with their novel tunings and rhythms. I listened to many of those cuts in today’s early hours, and there were those that were haunting, like the one that follows.

Rocky Mountain Raga, by Robbie Basho

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Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country? If you are the first, then you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in the desert.

Khalil Gibran

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Here in Paradise we are one mile closer to the sun than those that live at sea level. You’d think that being 93,000,000 miles away from that precious star of ours a single mile wouldn’t make a difference, but at least in my imagination it does. At midday when the temperature is in the 90s on a cloudless afternoon the sun is merciless. Your skin can turn a lovely shade of red much quicker up here, making sunscreens a vital need.

The sunlight leaches the color from everything it can reach. Signs and automobiles seem especially vulnerable. You can easily tell which cars have been garaged and which had to face old Sol all day long. Some retail establishments who perhaps saved a dollar or two on the sign that is their advertisement to the world come to regret it when after only a very few years that ad looks ancient, becomes almost illegible.

The sunlight leaches the color from everything it can reach. Signs and automobiles seem especially vulnerable. You can easily tell which cars have been garaged and which had to face Ol’ Sol all day long.

Some retail establishments who perhaps saved a dollar or two on the sign that is their gateway come to regret it when after only a very few years that ad looks ancient, becomes almost illegible.

This June it has been warm enough to set records many times. In the middle of the day there is no one out and about in our little housing development. We are all hunkered behind drawn drapes and waiting for the afternoon shadows to lengthen and provide a protective cover. When I lived in Buffalo NY, a cloudy sky was the norm, and whenever the sun broke through it was reason for celebration. Not so much here in Paradise.

So far this year, we’ve had 2.6 inches of rain here in Montrose, which is less than half of normal. Even that normal amount of rain produces what is termed a semi-arid climate. At the 50% level, we are that much closer to being a Mojave Desert suburb. Local municipal water costs are high enough that only the more affluent have those lush green lawns that are so (foolishly?) admired. Everyone else’s yards are half-brown, the grass stressed and tired, hanging in there and waiting for the coolness of Fall.

But one saving grace of living in Paradise is that we have only to take an hour’s drive to the north, south, or west to escape the furnace. A visit to Silverton at 9,000 feet takes away nearly ten to twenty degrees from those record temperatures. Like a splash of cool water.

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Cool Water, by Fleetwood Mac

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What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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Going to spend Thursday night in a rental cabin with the Hurleys. The cabin is small, with no electricity, running water only in summer, and limited cooking facilities. It’s a 50th birthday for Amy. When the children are AARP material it becomes even more difficult to maintain those mental myths of being middle-aged.

The cabin is located along the road to Silverton, and back far enough in the woods that it is not visible from the highway. Hiking is possible, a stream runs right by the place, and there is a grand view from the wooden deck. (Robin and I scoped it out a couple of weeks ago). Looks like fun to me.

I am in charge of cooking supper on Thursday, so of course I initially overthought the whole thing and brought myself to the fingernail-chewing point as a result. The menu that has evolved is almost bulletproof, needs only primitive help from the primitive gas stove and oven, and can be kept warm for hours if need be. So I am very near being relaxed and may even enjoy myself.

I do have a clear memory of one camping episode where I was responsible for the supper and had prepared a white chili ahead of time. I thought that, too, was a bulletproof arrangement. Just before serving it to our fellow campers I managed to dump the whole kettle-full onto the ground, where it mixed with the forest duff at the campsite. You might want to make a note of this, but combining beaucoup dirt and a few cups of pine needles with a white chili makes for quite an unattractive entrée. I scooped the mess up, tossed it into the trash, and off we went to a nearby town for pizza.

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