End of a Year

JWise Photo of the Day, Thoughts

Recursion

Fifteen years ago this evening, I started writing this blog as an exercise to give purpose to my interest in photography. My thinking was that while photography blogs were all the rage with the growing world of digital cameras, I didn’t want to add to that noise. Trying to figure out how to channel some level of creativity, I remembered that at one time, I entertained ideas of writing. That was it. I’d take a photo and write something to it and I’d do this for 365 consecutive days. In this sense, I was hoping to ride the emergent future with words emanating from my imagination as a kind of propulsion system into the depths of me.

Two thousand two hundred and ten blog entries and more than two million words later, I’m as keen on writing as I ever was while my photography has taken a backseat unless we are traveling.

When I reflect on the intervening years since that first blog entry, I’m left gobsmacked with how far intention can bring someone. Resolutions at this time of year are meaningless when not backed with solid follow-through. Your intentions must become your habit, or the years where you had the opportunity to meet your ideals will have been wasted on wishes you were never really ready to bring into your life.

So, where did our intentions bring us? Caroline got her associate’s degree; I wrote a book. We rafted rivers in Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Alaska, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Croatia. We visited Europe on three occasions, spending about 70 days exploring Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, and the Balkans. Caroline learned to weave, published the newsletter of her local fiber guild for several years, and even became president for two years. I started a very fulfilling exploration of synthesizers along with starting a floundering virtual reality game company.

Our New Year’s celebration happens for us at 4:00 p.m. MST when we call my mother-in-law Jutta in Frankfurt, and she goes over to the window opening it wide. At midnight in Germany, explosions from a crazy assortment of fireworks might convince some that war has broken out or at least madness. We’ll have a webcam or two open so we can watch the festivities while Jutta endures the freezing temperatures for half an hour so we can be witness to the sound, sights, and merriment that arises over the city Caroline was born in.

Afterward, we’ll be heading to Denny’s in recognition of it being the place 15 years ago where I effectively launched my blog while sharing a banana split. Back then, I simply chose a convenient spot and moment to grab a photo to give some focal point to starting the writing exercise. What I was becoming more aware of was how our everyday intention to live fuller lives was shaping things. We were choosing not to live life as a series of yearly resolutions that we would fail to follow through with, but instead, we were practicing being flexible enough to flow with serendipity into the many opportunities that others fail to embrace.

Is it a good idea to explore things recursively? Was our New Year’s Eve date with Denny’s ultimately fortuitous or just another moment in happenstance? Who really knows, but just as repeatedly practicing a skill improves the quality of what comes out of it, such as with languages, musical instruments, knitting, weaving, coding, or writing, maybe going for a banana split again will pave the way for another amazing 15 years?

What I’m certain about is that nothing lasts forever but also that we do not live our lives waiting forever in the hope something will happen. We go forward and embrace the things we don’t know, explore the places we’ve not seen, turn over the leaves to find what’s hidden, and are delighted with outcomes that are often unpredictable. Of the things we do know, we cherish the knowledge, love, experience, memory, and opportunity to celebrate the many facets of what our lives have been so far and where they could still take us. Happy New Year, and hello 2020.

Neo-Nondeterminism

JWise Thoughts

Neo-nondeterminism

The brevity of awareness, fear of enlightenment, and certainty that a kind of contagion will result from knowledge are all maladies plaguing modernity. We drag fear of the unknown from out of our distant past where the dark forest-harbored monsters bent on devouring our souls. Those things unseen and unexperienced would offend our sensibilities and bring disappointment, should we waste our time and money on that which we are certain we wouldn’t enjoy anyway. This is what living in history burdens us with – combined with a short lifespan that may not wake us to the lies.

A generation born of living in the moment and experiencing immediacy has been sheltered from the outside world by parents who wanted to shield them from that which they themselves feared more than living. Then, when their offspring, unaccustomed to face-to-face interactions, adapted to their sequestered existence, parents complained that their children didn’t have the social skills they deemed appropriate. In isolating their children, they cast the mold while the negative patterns were being reinforced by their own preoccupation and titillation delivered by the anxiety engine of television and the numbing of intimacy due to online porn.

Parents gleefully supplied the multitude of screens and connectivity to their children who assimilated the worse qualities of a society enchanted by the narrowing of their focus. Then, these very same parents dared have the audacity to question what happened to a generation as though they were fully unaware of their own selfish actions having an influence on their children. We look to tradition and nostalgia with the warmth that is now unjustified in light of the circumstances of being forced into an evolutionary catapult called technology.

With this type of conditioning, we should expect a deterministic behavior where the comfort of routine is returned again and again. To expect someone to wake from this state is magic thinking at best, but this is what the Boomers and Generation X expect of the Millennials, and Gen Z. We have created computer programs based on old paradigms that require the exact same results of the software to function like clockwork.

Nondeterminism is defined as a program that can exhibit different behaviors on different runs. I’m hijacking the term here and defining Neo-nondeterminism as an idea that people need to explore the intentionality of not doing things the same way over and over. They must get off their self-reinforcing hamster wheel of routine and change the pattern. From home to work, back home, cook, clean, sleep, back to work, and back home should not be fully normalized. Throw a monkey wrench into that routine.

Start some tutorials about a subject you would like to know more about or that you never considered learning. Pick a country on the globe, find a recipe from that country, and make a new dish for dinner. You might want to search YouTube for a list of songs from the same place to listen to while you cook and try these new flavors. Go bowling in drag just because, or start a band even if you don’t play an instrument. You have but this one life to try those things that are not reinforcing the boring potential we all call routine. Stop being so rigid in the outcomes you are accepting as what’s comfortable to you. You learned to poop outside the diaper into a toilet; you can learn to stop pooping on your opportunity for new experiences.

Glocalization

JWise Thoughts

Glocalization

After spending the majority of my life being deterritorialized, I’m now “cursed,” living a glocalized existence. Little could I have understood that leaving New York state as a 5-year-old, being moved around between relatives, moving to California and taking up residence in Long Beach, Monterey Park, and then West Covina prior to moving to Arizona and within a few years of that heading off to Germany, where I’d be at home for ten years, I was being primed to have a nomadic sense of place.

It seems apparent to me now that this type of nomadism works to deterritorialize people. I had no connectivity to traditional social, cultural, or political identities but instead grew adept at normalizing diverse tastes for the various regional attitudes, flavors, and sounds that were integrating me. As I grew older, I desired to bring the hodgepodge of influences from my various stages in life to new modalities where novelty ruled, and traditions were never able to take hold.

Without American football, beer, god, television, Christmas, or guns as foundational cornerstones of who I see myself, I have been able to instead find refuge in the music of our vast world, pleasure in sampling the taste of water, the thrill of exploration, and the celebration of every day as my version of an experiential life. I’m in a state of near-constant curiosity about those things I’m yet to experience. I’m actively localizing my encounter with the globe and growing impatient with the market’s failure to bring me life as I want it to be: convenient and within reach.

For me, the palette of reality I’m able to paint from far exceeds the immediacy it affords me. The desert I live in is not only a physical realm but a metaphor for how I’m trapped in a kind of monotheistic capitalism, meaning there’s a tendency to be forced to pray before the American God of Consumerism. In my perfect world, the taste of Burma, China, and Italy, the live sounds of Indonesian gamelan, German minimalist techno, and the heavenly emanations of a choir singing in Latin, along with the clothes of rural Croatia, the fabric dying of Kumo shibori, or even a dhoti would be easily found and used, though I feel uncomfortable using these things here in conformist America.

As such, I no longer feel like an American in the classical sense of that identity but subjugated by a cultural orthodoxy verging on militantism. From my perspective outside this dominant purview, I feel it’s apparent that fear of losing the traditions and dominance of a ruling class has society scrambling to contain the evolutionary processes that are underway. It’s as though after 70 years of propagating a globalist agenda that was intended to strengthen American allies and contain leftist/communist anti-capitalism, the fruits of this global collaboration are having undesired follow-on effects.

The idea that putting the internet and humanity under tighter control could somehow quiet dissent and stymie attempts at rebellion seems to be futile. Our world shares music, film, food, art, electronics, communication, transportation, resources, and the environment, even when we are flawed in just how we do those things. Many people are well aware of the interdependence on one another, and it seems obvious that this will likely continue to shape our futures. The notion that this cat can be shoved into a box it left long ago is foolhardy at best.

Number 9 of 20

JWise Thoughts, Travels

Trip 9: We are now booked for a rather short 5-day visit at Yellowstone National Park with reservations in hand for Old Faithful Inn during May 2020.  I even called ahead to have a note put on our reservation asking for room #225 we’ve stayed in on nearly half a dozen of our visits. To date, we have spent 36 days spread between 8 trips here at Yellowstone; this visit will push us to 41 total days. You can bet I’m already thinking about a winter return, possibly as early as Christmas 2020.

Update: This trip was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Caroline Wise and John Wise in Yellowstone Jan 2010

Trip 8: The next time these two faces are seen in Yellowstone National Park, it will have been ten years since we were last in the park and 20 years since we made our first visit back in May 2000. This photo was taken on January 22, 2010, during our second winter visit to the first national park on Earth. This indulgence of being able to visit two winters in a row afforded us another eight days here. That ice-cream-colored beanie was hand-spun and knitted by the woman on my right, and I chose the colorway. I felt it made a bold statement.

Yellowstone Jan 2009

Trip 7: Our first winter visit to Yellowstone was for nine days, split between Mammoth Hot Springs and Old Faithful Snow Lodge. We thought the park was going to be enchanting, but we never could have anticipated just how astonishing the place is during winter. There’s a fraction of the number of people who visit during the summer, and the quiet and serenity that accompanies this time of year cannot be understated. We arrived on January 10th, 2009, in time to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary here in Yellowstone.

Canary Spring in Yellowstone July 2007

Trip 6: Four days over the long 4th of July weekend back in 2007 was enough to refresh our memories of how beautiful Yellowstone Park is.

Yellowstone Hot Spring May 2005

Trip 5: Only two days were spent in Yellowstone back in May 2005. My mother-in-law, Jutta Engelhardt, is with us again five years after her first visit to Yellowstone, this time in the spring instead of late fall.

Bison in Yellowstone May 2004

Trip 4: It’s May 2004, and we are with our friend Jay Patel on a cross-country road trip that wouldn’t have been complete without a stop in Yellowstone. Over the course of three days in the area, we spent a great deal of time exploring the geysers, mud pots, and wildlife. While you can’t tell from this photo, we also had plenty of snow to make snowmen and snow angels in.

Old Faithful Inn Yellowstone July 2003

Trip 3: Our only 1-day visit to Yellowstone occurred on July 6, 2003, after being away from the park for three years. We were on our way south after visiting Glacier National Park on the long 4th of July weekend.

Jutta Engelhardt and Caroline Wise in Yellowstone 2000

Trip 2: Under the guise of bringing Caroline’s mother, Jutta Engelhardt, over to see Yellowstone (because I’m that kind of selfless husband and son-in-law), I was able to convince my beautiful wife of the importance of making a second visit to this corner of Wyoming in the same year. Truth is, I would have sold Jutta to any bidder for the opportunity to visit again, as I couldn’t get our first visit out of my head. This is during October 2000, the closing days of the park. We spent five days on this visit.

Caroline Wise and John Wise in Yellowstone 2000

Trip 1: Our very first visit to Yellowstone National Park with our friends Ruby and Axel Rieke started on May 14th, 2000. While we had reserved a room for four days, I could have stayed for months. I was smitten with Yellowstone all summer long and schemed to figure out how to justify coming back sooner rather than later. Never in my wildest dreams could I have ever imagined that within 20 years, we’d be making our 9th visit and that we would be able to visit the park during all seasons.

Cleaning Up

JWise Photo of the Day, Thoughts

Back on November 1st, we bought a grabber from our local hardware store and took our 5-gallon bucket out for a walk around our neighborhood. We’d grown tired of the abundance of trash in our neighborhood and decided that we had to take personal responsibility for it, or we’d grow angrier being confronted with it every day.

Starting on the 1-mile loop, we walk a couple of times a day I thought we might pick up about 10 gallons of trash, but I was surprised by the reality of the situation. We had grown so accustomed to seeing the trash that much of it had become invisible. The statistics of exactly what has been collected boggle my mind. While we expanded our pick-up zone to a small area around the intersection we live next to, the majority of our new roles as trash collectors/de-ghettoization crew are focused on our walking route.

Here are the statistics so far:

  • 150 gallons or 30 buckets of often overflowing trash
  • 150-300 pounds is the estimated weight of our haul
  • 21 miles we’ve walked in our effort to pick all of this up
  • Four syringes
  • Six shopping carts returned to our nearby grocery store
  • One tire with one more that we still have to roll to a trash bin
  • One hubcap
  • Two bullet casings
  • $5.31 in cash
  • countless cigarette butts
  • hundreds of Halloween candy wrappers – consider the dates we’ve been doing this
  • probably a couple of hundred straws
  • dozen of plastic bags
  • various clothes, towels, shoes, work gloves, and rubber gloves

We refuse to pick up dog waste, though there is plenty.

My wish is for more people to go to their local hardware store and spend the $10-$20 for a picker/grabber and another $4 for a 5-gallon bucket and get out on their streets and start picking up the eyesores. Caroline and I will maintain this over the winter while we can still walk the streets of Phoenix before the heat prevents us from venturing outside for longer periods of time. Hmmm, this makes me think I should write to the CEO of Home Depot and ask them to partner with us on just such a project.

Number 19 of 17

JWise Photo of the Day, Thoughts

Caroline Wise and John Wise on the Oregon Coast November 2018

Here, at the last minute, we decided that we’d go north. The destination we are heading to is Oregon, the coast specifically; it will be our 19th visit during the past 17 years. Only seven of the previous journeys into the state were made outside of late fall and winter, with our inclination to spend time on the rocky coast during the quiet season. The photo of us above is from last year somewhere along the Oregon coast.

Three Arch Rocks March 2002

Trip 1: Back in March 2002, we made our first visit to the Oregon coast and were smitten within minutes of arrival. This is the view from Three Arch Rocks National Wildlife Refuge, seen from Oceanside Beach near Maxwell Point.

Cleetwood Trail Crater Lake July 2002

Trip 2: By July of the same year, we were once again underway on our way up through California on our way to Oregon. It was the long 4th of July, 2002, and we now knew that the drive that far north wasn’t all that difficult, so off we went. The trail took us past a remote corner of Death Valley, through a ghost town, and up to Crater Lake National Park before we turned around to race home to Phoenix, Arizona.

Mount Hood November 2002

Trip 3: Hey, it’s now November 2002, and we’ve just gotten started exploring Oregon with so much left to find. Here’s Caroline standing in an ice-cold mountain stream at the foot of Mount Hood. If you think freezing cold water phases my wife, you’d be sadly mistaken. We are now attempting to see all four corners of the state and the interior, so we have a better idea of exactly where we want to return to on future visits.

Harris Beach Yurt and Caroline Wise in Oregon November 2003

Trip 4: November 2003 and where better to go than back to Oregon. In the intervening time between visits, we’d learned that more than a few state parks along the coast have yurts as part of their accommodation offerings. Back then, they were incredibly cheap in our eyes and seemed romantic from afar. With this here, our first night staying in a yurt, we fell in love faster than it took to unlock the front door. We knew we were hooked. This photo of Caroline was taken at Harris Beach near Brookings, Oregon.

Horses near the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon

Trip 5: Barely six months had gone by before the call of Oregon summoned us back. Emboldened by the ease we were getting to places we thought were too far for 5 to 7 days, we took on this July 2004 summer drive back to Crater Lake. From there, we headed over the Columbia River and up to Washington to see Mount Rainier before driving out to Olympic National Park. Our return was via Oregon and California back to Phoenix, where the scorched desert awaited us. The photo was taken somewhere between John Day and the Columbia River in Oregon.

Caroline Wise and John Wise at Dutch Bros in Grants Pass, Oregon

Trip 6: This one was almost missed as we were only in Oregon for 2 hours after leaving the Redwoods down in California to head up to Grants Pass for a cup of Dutch Bros. coffee. It seemed like a great idea at the time. November 28, 2004.

Cape Meares Lighthouse in Oregon May 2005

Trip 7: May 2005, and it was time to share our affinity with the Pacific Northwest with my mother-in-law, Jutta. With Caroline and I now quite familiar with some “best of” places, we took her mom to Death Valley, the Redwoods National Park, up the coast of Oregon into Washington, and then over to Glacier National Park in Montana before dropping into Yellowstone for her second visit to that park and then down across Utah before stopping for her first-ever visit to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The photo is of the Cape Meares Lighthouse near Tillamook, Oregon.

Caroline Wise at Cape Ferrelo Viewpoint in Brookings, Oregon

Trip 8: Oh, it’s Thanksgiving, and there’s no better way to escape family obligations around the holidays than for us to be out on the road. November 2006 was the witness to this short 7-day excursion up through San Francisco with a quick jaunt into Oregon for a couple of days before heading down to Santa Cruz, California, to spend some time on that coast, too. The photo of Caroline was taken at the Cape Ferrelo Viewpoint near Brookings, Oregon.

Carl Washburne State Park in Oregon November 2007

Trip 9: This is becoming a trend where we pack things up for a road trip that somehow keeps ending up in Oregon in November because here we are in 2007, testing the question of, “Will it be boring this time?” The answer was a resounding “NO!” This photo was taken in the Carl G. Washburne Memorial State Park, home of the most southerly temperate rain forest in the United States.

Rocks rising above the water in Siletz Bay, Oregon

Trip 10: You can pass Siletz Bay near Lincoln City, Oregon, one hundred times, and this view will always look different. I’m not sure we’ve stopped here that many times, but on this November 2008 trip along the coast, we were taken by the silhouettes etching out a perfect scene as our day was coming to a close. It was difficult choosing this photo of Siletz Bay when this was also the trip up the coast that had us stopping at the Devils Churn near Cape Perpetua for a sight that enchanted us for a solid hour or more. Click here to see an image from the Churn that is still one of my favorites.

Caroline Wise Kayaking in Garibaldi, Oregon September 2011

Trip 11: Oh my, it’s been three years since last we visited Oregon though we have great excuses why we couldn’t make it. In 2009, we visited Yellowstone National Park for the first time during winter. In May of that year, my mother-in-law Jutta spent two weeks with us in the Eastern United States. In 2010, we visited Yellowstone in January again, as the year before was so fascinating. Then, later in the year, we rafted the Colorado River through Grand Canyon National Park for nearly three weeks. Enjoying the idea of boating, we stretched out on our 10th trip to Oregon for some kayaking here in Garibaldi in September 2011.

Near Heceta Head Lighthouse in Oregon November 2011

Trip 12: A second visit in one year is kind of extraordinary, but we apparently have an addiction problem, and I don’t mean mushrooms. This trip saw us bringing a friend along as maybe they can corroborate our sense of amazement for Oregon or they can point out why our regard is too high, and we can back off this incessant need to visit the state every chance we get. The mushroom was photographed near Heceta Head Lighthouse in Florence, Oregon, in November 2011.

Oregon Coast November 2012

Trip 13: Rafting in Alaska this summer wasn’t enough for us, so here we are in November 2012 for our 12th visit to Oregon. With some research, information about the location of this photo could be found but I’m feeling kind of lazy about this time in trying to write this blog. You see, when I started this entry, I thought we’d made 14 visits, but then I discovered a few more trips about which, for one reason or other, I never blogged. With no photos posted here, I had just assumed my blog showed all of our visits; wrong.

South Coast of Oregon May 2013

Trip 14: Out with my daughter Jessica in May 2013 because we’d never seen the state of Oregon with her in our company; seemed like as good a reason as any.

Oregon Sunset November 2015

Trip 15: It’s that time of year again. Here we are in November 2015, and once again it’s Oregon on our minds. We missed last year due to me starting a new company to build a Virtual Reality world, only to end up neglecting ours. True, we did raft the Yampa River up in Colorado and Utah with friends, and we visited Los Angeles and San Francisco during 2014, but it was truly the slowest travel year we’d experienced in over a dozen years.

Depoe Bay, Oregon November 2016

Trip 16: November 2016, did you think there was any chance we’d miss the opportunity to visit Oregon at this time of year?

Caroline Wise at Rockaway Beach, Oregon April 2017

Trip 17: Are we bored yet? Do we look bored? One doesn’t ride the wild corn dog if things are not top-notch. April 2017 marks the first time ever we’ve been in Oregon during this month: wow! So now we’ve visited this amazing state in March, April, May, July, September, and November, leaving only six other months we’ll have to plan visits for. Where do you find this exhilarating ride? In Rockaway Beach.

Boiler Bay in Oregon November 2018

Trip 18: By now, you must have already guessed that this was shot in November 2018. If you guessed that date, you win a trip with us to Oregon on one of our next visits. You just have to pay your way and pass a compatibility test with us grizzled travelers, and maybe you’ll be out exploring such fantastic sights such as this one on a late afternoon at Boiler Bay near Depoe Bay, Oregon.