Why I’m a Liberal

I was raised a Christian.

In my book, that should be all that’s necessary to be said. The fundamental principles are all there. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Feed the hungry. Heal the sick. Shelter the homeless. Do good to those who would harm you.

Of course, my friends all know that I’m not a Christian. I found ‘faith’ to be a convenient excuse for avoiding responsibility. I found the Bible to be an old book that had some good things in it but banked largely on people’s superstitions and formed the foundation for massive corporations that strip people of their humanity by promising them eternal happiness.

But that didn’t change what makes good people. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Feed the hungry. Heal the sick. Shelter the homeless. Do good to those who would harm you.

While I find the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ to have absolutely nothing to do with the actual actions of people classified in those camps, the Christian principles that I was raised on far more closely align with the so-called left than the right wing.

The coming election is not about who lied or who was a better person or who should go to jail. If we had objective and rational voters, there would be a different slate of candidates running. I will simply weigh every word that issues from the mouths of the candidates and their supporters and their platform against those five principles.

And vote ‘liberal’ in November.

Had company while I was eating breakfast and composing this statement this morning.

Rethinking the Golden Rule

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Luke 6:31.

It's Sunday morning, so I've decided to give a little homily. Forgive me, for I know not what I'm doing.

I saw this little clip on Facebook this morning, and that inspired me. What we get from Facebook memes:

https://www.facebook.com/WiccanInspirations/

I got to thinking what it was like to be on the receiving end of all that. Yes, the rule is for what you should do, but what about the person you do it unto?

I don't want to be treated like you treat yourself!

I don't want your self-loathing. I don't want your self-indulgence, your drugs, your alcohol, your ego. I don't want to be treated the way you want your husband or wife to treat you. I don't want your abuse, your lust, your secret desires.

I want to be treated the way I want to be treated.

Give me your kindness. Give me your respect. Give me your concern for my well-being.

How do you want to be treated? Are you willing to accept my treatment of myself for you? Don't do unto others as you would have them do to you. Do unto others as they would have you do. That is my Golden Rule.

’Tis a Puzzlement…

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12 Lessons I Learned from the Software Industry

1. Back in the old days, (1980s) we had this joke: QUESTION: What's the difference between a software salesman and a used car salesman. ANSWER: A used car salesman knows when he's lying.
LESSON 1: You can believe your own bullshit, but it doesn't make it true.
LESSON 2: No matter what you buy, you're going to get lied to.
2. You can sell a lot of stuff based on differences that don't make a difference. One software company boasted that its product could control kerning (letter spacing) in 1/50,000th an em-space increments (about 0.0000016 inches or 16 ten-millionths of an inch). The competitor in only 1/1000th of an em (about 0.000083 or 83 millionths of an inch). But the highest resolution printers had dots that were 0.00029 inches (29 hundred-thousandths). Both competitors had greater control than could be shown or printed. Still today!
LESSON 3: When differentiating your product, choose a feature that ignites people's passions but doesn't make a difference and can't be proven.
LESSON 4: Buyers have no concept of what is actually important to them.

3. The software industry's first priority is selling software. You always have to sell the next version. A product that is complete and can't be developed any further is obsolete. There can never be a 100% solution or the software company would go out of business. Software companies inherently collude in forcing trickle-down upgrades to products dependent on them.
LESSON 5: There must always be a 'critical' feature or 'discovered' flaw to drive the next version.
LESSON 6: It should always be more costly to change to a competitor than to upgrade.

4. Security sells. Software companies routinely add and sell more secure versions rather than educating users on safe use. The best way to get a customer to change products is to convince them the competition exposes them to greater risk and is not secure.
LESSON 7: A perceived or promoted threat from outside will divert attention from real problems inside.
LESSON 8: People would rather be protected than act responsibly.

5. Software is designed and created by engineers. Engineers know how to write code. Therefore all problems can be solved with more code. Not all code works with other code. The answer to that problem is more code. Engineers almost never understand the industry for which they are writing code. They understand how to write code.
LESSON 9: Solutions create problems.
LESSON 10: Those who create solutions seldom understand the problem.

6. Even if the leader of a software company has never written a line of code in his or her life, all solutions to all problems and concepts for improvement will look like the brainchild of that leader. Engineers will be scrambling behind the scenes to try to make product sense out of what the leader says.
LESSON 11: Sell customers on the vision and you can blame others for failing to fulfill it.
LESSON 12: We have no concept of the path between vision and the future.

This is all stuff I learned from the software industry. It has nothing at all to do with the 2016 Presidential election.

The Case Against Gutenberg

Like Brutus at the murder of Julius Caesar, Gutenberg wasn’t the only one to stick a knife in Christianity. But this friend of the Word also got blood on his hands.

In Gutenberg Plaza in Mainz, this statue dominates. However, there is no known likeness of the man that was made during his life, so none of the several statues and busts of him look the same.

I researched the life of Gutenberg and the intricacies of his inventions for close to twenty-five years before I started writing The Gutenberg Rubric. I love printing. I love the elegance of Gutenberg’s movable type and font design. I love the care with which characters were shaped in different versions to make the lines of type come out evenly against the margin. I love the fact that he inked in two colors so that lines of type could be set in red, and that he provided a rubric—a guide to what letters should be placed in the blank spaces by scribes—so hand crafting could be combined with machine work. I like the ‘alchemy’ involved in the formulation of lead type. I like the adaptation of a wine press to provide sufficient pressure to imprint the pages.

My book takes great liberties with the story of Gutenberg, Schoeffer, Fust, et.al. Nothing in it particularly contradicts the historical accounts, but the story is not historical. It just looks like it fits. You can get the paperback at https://www.createspace.com/5220838.

And the Kindle eBook at http://www.amazon.com/dp/0983369127.

In general, as I stood in front of three different copies of the Bible printed by Gutenberg, I was speechless. 560 years ago he invented the process that made books available to everyone. He made literacy a thing to be strived for. He enlightened the world.

His hand held the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

This picture of "The Fall of Man" by Lucas Cranach the Elder dates back to 1530. Interesting that he paints the serpent as a woman, isn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lucas_Cranach_(I)_-_Adam_and_Eve-Paradise_-_Kunsthistorisches_Museum_-_Detail_Tree_of_Knowledge.jpg

Let us consider Adam and Eve. As long as they remained in ignorance, they walked with God. Once they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Etz ha-da'at tov va-ra) they were cast out of Eden and out of the presence of God.

When I began intensively studying the Bible back in the late sixties and early seventies, my mother, a United Methodist minister, warned me that too much study would destroy my faith. She was right. Ultimately it did, though not for many years. And in spite of my study, I do not profess to be a Bible scholar any more than I am truly a print scholar. Far from it. And that is part of the problem. Faith—walking in the presence of God—requires ignorance. In fact, that is its definition. Faith is acting on a belief without proof. When we have proof—true knowledge—we no longer need faith.

Gutenberg took away ignorance/innocence.

Of the 49 copies still remaining in whole or in part of the Gutenberg Bible, this one is in the New York Public Library. CC BY-SA 2.0hide terms  File:Gutenberg Bible, Lenox Copy, New York Public Library, 2009. Pic 01.jpg Created: 28 May 2009

Prior to the invention of movable type, books were costly to produce. They were painstakingly copied by scribes, some of whom (if we are informed correctly) did not even know what they were copying, but faithfully reproduced each letter. Even the language of the text was not known by the common people. People, who did not read, took the words of the priest on faith. The priest—a scholar who could read and interpret the Bible—kept the message relevant both to the people and the time. Christianity lived and adapted.

The Cathedral, or Mainz Dom. It is no longer required that people go the church/cathedral to hear the words read in a different language and listen to the priest's interpretation of them. People now hold the knowledge in their hands and partake of the forbidden fruit.

But the printing of some 160-180 copies of the Bible moved the book out of the sanctuary and into the hands of the ignorant/innocent. Literacy spread. Each person could read and interpret the words for him or herself. People no longer had to take the words of the priest on faith. They held in their hands the knowledge of good and evil.

And with that act, the Bible was frozen in time. Each individual became responsible for his or her own interpretation of the Word. It could never change. It could never be anything more than the absolute knowledge of good and evil: original sin. The Bible is proof of whatever we want to believe.

Gutenberg’s hand held the bloody knife that killed faith.

Gutenberg died in 1468, largely unknown. He was buried in the Franciscan church which was later destroyed and the graves lost. The church in this picture is St. Christoph in Mainz which was Gutenberg's home parish. It was also nearly destroyed by Allied bombs in WWII in 1945. While the sanctuary is now 'open air', the chapel under the bell tower is still used a few times a month by various churches. It is just a few blocks from where Gutenberg was interred.

The Problem with Pets

Let me start off by saying that I love animals. I like dogs, cats, guinea pigs, and horses. I comprehend the fascination with snakes, ants, geckos, birds, and ferrets. I have nothing at all against animals. Okay?

A friendly cat in the Meteora of Greece. 4/3/2016.

When I started traveling full time back in 2013, one of the first questions I was asked was whether I was taking a dog. I was pretty much appalled. No. No pets.

I carefully explained that having a pet in my traveling circumstances would be unfair to the animal. It would spend hours a day in my truck where I would have to figure out a way to leave it safely when I stopped to eat, get coffee, tour a museum, or visit any of the hundreds of places where pets are not allowed. I would have to leave it behind when I took an airplane, arranging care for the pet. Or not travel. Each country I visit as I go around the world has different rules regarding how long a pet has to stay in isolation before he can join the owner. My trailer is tiny and there is no place for the accoutrements of a pet. (Cage? Litterbox? Dishes? Leashes?)

Prague across the Vltava River. 5/17/2016.

Then there is the problem of disruption. I have been in many campgrounds where pet owners have bragged about how well-behaved and quiet their dogs are and what a pleasure it is to travel with them. Their words have been made into lies as soon as they leave the pet in the trailer to drive someplace it can’t go. I’ve have listened to dogs wail and cry and howl all day long when their owners are absent.

Not fair to the pet and not fair to the traveler. Having a pet puts a restraint on where you can go and how long you can be gone. Even how much you can afford. Pets are costly.

Statue of Juliet (Romeo and Juliet) with her good luck breast rubbed shiny. Over stimulated, I think.  Munich, 5/21/2016.

“But don’t you get lonely?” I’m asked.

Hell, yes! I spend about 90-95% of my time alone and usually lonely. I miss touch and love and the cuddles that pets give without ever asking for more in return than that you care for them.
And that’s the real problem with pets.

Schloss Neuschwanstein in Bavaria. One of the most romantic views on earth. This is the castle that Disney artists modeled the Disneyland castle after. Hohenschwangau, Bavaria, 5/22/2016.

I read blogposts, email, and Facebook posts that either personally or conglomerately talk about the importance of their pets. “My pet is a member of my family.” “My pet lives here. You don’t.” “I love my Pug, Pom, Pyrenees, Persian, whatever.” “Happiness is a kitten.” “There is no loyalty like a dog’s.”

I appreciate the sentiment. Pets quickly become as important to their owners as the people in their lives. And often more so. Pets actually become a substitute for people. We will cuddle and pet and groom and feed our pets when we won’t do the same for our spouse or children. Because they don’t demand anything else from us, it is much easier to have a relationship with a pet than with a human. We can complain about anything. They listen. We can push them away. They wait. We can reach out a hand. They are there to be petted.
It is easier to love a dog than a person.

Great-great-...-grandsire Everett. (Everett="Boar Heart"). Now that would be a pet... Munich 2/21/2016.

When our first greyhound died back in 2009, my daughter’s coach talked to her gently. “Parents give us pets so we can learn how to deal with the loss of a loved one.” It was a beautiful sentiment. Our dog was a loved one and we dealt with the loss. But a step from that to being the focus of our love to the exclusion of our loved ones is entirely too easy to make. If I had a dog, I wouldn’t need a person. It is so much tidier than dealing with the emotions and needs of someone who might not always feel the same. Who won’t jump into your lap simply because you sat down. Who won’t sit for hours while you stroke its fur. Who won’t always be standing at the door waiting to go with you wherever you are going. Who doesn’t show joy whenever you walk into the room. Who will always put your needs first.

If I give that kind of affection and care, it will be to a human being who returns it. That’s the problem with pets.

Ja, David. Sie hat einen 'innie'. Lowenbrau Biergarten, Munich, 5/21/2016.

Consider the Stones

Look around. See the stones? Rocks. Gravel. Sand. Pebbles. Boulders. Gems. Stones are ubiquitous. We see them in every direction. The whole earth—this third rock from the sun—is made of stone.

We classify them as igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. We name them marble, granite, limestone, `a`a lava, sandstone, quartz, basalt, slate, coal. We treasure diamonds, rubies, opals, emeralds.

They are all just stones.

This stone cairn was built on the Big Island of Hawaii overlooking the Pacific. Just a pile of stones. 2/20/2016.

We spend our lives ignoring them. Unless we trip over them or bang our heads on them, they are virtually invisible.

But stones are the miraculous building blocks of civilization. We build palaces, cathedrals, skyscrapers, castles, and shops. We carve them into sublime statues that outlive both artist and subject. We engrave them. We stack them into cairns and memorials to great achievements and to great tragedies. We lay the cornerstones of our buildings and our property boundaries, build fences and walls, and make dividing lines between our countries. Stones to keep cattle in and barbarians out.

Leaving Greece and entering Bulgaria on a bed of stones. 4/12/2016.

We crush stones into a paving bed for our roads and highways. We mold them and bake them into bricks to build homes, offices, fireplaces, and barbecues. We grind up rocks and blend the aggregate with cement—itself just more fluid rock for binding—and make blocks to build bunkers and to lay the foundations of our homes.

Wat Chedi Luang in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The oldest of some 300 temples in the region. A huge pile of stones. 3/10/2016.

The vast sandy deserts are no less than the remains of quartz mountains ground down by wind and water into tiny grains—little stones in their most malleable form. Moistened on the beach, we mold them into castles to be swept away by the tides. Under pressure, they can blast the rust from metal and clean graffiti from walls. Ground finely and heated to melting, those little stones turn transparent and we look through them. Our windows—the glass that keeps the heat in and the cold out or vice versa, that protects us from wind and debris, that mirrors our image—are just stones.

The Parthenon, Athens. A temple monument made of stones. 3/31/2016.

Incredible stone monuments are guideposts to glory of mankind—the pyramids of Giza, the Parthenon, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, Notre Dame. All made out of stones. And amidst them we find ruins—victims of siege engines that hurled rocks with such force that stone walls fell, or like Jericho crumbled at a shout.

The Theater of Dionysus in Athens. Even our entertainment is produced in a pile of stones. 3/31/2016.

The earliest weapons were no more than stones, thrown at prey or at enemies. We lay in wait and tumbled boulders on the heads of our foes. We set a stone in a sling and brought Goliath to his knees.

Or, on our knees, we present a stone in a golden ring to pledge our love and troth.

Sublime. Statue in Thessaloniki. 4/8/2016.

Yet stones are tools. The miller’s grist stone or the peasant’s mortar and pestle grind grain into flour for our bread. We pound stakes into the ground with a stone to anchor tents when we camp. We strike the stone flint against steel to create the spark that will light our fires. We surround the fire pit with stones to heat our homes and cook our food.

St. Nikolas Monastery in the Meteora of Greece. Building our retreat on top of a stone. 4/3/2016.

At the end of our lives a stone is engraved to mark our passing, returning to the soil, becoming minerals, absorbed into stone. We scatter the ashes of loved ones among the pebbles and pray for their peace and our own.

Stones simply are.

The stony shore of the Aegean Sea, Split, Croatia. 4/30/2016.

They have never asked us to believe in them. No stone has ever sent one nation to war against another. No stone has ever demanded that we believe in no other stones, that we love it, or that we bow down and worship it. No stone has enslaved people. No stone has considered one person chosen and another damned. No stone has subjugated a woman or made chattel of her children.

Old bones turned to stone. At the Museum of Natural History in Bucharest. 4/18/2016.

Stones are not capricious. They do not do not care about race, religion, national origin, sexual preference, or economic status. They are not soft for one and hard for another. They are not liquid one moment and solid the next. They don’t give blessings to one and curses to another.

Stones obey the laws of nature. They fall to the ground because of gravity. They fly through the air when propelled by force. They crumble under sufficient pressure. They are nothing more nor less than stone.

Stones hold the water in its channel. Ljubljana. 5/4/2016.

I believe my family and my child love me like I love them. I believe in the brotherhood and goodness of all mankind. I believe in the faithfulness of my friends. I believe in Mom, apple pie, and the American way.

Sometimes I even believe in God.

What is a cathedral other than a great pile of stones? Cathedral of St. Vitus, Prague. 5/172016.

But when it comes down to it? When I need to depend on something constant and never-failing?

I believe in stones.

I am, after all, not a sage. Just an old man sitting at a sidewalk café waxing eloquent on the world. Bratislava, Slovakia, 5/12/2016.

The Pledge of Allegiance

This will be short and interspersed with yet more great pictures and comments from my trip around the world. I seem to have a lot of things to say lately that that are likely to alienate my friends and enemies alike. Just wait until you read the upcoming post about stones!

A lot of people follow me and I follow them on Facebook. That place is the repository for more inane memes and commentary than anyplace I’ve ever imagined. I’m pretty sure that if there is a hell it is a daily feed of memes from Facebook. So, it is just as stupid for me to respond to them. Still, here I am.

The "Man on a Horse" statue took on new dimensions in Brno, Czech Republic. Apparently they cut the budget for the pedestal and just lengthened the legs!

One of the most common posts I see has to do with keeping the words “under God” in the pledge of allegiance and how that made us all somehow mystically better citizens when we were growing up. When my first grade teacher taught us the pledge, she was still stumbling over those words that had just been added to the pledge the previous year. They weren’t there in the pledge my parents knew. Still, my parents’ generation had no difficulty standing up to the Nazis, the Japanese, and the Koreans. Somehow the nation had survived the first and second World Wars and the Great Depression without reciting those words.

This is Na Stojika in Brno. It means "to stand." There are always different beers to try at the bar, but then you bring your mug or glass outside and sit around or stand around the plaza. It's pretty calm here on a Sunday afternoon, but Saturday night there were a couple hundred people just standing around with their beers talking!

Dwight Eisenhower pushed to have the words added after a Presbyterian minister preached a sermon about it. Eisenhower was a new convert to the Presbyterian Church. Somehow he’d managed a successful military endeavor in WWII and a campaign for presidency without them. In spite of the fact that the U.S. Senate formally censured Senator Joseph McCarthy at the end of 1954, they were still so cowed by the threat of being called communists and homosexuals that no one dared stand against the addition of this obviously anti-communist sentiment to our nation’s pledge. In 1956, “In God We Trust” was added to our nation’s currency, again with Eisenhower's and his minister's encouragement. McCarthy, at least, had the good grace to die the next year and finally end the witch hunts he inspired. Sadly, we don't seem to have learned anything from that.

This is the moat at Castle Spilberk. The doors at the left led into the dungeons. When I look at it, I can easily forget that the prison could hold three or four hundred people and I think "Wouldn't Dick Williams have loved this for a theater set. I can almost see Shakespeare being performed here, but I think he'd probably find a way to stage "Hello Dolly" here if he had to.

Whatever your religious sympathies (and let us not forget that it was Jehovah’s Witnesses that refused to stand and recite the pledge in classrooms, not Muslims) please recognize the fact that these two phrases are not part of our national heritage. They did not make us better citizens. They were not in the plans of our founding fathers who expressly indicated both in the Constitution and in their private correspondence that this was not a “Christian Nation”, and that no one had the right to force other citizens to adhere to any portion of their religious beliefs as part of national law. The words “under God” and “In God We Trust” are both primary examples of the government mandating adherence to a religious belief in order to be considered loyal Americans.

I find that mandate to be utterly repugnant.

These four guys bear the weight of a huge building on their shoulders. They never get a break. Whenever you think life has you weighed down, think about these guys. It isn't so bad.

The constitution supposedly guarantees that the government will not pass any legislation that supports or promotes a specific religion. It does not say, “except Christianity.”

Get over it.

Giving It Away

It's been a couple weeks since my last post--weeks filled with exciting travel to Split, Ljubljana, Vienna, and Bratislava. It's not because I'm not writing. I started this post the first week of May and keep noodling it over. It's still a rough draft as I get my thoughts together. I'm pretty sure all my friends who are writers, artists, musicians, dancers, etc. will hate the suggestions I'm making, but touring some of the world's great museums and seeing so much art the past several weeks has started me thinking deep thoughts. What a dangerous thing to do! So, of course, I'll sprinkle pictures throughout.

This is what I mean by "traveling light." The little bag contains my laptop, tablet, journal, camera, and any snacks I think I need for the day. The big bag contains everything else I need for eight months on the road. Currently, it's mostly dirty laundry!

I’ve been talking about 'giving it away' on and off for a couple years now, but have never encapsulated it. This was not the post I intended at first, but it is probably more upbeat than the one about scars and wounds of life that I’d planned. Now you know what to look forward to in the future! What inspired me to this post, however, was a trip to the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The museum is next door to the U.S. Embassy. It is fairly small—just one floor with permanent exhibition on the left and temporary on the right. One of the museum’s major draws is the Café Moderne in the basement where they served me an entire Chemex Pot of coffee!

The inspirational part of the trip was the exhibit of Constructivists. I kind of understand that movement as I studied it in relationship to theater. The movement (started about 1913 in Russia) rejected the idea of autonomous art in favor of art as a practice for social purposes. But I discovered that I don’t go to art museums to learn about art. I go to find pieces of art that speak to me. The Constructivists railed against art as they created it. They were against paintings, religious artwork, representational art, etc., etc. Yet their paintings and constructions are here on display in a museum. Hanging on a wall. How ironic.

While touring the castle in Ljubljana, I found that it was used as the first penitentiary in the mid 1800s after a revision in the legal code started the practice of incarceration as a penalty for breaking the law. Prior to that time, recompense and capital punishment were the prevailing trends. People were put in prisons to await trial or to be held for ransom. I noted that the average term of incarceration was ten years and both men and women were held there. The most common offense for women? Child murder. Apparently, there is something to be said for mothers who eat their young.

A few years ago, I started reevaluating my goals in writing. That had a strange sound to it. Did I have goals? Don't we all just want to be published and have a best seller with a six figure advance and a contract for our next three books. And a movie deal? My ego loves stroking, so I wanted people to read my writing and to tell me how much they liked it, but I really had no pretenses of having a runaway best seller that would provide for me through my old age. That was when I started writing on free story sites and giving books away. Over the past two years, I’ve ordered paperbacks as I was traveling around the country and simply gave them to people who I felt would appreciate them.

I started giving it away, and I liked it.
I proposed a conference topic to the PNWA called “Giving It Away” because I detected that many people who attended had other goals than to get an agent and publisher and income. But that is what the conference is targeted toward. I think there are other reasons for writing and so I’m creating my manifesto.
Art should be free. Writers, artists, sculptors, painters, dancers, musicians should not be paid for their work.

Apparently I have half of all I need!

How is an artist supposed to earn a living?

Who cares? That’s been my thought for many years, as far back as the 70s when I rebelled against theater people who felt the public owed them for their performances—even if they were poor performances—and should support them simply because it was art. Bullshit. I’ve listened to many fellow artists talking about how they can’t pay the rent with “exposure” and that downloading music from free sites steals from the artist and that we need to strengthen copyright laws to protect the rights of artists. Bullshit again.

If I could describe a perfect world (which I’ll probably do in a wildly successful runaway bestseller one day) I would say that no one should earn a living from their art. I don’t mind getting a little extra spending money occasionally when someone buys a book or simply donates to keep me writing. But I am not entered in the popular publishing lottery. I will soften this by saying that political and religious leaders should also not earn a living from their ‘service.’ There are probably several other ‘professions’ that I could list here.
Once an artist bastardizes his or her artwork to make it more successful in the commercial world, the art loses some of its artistry and ultimately its value. Money becomes the reason instead of art.

Mmm. Schweinbraten, Sauerkraut, und Knödel. Und Bier!

So we are supposed to suffer for our art?

No! We are supposed to suffer without it. Not writing, not painting, not sculpting, not playing music should hurt. The artist should suffer if he or she is not creating art.

This would certainly cut down on the number of mercenary artists. And art itself would become more treasured. I have noticed as I traveled in Europe that there is a lot of graffiti. But I have never seen graffiti on an ancient monument or artwork. Amazing. It is just as illegal to tag a train as it is to tag the Parthenon. Yet those monuments are avoided. The art is treasured.

Graffiti in Ljubljana.

Artists, in my Utopia, would have to support themselves in other ways. Certainly there are some who could rise to a position of importance (profit) in their profession and still satisfy the ache in their psyches by painting or writing most of the night. Most artists, however, would fill the hard jobs—non-intellectual labor that leaves the mind free to create when the job is left behind at the end of the day. The leaf-raker doesn’t need to rush home, shower, dress formally, and head out to the leaf-rakers' charity ball. The apple-picker does not waste mental cycles trying to solve the problems of fruit production when he leaves the orchard. He can focus on just two things: art and sleep.

Artists would find it difficult to form long-term intimate relationships. That is no concern. Artists have always had difficulty with long-term intimate relationships.

The Butchers' Bridge in Ljubljana is a place where people write the name of their lover on a padlock and lock it to the railing on the bridge. I have seen this repeated in Vienna and Bratislava as well. I guess that's one way to make a permanent relationship, but do they keep the key in case they need to go remove the lock sometime?

How do we prevent ‘bestsellers’?

I would propose banning mass reproduction of any form of artwork. Music would return to being a performance medium rather than a recording medium. Libraries and museums would become the places where people go to view, listen, read. They would become the places of worship they mimic.

Gutenberg was a criminal! He took living words and killed them in a wine press. The mass production of Bibles froze Christianity. It pitted book against book as nations pitted flag against flag. Neither had anything to do with what it represented. Of course, those books are not art. The result of Aldus Manutius creating books that would fit in a saddlebag meant that people no longer had to go to the book to read. Books became cheap commodities and lost their value. Even more so now that they are nothing but electronic bits displayed on cell phones.

Banning critics would also help. Critics do nothing to enhance the value of art to the artist or to the public. They serve a commercial function by instructing people on what they should like/buy and what they should not. They seldom have anything to say that is actually relevant to what the artist intended or felt when painting, writing, or performing. Discussion of the art, however, should be encouraged. Libraries should not be places of silence, but rather places where books are read aloud and people respond with laughter, tears, joy, anger, and even love.

The cheap imitations of art that people hang on walls prevent people from decorating their space. Even as a long-time proponent of wallpaper, I say there is no art in wallpaper. It prevents us from filling the palettes of our homes with dynamic, meaningful expressions of life. If you "own" an original piece of art instead of a reproduction, you need to share it with others. Invite them into your home. Talk about the artist and the artwork. Invite him to dinner!

I have an acquaintance who gets up each morning and takes a picture of sunrise. Rain or shine, no matter where she travels. I've thought that perhaps I should collect pictures of 'man on a horse' as there seems to be one in front of nearly every train station or palace or museum.

But there are so many more interesting subjects! I could be out finding a sculpture of naked women every day! Or maybe live ones!

Are you suggesting we live in monasteries?

That might not be as far-fetched an idea as you think. Under the conditions I describe, the poor artists are going to have to live somewhere! And so is reborn the artists' commune. I know for a fact that there are people who collect around artists. Call them groupies if you want, but really they are disciples. Authors, sculptors, painters, musicians become holy men and women. (Well, maybe not drummers.) They are the source of what is good and beautiful in the world.

What they can't do, however, is depend on government grants, tax-exempt donations, and welfare to see them through. Needs must be met through the traditional forms--labor, servitude, and begging.

There are reasons that so many authors, musicians, and artists tend toward substance abuse. Help them along in their quest.

So, I say give it away. I don't write for a living; I write to live. If dollar-signs are foremost in your mind, art is suffering.

A new game's afoot!

To all my brilliant computer programmer and gamer friends: As I was standing in the train station in Prague trying to figure out which track my train was going to leave from, I started thinking about what kind of training a "World Traveler" should have. Of course, the first thing I thought of was that a world traveler should be able to arrive in a city in a foreign country where she does not speak or read the language, buy the correct fare ticket, locate and board the cheapest public transportation, and get off at her hotel stop. I got to thinking that you could get double points if you used a machine that didn't have an English screen to buy your ticket. You lose points if you board the subway going the wrong direction.

So fare, five different countries, five different currencies, five different languages, and three different alphabets! And that doesn't include landing in Japan to change planes, a month in Thailand, or a stop-over in Abu Dhabi. Three more languages, currencies, and alphabets!

Entering Romania. Don't forget the game has to include large armed men collecting your passport and returning it half an hour later while you wait on the train.

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Wow! It would almost be like a game. Play "World Traveler" today! You have a budget of $100 per day to visit Nerdavania for a week. You must, exchange currency (learn where and how to get the best rates), find lodging, get transportation, read a menu and order food, visit the top attractions of Geekout, Nerdavania, and never EVER be without your passport. But don't worry! Your host will speak English and you will actually understand every fifth word that is spoken! In the expert edition, you get only $50 per day.

Lodging can be acquired after you arrive or just before you embark on your adventure, but the cost has to be included in your daily allowance--including the extra day's fee that the website charges for the convenience. You have to balance cost of lodging against the safety factors and convenience. If you have to pay $10 a day for transportation from lodging to anything else, you will lose money. And is there someplace reasonable to eat nearby?

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I'm sure someone out there could make a really cool game out of this. It would be packed with maps from Microsoft so you will never know if what you are seeing is true. (Nor is there a key or scale of miles or any other cartographic information that is actually standard on a map. But you can see where you are within fifty meters from a satellite view.) Your cell phone won't work unless you invest in a local tourist SIM (after you find a store that sells local tourist SIMs). And "Free WiFi" traps abound! We could start having the timid World Traveler go from the U.S. to Canada. Advanced Travelers could go to hostile countries or to countries that lack the infrastructure that we have in the U.S. and Europe. What happens if you get sick? And in "Extreme World Traveler" you get to be kidnapped or even killed. Where will you rest in peace? (The game continues as getting your body back could bankrupt your family!)

What will you eat? On a budget. A $5 meal (above) could easily turn into a $30 meal (below) if you forget what the currency exchange rate is.

Where the food is can be just as important as what it is or how much it costs. Don't forget that if you go out for a meal at 8:00 p.m. (a common time for dinner in Europe) that you will be coming home in the dark. Can you find your way? Is it safe? Are you too drunk to know?

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I'm too old to program manage this, but I'll be happy to test and research. I'm sure you can see the possibilities. The big benefit, of course, is that it might get some Americans who successfully play the game to get up off their duffs and go visit someplace besides the local bar or church.

Finding a bathroom can be a challenge. Are the only choices for skinny men and fat women? Is a toilet, WC, toalet, banya, salle de bain? And don't forget that you might need local currency to pay the bathroom attendant. 150HUF in Budapest and he handed me my toilet paper allotment.

No matter how liberal the bathroom laws are as you travel, this is frowned upon almost everywhere. However, at my cabin in Hawaii the instructions were to "pee in the yard and poop in the bucket."

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I just think there are a world of possibilities here (so to speak). I've even come up with a concept for a U.S. version because traveling from state to state and city to city in the U.S. has many of the same problems. Is this the state where the speed limit is enforced at exactly what is posted? Can I pump my own gas? Can I smoke pot? And what was it that Yankee, West Virginian, Texan, or Valley Girl said? Is this really the way to San Jose? 

What do you think?

Why Americans Won't Colonize Space—Part 3

It’s my stuff!

I recently reread George Carlin’s great routine about ‘stuff.’ I especially love two lines in the routine. “Ever notice that other people’s stuff is their shit and your shit is stuff?” Or, “A house is a big box to keep your stuff in.”

Here’s a rundown on my stuff. I used to own a house. Shared. Think about how much stuff is in your house. Start with the big things like the antique mohair sofa (500 pounds), the recliner chair (200 pounds), your bed, springs, and mattress (800 pounds). Then there are little things like your kitchenware. My set of layered steel pots and pans that I bought just before my daughter was born weighed close to 250 pounds! And did you know that your china weighs a ton? And your silverware? And all the gadgets like the 30-pound VitaMix. Of course, there are the lightweight items. Your clothes probably only weigh 300-400 pounds. Your artwork, photos, CDs, DVDs, video tapes, LP records and all the devices you need to play or record them are another half-ton.

I left on August 10, 2013 with just what I could carry in the back of the truck and in my little trailer. And my daughter. She doesn't weigh anything!

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When I began paring down my stuff in order to travel three years ago, I determined that I could only carry an extra 750 pounds in addition to the weight of my trailer and water. The very first thing I did was throw out nearly 500 pounds of paper! These weren’t books. This was just paper that I had collected—some of it for forty years—that included drafts of things I had written over the years, samples of projects I’d done, training manuals I’d written for products that don’t even exist any longer, old catalogs, magazines that I intended to read an article in one day, and Christmas cards from twenty years ago. My wife and I once joked that humans were ants who instead of moving grains of sand around, moved pieces of paper from one place to another. It seemed like it was our life’s purpose. I stopped carrying paper. Mostly.

Back in '91, we had a leak in our house and the closet where all my writing was stored got drenched. The insurance paid to have everything dried out. But, while the pages were all dry, nearly all of them were blank. Water soluble ink and pencil. I was storing boxes of smelly blank pages!

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That brings me to books. If you are a book lover, you could summarize the entire ‘stuff’ argument by pointing at your library. Children’s books from when you were little through college textbooks, technical manuals for your electronics through bestsellers and beloved novels you plan to read again. And for me, it included volumes of ‘rare books’ from the nineteenth century that I’d lovingly collected for years. Hundreds—thousands—of pounds of books. What do I take in my allotted 750 pounds?

In Budapest, I have seen more bookstores and more street vendors of used books than anyplace I have traveled. I write books. I shouldn't be talking about getting rid of them, should I? What sacrilege!

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But pioneers are different, right? The pioneers of the old west loaded a wagon and hitched their oxen.

They traveled light.

Wagon ruts of the Santa Fe Trail, sometimes so deep you couldn't have seen the heads of the oxen and mules pulling the wagons.

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Not so. I’ve seen the ruts of the Oregon Trail and the Santa Fe Trail. They shattered my image of wagon wheel ruts worn a few inches into the soil and still visible. We are talking about ruts eight feet deep through dirt and stone, the center worn by the feet of the oxen and scraping the bottom of the wagon against the ground. The weight that six oxen pulled across the continent was measured in tons! That bed with the walnut headboard that is six feet tall? The matching chest of drawers and wardrobe? All the pots and pans and even a cast iron stove that you would need to cook meals? Saddles, harnesses, tools, a plowshare, clothes, precious heirlooms, a truly rare book. The pioneers did not travel light. And thus, bits and pieces of households were scattered across the continent because they needed to lighten their load.

I got my life down to 750 pounds. Except for some things in storage that I couldn’t get rid of. Ten boxes of genealogical research and source material. Said rare books. Glassware that I couldn’t sell. Artwork that is worth thousands when you buy it as an investment but is nearly worthless when you try to sell it. It was not stuff that I didn’t want to get rid of. It was stuff that no one else wanted either!

Stuff.

When I decided to spend four months in Hawaii, I emptied my trailer into storage, packed a single suitcase (the size of a camping backpack) and a computer size backpack. That was what I took with me. When I left Hawaii to spend four more months continuing around the world, I eliminated more stuff and shipped some back to storage in Seattle. My suitcase weighs about 50 pounds. The backpack (since I had to add another computer to it) weighs about 25. I’m down to 75 pounds. I just bought a shirt because I didn’t have anything long-sleeved and it’s cold here in Europe. Now I’m looking at my suitcase to decide what gets left behind that I’m replacing with that shirt.

I didn't actually take the cat, but that's about everything else that I have been traveling with for the past six months!

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But when I talk to people about traveling, the most common comment I here is “Oh, I want to do that!” My answer is “No you don’t. You want to dream about doing that.” Because it's hard. You have to leave stuff behind.

And that is my opinion about space travel and colonizing the distant stars. Every space movie that comes out has an even bigger spaceship or deathstar in it. Because we can’t imagine going off to colonize space in something as small as a Conestoga wagon per family. We’d never get our stuff into it. And we certainly couldn’t leave our stuff behind. What would we do with grandma’s collection of salt and pepper shakers?

As often happens, I looked up a reference in The Book of Wesley (CC128) that I confess to having written some 35 years ago. “128. It is most frequently seen that the “saviors” (those who seem to live outside the realm of physical law) have no possessions and are possessed by no one.” (http://bookofwesley.blogspot.com/2013/10/cxxx.html)

Space is even bigger than the ocean. Never lose your towel.

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And so are those who would colonize space. If we would go, we will have to leave everything we know and all our stuff behind. I think we will have to look to those who have nothing for volunteers.