Blackcap Blog

Published at 10:06 on 12 January 2013

This goes along with my recent post on stability; just like stability, while apparently sought by many as a desirable end goal in and of itself, is not a valid end goal, neither is home ownership. In this case, it’s a distinction between a tool and a goal, rather than the validity of something as a goal in and of itself.

I see home ownership as very much a tool (or maybe tactic or strategy would be better words) not a goal. Part of that’s because I’m fortunate enough to have enough money to easily afford a home, should I choose to purchase one.

It’s also because life is never simply a decision about which doors to open: it’s also a decision about which doors to close. That’s because those metaphorical doors turn out to be connected by metaphorical strands of very hard, thin, but uncuttable cable, and they all open away from the metaphorical hallway. Open one door, and the previously open door connected to it across the hall slams shut.

Going to college opened the door to a professional career, which opened the door to a higher salary than if I had just gone to trade school. But if I had gone to trade school and become an electrician instead, I would have had much more freedom to choose my city of residence: building trades are in demand everywhere, while software jobs are concentrated in a few major metropolitan areas. That latter fact has been to my regret in recent years.

Home ownership opens the door to greater stability in one’s housing situation, and the door to having the freedom to modify one’s home as one sees fit. But the door across the hall labeled “freedom to relocate easily” slams shut: the transaction costs involved in exchanging one owned home for another are steep indeed.

But, to reiterate, I am not seeking stability right now. My employment situation is presently about as good as it could be, but Seattle is lacking enough in what I see as making a place desirable to live in that there’s no way I’d want to make the sort of long term commitment to live here that owning a home here would entail.

All in all, I’d much rather be living in Bellingham. It’s much easier to get out into wild nature there; unlike in Seattle, you don’t have to fight your way through a wide moat of sprawl and horrible traffic to get out into the country. It doesn’t have all the amenities of a big city, but (thanks to many decades of dysfunctional local and state policy) neither does Seattle (consider Seattle’s absolutely pathetic mass transit infrastructure as a case in point). And, being a college town, it’s actually quite sophisticated for its size; for example, it has a very robust local arts scene.

I plan on taking the first steps to pursue that goal this year, by attempting to transition to telecommuting for most of my work. Even if those plans go far better than expected, I still don’t see them ending in my purchasing a home in Bellingham in the near future. Bellingham is sorely lacking in employment opportunities (inability to find employment there, despite trying, is why I’m not there already). The only practical way to move there is to move together with one’s job, and I’m not yet sure enough about the longevity of my current employment situation to feel comfortable committing to living there full time.

Fast forward a few years into the future, and if everything is going fine with my current employer and it looks like something that’s really going to last, then it will be time to conclude that the doors opened by home ownership in Bellingham outweigh the ones closed by it.

Alternatively, if I go through a few exercises of trying and failing for various reasons to secure telecommuting to work from outside of Seattle, and I’m burned out by the process, and I decide it’s time to give up on that goal and pursue other goals from within Seattle, then it might be time to start thinking about purchasing a home in here.

But only then, not now. In neither scenario is now the right time to commit to settling down. Doing so would entail giving up too soon, and in general, “giving up too soon” is something I’ve tended (to my detriment) to do altogether too much. It’s the time in my life to entertain the virtue of persistence for a few more years at least.

Published at 16:24 on 1 January 2013

So many people tend to think it is, but it’s not. Not really.

It’s a good thing if one is in a good situation. It’s definitely not a good thing if one is in a situation (or a place) that one does not like. In the latter case, “stability” amounts to being trapped against one’s will.

It’s why I’m not rushing into home ownership. Seattle is really not a very good match for many of my values. It’s better for me than Portland, and it’s a useful place to be while I try and get things arranged so I can live someplace more to my liking (which probably means telecommuting), but that’s about it.

Seeking stability prematurely would merely mean entrapping myself in the near future.

Published at 19:40 on 3 December 2012

Introduction. This is going to be a somewhat long and rambling collection of thoughts prompted by a visit to Vashon Island last weekend. Conventional blogging wisdom says I’m not being a very good blogger big gaps in activity punctuated by periods when I post lots of content.

To hell with the conventional wisdom. Regarding the first electrical communications medium, Thoreau once wrote:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

Well, often times I have nothing meaningful to communicate. In those cases, the most appropriate course of action is to post nothing.

On last Saturday. I spend most of the day (and the following night) on the island, visiting some friends, touring artist’s studios, communing with nature, and generally evaluating Vashon Island as a possible place to move to and live one day.

On primal beauty. One of my favorite places on the island is Maury Island Marine Park (despite its name, Maury Island is connected by an isthmus to Vashon Island, making it a peninsula rather than an island of its own). Much of it is a pretty ravaged landscape, having once been a large sand and gravel quarry.

No matter. Nature is continually reasserting itself, showing that in the big picture, on the scale of eons, civilization’s depredations, catastrophic though they may be, will be but a fleeting departure from the normal wild state of things. Already madrone are spreading from the surrounding forest, colonizing the once-bare land, the sunny, denuded slopes being to the liking of this drought-adapted species near the northern limits of its range. Many of these relatively young trees are already the brilliantly intense red berries that are their fruit, ensuring that the pace of afforestation will only accelerate in the coming years.

So there it was, little bits of red so intense and vibrant littering the ground, contrasting so strikingly with the overall grayish-blue dusky scene. I didn’t even bother attempting to photograph any; some things must simply be experienced. Art always falls short of wild nature, serving at best as a reminder to get out and appreciate it.

On feelings, reason, and rationalization. Ultimately, it is the feelings inspired by direct, unmediated exposure to primal beauty and not logic or science which will save both the natural world and the possibility for freedom to exist. That’s not because science and logic have no value, but because they are merely amoral tools. It is as easy to construct arguments — logical arguments based on scientifically-determined evidence — against freedom and wildness as it is to construct arguments in their favor. We are ultimately not rational animals but rationalizing ones.

The forces of capitalism ensure that almost all the money is on the side of the destroyers. How do you privatize and monetize beauty and freedom? You can’t. But you can easily to both to natural resources, even when extracting these resources destroys beauty and freedom.

On Anarchism, Evolution, and Freedom. That freedom is possible is probably the greatest and best thing about the world and universe we find ourselves in. That’s probably why most authoritarian power structure value organized religion and why the advocates of both tend to get so upset when the lack of evidence for their boss in heaven is pointed out. The existence of our 3 billion year old biosphere proves that leaderless systems can work and create a lasting order — and order that has lasted at least six full orders of magnitude longer than any hierarchical civilization has lasted.

With all its warts and drawbacks, I can think of no better way to exist as a sentient being than as the way I do, in fact, exist — as an animal, as a product of a freely-organized and freely-evolved natural order in a world where the pursuit of greater freedom for all beings is possible. Morbidity and mortality are small prices to pay for this possibility of freedom.

On commuting. I tend to forget the above when I get wrapped up in my workaday city life. It’s particularly a hazard in a place like Seattle, which has not done a good job of preserving any large swath of nature close to the inner city. There is no Forest Park, Point Defiance Park, or East Bay regional park system here. One must cross a wide moat of sprawl in order to get to anything reasonably wild.

Of course, were I to live outside of the city that would not be the case. But it would be no win for either myself or the environment — I’d merely be replacing commuting to nature once a week with commuting to the office five times per week. Under my present circumstances, commuting cannot be eliminated, only minimized.

I hope to make the transition to mostly telecommuting within a year. That would make living out of the city more of a net win, if I could get my in-person appearances down to a weekly or fortnightly level.

On island living. This takes me full circle back to where I was on Saturday. Overall, I feel save saying now that Vashon is about what my previous observations led me to believe. It’s not a particularly good match for me. Although it’s not an awful match, and I could probably make it work, there’s a few things about it that give me pause.

For one, grocery shopping — a routine task for which it is thus critical to be able to accomplish on-island — the options are significantly more limited than on the mainland. There’s a small natural-foods store, but the key word is small. There’s a nice Thriftway supermarket there, but that is still slim pickings compared to the food co-ops found in Seattle (or in Bellingham, Mount Vernon, or Olympia).

There’s also a moat — one of water, this time — between the island and any truly large wild areas. Most of the island itself is exurban in character; there are many hobby farms on lots of 5 to 50 acres there. Swaths of wild land tend to be limited in number and size. If I’d want access to any wilderness, it would mean a ferry ride. Sure, there’s always bicycling the back roads on the island, but I’d still be on a machine on a paved road — not as good as being barefoot in the wilderness.

So, probably not. With the proviso that any future living arrangement I transition to is going to depend strongly on some particulars. If I find a home on Vashon which is in all other ways ideal, then I could see perhaps deciding to accept the other limitations of the place.

Realistically, though, the odds are against my finding that otherwise perfect match there.

Published at 11:35 on 8 July 2012

No new revelations, really: I miss how Portland is more countercultural than Seattle. I don’t miss the lousy air quality or more prolonged summer heat waves.

I also don’t miss the flaky hipster factor: as an example, there’s one vegan food store in Portland that doesn’t open until 10:00 AM because none of its owners (nor, frankly, much of its clientele) are up before noon, so 10 seems almost unimaginably generously early an opening time for them. And since 10:00 AM is (by their standards) an ungodly early hour, the store almost never actually opens at the stated time of 10, anyhow. Which is annoying to anyone whose schedule isn’t based on “rock and roll hours”.

Published at 21:43 on 7 July 2012

I’m in Portland for what was billed as the estate sale of a friend who passed away this spring, which turned into a giveaway of possessions to friends, which then turned once more into a giveaway of only minor possessions. Which turned the trip into something of a wild goose chase, because the object I was most interested in might be valuable.

In the end, it probably shouldn’t have been that big a surprise, because difficulty in managing the need to divest oneself of possessions sort of runs in that family: my friend’s mother was a compulsive hoarder who filled a whole house with stuff, and my friend then obsessed for years about meticulously sorting through all his mother’s junk.

And I can’t get that angry, because the object I wanted is definitely a want and not a need.

Published at 19:25 on 8 June 2012

I’m back home after fleeing for a week to let the scabies mites die in my absence, after treating myself a second time with permethrin. After some worrying false alarms caused by scratching provoking old rash areas to temporarily inflame (only to calm down in a matter of hours), I’m at the point of being on the optimistic side. Though it’s probably going to be a while before I cease worrying completely about reinfection, given how hard it was to get rid of the infection.

I have yet to figure out how, absent a good measure of luck, one is supposed to ditch the buggers without doing as I did. The insecticidal ointment is intended to be applied before bedtime, left on for 8 to 14 hours, and washed off in the morning. Given that, there’s really not enough time to do the thorough cleaning you’re supposed to do while you’re toxic to the mites.

Which leaves two options for performing the cleaning, both of them unacceptable: Attempt to do the cleaning prior to treatment, and risk infecting what you are attempting to clean, or do the cleaning after treatment, and risk reinfecting yourself.

Published at 08:45 on 30 May 2012

Is that my first attempt at scabies treatment failed so it’s time to start another, more thorough and expensive, one. I’ll be off line for most of a week because this treatment involves leaving my apartment for a week with basically only the clothes on my back, because one likely possibility is that I am infected with hypervirulent scabies mites and I reinfected myself while attempting to cleanse infected items.

Published at 21:33 on 22 May 2012

Today I went to the doctor, expecting to launch a protracted odyssey trying to figure out how to find the root cause of a mysterious (and increasingly annoying to the point of becoming intolerable) allergic itch that has been plaguing me ever since I moved. That’s because allergies, particularly chemical sensitivity ones, are not something that Western medicine understands very well.

Instead, Western medicine, in the personage of my physician, took one look at me and informed me I had scabies. Not having had any intimate contact in years, the only plausible way I could have gotten it is via some re-used box utilized by the movers to pack my bedding. Which I believe they did, given that they showed early in the morning before I had much chance to pack it myself.

The good news is that it’s something Western medicine understands very well and has excellent treatments for. The bad news is that I now have to try and decontaminate any piece of cloth I might have touched in the past several days. That, and, and the fact that killing the little bastards responsible doesn’t make the damnable itch go away promptly.

Published at 16:56 on 20 May 2012

Mind you, in general I’m happy to live in a place where I don’t feel continually under assault by overly-strong sunlight which is threatening to burn my skin, but whenever something in the skies grabs my interest, sometimes I end up wishing I lived someplace that wasn’t so continually cloudy.

And so it is today, when the eclipse is happening above a thick layer of overcast which has about zero chance of clearing. And the normal trick of going to the eastern side of the Cascades is of no help today; today’s storm is one of those strong enough to make it across the mountains.

Sigh.

Published at 21:14 on 30 April 2012

I just bought one, and was somewhat surprised to learn that once you spend more than $700, your money is pretty much wasted because the extra money goes into substituting high-end road bike parts for the mid-range mix of road and mountain bike parts that are on less pricey models. So you end up with what is essentially a road bike with a straight handlebar.

Twenty years ago, once you spent more than $700, your money was pretty much wasted because the extra money went into substituting high-end mountain bike parts for the mix of parts that was on the less pricey models. So what you ended up with was a basically mountain bike with smooth tires.

The surprise is that the price point at which it’s pointless to spend more hasn’t budged in unadjusted dollars. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise, since the hybrid I bought twenty years ago was made in the USA. That made it something of a holdout even then (most manufacturers had offshored their manufacturing to Asia, generally Taiwan, even then). Now virtually every bike is Made in China.

Well, some of the ones which are fundamentally road bikes with straight handlebars are made in Taiwan, but I don’t want a road bike. “Road” bikes are designed for an ideal world where street departments resurface every paved surface every five years. Particularly in Seattle, a city that has raised neglect of street maintenance to a high art, that’s an unrealistic premise. I’d rather have tires with a bit of width and tread to them to cushion the shocks and enable me to better stay in control.