North To Utah As Alaska Is Too Far

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

The day starts like any other day on the streets of Phoenix, Arizona. Shortly after 5:30 in the morning, Caroline and I find ourselves checking out the Christmas lights. We won’t have a lot of time to dawdle as after the sun rises, one of us will be staying home, and the other of us will be heading up the road to Utah, as why not?

Brinn shows up on time, but before we start the endurance test of our butts, backs, and hips, we have to stop in at King Coffee, a regular stop for coffee for me and occasionally for Brinn too. This is not King Coffee.

As a matter of fact, we’re no longer anywhere near Phoenix but well north of Flagstaff by this time. An abandoned old motel in Gray Mountain has become a bit of an art project, well, the outside, anyway.

The inside of what remains of this roadside lodge is now questionable at best, sketchy at least, and interesting in some weird way like so many of the rotting remains from another age one finds while driving around America.

Fresh blacktop slicing a deep black trail across the red and gray desert makes for an interesting contrast, but the poverty up here still retains the same bleak hostility of neglect that economic isolation puts on the population of these native lands.

We were able to catch some rafters passing under the Navajo Bridge that crosses the Colorado River here in Northern Arizona. Minutes ago, we were able to watch one condor perched on the girders of the opposite bridge while four others were flying about further downriver. With five of these birds on view and sadly unable to capture an adequate image of these majestic rare birds, I’d like to think that their reintroduction to the Canyon system 25 years ago is looking successful.

I tried yelling down to this private trip of river rafters, but their music was too loud to hear anything else, so I don’t believe they heard me informing them about condors just ahead.

There are people who raft rivers who would look at this photo and know exactly where I’m going next.

John Wise at Lees Ferry Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona

Yep, Lees Ferry, a.k.a. mile marker zero in the Grand Canyon National Park and the starting point for Colorado River adventures that depart from right here.

Lees Ferry Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona

The first riffle of white water in the Grand Canyon. Eleven years ago, when we first passed over this minor speed bump, from my perspective in the front of a dory, this was as terrifying as anything I could imagine. It turned out that this was nothing compared to what lay ahead. Read about that day starting at THIS LINK.

Our little two-day road trip is taking us up through the Vermillion Cliffs and will have us pass by the shuttered-for-the-season turn-off to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

Good thing Lefevre Overlook isn’t popular with influencers yet because when Brinn and I pulled in, there was nobody else here enjoying the view. It wasn’t for lack of traffic as all day we’d been surrounded by those racing to get somewhere fast while this gray-haired old man plodded along, oblivious to how many middle fingers might have been thrown my way. The truth is that I don’t have time to race across the landscape failing to see more than a few of the details as one never knows how often they’ll pass through parts of a country not exactly convenient to visit.

The view from Lefevre Ridge.

Brinn Aaron in Utah

Brinn in Utah. Yesterday, while he and I were out between Superior and Globe down in central Arizona, he’d mentioned Utah a few times, so I had to ask, why? He’d never been to Utah, which was when, after a few minutes of thinking about that, I asked if he’d like to head up this weekend. Obviously, he agreed.

While we didn’t take the opportunity to have some “Ho-Made” pies, we did fill up on gas at the station next door, snapped a photo, and waved to our left as Zion National Park was not on today’s agenda. We are still heading north. According to an old blog post, Caroline and I first passed this place nearly 20 years ago.

Bryce National Park seems to come to mind.

After our stop at the old motel, a half-hour at Navajo Bridge, another half-hour (or so) detouring to Lees Ferry, and lunch at the Marble Canyon Restaurant, the remaining light of day is quickly escaping us.

While hints of what was to come tomorrow were able to be gleaned in the last moments of twilight, we arrived in Bryce just outside the national park when it was well dark and getting mighty cold.

Change Of Scenery

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

East of Superior, Arizona

Where does one go to escape themselves? Definitely not into the treadmill of routine. Sometimes, it’s so difficult to see beyond staying on the train of misery that we need a nudge that can toss us out of our well-worn groove.  Well, it so happens that a friend of mine is presently experiencing a minor hiccup that I felt he could benefit from being dragged away from his rut.

Brinn in Miami, Arizona

This is Mr. Beefcake, who, although heartbroken, is not so broken to have lost his lack of shame or sense of humor as he took up this sexy pose. (Maybe in this lower resolution, you can’t see the nipple tweaking and seductive tongue lolling out his moist lips, so I’m sure this mention will benefit the reader to better see what I witnessed.)

Note: Mr. Beefcake, not his real name, requested anonymity, hence the meaningful pseudonym. 

Miami, Arizona

In my universe, green chile on carne asada is always a cure for the sad heart, and there’s no greater cure for melancholy than this amazing plate of yummy from El Guayo’s in Miami, Arizona; so let the healing begin!

Miami, Arizona

After the gut is pacified with the salve of good eats, eye candy is next up on the menu. The romantic ruins of a crumbling old-west mining town can work the kind of wonders that will restore vigor, manhood, and the speedy relief of what ails the soul.

Miami, Arizona

We basked in the splendor of a dry river bed devoid of the distracting sounds of life that don’t allow sorrows to evaporate like the waters that once flowed through this place of decay.

Miami, Arizona

Window shopping? Sure, if you are looking for dust, pigeons, crumbling walls, and faded dreams. We were here to recognize that we were alive and fortunate enough to celebrate our vitality while what remains of Miami has been relegated to the scrap heap of things lost. We, though, are not lost, dusty, or being shat upon by pigeons; we can leave and heal ourselves because that’s what we do: we rebuild, and then we shit on pigeons.

Highway 77 south of Globe, Arizona

Sorrow is like a rusty old barbed wire fence in our minds that is stopping us at the gate of unification. I should probably mention something about God right about now, but would you really expect that from the person peddling this snake oil bullshit yer reading above?

Highway 77 south of Globe, Arizona

Open your heart like the openness of the Arizona desert, Mr. Beefcake, see your infinite potential on the horizon, and put down your troubles, squash that drama like a mosquito that’s landed on your nose.

Brinn on Highway 77 south of Globe, Arizona

After taking this photo, I consulted a physiognomist friend of mine who professionally analyzed Beefcake’s face and skull shape and then informed me that this specimen of a man is likely to be a repeater of potentially harmful behaviors due to his lack of ability to see much past his glowing mustache.

Gila River Highway 77 south of Globe, Arizona

But let us take a moment. To be honest, at this moment, Mr. Beefcake can be compared to this quickly fading river that once ran gloriously over the desert sands of Arizona. He is a pale reflection of his life prior to the anguish that has allowed his flow to be sucked away by the thirsty world that cares not if our towns, signs, homes, or souls are consumed by the relentless and vicious sunlight destroying man, beast, and river alike. But I trust Beefcake and am certain that he’ll soon regain his strength like a torrent of white water carving out canyons and pushing obstacles out of the way. He’ll reign once more over his domain.

South of Superior, Arizona

So, with the likelihood that tomorrow risks being a repeat of the day before, where the bad storytelling of contrived crap that arrived with this poor excuse of a blog post won’t be found, we decided under the romantic setting sun to head into new potentials by driving to Utah in the morning to find God, just as the Mormons did.

The Tears of a Man Flow Inward

JWise Photo of the Day

John Wise with Theo and Pacifique Irankunda

You never know what will come into your life if you don’t follow your instinct to reach out and so it was that today I found a valid moment of being thankful on Thanksgiving. My conversation started with Theo who stands in the middle in this photo. Theo entered my attention due to the word “KNOWLEDGE” emblazoned across the back of his t-shirt. He was here at this mostly empty Starbucks on a major holiday that invites people to enjoy a day of nesting with family, yet instead came here alone. After 5 minutes of dithering whether I should intrude, I did just that and asked if he was an artist. He laughed, “No, but the friend I’m meeting here any moment is; he’s a writer.”

Theo and I continued chatting as we spoke about him coming from Burundi, my time in Europe, and being thankful every day for the incredible luxury we are afforded by living in America. Then the friend he’s waiting for walks through the door and joins him ,and I’m introduced to Pacifique (pictured on the right) who also hailed from Burundi. For close to a half-hour we talked about the importance of every day being worthy of a holiday and of friendship that should mean something more than simply social media contacts.

Getting to Pacifique being a writer, I’d already learned that he would have a book coming out but the few details I knew I had been told by Theo prior to his friend’s arrival so it was time to ask Pacifique to share more about it. The book’s title is The Tears of a Man Flow Inward, and it is due to release next March. “Is it available on Amazon as a pre-order yet?” Yes, was his answer and so without learning more I grabbed my notebook and did a quick search for The Tears of a Man Flow Inward: Growing Up in the Civil War in Burundi by Pacifique Irankunda due for release on March 15, 2022. I was immediately struck by the serious tone of the part of the title Pacifique hadn’t mentioned and, without a second thought, I ordered it but was seized by the potential for it to be an emotional storytelling.

Then, just as I thought our ways were about to part, Pacifique joined me at my table asking me a few questions regarding my own path in life before he and Theo needed to head out. To say this was one of the best Thanksgiving’s ever would diminish that Caroline and I have shared thousands of Thanksgiving’s experiencing the flow of life, but this one certainly joins the ranks of the memorable.

How Many Socks? All The Socks

JWise Photo of the Day

John Wise Sock in Phoenix Arizona

If you think sock modeling is easy, you should be in my head while I struggle with what kind of background I should use or sorting out if I should include both feet or just one foot? Maybe just show a bit of sock using a close up to best demonstrate the immaculate and regular stitches that Caroline uses for my socks so there’s not a seam or even slightly bumpy area that could cause a hotspot, which in turn would cause blisters thus diminishing the pleasure I gather from wearing handknitted foot-gloves a.k.a. socks. I can proudly say of my yarntastic wife that the days of her having to fit my socks at various stages of the knitting process seem long gone as she now goes to work meticulously comparing her progress to that of another favorite sock of mine to ensure they are precisely the same.

The sad thing about being gifted such exquisite things that get used every day is that some of them wear out, typically under the front pad of my foot where they are rendered as momentary keepsakes that I’ve grown too fond of to just toss them away. Maybe you think they can be repaired? Not a chance as my sensitive feet would feel where the patch was knitted in and a fraction of the incredible pleasure would be lost so I wear them a few more times as the nostalgia builds that a particular pair is about to be retired.

Fortunately, Caroline’s busy hands and a backlog of maybe dozens of skeins of yarn await conversion into man socks, i.e. this man’s socks. Just how many socks John? All the socks.

[John bought this yarn in Stricklaedchen in Limburg, Germany, earlier this year. You can read all about his grand day out here. – Caroline]

Homeless, Bodyless, Signless

JWise Thoughts

Homeless Sign

The discarded sign of the homeless person who needed nothing else and so they left behind the only symbol that they were here and had existed for a moment. Of course, it could also be a situation where the fentanyl was disabling their motor skills, and in the process of lightening their load, the sign simply fell to the wayside. Or maybe their Uber driver arrived to whisk him/her/they/them to a new life not defined by begging, which also included the help to deliver them from the nothingness that afflicted them?

When we fall in love with celebrities, we are projecting ourselves into their role, be it sports professionals, musicians, actors, porn stars, or influencers. This obvious attraction due to our own desire to be seen, known, wealthy, and influential is an easy equation to relate to, but what is not so apparent is why we often have such visceral disdain for the homeless.

We can blame the trash and feces they leave behind, or the crime we perceive will arrive with them, or maybe we believe that they are capable of work but are too lazy to find the wherewithal to apply themselves. Not taking into account the specifics of what has led any one person or group of people to homelessness, I want to address where we, the not-homeless, are in this equation.

Witnessing success, we celebrate our hope that we might arrive there, too. The celebrity is the surrogate of our own ascent of the ladder to fame. The homeless person is the nagging ugly reminder that we, too, could end up in their tattered shoes. We need to hide these creatures away from our own neighborhoods as they represent a decay that plagues others but should not influence us or our children.

But this is the all too obvious and most apparent cosmetic delineation between us and them. I’d posit that there’s very little difference between the majority and this rarified margin of extreme success and failure. How many people are as empty as those they praise or despise? In this age of mass deterritorialization where ubiquitous media has insidiously stripped away the unique territory of the individual, many people are bereft of personality traits developed by their own explorations as opposed to those images and ideas of personhood pumped into them from the same hose that was feeding the rest of the herd.

The manifestations of the homeless are only the most obvious refuse of a society that no longer allows for a population of individuals sharing a common space but requires those of homogenous form and character to congregate in mass pilgrimages to consumption. When you fail to fit that mold, you have but a few options in American life: fame, destitution, entrepreneurial struggle, isolation on the margin, or expatriation.

Nobody is part of a community anymore unless you believe that belonging to nothingness is somehow a valid place and identity. Under most circumstances, the vacuous shell of political idolatry worn on a hat, the brand emblazoned on your computer, phone, watch, or your shared loyalty to some sports franchise are but junk food fed to you by the machine. The decades-long programmatic building of a population, according to a select group of California thinkers, has gutted individuality while they have been refining their tools to strip all semblance of meaningful character through social media and entertainment until we are left with the banalest citizenry of nothingness, reducing us to something less than the most useless of insects.

Consider that all modern industrial conveniences, including their environment and intellectual harm, arose from an age where everyone had different backgrounds with a multitude of environmental and intellectual influences from across all geographies and disciplines. From that dis-order, the age of machines brought humanity a bevy of tools and devices that would compliment the comforts of many people on earth, but as convenience pandered to our laziest inclinations, it simultaneously removed the need for us humans to venture out to seek what our minds were hungry for – new stuff. Novelty was brought directly into our homes, and now we can gather new information no matter where we are. Smartphones and the internet allowed the pipeline of intellectual junk food to find the vein into our very souls.

Stripped of individuality and embued with the ever-present need for societal/group acceptance, we work hard to stay current with the newest gossip regarding celebrities, boss fights in video games, conspiracy theories, dramas between reality TV personalities, or some other narratives designed by the powers that be in order to find the excited enthusiasm of others who are lost in this non-sensical trivia that does nothing to help define a person. In another age, it was the sharing of anticipated weather conditions or who was getting married in the community that held the glue of being present in one’s surroundings. Today, we must be atop the news of Pete Davidson and Kim Kardashian dating, the verdict regarding a kid killing demonstrators with an AR-15-style weapon, the release date of the next installment of Grand Theft Auto, or the sexual orientation of a Marvel Universe character.

So, should we all be intellectuals? Not in the least, but one cannot be an authentic individual if they are merely a clone, fractionally different from those around them. Just as there are not a billion people on earth having conversations regarding deconstructionist ideas from Jacques Derrida, there shouldn’t be a billion people discussing the merits of a Korean TV show that snuffs out the life of those trying to escape crushing debt as is found in Squid Game.

According to Google, there are more than 135,00,000 million books written that they know of. Obviously, not all of them are in English, but even if only 1% of those were in English, it would relate to a boatload of books read by Americans with a million different stories to share. But, according to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), only about half of American adults can read a book at an 8th-grade level. Well, that means there are only about 130 million Americans who can reasonably be expected to be able to even read a book. Compare those who could read a book with how Squid Game reached 142 million households and that the average household measures in at about 2.5 members each, which could imply that 355 million people have watched this program. Possibly the best-selling science book of all time, A Brief History of Time, written by Stephen Hawking, sold over 10 million copies, but it took 33 years to reach that number, and you can easily see that we want our content to be easy to consume and about as mindless as can be.

Why does any of this matter? We are facing a crisis of civility, pandemic, and environmental chaos, but the societal cohesion and collective intelligence required to wrestle with what amounts to purely intellectual problems is sorely missing and likely cannot be remedied with any quick fixes as there’s no amount of money that can repair stupid. From the vapid heights of celebrity to the person shitting on our streets, we are living in the midst of a mediocrity brought about by our own idiotic doing, in large part due to our desire to be entertained to death. The strata of dumb we must climb out of to begin understanding our dilemma is likely insurmountable, so just throw away your signs, enjoy the rest of your nothingness, and realize you were never really at home within yourself. You, me, all of us, are already homeless, but at least we’ll be celebrated as the most uncaring, superficial species ever to wreck the good fortune we once had.

That Was Then This Is Not

JWise Moments

Driftwood Coffee in Phoenix

Go places or don’t, read or write, dream or die. The routine, sad to admit, is only mixed up when I opt for a different coffee shop, I’m in a different book, or I demand I do something I’ve been neglecting, such as writing a blog entry after a long break. Feeling like it’s been a long time is not the same as really having been a long time. I checked and saw that I posted a list of things just six days ago, but that was a list, not a blog, in the sense that I want to interpret it. Though this is easy enough to contradict even before I even make my point, as the blog post should share something personal to me, is that really possible? You see, the last post about our diet is certainly something personal, and among some subset of people who live in Phoenix, Arizona, and enjoy food diversity, it is maybe nothing out of the ordinary and then, on the other hand, the majority of Americans would consider us culinary freaks.

This last statement is based on empirical evidence gathered while observing my immediate vicinity when, in one tiny slice of time, I find myself in a situation in which I am in the minority, ethnically speaking. Of course, this is easily proven by taking myself to a “major” supermarket where I find myself in a sea of similarity.

Coffee shops are like seas of similarity, too. As I focus my photos on my isolated work setup, there are the obligatory tattooed baristas, man-bun-wearing big bearded hipsters, a homeless person, two people talking shit about the friend they each talk shit about the other with, the random man in a suit (I’m in Arizona where people don’t wear suits), four to seven computers open for work each with their white illuminated Apple logo, and someone like me (an arrogant wanna-be writer looking in disdain upon these empty souls trying to find a viable way to spend part of the day that would otherwise be empty and devoid of meaning).

Black Rock Coffee in Phoenix

And then the next day, I do it all over again, except now I’m further along in the book I’m reading, or maybe I’m editing the embarrassing piece of writing while I’m leery of sharing the same old thing I’ve lamented about 45 other times or maybe it’s 55. I am not sure because I don’t track my worn-out threads because admitting with precision how repetitive I might be could derail my efforts to fill a space so few eyeballs will ever discover.

Is it ironic that this act of attempting to blog is a disruption to reading The Age of Disruption? Well, maybe not if you consider that I’m also reading Radical Animism by Jemma Deer (it’s on-screen), and if I consider that my blog post is a kind of object in nature, then these words take on an animism; so maybe taking a page from her book to tell some story or other is in line with adding to the realm of our earth.

Should you, at this point in this pointless entry, be wondering what this has to do with the title of That Was Then This Is Not? Well, the beginning of this post about whatever I was writing then is not where I’m at now, so maybe you follow that what I wanted to say was I don’t really have anything at all to say.