Paxus's blog

We have a big place in which there is constantly need for repairs of something.  When i was growing up, my father stressed the importance of fixing roofs early, everything gets worse and more expensive the longer you wait.

And because there is a lack of champions for roofs here, i occasionally take one on.  These days i am working on the TCLR roof.  Not the real work of swinging hammers and removing shingles in the hot sun.  Instead i am a the bureaucrat for the project.

This roof has needed attention for a long time.  Two years back we approved the money (tho we did not specify how much) for this repair and there has not been anyone who has been willing to step forward and push our collective process or lead the construction work needed to make these repairs happen.  Then the earthquake hit and everything which was not urgent got pushed back even further.  You have been able to see the sag in this roof for several years now and tarps have been installed by Trout to keep it from leaking.

A couple of months back i met with Red and ex-member (and general contractor) Rob Jones about the Ta Chai Living Room (we call it TCLR) roof.  Both were interested in fixing it and while it is a little unusual for us to hire out work, it was agreed that Rob could help keep the job on schedule and both men would be advantaged by the other being on the project.

Fabian and his parents are away.  They visited for a bit over two weeks and almost everyone in the commune was happy to have them, especially the crowd at Nashoba where they were a big hit, unlike some of my other guests.

Moments before Fabian left on the train

As  we find with some regularity the English language is weak in describing these unconventional relationships.  i am Fabian’s donor, but what is he to me?  Certainly not my son, and “biological son” is a bit too clinical sounding.  We shall have to craft new words.

Can you see the resemblance?

I also learned some things i did not know of this visit.  Fabian has dyspraxia which gives him trouble with writing and some other motor skills.  I had always assumed that this was a genetically transmitted trait and held guilt about this.  Micha informed me that it was almost certainly induced by the hospital which gave Fabian anti-biotics the day after he was born, without consulting the parents.  This does not reduce my sadness about it, but i dont feel responsible.

This is the down side to sharing.  Living closely to each other we occasionally can do nothing about passing on infections.  The last week has been pretty hard for the community in general.  i got off easy.  i was only down for part of a day and i did not have diarrhea nor was i vomiting like many of the folks here were.

Fortunately, this virus which has hit over 50 members, guests and visitors in the last week does not typically last more than a couple of days.

Perhaps our nemesis looks like this

And what strikes me most about this unfortunate situation is our collective resilience.  With all these people sick, only one meal has been missed (which we could have gotten covered if the ailing cook has just asked for help a bit earlier).  Hundreds of shifts: tofu, dishes, child care, garden is this crazy heat, shipping, wood working, chairs weaving, auto maintenance, bike maintenance, cheese making. food process, seeds gathering, seed packing, cow milking, bread baking and granola making, orchard, ornamental flowers, Louisa, CVille and Richmond buses and many more – are all running at nearly normal capacity.  People who are not sick are doing some extra work so people who are can rest and get better.

What is especially impressive to me is that even though the community is no longer linking hammocks production to quota, and even though our current production goals are lowest of the year, because we have sales that members know we can make if we make more hammocks – even with these ailments and incapacitated workers we are still producing more hammocks than our goals.

The UK Guardian reports that China is in top level negotiations with the UK to build 5 reactors in the country, with a likely underestimated cost of US$ 55 billion for the 5 reactors. Prior to Fukushima, German utilities and French state nuclear industry were the lead contenders for the construction of this Horizon project.

After Fukushima melted down three times, the German utilities, in response to the German states rapid phase out plans, decided to walk away from building new British reactors (tho not from renewables in the UK).  France has elected (by French standards) a nuclear skeptic Prime Minister Hollande, who may not be willing to repeat the embarrassing mistakes of the new reactor in Finland which are 5 year late and at least 120% over budget.

What are the chances these will be on budget?

Why shouldn’t China build these reactors? you might well ask.  China is graduating more engineers of all types than the rest of the world combined.  China is manufacturing everything from Ipads, to running shoes, to solar panels.  Are reactors really anything other than another type of widget?

i took a chance and got burned.  Or more precisely, i took a chance and we collectively got burned.

i share the recruiting and outreach managership with Valerie and our styles could hardly be more different.  Valerie gets hundreds of emails, responds to them carefully, tracks what she has written, creates stock answers for good questions so she can save time with future similar inquiries, enters information about people who are interested in the community in our database so we can remember years from now who these people are and what types of interactions we have had with them before.  She is organized, efficient and thorough.

i use a more “house on fire” style of correspondence.  Depending on the moment the inquiry comes in, i will dash off a reply and then completely forget about the correspondent or write something thoughtful and more complete if i am in the mood.  i rarely look back to see if we already know the person and even more rarely carefully save my answers for re-use in a future similar inquiry.

So it was with Jason, who was interested in the community and we started corresponding thru several different virtual media (guaranteeing fragmented records of our communication).  Jason was clearly smart, not just because he was a mechanical engineer, but because of the good questions and occasionally frustrating overly-intellectual responses i got from him.  He is a marxist transhumanist, most people are not thinking this hard about stuff.

My cell phone is a bit dangerous.  It has lots of numbers in it of people who can make all manners of magic happen.  I called Kenric on the Cville trip today and he bought a pricy box of magic cards.  I called Gpaul and he agreed to come over from Acorn to play.  Then there was Tim’s food processing shift that needed to get covered so he could be involved and on it goes.

But after a large number of calls, i did actually pull off a draft magic tournament this evening with Willow and Fabian and Jonah and Rowan and Tim and GPaul and Abe and myself.

Willow’s favorite new card

There were a lot of other things which i might have done today, but when i realized that this was the last chance to get it organized with Willow and Fabian both playing, other stuff seemed less significant.

Thanks to all thos folx who went out of their way to make this be possible.  It was both fun and significant for the kids.  And even though it was only the second deck i ever made, i managed to win all 8 of my games and the tournament.

if you have come to this post hoping that it will be discouraging of people attending Landmark Education’s Forum course, you will be disappointed.  My overwhelming impression is that the Forum helps people  get out of their own way and improve their relationships with people who are critical to them.  If you have personal problems that your friends and therapist cant help you with and you can afford the Forum course, you should probably go, it is extremely likely to help you.  i have a number of critiques of the program, which i will touch on in this post.  But what i really want to talk about is my own peculiar set of excuses for not doing Landmark.  [If you want to read critical things about Landmark there is an article in Mother Jones and a more "balanced" on in the UK Guardian.]

Typical Landmark Inspirational Graphic

One of the most important, tho oft not discussed aspects of community life it the lack of commuting.  We live and work at the same place.  Okay, some people have to ride a bike for 5 minutes to get to Emerald City, but this lifestyle difference saves, i estimate, 5 to 10 hours a week over our Babylonian counter parts.  This is huge.

Combined with the amazingly flexible labor system it creates conversations like the one i had with Christina this morning.

Christina does this instead of rush hour

She was describing her history around these types of cards.  ”It was something i always wanted to do before, but i never had time.  Here i do it.”  She was making the card for Carley, her next door neighbor.  ”She does so many things for me, i wanted to do something for her.”

What would you do instead of sitting in rush hour?

30 years ago today a handful of armed FBI agents arrived at a cabin door in Indiana.

“Are you John Steven Fawley?”

“Would it make any fucking difference if i said ‘No’, officer?” asked Coyote in a most respectful tone.

“Absolutely none, Mr. Fawley”

“Then please come in officers, mi casa su casa” Coyote offered with a wave of his arm in greeting.

Inside they found 1254 marijuana plants growing.

leave no trace

On January 21, 1983 Coyote had is day in court and this is what he said.

“I would like to begin by telling the Court that i am not a troublesome individual.  If my life has been not exemplary, certainly it has been praiseworthy.  I think a cursory examination of my skills as a teacher, many of which i think are evidenced in the probationary report.

I have been a teacher for most of my professional life.  I am a good teacher.  I enjoy my work.

As a matter of fact, in Vermillion County and Champaign County last year of the students that i prepared to take the GED test for high school, 61 of the students under my tutelage managed to pass that examination.  The previous record for students graduating for a single teacher was 27.  I am a good teacher, i enjoy my work.

At one point i wanted to write an article about the income sharing communities i hang at called “at the end of the road” for many of these communities are located in rural areas off of dirt roads.  Specifically, Acorn, Twin Oaks and East Wind all are.  Until soon.

The sign before our driveway like this was taken down today

Perhaps 20 years ago, as the story goes, the state wanted to come in and pave Vigor road which leads to Twin Oaks.  The way they do this, so the story goes, is they ask the people who are actually on the road if they want it paved.  Which seems completely reasonable.

We did not want it paved, upsetting a number of our neighbors who did.  I am told the reason we did not want it paved was that they widen gravel roads to pave them and this would mean several big beautiful trees of ours would have been cut down.  Because the population of the community outnumbers the entire 4 mile gravel road, and because we acted as a block we were able to stop this project.

Fast forward 20 plus years.  The state did not ask us this time, nor did they widen or straighten the road, they are just paving it.  And the sign like the one depicted above, which i wanted to snap a picture of for this post, was taken down today – just hours before i tried to shoot it.

i had thought Hawina had said they were coming into the bus station just a bit before 9PM.  But when the NYC bus arrived, Willow’s half brother Fabian, Wieneke and Micha were not on it.  I had to stay at the station to pick up my virtual friend Jason.

half brothers consult on killing ipad zombies – circa 2008

But as luck would have it, when i showed up at the train station, 30 minutes late, their train had just arrived.  There was an animated reception in the station and we all hopped in the car to go back to the commune.

While we were driving i mentioned that i had set up a chess tournament for Fabian, who is something of a a chess wiz and had enjoyed playing with a bunch of members and guests last time he visited Twin Oaks in 2010.

The last time i came close to beating Fabian at chess

We were talking a bit and Fabian said “Too bad the last day of the tournament is not Wednesday, then we could be part of the party.”

“What party is on Wednesday?” i asked

And the car fell silent.  Wednesday is Fabian’s birthday.

Just as the restarted Oi 3 reactor was signaling the end of Japan’s brief respite from nuclear power, the special independent commission of the Japanese parliament was releasing its findings on the Fukushima meltdowns.

i have read and been affected by many governmentally/bank appointed “independent” commissions findings on nuclear power.  The number which were honest or independent or anything other than a whitewash endorsement for reactors i can count on one hand.    So i was quite surprised when i read the conclusion, that the Fukushima meltdown was a preventable, man-made disaster stemming from the worst conformist tendencies of Japanese culture.

The report clearly blamed both TEPCO and the government for mismanaging the disaster, but especially TEPCO for not building a real nuclear safety culture and capturing the regulator.    Three previous reports let the utility off easy blamed mother nature saying such a size tsunami could not be predicted.   Where the utility and former prime minister sharply disagreed, the commission tended to believe the now anti-nuclear former PM Kan.

“What must be admitted, very painfully, is that this was a disaster ’Made in Japan,”’ Kurokawa who chaired the commission wrote. “Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to sticking with the program; our groupism; and our insularity.”

We had More Magazine in here recently and they did a minimally adequate job of covering us.  While i enjoyed the writer of the piece, i knew that the piece was too ambitious.  The magazine wanted her to cover three significantly different communities in 6000 words, then they cut the words she had to describe all three of us in half.

The article rightly criticizes Twin Oaks for being overly bureaucratic.  And one of the specific examples of this is our norms (aka agreements) around toplessness and nudity on the farm.  This policy (which is below) we are told by More is 4 pages long single spaced.  Clearly, the implication is that this is excessive detail.  But i would encourage people to read it.  In some ways it is classic Twin Oaks.

there are no nudity police where i live

We recognize that this problem is complex in terms of our own exposure to nudity, kids comfort, local relations etc.  Not to mention the many different faces the community posses to the outside world. As i read this policy, lots of it is explanation, rather than only restrictions (tho there are lots of specific restrictions, which are done in a zoning type of way).   It is in several places more like an ongoing conversation than a set of requirements.  Which is why it is so long.

Always drawn to heretics and outcasts, here is some “eye candy” recently sent to me by ex-Oaker  and ripped from her tumblr account.

the mistress of illusion herself – circa unknown

“Can i ask you a question?” a well meaning communard or guests will say to me.

“You can always ask me a question, and you never need to ask.” is my regular reply

Because we live, work and socialize in this tight little hyper village, we have a number of agreements as to how we will protect peoples personal space.  One of the most foundational is “Asking to ask”.   Let’s say you have had a hard day, you are at line for dinner, someone who has been trying to find you sees you there and approaches.  If they use this protocol, it makes it relatively easy for you to repulse their inquiry.  They are anticipating that you might not be wanting, in this particular moment, to talk with them about what ever it is that is so important to them.

I dislike this norm.

Ignoring for a moment that the person is already presuming they can ask you a question, by asking this first one.  It is inefficient and formulaic and it is basically never the case that i personally want someone to check in about talking with me.  And despite me repeatedly exempting everyone on the commune from this agreement in my particular case, almost everyone keeps doing it to me, despite repeated reminders.

And it is not a big deal.  i get why it  is important to some people i live with and i am happy that we take care of them in this way.i get to make my little speech about how i am special and dont need this form of care taking and then they get to remember that i have told them this perhaps a dozen times before.

Electricity production is not simple.  There are myriad factors which affect price, fuel choice, local versus remote generation, feed-in-tariffs and more.  But there are some things we do know by watching what is happening in the major European power producers.

As i mentioned in an earlier post, the closure of 8 reactors in Germany has already lead to renewable energy and especially solar  taking up the slack and especially on hot days producing over 50% of the countries electricity.

What pro-nuclear critics have historically pointed out is that Germany has the highest electricity prices in Europe, driven in large part by taxes and government regulations.  Turns out this is no longer true.  France (often touted as the nuclear model for the world) now has higher baseload electricity prices,  Please remember baseload is what nuclear is supposed to be good at.

But what is more interesting, is that the market is expecting German electricity prices to continue to decrease, because of the high renenwables component and for the near term French prices to rise because of reactor outages.

One of the hardest things for me when i was learning to be a ZEGG forum facilitator was to avoid the temptation to use this powerful introspective tool for therapeutic purposes.  It seemed like a natural.  This dynamic theater tool used for symbolic and direct self expression was a powerful force in looking into yourself and if you could see into yourself why wouldn’t you want to tweak yourself to improve yourself.  Like most white males i like to think of myself as a problem solving get stuff done kind of guy.  So if you have tools and you can see things are messed up, then you are somewhat obligated to try to improve things.

open

What it is supposed to be used for is self expression and self reflection.  These are quite different things.  Self expression can be all manner of transparent revelation,  What i learned to the forum and now thru its evolving sister group Not Forum is that being transparent has tremendous value in and of itself and this is why it makes sense to practice, even if you do not have a goal towards self improvement work.

At the top of the list is self knowledge and trust building.  IF you are doing these exercises you are looking in and trying to figure out what it is that you are doing and how you show up, even if you cant fully capture the whys.  And by going thru this work with others, you are learning how to be open to sharing aspects and elements of yourself which are generally kept secret oft even from yourself.  The honesty in these groups weave trust and deepens relationships.

When I arrived at Independence Mall in Philadelphia this afternoon looking for the Occupy Nat Gat, instead I found many police and paramilitary units from many different different city, state and federal agencie.s. The first perhaps local officer I asked where the gather said:

“I think they have dispersed, I dont think they are anywhere.”

One hundred feet away another officer in a more exotic uniform started talking to me as I approached.

“You dont want to ask me anything.”

“Could you tell me where the occupy national gathering is.”

“No I can not tell you.” His expression was stoney cold.

“Thank you for being so helpful”, i replied in an earnest tone

I asked a younger bicycle riding cop another 200 feet away the same question.

“I really dont know, I have not seen them.” he said earnestly.

A couple of blocks later a park ranger said

“They are at 5th and Market.” Said in a dismissive knowledgeable way.  This address was where this series of questions had started.

Philly police putting on riot helmets, when there are no protesters anywhere near by.

I returned to 5th and Market and spoke the to vets who were there and they said “Occupy is at 6th and Race.” It was common knowledge they had been their all day, since they did not get the permit for Washington Park.

Every cop knew this was true. Everyone knowingly lied to me. My taxes pay for them to lie to me. Something is wrong here.

So part of the adventure was just getting here.  The traffic was pretty bad, but what was weird about it was that there were traffic jams at odd times.  We (Emily X, Claire, Sara and myself) stopped outside Baltimore to avoid the rush hour traffic, we got back on the road around 7 PM and it was still jammed.

When we made ti to Philly several sets of housing for us fell apart, but ex-student Ian is a great organizer and as one place to stay feel apart or did not work he found another.  After sleeping ont he roof of the warehouse did not work out because of the rain, he housed us at his fellow organizer Cat’s place, which was great.

But as we were driving to Cat’s at twenty minutes to 1 AM, i was struck by the full on traffic jam going on on  I95.  So this is two lanes, no lights, after midnight, stop and go, largely stop.  And it did not appear like any accident causing the slow down, so it remains a mystery.

Rad Con’s organizers come from Sara’s pedigree.  They worked with Occupy, they were disillusioned with the groups unwillingness to work on internal issues of class and privilege and they continued to work with like minded folx on post Occupy events.  The following essay is the intro to the heretical fingerbook on “why not one big Occupy”

Fingerbook Cover art by Diana

“Why not one big Occupy Movement?”

When I told my friend i was going to the counter convergence in Philly, she was disappointed “Why can’t everyone be under the big Occupy tent?  Why do we always have to be divided?”

Occasionally, people get upset at the way i run naming parties.  I use a facilitation technique which has been called “Florida Style” after the voter fraud that got Bush II elected.  Let’s just say being precise is not always my priority.  Presumably because i am entertaining in my presentation (and i cant really influence the decision process) i get asked back to run naming parties again.

Over 10 years ago, after we installed the new rope machine we realized we needed a name for it.  We had gone over 20 years without a name for the old rope machine, because there was no need to distinguish it from anything.  But with two side by side, we threw a naming party for both and they were ultimately called “God” and “the State”.  As Marx predicted, the State has withered away and only God is running these days, but the name lingers even tho there is nothing to be comparing it to locally.

Joanna, Kristen, Luuk, Ridgely, Zadek, Sami and Anja are Unicorns School the day this photo was shot

And if you start something new, you can name it, so when Rick and Joanna started the current awesome child care, basic education program in the community (which now meets 5 mornings a week), they decided to call it Unicorns school.