just went down to the bottleworks here in seattle and got one of the beers i've been most excited to try. it's the hair of the dog brewery's fred beer. and it knocked my socks clean off. delicious, sweet, hoppy with some great caramel and chocolate notes and superbly balanced so that it didn't really taste as hoppy as it was. well worth the purchase and i'm really happy i got two. next up is adam, a monster of a barley wine style beer. i pray it's as tasty, because this was awesome!
that's it.

yeah, that's us out snowshoeing. i would be the one closest the camera. flat out!

i'm doing well, just enjoying our rare warm, sunny streak here in the rainy city. it's not so much rainy as it is just plain dreary and grey. but i got back some great news about my motorcycle and i'll have it back, running and happy, sometime in the next few weeks for less than a third of what i thought i was in for. life is good.

"Behind intolerance there is always fear, regardless of the form of government under which the repression takes place." Moses I. Finley

Took a quick snowshoeing trip this afternoon. Made a few miles' worth of tracks in the dark and came home.
I'm always struck by the world you can make for yourself even in a group. A lot of why I go out there is the solitude that each person carries within themselves in the wild. You are many things in the urban world but out there you are and nothing more. Life in one of its many forms.
I don't pretend to be the most profound thinker. I never could even commit such a farce let alone pull it off but every so often I have a thought worth committing to this, our great new conciousness: outside that small bubble of your self-perceptions lies everything you are ignorant and, indeed, intolerant of. The pair of eyes staring back at yours becomes sinister even if it is only a squirrel. Ignorance breeds this fear in us. It is natural but it is fundamentally anti-social. Nature teaches us not only how to live alone and unaided but also illuminates that great dark question of why we live with other people. I know that I often find city life vexing at best and that it is so cut off from the half of my brain that is the seat of my emotions that the logic can only control me so long.
I really don't know if that makes much sense but it was an insight for me into who I am and so it is good. I just felt like sharing it with all of you.
that's all.

Brilliant!

got a thought for the past few days. i'm going to just write it out; this is loren eiseley commenting on his thoughts as he thought of the connections of humans to a fish he called the Snout, our very earliest forebearer if you believe in things like macro-evolution. I found it to be one of the most obvious, but unthought of, perspectives out there.
"I have long been an admirer of the octopus. The cephalopods are very old, and they have slipped, protean, through many shapes. They are the wisest of the mollusks, and I have always felt it to be just as well for us that they never came ashore, but-there are other things that have.There is no need to be frightened. It is true some of the creatures are odd, but I find the situation rather heartening than otherwise. It gives one the feeling of confidence to see nature still busy with experiments, still dynamic, and not through nor satisfied because a Devonian managed to end as a two-legged character with a straw hat. There are other things brewing and growing in the oceanic vat. It pays to know this. It pays to know there is just as much future as there is past. The only thing that doesn't pay is to be sure of man's own part of it.
There are things down there still coming ashore. Never make the mistake of thinking life is now adjusted for eternity. It gets into your head- the certainty, I mean- the human certainty, adn then you miss it all: the things on the tide flats adn what they mean and why, as my wife says, 'they ought to be watched.' The trouble is we don't know what to watch for. I have a friend...who drops in now and then between trips to tell me about the size of crodile jaws in Uganda, or what happened on some beach back in Arnhem Land.
'They fell out of the trees,' he said. 'Like rain. And into the boat...We were pushing a dubout up one of the tidal creeks in northern Australia and going fast when SMACKO we jam this mangrove bush and the things come tumbling down.
What were they doing sitting up there in bunches? I ask you. It's no place for a fish. Besides that they had a way of sidling off with those popeyes trained on you. I never liked it. Somebody ought to keep an eye on them.'
'Why?' I asked
'I don't know why,' he said impatiently...'A fish belongs in water. It ought to stay there- just as we live on land in houses. Things ought to know their place and stay in it, but those fish have got a way of sidling off. As though they had mental reservations and weren't keeping and contracts. See what I mean?'
'I see what you mean,' i said gravely. 'They ought to be watched. My wife thinks so too. About a lot of things'
Not long since i read a book in which a prominent scientist spoke cheerfully of some ten billion years of future time remaining to us. He pointed out happily the things that man might do throughout that period. Fish in the sea, I thought again, birds in the air. The climb all far behind us, the species fixed and sure. No wonder my explorer friend had had a momentary qualm when he met the mudskippers with their mental reservations and lack of promises. There is something wrong with out world view. It is still Ptolemaic, though the sun is no longer believed to revolve around the earth...
We see ourselves as the culmination and the end, and if we do indeed consider our passing, we think that sunlight will go out with us and the earth be dark. We are the end. For us continents rose and fell, for us the waters and the air were mastered, for us the great living web has pulsated and grown more intricate.
To deny this, a man once told me, is to deny God. This puzzled me. I went...not in the past, not by the bones of dead things, not down the lost roadway of the Snout. I went back along the pathway to the marsh. I went...in daylight, in the Now, to see if the door was still there, and to see what things passed through it. I found the same experiments were brewing, that up out of that ancient well, fins were still scrambling toward the sunlight. They were small things, and which of them presaged the future I could not say. I saw only that they were many and that they had solved the oxygen death in many marvelous ways, not always ours...The old ways are exploited and remain, but new things come, new senses try the unfamiliar air...We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time."

so, first order of business for all you political types: http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict/bush_surge_4239.jsp.
great article and you know, it puts down what i think of this whole war thing. rather than taking a good way out W has chosen to escalate the war, kill more people, make more people in the middle east radically opposed to our interests and to further train radical Muslim terrorists all while crippling us financially and deverting our focus from far more important problems.
oh, and do you think that the "war on terror" can possibly end well when we ourselves are creating terror in the hearts of men with our pre-emptive wars? how can we possibly end something we're creating unless we change?
second order of business is the grilling condi got yesterday. did you hear Sen. Obama? "The solution always seems to be six months away." so fucking true! she was not used to getting this sort of treatment and i loved watching her get eaten by those senators. i say they deny funding for the war machine. the bull-headed ignorance going into this whole thing is going to cost more american lives and put us deep into a debt we cannot afford.