Dried Goods

:: about a conference six years ago, mentioned below ::

I haven’t posted about Costco in a long time, whereas I used to, featuring photographs and everything. Well it’s not like I’ve lost any respect for Costco, but yes I’ve allowed my business membership to expire. These are not mutually exclusionary conditions.

These days it’s Winco, and there’s continuity there, going back to Jupyter Hotel and the special conference for creatives. Our principal organizer with a Winco guy. And yet believe it or not I’d never been to one myself, a well known chain, another check in the “everyone but me” box, right? So it’s cool, right? All those bins of dried goods.

Yes, this is one of those prosaic blog posts where I list some of what I got on my last haul, proceeding directly from Providence, where I’d had an every so often (couple years or so) echo cardiogram. Kudos to the system for populating MyChart with myriad numbers, all back trackable through previous such routine exams. So on to Winco from there.

Dried figs, dried mangos, dates, croutons, trail mix (not the most expensive), wasabi peas (from one of like a hundred dispensers, across several aisles, lots of pasta varieties… and candies…)… this is like a memory test, do we get to once again head around this block… I avoided anymore pasta this time, and left the dried goods section. Winco has more to offer.  Like Diet Dr. Pepper.

My total bill was well over a hundred, and some of you, especially knowing the same neighborhood (we’re talking the Winco at 82nd and Powell), are thing why not Trader Joe's?  I live half way between two of those, what’s up with picking on Winco and not TJs?  I’m I an industry plant?

You know how it is: one gets into loops and routines. In no way have I lost respect for TJ’s, even if my attendance is way down. There’d be a recent spike in the data though, as I went through for old time’s sake. I’m gonna make a joke about “Groceries” now, a Trump obsession, and mention I was shopping for covfefe (that’s gotta be a brand by now, right?). Quoting Google:

Covfefe (/koʊˈfɛfi/ koh-FEF-ee, /kəvˈfeɪfeɪ, koʊˈfɛfeɪ/) is a word, widely presumed to be a typographical error, that Donald Trump used in a viral tweet during his first term as President of the United States. It quickly became an Internet meme. Avatar of Donald J. Trump. Donald J.

This edition of my Safari browser is getting confused by all these fonts from cutting and pasting so I’m gonna save this from my iPad and finish it up in Vivaldi, the browser I’m using on a Mac Pro in the upstairs office. On the way up, I’m gonna check for any dried goods I might’ve missed from my list.  

Dried apricots, I coulda sworn I'd remembered those -- good thing I didn't.

Thrift Store

Slabtown

David and I both went to this Ivy League thing at Breakside Brewery, which, amazingly, I'd never been to. It's in the Pearl, NW Portland. Or is this newly developed area rebranding as Slabtown (a moniker for Portland)? 

When we first got to the neighborhood, we verified where the Ivy League thing was happening, making name tags, but then left, as the first order of business was to find a nearby pizza place participating in Mercury's Pizza Week, meaning a $4 special slice is offered, along with a $25 whole pie. 

However, Ruse Crust Collective Slabtown had a sign on the door saying they weren't doing individual Pizza Week slices, only whole pizzas -- we considered that breaking the rules and thought writing to Mercury might be in order. We went to New Seasons instead, where I ended up spending more on a single salad than I would have on a whole pie.

We returned to Breakside Brewery and joined the 2nd floor throng (I exaggerate -- a small gathering). We both got non-alcoholic beers for $6 each. The topic of conversation, in the clutch we joined (hi Peter), was somewhat predictably the USG's wish to police Harvard's course materials, as a condition for receiving federal funding.

I'm thinking weaning universities off any federal funding might be a good idea given the bankruptcy of the latter (most would say "impending" -- always putting off the day of reckoning). The university, as an institution, predates the modern nation-state, and it may have outlasted said old world order. The "global university" is taking over, as the more dominant Spaceship Earth metaphor (indivisible, still striving for liberty and justice for all).

I find myself imagining an alternative reality in which the USG is explicitly withholding funds from universities that fail to effectively share contemporary American history, by withholding all the memes my Quakerly subculture is trafficking in, namely the Bucky stuff. How are those graduating from these institutions supposed to navigate successfully, if deprived of any reliable compass?

Bucky's Medal of Freedom was famously awarded for Synergetics, by then president Reagan, and yet Harvard, home of American Transcendentalism in Margaret Fuller's day (Bucky's great aunt) is paradigmatic in how little it shares of our paradigm. No wonder the USG is pulling the plug, right? Funny to think in that way, if only for my private entertainment. And besides, Princeton has been doing some stuff around the Geoscope recently. Not every Ivy League school is as slow as Harvard.

A Journey

A tack I took, not documented in Graph Theory 2025 (maybe 2026):

Starting with Freud and others Freudians, really early (8th grade in Rome, and continuing on through high school in the Philippines) I got to Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death (which Woody Allen liked) followed by Norman O. Brown: Love’s Body and Closing Time.

To bring it full circle, I was just chatting with Perplexity about Closing Time a couple hours ago. I’ll copy over the prompt in a minute.

Then when I got to Princeton I found myself switching gears into Wittgenstein, mixed with international relations as I was either gonna be a psychoanalyst (med school ugh) or a diplomat (coming from an already-expat background). I wound up doing neither, directly, but fast forward and I reacquainted myself with fringe figures (from academia’s viewpoint): P.D. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.

But not so much directly as through the Jungian flavored writings of one Maurice Nicoll, a Scot, and admirer of both Jung and Ouspensky.

I found this pathway great for coming back to Synergetics since Fuller was quite familiar with the cult of Gurdjieff and even mentions him by name. Also, I believe P.D. Ouspensky was on the short list of people Fuller urgently should get a copy of 4D Timelock, his first manifesto of sorts. As documented by art-historian Henderson in her award-winning book on Non-Euclidean geometries influencing modern art, Ouspensky as active around the 4D meme, as was Fuller.

What I think binds Fuller’s philosophy closely to Gurdjieff’s is that whole East-meets-West Boho generation’s (Blavatsky…) emphasis on man’s robotic and/or machine-like nature, highly programmable, manipulable, by design, as we’re born as EPROMs, brains as yet far from fully formed, ready to embrace whatever culture said human is born into.

However we’re also able to jump through moments of open mindedness and feel ourselves divinely reprogrammed (it feels like it comes to us, more than we dig it out purely willfully — God’s grace is in response to passive “waiting full of expectation” (the Quaker jargon)). That mostly closed, reflexive, robotic being vs intermittently open model is what comes through in Omnidirectional Halo and brain vs mind.

Caveats

Whereas I found myself in agreement with a lot of the signs at Hands Off!, on April 5, most especially "Hands Off Gaza" and "Hands Off Yemen", I note that neither of these current bombing targets were among those officially listed on the Hands Off! poster itself, along with libraries, social security, other safety net institutions. Along with NATO.

Yeah, NATO is listed first in Wikipedia, regarding the Hands Off! agenda: 

The protests were in response to what the organisers saw as the administration's overreach on many issues: NATO; schools; libraries; courts; veteran services; fair elections; transgender rights; Social Security; Medicare; Medicaid; the federal workforce; abortion rights; and many others.

How'd that happen? It'd seem pretty incongruous to an old timey anti-war activist, to see NATO, a military socialist club, really into money making, listed right up there with Social Security and Medicare. 

Since Eisenhower, we've been thinking the jobs corps and charity programs administered from the Pentagon, as in competition with ordinary civilian public services. And anyway weren't those folks supposed to protect and uphold the Constitution in return for that budget? Did they? I'm afraid by now, it's way too late.

As a courtesy to fellow WILPFers, mom's organization, and by extension to Code Pink (some AFSCers too), I relayed the necessary bonafides, while circling my Venn Diagram overlap when it comes to what I actually do support, for example abortion rights (by free choice, after soul searching and consideration) and transgender rights (the right to change gender, or at least make the attempt). 

I wanted other lefties to know that I'm tracking Medea Benjamin's position, although my own wakeup call came from Garland Nixon (meaning from his YouTube channel).

As I wrote to my inner circle: 

Conclusion:  Whereas I overlap with Hands Off! on many fronts, in fighting Trump ("resonated with most of the signage"), I think Carol, a seasoned activist, would have picked up on exactly what I picked up on: the NATO affiliation. I in no way regret my participation and would do it again with gusto. But I don't mind making my own platform (Pirate Party) explicitly clear in the wake of such meetups. I don't want to be tainted / associated with every aspect of the DNC's propaganda. I'm free to pick and choose. 

Portland Protest (April 5)

:: April 5, 2025, PDX ::

Touring the Borderlands

I know no one is looking forward to some kind of DMZ situation, ala Korea, in Ukraine, along the border with New Russia. Or maybe not no one, as that'd be a lot of job opportunities, manning those stations, not letting people cross, but with that many miles, there'd be a dramatic defection, one way or the other, at least daily. That'd make for a lot of television and commercial revenue.

We might get some guided tours though, I'm hoping, with some high ranking feeling safe enough to risk it, like when CDI hosted retired brass on trips to Cuba. Castro wasn't about to have anyone gunned down. He wanted to talk, after the visitors had some fun in the sun and some beer. The scene was copacetic. 

We're getting some of those tours from YouTubers even today. I've been surveying Mariupol, wondering if a city that size might build back better. What does one do with partially damaged apartment buildings? We've seen cities rubblized before. The WW2 generation rubblized their cities, why shouldn't we rubblize ours, is that the thinking? Then they'd rebuild.

The tour guides will tell different stories, and tourists will sample them both, kind of like how the same tourist is free to show up at the Korean DMZ on either side, one might hope both sides over time, more than once. Get each point of view. Don't make a run for it, providing target practice; just leave to a neutral liminal space of air travel (Pyongyang to Beijing?), and return on the opposite side (Beijing to Seoul?), through the looking glass.

We're not going to ignore all the death and destruction that happened (is still happening as of this writing), meaning we're touring a space of cemeteries, well kept and full of ceremony.