Mating by the Interstate

An audio experience:

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Not The Last Semi-Authoritarian Regime?

I was going to joke that, with all these Middle East protests, soon only Iraq would have a semi-authoritarian regime. The current government there has been cited as one of the most corrupt in the world, but I have been thinking that most Iraqis are tired of upheaval and would need a few years off before engaging in large-scale political activism. And, as if to forestall protests, Maliki said he would not run for prime minister for a third term.

But now there are small protests in Iraq and efforts to make them large protests. So maybe we will see a larger movement. The problem in Iraq is that it is the Middle Eastern country most fractured along ethnic and sectarian divides. Protests there would not take the form of "people vs. government" so much as "people vs. people vs. government," in violent competition to see what group might prevail. We saw this situation already in the civil war that flared prior to the surge, Awakening Councils, and the near purging of Sunnis from Baghdad. And with some of the U.S. military still there, it would be hard for us to maintain the distance stance we have kept from other protests. After all, this is the country that the U.S. had a direct hand in "liberating." Can we allow it to appear to need to be liberated again?

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Late Night Thoughts on Listening to "Hey Mama"

What are kids today supposed to think? If the music they hear is mostly commercial stuff such as the Black Eyed Peas' Hey Mama or Let's Get It Started, where do they think music comes from? They can see that vocals come from the voice, sure. But the instrumental parts? That appears to emanate from the dancing.

We see instruments in some videos, yes. There's a rock band in the background of "Started" and there's a chamber orchestra in "Shut Up." But the sounds we hear are not what come from these instruments, mostly.

And the stars of the videos are never instrumentalists anyway. If they produce sound from anything other than their voices, it's by manipulating a turntable with a record -- which itself is a recording. So, in the music video, which is how we receive recorded music these days, we watch a guy playing a recording. Isn't this like not watching a basketball game, but instead watching a video in which the Lakers are watching a video of themselves, or someone else even, playing basketball?

When do kids these days become inspired to actually play an instrument?

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This Would Have Cut "Black Swan" Short

When the choreographer was asking his lead if she masturbates, a more world-weary dancer might have said, "Yeah, I masturbate. Is that why you invited me up here? You just wanted to ask me if I masturbate? Shoot. I could be home masturbating right now."

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Killing Government Programs

Representative Gohmert wants to introduce legislation allowing members of Congress to carry concealed weapons to the Capital and around D.C. This is one way to shrink government -- let Congressmen shoot each other.

On the other hand, there is Peter King's move to ban guns within 1000 feet of a government official.

Don't they know that if both laws are passed, they'll need to build a gigantic capital building?

P.S. I'd put this on facebook, but I'm trying not to use violent language in public forums. My public blog, on the other hand, is basically a private forum.

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Class Distinction

It’s a process that few would understand. Certainly not the realtor who sat under the chandelier and proclaimed that the house and property we rent could sell for over $300,000 as it is now (in need of much renovation and central air) if the empty side yard is big enough to build another house on.

Sitting with a more understanding friend under that same chandelier, I explained it thusly: We keep four of the bulbs in it loose enough to not shine, and the fifth tightened until it does shine. That is a bright enough light for that room, though being a point-source, it casts stagey horror-flick shadows. When that light burns out, we tighten another, making it glow until it burns out.

“How many housemates do you have here?” said my friend.

I told him five.

“So each housemate could be responsible for one,” he said.

Yes, I said. And when all five have burned out, then it’s time to change the filter in the Brita pitcher, I said.

It’s a beautiful process. And yet, like the realtor, whatever sucker buys this heap of bricks for $300,000 certainly would not understand.

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Why Did She Do It?

I had simply taken 6 months to complete my registration on Freecycle, a process drawn out partly by the numerous obstacles established by the group’s proprietor, who is quite the net-nanny when it comes to keeping scammers off her site. I swear, you could let your pre-schoolers on there talking about free toilet seats or hernia belts, and they really would be talking about just those exact things, with people not lying about their age or gender.

To register on Freecycle, you have to send an email saying you will follow the rules. And then, to post, you have to follow the rules. Which I didn’t on two attempts each to offer two items, a washer and a dryer, which have been out-of-service for years and probably don’t work. My last rejection was back in May, and I didn’t follow up on it for months. But this past Monday we got the bad news that our landlord was sending a realtor to check out or property with an eye toward deciding whether to sell it in the next year. This means we better be purging. So I took a deep breath and my ADD pills and set out to follow the rules exactly this time.

Within hours of posting, someone responded. She wanted the washer. We worked it out. She would rent a Home Despot pickup truck and come get it after work.

I worried. I had envisioned two guys in overalls from Habitat or something, with ownership of a truck and skills at repair presumed -- not some single woman having to rent a pickup.

I wrote back, “You understand these have not been used for years, right, and might not work?”

She didn’t respond to that, and I thought she might not show up.

I was heading out to clip my nails in the dark front yard around 6pm when a stranger came up the walkway toward me, her feet shushing through the leaves. She was the type who refused to raise her voice, and thus, didn’t respond to my calling out, “Hello?” as she approached. She was in handshaking distance when she said her name. Her truck was down the street -- she was walking house-to-house so she could read numbers.

I directed her to drive around back and I opened the cellar door. Her pickup had come with a handtruck but no straps or ramps. We dusted off the washer, and I said again, “Are you sure you want this,” reminding her that it had not been used for years.

She said she didn’t mind tinkering with it, and did I know what a new washer cost these days?

I reminded myself that these were free. But still, it seemed, since she had paid for truck rental, that she was paying too much.

Housemates came out and gathered ‘round, and we hoisted the washer on to the back of her pickup.

She had not asked about the dryer, but I pointed that out to her. “Sure, I’ll take it,” she said. So we wheeled that out and lifted it onto the truck.

Then we went about the basement gathering up old boxes and styrofoam packing material to put in the spaces in the truck bed to keep the washer and dryer from clanking against each other.

I offered her all the rest of the contents of the basement, but she declined. Indeed, taking the old unused washer and dryer was aid enough for us. We had been talking for years about cleaning out the basement. We had had a yard sale and barely sold anything (and had been unable to sell this washer and dryer); we had talked about taking them to the landfill where we would probably have to pay a fee for dumping them; we had cleaned out a few other things around them. Still, these appliances had remained unyielding in their spots, essentially natural rocky outcroppings, immovable in our basement, a burden persisting.

Now, just because I had managed to send a few emails correctly, someone else had rented a truck and taken them. It’s like a void opened where a bad feeling had been; like being absolved of guilt. Some of our persisting roots have been uprooted. I can see to a day when we might actually float free.

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Being Counted

The podcaster asked me if I thought it was a cluster fuck. I said, to describe it that way would be to disavow our newly cultivated caution against hyperbole. I said, instead, I would just call it . . . crowded.

During the drive up, Svetx had asked what would be most important to me about the rally. I said the important thing was to be counted. I had learned that phrase from a friend who was in a civil rights march one time. She got arrested, and said later that it was important to her to be counted with respect to that issue.

This was my time to be counted. I wanted attendance at this rally to beat that of Glenn Beck’s. On the phone the night before, my step-father had assured me it would NOT surpass the Beck rally, and I needed to prove him wrong.

Svetx said she was going to restore sanity. She said that, in any discourse, that was the first thing that should always be restored.

We woke on Saturday in friend G’s apartment right across the street from the College Park metro station. We took our time and ventured into the chilly morning around 9:30.

At the metro station, the ticket line unfolded before us, laying dismay upon dismay, like some awful vista of a mob trying to fit itself into a few dinghies to escape the land-roving aliens in War of the Worlds. The crowd filled the large sheltered space before the ticket machines; it went 4-persons wide up the steps, around the corner, along the parking lot and into the parking deck. And it was not moving very fast, as if everyone were figuring out the ticket machines for the first time.

I had not prepared properly. I should have had us purchase tickets the night before. This was not sane.

I texted that sentiment to friends who were driving up from NC that morning. They texted back that they were at the station in Springfield and having the same trouble.

One woman in line front of us said the line was worse than the line for Obama’s inauguration. A guy behind us said to bear in mind that this was a college stop and would draw an inordinately large crowd for a Stewart/Colbert event.

This was my second strike. Not only should I have bought Metro tickets the night before, I should have thought that this might be a bad place to board the Metro. Svetx and I talked about driving to another station, or even driving downtown. But we figured, countryfolks like us shouldn’t try to drive in the city on a day like this. We stayed in the line. And, an hour later, we were buying tickets and heading to the platform where, thankfully, the distribution of people allowed us decent positioning to get on the train.

We College Parkers did fill the train though, so that from the next stop onward, virtually no more were able to get on. Crowds on the platforms would look at us in disbelief as our doors opened and our ranks swelled outward a little, taking a breath, before retracting so that the doors could slam again. One rider yelled to waiting passengers, “Go to Greenbelt,” meaning, ride out of town to a station not crowded, then get on an empty train coming in.

We had seen our first sign at College Park. It read, “Fear Through the Ages” and gave examples like “Satan” and “Fallen Women.” On the train we saw a woman with “I Could Be Working.” I was glad I had not executed my own sign idea, “Algae Oil -- The Sanest Transportation Fuel,” because now it seemed bland compared to these others.

Folks pressed against us on the train said we should get off at the Archives. Sailing into that station, we saw hordes of people, shadowy through the train’s tinted glass. We wondered why this platform, the Metro exit point for rally-goers, was even more packed than those we had passed. Then, stepping out, of the train, we saw why. The exit escalator and gates were simply clogged.

But this crowd was moving steadily, if slowly. We would get out. As long as nobody set off a bomb or something and caused a panic.

Ahead someone held a tall sign on a stake, like a military standard, leading the way. The Metro ceiling was high enough to allow this sign to tower above the rest of us, broadcasting its message even to this underground audience before emerging to its intended venue of daylight on the mall.

For the Metro’s part, it doesn’t help that you have to run your ticket as you LEAVE the station, not just as you enter. Why on earth does DC require this?

Upstairs in daylight, everyone walked with long strides on streets, sidewalks, low walls bordering sidewalks, heading south toward sunlight, toward the wide open space lined with grand marble buildings, toward shimmering glints in windows. We ignored regulatory walk signs and simply crossed, giving cars no chance. We passed hucksters selling activist buttons and signs -- the pink booby awareness people, the abortion people, some Guantanamo people -- groups I’ve only seen, heretofore, on TV -- and one guy advertising “Generic Signs” holding my favorite for the day: “My Balls Itch No Matter Who’s In Charge.”

Clearly, this was the big time.

Ahead of us bobbed other signs advancing toward the Mall, including “God Hates Figs: Mark 11:12-14”


We were on 7th, which was supposed to be the back of the Rally. Entering the Mall, though, it seemed the crowd stretched equally far toward the Capitol and toward the Washington Monument.

I’ve been tuned to crowd murmurs since, as a child, my Dad would listen to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. He once told me that as soon as we heard the crowd noise on the radio broadcast, that would be the top of the hour, and I could set my watch.

I would do this every Saturday. I learned to spot that audience murmur as soon as I heard it. Now, entering the Mall, we became enveloped in a crowd murmur far more substantive. The 200,000+ voices sounded hushed under the big bright sky, with no concert hall to lend its reverberation. But like the South Dakota grass, there was power in the numbers.

And, like the South Dakota grass, there were waves. We would hear a roar coming and, country boy that I am, I would experience slight panic -- was there a terrorist attack going on ahead where we couldn’t see? The roar would come closer and we would hear the strength in those voices, the mid-range growing, alarming; and then there would be the hands in the air and we would raise our hands too, and the wave would pass on.

It probably took us half an hour to cross the Mall on 7th. Then we spent another half-hour crossing back. Like hardening concrete, the mob was getting denser, and we needed to quickly pick the spot we would be cemented to. So we stood at the back of 7th sort of behind and to the side of the TV trucks.


We could barely see a jumbotron and hear a stand of speakers; then an ambulance parked in our line-of-sight, and obscured both of these. We essentially saw and heard nothing through the entire rally.

In front of us, on 7th, the concrete never fully hardened. People oozed past in both directions, pressing each other. And, strangely, immediately to my left, there was a constant single-person thick trickle of people going both in to, and out of, the grass behind us. It was like when you take a decongestant, and you can’t believe how relentlessly your snot flows out. This line of people flowed through the whole rally. A grumpy northeasterner just to the other side of this trickle kept griping at the people. “We’re going to cut this off. There’s no room back there. Why are you heading there?”

Expressing counter sentiment, one passing mom said, “Cut it off after me. My son just went through.”

When the Rally was over, we just stayed where we were. The crowd thinned slowly. A set of signs went by, each held by a different person: “How Do We Get Out Of Here?” “I Don’t Know.” “How ‘Bout That Way?” “Okay.”

Svetx and I laid down in the grass and rested our backs. The late October sun was still bright, but angled low in the sky. It would be a long time before anyone could freely walk wherever one wanted. I later heard that, into the night on blocks surrounding the mall, people could be seen still wandering or just sitting on the sidewalks in their folding lawn chairs, with no idea what to do for the night. Hotels and transportation were probably booked, leaving them with no options.

Text messages had been impossible during the rally, but when they finally started again, friends said that they were at the Archives steps. We met up there, and wandered to view the WWII Memorial.

The WWII Memorial does make great use of spacial divisions, with upper layers of flat pools giving way to waterfalls which spill to lower layers; and curving ramps that draw the visitor down to its bottom layer. But what’s with the columns depicting names of states and territories? Arkansas, Alabama . . . these words alone do not represent soldiers fallen in war. If I had not known this was a WWII memorial, I would have thought it was simply a monument commemorating the states, as stamps and quarters do.

The Vietnam Memorial, on the other hand, is a truer memorial in my view. There is no confusion about what the names listed there mean, and no way not to be conscious of the death. Every visit there, I have seen people making rubbings from the names of the dead, and volunteers helping them and answering questions. This is what a memorial is for -- place to address the pain. I’ve known no one who died in that war, but it is hard even for me to go there without being moved to tears. Svetx’s father was in the war and surely he knows lots of names on the wall. I think about how I’m so glad he survived, and I think about the others coming here who know a name on the wall, and for whom the only explanation I can give is that a president did not want to appear soft on communism.

Friend S pointed out that the list of names for memorial for an Iraq and Afghanistan war would have a distinction from the Vietnam list: Many would be Latin American.

We moved on to the Lincoln Memorial, which now stood on its hill in the setting sun. Inside are the words of a president who served during war and claimed responsibility for his decisions about that war, vocally questioned his own wisdom, and observed the correlation between the slashes of the swords and the lashes of the whips in slavery. How refreshing this is compared to today’s politicians who never seem to question themselves, and never acknowledge how our nations past actions may have contributed to present strife.

The Lincoln Memorial has been the site of past rallies of people who really needed to rally. They were oppressed, or protesting a war, for instance. In my lifetime, I have also seen rallies of laborers, people seeking abortion rights, women’s rights. I have not felt moved to attend any of these. Why, of all rallies, did I come to the Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear?

Because it struck a chord. Because I get it -- at least, I hope I can claim to be one of the “It Getters” that Colbert identified as the viewers of his first show back in 2005. It was a rally about rallies, with signs mostly mocking or referencing slogans from past rallies, and Stewart invoking the criteria on which past rallies have been judged -- the size and composition of the crowd -- and declaring the rally to have some exaggerated number of people, just as past rally organizers have done.

We were not desperate people fighting for civil rights, as many Americans rightfully have done; and we do not perceive ourselves to be living under a socialist or Muslim president. We are the more middle-ground folks, the “million moderates,” in Stewart’s words.

Probably, we can afford to be moderate because we are just lucky. But surely it is a good sign that our rally was more than double the size of the teabaggers’.

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Ideas for Signs for the Rally to Restore Sanity

Here's all I have so far:

"Hitler . . . Was a 'Ho!"

"Once you steep loose tea, you can't go back to bags."

"Hey Teabaggers, you're not grassroots. Everybody knows Fox News and Dick Armey sencha!"

"The best way to steep tea . . . is in a French press!"

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Just Another Farming Industry

I’ve been reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and the way I see it, it’s like this:

If you looked at Iowa in the ’50’s and saw the diverse farms with their cows, pigs, chickens, varied rotating crops, orchards, and someone told you that one day, nearly the entire state would be stripped to nothing except corn (during the growing season) or empty dirt (the rest of the year), you would have thought that to be ridiculous.

If you looked at pigs growing on that farm in the '50's, and someone told you that one day they would be raised in barns with slotted floors so that their urine and feces could mostly drop down into a pool beneath the floor, with maybe 10 hogs to a pen and maybe 100 pens to a barn (a barn can contain 1000 pigs), coexisting with the cloud of ammonia just above the pool of their own excrement, and their skin coated with the excrement that has not been kicked down between the slats, you’d say I was crazy.

If you looked at the cows grazing in the fields, and someone told you that one day they would be raised on feedlots, eating not grass but corn, standing in their own concentrated manure, being administered preemptive antibiotics because of the high likelihood of disease, you’d also say I was crazy.

As Michael Pollan says, the logic of industry has replaced the logic of nature in farming. So I’m telling you now. We might as well let the logic of industry take on algae farming to grow fuel oil. It’s not the strangest thing we’ve done as humans.

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Algae Fuel Progress

For newcomers to the algae biofuel scene, here's the algae pitch in brief: Some strains of algae are the best oil-producing plant. Unlike other biofuel sources, algae does not need to be grown on farm land or use fresh water -- it can be grown on non-arable land in ponds, tanks, vertically hanging sacks in greenhouses, or other apparatuses. Freshwater is not necessarily needed because many strains of algae can grow in salt water. But, regardless of the kind of water used, if the algae growing system is enclosed (not open to air), the water in which the algae grows is not lost to evaporation and can be recycled. Some algae proponents claim that enough fuel oil to power all the United States' transportation needs could be grown in 15,000 square miles, which, if this landmass were a square, would have only 122 miles per side.

Challenges in growing algae are finding or engineering strains that produce the most oil; designing the growing apparatus that uses space and energy most efficiently; and separating the oil from the algae.

While algae biofuel production may sound too strange, or too good, to be true, there are regular advancements that indicate the field is moving forward.

The month of June saw air-show flights of a small twin-engine Diamond DA42NG running on 100% biofuel made from algae oil. There have been past demonstrations of airplanes running on biofuel, but the concentration has not been 100%. That article reports that the fuel burns more cleanly and also more efficiently than standard Jet A-1.

In New Mexico, there is now the world's first fully integrated biofuel refinery. Nearly a year ago, I wrote about CEHMM's large-scale demonstration algae farm, composed of open-air ponds growing a native species of algae in brine water. Now this 501(c)(3) company, located in Carlsbad, NM, has announced completion of companion facilities for oil extraction and conversion to fuel. The operation can produce 1000 gallons of fuel oil per day -- nothing when compared to our nations current fuel needs, but enough perhaps to lead to further upward-scaling of algae production by this company and others. CEHMM's work is also important for drawing attention to the use of salty water and the non-arable land of Southwestern U.S., showing that algae production does not compete with food production for land and fresh water.

While the CEHMM project uses a native species of algae, lots of algae companies view genetic engineering as the key to cost-effective algae fuel production. The leader on this front is Crag Venter of Synthetic Genomics, which has been in partnership with Exxon with nearly a year. (Exxon's $600 million investment in algae makes it the world's largest algae company-- and algae is Exxon's only significant investment in alternative energy.) Before joining with Exxon, Venter had already genetically engineered algae to secrete its oil, thereby circumventing the expensive process of extracting oil from the algae cells. Now he has announced the creation of a fully synthetic living cell. While this synthetic cell is not an algae cell intended for fuel production, he has stated that he will turn his attention toward engineering algae cells optimally suited for producing fuel oil quickly, in high volume. The blogger at Oilgae.com opines on this matter, summarizing the challenges algae oil producers face and speculating on what Venter's work could do for it.

One might be concerned that Exxon will keep its research tightly under wraps and unavailable for public use. But be assured that there are many algae companies vying to be the first to revolutionize the fuel industry. Scroll down the left-side menu column on this page to see a list of such companies. Most of these companies aim to be algae fuel producers -- but one company, OriginOil, intends not to actually produce fuel, but to provide the machinery for algae oil production and be, effectively, the John Deere of algae oil production.

Recently, OriginOil released a new production model for growing algae based on the fact that a single layer of algae, such as what naturally grows on the surface of a pond, uses only a small percent of the sun's energy striking it. This model, called a Multireactor, grows algae in channels arranged in vertically-stacked layers. Between the channels are lenses that collect sunlight and distribute it to the next layer beneath, where more channels contain growing algae, and more lenses further collect and distribute sunlight to the next layer. By efficiently using sunlight in this way, Origin can maximize the algae produced per acre of land used.

Origin has also done extensive work on how to most efficiently deliver CO2 and other nutrients to a growing mass of algae; and, the company claims to have greatly reduced the costs of extracting oil from algae by using low-energy radiation and ultrasound to break algae cells, thereby reducing the need for Craig Venter's algae with pores and giving the Exxon/Venter collaboration a run for its money. Such competition will be crucial in preventing Exxon from withholding its research until the timing suits them. We need algae farming as soon as we can get it.

In its quest to become the John Deere of algae oil production, OriginOil is taking steps to make its products readily demonstrable and deliverable to customers. A miniature, mobile version of its oil extraction apparatus travels the country, visiting prospective investors and algae growers, showing how Origin's technology can benefit them; and its new Multireactor can be shipped in modules in shipping containers for easy scalability on-site. In July of this year, OriginOil shipped a Multireactor to its first paying customer, MBD Energy in Australia, and in September followed-up with a shipment of oil-extraction facilities. MBD is using algae to capture carbon from power plants and convert it to usable fuel oil.

I’ll be watching for news on how Origin Oil’s equipment fares in Australia. Algae enthusiasts have said that algae farming will make its first impact in the realm of carbon capture. If all goes will with MBD Energy in Australia, this could be an important step.

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The Grass

Reprinted from the Road to Rushmore 2010 blog about a road trip I took with two friends earlier this July. I write there as whitecrispprotectivecap.

It’s like going into one of those specialty stores in New York City that sells only one thing, like candy for instance. You have seen candy throughout your life and never paid it much heed. But here are aisles upon aisles, shelves upon shelves, of candy. Mundane candy even -- regular old Skittles and Reeses and whatnot. Nothing special. But when there is really that much of it, it becomes profound. You can’t believe someone mounted such an effort.

In South Dakota, it’s all about grass. Not even varieties of grass -- pretty much just one kind, I think. And that one kind they do very well. This grass is noble. Several times, glancing at a grass field, I mistook it for young corn. Just like everything else out in South Dakota -- the dandelions, stairwells, hotel rooms, main streets, Mahler symphonies -- the grass has room to be bigger, and it is. It has large blades. It grows tall. And its stems are spaced farther apart so that you can look down between them and see the ground like cracked, white scalp. If you pull too much grass, you’ll leave that scalp unfastened to flake away and start a new patch of Badlands.

The wind causes the grass to shimmer. It chases flashing, silvery patches like speeding dolphins breaching a water’s surface from horizon to horizon, prairie power running wild.

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Stürmish Bewegt: A Tornado Story

Reprinted from the Road to Rushmore 2010 blog about a road trip I took with two friends earlier this July. I write there as whitecrispprotectivecap.

Blazing across southern South Dakota on I-90, I wanted to summarize, for posterior’s sake on my Tascam audio recorder, our mid-day thoughts on listening to Mahler's 9th -- and Mahler's everything else too. With the Tascam in my one hand, we talked. But there was also this awesome storm ahead. I had already video-recorded, while riding toward Memphis, a lightning bolt on K-Os's flip-cam. So I picked that up in my other hand and started shooting the storm too.

The rain smacked the windshield sharply, startlingly, a sign that hail was mixed in. I checked the windshield for cracks.

In the back seat, Dr. Data observed that in each field we passed, the cows were all clustered against the fence in one corner. They had moved as far as the barbed wire would let them from the oncoming storm. What fear lurks behind their dull eyes when they are unable to flee and take cover according to their instincts' desire? But at least these cows are on large grasslands and not in feed lots where rain no doubt boosts the pestilence festering in the feces in which they spend their lives wading.

I would be foolish to try to reproduce K-Os’s expert technical analysis of Mahler. But his more general observation about the composer’s loose structure is very useful to me. He pointed out that Mahler’s first movements lack a clear sequence of exposition-development-recapitulation. It seems that the main theme often contains a sense of development from its first statement at the beginning; and it reappears many times throughout the movement, alternating with other material, played a differently every time so that you can't tell which time was supposed to be the actual development, and which the recapitulation, if any. It’s as if Mahler doesn’t want the listener to keep track of the structure -- he wants us to instead be lost in his drama, or whimsy.

This sheds some light on why I like Mahler so much, and why some dislike him. His liberal departure from familiar structure deprives his music of succinctness -- and lots of good, honest working folk like succinctness. They don’t have time for a thirty-minute first movement that sounds like three movements, and a second movement that sounds a lot like the first movement. (Indeed, Dr. Data, listening in the back seat most of the trip, could never tell when the movement had changed. And I, familiar with all Mahler’s symphonies, still can’t tell the changes between movements from the 3rd movement to the end in the 2nd symphony.)

But I was never good honest working folk. It’s not that I don’t work hard when I have a job -- it’s that wise choices for a lucrative career have not been my primary guide in my life decision making. When I started listening to Mahler, I had just graduated from college with a B.S. in physics. But I had known for half my college years that I was not cut out for that field. I didn’t want to work in a job that physics might have trained me for and I didn’t want further schooling in it. I was living with K-Os, ShakeThatCat, and some other folks, for $60.00/month plus utilities, in a mildewey basement; working at Kinko’s; and following a whim of trying to get some of the weirdest work I could think of, which was to work in the film and video business.

In the music of Mahler, I identified with the lack of adherence to form, the whimsy, the intrusion of flippancy into profundity. And when I did start to get work in film and video and gave up full-time work, there were lots of idle weekdays providing even more time for Mahler. His long symphonies must have been intended for the un- and under-employed, an alternative to beer or self-help.

We drove through that rain fairly quickly, and then spied what we thought would be a great grass-field shot for our photo essay. We exited the interstate, parked on a side road, and stepped out of the car into the stürmish bewegt. We had not realized how windy it was. Our ears filled with the its rumble; the grass bowed and rippled like hair under a blowdryer. We were still beneath the dark overhang of clouds, and with that wind, it seemed the rain and lightning were not done with us.

We were well rehearsed in our photo process. K-Os and I would grab three lawn chairs from the back of our vehicle and plunk them down in front of our desired background; Dr. Data would plant the camera, level it, then holler instructions to refine the composition. Then he would start the timer and jog to his seat, pushing his hair back to keep it out of his face for the shot.

During this setup, two large Diesel pickups drove past, accelerating with no regard for us. One cut pretty close to Dr. Data while he was still at the camera; the other came after Data had sat, and nearly sideswiped the camera.

We got our grassfield picture. Then I wanted to record my beloved grass blowing in the wind. I’ll write some other time about the grass. At that moment, it sounded like all the NFL cheerleaders' pom-poms in a cardboard box being shaken. I knelt next to it and tried to shield my Tascam from the wind using my body and my hat, but this was futile. The audio has distortion and other afflictions. I’m not proud of it. But you can hear a little if you want.

Our vehicle, Entropy, was parked by an intersection of gravel roads amid the fields. We saw another shot we could take in a different direction from the intersection, so we walked about 20 yards and started setting it up.

A minivan approached us. This was the third vehicle to encounter us, and I was thinking that this time, we’d be asked to leave. Its window came down and a woman called from the drivers’ seat.

“Are you taking pictures of anything particular?” she asked me.

I wondered what secrets this land held that she might not want us to photograph. Signs from aliens hidden in the grass? Minuteman missiles? (I’ll get to those in another entry.) I explained that we were taking pictures of ourselves for a photo series, and we liked the scenery. I was ready to be completely diplomatic if she were to accuse us of trespassing or something.

She looked at Dr. Data and K-Os on the road ahead. She seemed to be thinking over what to say next, as if my response had any authority, any weight worthy of consideration.

“Well . . .” she hesitated, as if I might not want my time wasted by what she had to offer. “There’s a tornado back there.” She pointed back through the intersection toward a hilltop where some other cars were parked, and some people standing around.

Several things went through my head.

1. She doesn’t own this land. She’s just a gawker like me.
2. K-Os once had a close-call with a tornado and might not want to dally with this one.

I looked at Dr. Data and K-Os who were looking at me. Data might have actually said “Tornado?” before I said, “Guys, there’s a --”

3. “TORNADO!!”

K-Os said, “We’re outta here.”

I struggled to voice a thought. Something had been left out of this woman’s information, and I needed to know it. After an agonizing second for formulate my words, I blurted it out.

“Is it going away from us?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Guys, tornadoes have been known to change directions,” said K-Os. Chaotic in nature, he should know.

He and Dr. Data had grabbed the chairs and were walking toward the intersection. I grabbed the tripod and camera and walked just ahead of them. I didn’t know if we were headed toward the car or toward the hilltop where we could see the tornado too. I asked K-Os if I could run while carrying his camera.

“Long as you don’t trip,” he said.

So I jogged up the hill. At its top was a small car with some kids sitting on its back trunk, looking over its roof. Upon my approach, a young mother got out, frowning, and ordered the kids to get inside the car. The father, in the drivers’ seat with his window down, was a dreadlocked white hippy. He pointed across the blowing grass. Beneath much of the cloud was a solid mass of rain, but to the right of the rain I could maybe see some points extending from the cloud to the ground.

“It was touched down, but it’s not right now,” he said. The status of being touched-down or not seemed important throughout the conversation of these native South Dakotans.

I couldn’t tell it was a tornado, really. It was like looking at distant celestial objects through a telescope. I had to take the expert’s word that I was seeing it. But the cloud ceiling between us and the tornado did appear to have concentric “rings,” like overhead ripples, centered on what he was pointing at. Something “circular” was definitely going on. And the wind was unnaturally fierce, whereas, in NC, once a storm has passed, the wind is over.

I think it was Dr. Data who first suggested we take a photo essay picture in front of the tornado.

K-Os spoke against it. “Come on guys. It’s a tornado.”

“It’s a tornado!” said Data. He set down his lawn chair. I gave him the camera and took the other chairs from K-Os and positioned them in the grass. I feared the wind would blow the camera over on the tripod, but it held. Resigned, K-Os took his seat next to me. Data framed up the shot and we got it.

(Days later, on the way home, we looked over our Bison series photos and decided that the tornado photo was not worthy of the series. You can hardly see the tornado, and without that, there’s no apparent point to the picture. Plus, our hat and hair are messed up, and we’re angled funny. K-Os said the photo should never appear anywhere at all, but I insisted that it was valuable as documentation of this tornado experience. So he said I could show it here if I emblazoned on it “Not In Bison Series.”)



We packed our chairs up and headed back to the car. Dr. Data wondered out loud if we should chase the tornado.

"NO," said K-Os. "We're the lawn chair guys. We're not the storm chasing guys."

That night, in our hotel room, K-Os happened to look over the footage I had taken while approaching the storm and talking about Mahler and cows. Centered, in the frame, was the gray mass of rain and cloud where the lightning was; but to the left of this storm center, there were some peculiar conical clouds. In the video, we could hear that he had actually commented on these clouds. The whole scene, with the main gray mass on the right, and the conical clouds on the left, was a mirror-image of what we saw from the hilltop at a greater distance after passing through the storm.

So basically, we had driven straight into a storm that included a tornado, though the tornado was not directly in our path. And I had videotaped the tornado purely by accident, while blithely talking about Mahler and cows and whatnot. At the time of this writing, if we weren’t already safely wrapped in the humidity, allergens, and insect-noise of home, I’d say we’re totally toast out in the Wild West -- we’d step right on a rattlesnake thinking it was a throw rug, or get our heads bitten off by a mountain lion while trying to feed it beef-jerky.

K-Os selected for us the best footage of the tornado. This accidental shooting of it was far better than what we saw from the hilltop. I’m so glad we have it. Honestly, it might be the highlight natural wonder from our whole trip.

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Suggestion for Tea Baggers:

Start your own currency. Call it the Camellia. Create a national directory of businesses and consumers who deal in the Camellia. Buy and sell as much of your goods and services as you can with it. Start your own banks with it. Heck, start a health-care plan with it. Show the rest of us how healthy a back-to-basics economy would be. Best of all, it could not be taxed.

Act fast, or the liberals will beat you to it.

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