comment to: santos137@yahoo.com
DRAFT
huastic-mayoid
BIKE PIRATES
winter migration booty
or
Tropical Mind Garden
plus: ROBOT PUKE
2004-5 concept harvest
[12-'04] We were 18 bicycles surfing winter out of Austin into Mexico & soon enough arrived in real storybook jungle of strangler figs, bromeliads, & bottle-water lianas. Psychogeo pearls came strung thick on the golden threads of our natural migration. Oh, what far-out visions; a ruby-dark moon, its spectra sodium drenched, floated up from a turquoise lightning storm of dinoflagelate bioluminescent Gulf s-s-surf. Oooh, the crazy birdscapes- at dawn, centered in surround-sound space, a soccer field in a "joya" sinkhole in El Cielo biopreserve, massive overgrok, by eye & ear, thirty-odd species of birds at the same time (utopian overload or paradise burn) & climbing the sierra, a thrumming hummingbird tree of flowery red fireworks, the mx. coral tree, Erythrina Coralloides; & climbing higher yet, oh primordial emblem of freedom, sun-gilt great parrots, Ara (macaw) militaris mexicana, mountain wave soaring & calling in the biopreserve's azure zenith, forget not why the caged bird cries; Ah, the deep meditations in lost ruins of a mysterious huastic-mayoid civilization in the coastal sierras of Tamaulipas;
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Migration watercolor impression detail painted on salvaged 8 1/2 x 11 copier stock with a homemade ultralight watercolor set (35 gr.) made from a recycled little sushi tray, as a replacement for digital video. Click image for larger version. |
The essential Tamaulipan pastime is "cotorreo" (parrot talk), a tradition of picaresque language where even Abuelita cusses sailor-like & actual sailors seem polite. I saw a babe in arms forming first words in the proper salted mucus & grit phonemes; something like " hi-hi-hijo de su pi-pinche pe-perra madre!", as her parents beamed & cooed over her. Even the calls of Ara & the Tamaulipan Crow (Corvus imparatus) have the same profound hoarseness. Maybe birdsong started it all, this is the continents migration gateway. It was this timeless wildness that drew Ambrose Bierce to his disappearance & fulfilled Antonin Artaud's pregnant-with-alien madness. Any sort of character can be found here-about. There's Don Simon, a 92 year old eco-saboteur who, in the 60s, pre-Monkey Wrench Gang, torched a fleet of logging trucks in what became the El Cielo Biopreserve, & the logging company was scared away by this fearless little man's Pito Perez logic, "if God lets me". I found him sitting with an open bible in Cd. V., "I'll do it again if needed". Mexican ninja missions- pacifist culture-jamming as revolutionary spectacle in a deconstructed narco-satanico police state. Declaracion de Victoria- On maestro Rosales' radio show we proclaimed the apparent border renaissance based on a home-brew creative pacifistic humanism, including a return to cave painting (the ultimate archival tech.),
Our "Peace House" in Cd. V. is ringed with chatium-dens or digisweatlodges (not counting the odd corner-store terminal 'tween old bananas & empties). This document took birth in such. The Internet is nuclear war resistant, but during Semana Santa the mexican Net relives easter passion, dying by shut cafes, forsaken by its vacationing techies & resurrected the third (biz) day, risen again by magic-realist geeks hospice caring granma's ol' clone, a preY2K hulk with the ne'r-patched buggy math co-processor, long turned mission-critical server. Anywhere in mx., in mom & pop's ISP/candy store, their child resignedly swats at heavy Slavic malware, between customers.
Major corporate logos are wildly popular in Mexico. Our friends on the Cd. Victoria mtb team mostly ride Mexican bikes overlaid with counterfeit Trek or Specialized decals & wear uniforms emblazoned "Discovery Channel", pirate mimicry just like the biomimicry of plants & animals in the local tropical forests. Talented rider, "Pinky", enthused that girls might actually think the DC a sponsor. In the spirit of O. Henry, such a girl could properly counter Pinky's imposture with silicon breasts, glass eye, false teeth, wig, & a wooden leg. Counterfeiting is life. A pal's child cried because mom failed to score pirate Nikes, substituting "Mike"s, an unforgivably flawed forgery. Here, in world citrus heaven, the intelligentsia prefers artificial citrus flavor powder by Coca-Cola mixed into the finest spirits. By contrast, we radical bike nomads may wear real Nikes (salvaged), logo defaced. Our bikes are often real Treks or Specializeds, logos scraped & culture jammed to say, like, "drek" or "radicalized". We drink cheap booze (humble local brands & "neutral spirits" a fairly clean industrial drinking ethanol) mixed with fresh tropical nectars. On this trip i perfected augmented tepache ("Tepachon")- a quality pineapple & brown sugar brewed by simplest means; salt as disinfectant- concentrated brine replaces boiling for sterilizing (plastic rather than glass) bottles (good canteen storage trick); plastic carbonation-proof drink bottles enable a golden age of home-brew "champagne"; primary ferment in screw top bottles cracked open just so, too little, the contaminants may back-flow, too much & the bottle blows up. Fill bottles to very top, keep thermally stable, & the ferment out-gassing is reliable.
huastic-mayoid culture
| We mutant bike nomads seek & camp outside "lost" ruins of a mysterious civilization on the "mesoamerican frontier", so called "Indian Nations" of the Tamaulipas Coastal Sierras can be seen as a suburban trans-Caribbean "Mayoids", a huastic-mayoid branch. Just 3 days ride from South Texas there are over 500 very large round stone foundations at one site (El Sabinito), some conjoined as a flowing wall over 300m long, with a cool round pyramid in the plaza. A related site (Blacones de Moctezuma) is panoramically perched picchu-like on a saddle ridge, all just 2-3 days bike ride from tx. Any stone recent fallen, we refit, & we unlitter. Just as the Mexico City Bicitekas gather at the symbolic city-heart, the Angel goddess statue, & peg their Ruta Chichimeca to ancient sites such as Casas Grandes in Chihuahua, so do we directly inherit & become neonative protectors of sacred places that the profane world only experiences, if at all, in commodity simulation. On this shore a pale avatar of Quetzalquatl famously washed ashore & recovered in a cave, perhaps in the north-most seaside sierra, San Jose de las Rusias, karst sho'nuff, last coastal mountain until, what, Maine? Perhaps he was an albino mayoid shaman from far to the south or east, perhaps raised in dark isolation as with the Columbia's mayoid Kogi, with otherworldly teachings, notably nonviolence. The Lacandon Maya have a high albinism expression, such as the child at right who, sans eyeglasses, may resemble young Quetzalcoatl. |  |
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My reconstruction of typical structures at the time of euro-invasion- a) infill panel wattle pattern survival in jacal walls applied to round palapa (as seen at Balneario La Florida); b) add striated contour palm thatch pattern (optional, as seen in old South Texas RR stop historical photo) to c) round palapa (still ubiquitous) & place on d) pan-mayoid stone foundation (as found from Kogi in Columbia to Tamaulipan coastal sierra sites ((Balcones de Montezuma & El Sabinito) bench ring just inside splash zone, steps just so, etc.). Its an interesting new eco-village pattern for re-enactors to inhabit & time share with sustainable tourists supported by roving solar utility carts, allowing both historical fidelity & hybrid creativity at one site. |
From space the northern Sierra Madre Oriental is a giant fingerprint, from within, a whorly fractal minotaur haunted labyrinth- long-horned bulls (y "vacas bravas") & minitaurs, tiny ticks that swarm aboard the brusher-by who must constantly self-inspect & even then they score. The ticks came with the invasive old-world livestock gnawing native biomass down to hard scrabble. The ranching poor are substantially vegetarian as meat is too valuable as sold to cities.
One sees how El Cielo sierra launches trade wind driven gulf moisture upward & how it crashes back down as rain. The giant sinkholes called "joyas" have small floodplains formed by hurricane rains; these closed valleys dam chinooks, their lips (or sills) create lee wave clouds (rotor rain or rizzle) that harvest moisture, terrain vortex shedding creates "oscillating fan" breeze effect in joya ejidos, mountain leading edge drier due to high baro. pressure & higher evap., trailing edges moistened by lower pressure & lower evaporation rate; enhanced fertility (gigantism, etc.) of high terrain surface area observed, forest on rough ground has more than an order of magnitude more mesoscale surface than flat desert, over north Cd. Victoria i saw a transparent mesoanticyclone ringed by two layers of convective cells at the shear zone of an easterly upper level pacific jet & westerly gulf breeze, a vast rotating inside-out wedding cake.
Memo & Flash are competition mountain bikers out of Cd. Victoria who made multiple trips guiding the gringo nomads to obscure but locally legendary sites. They teach us mountain bike & mx. culture & we share our mutant nomad science. They knew the Sierra's coolest mtb paths, but in a warped way, riding 4x4s to remote starting lines & racing over wonderlands with not a moment's ease or reflection, but now, to frolic or laze at will, to camp & minutely explore the terrain & its biology, & deeply bond to the local humans (lugarenos- master librarians of place) was a revelation of the missed heart of things.
In Jan. the full compliment of nomads rode to the ruins near V. (Balcones) on the "old" mountain highway outside Cd. V. to San L.P. which was ever bike suicide due to heavy bus & truck traffic, but has been bypassed & is now empty & a cyclists dream. On the return leg we stopped to refresh at a roadside kitchen. To the side sat a time ruined ancient. Memo sought him out & found he was a lifelong native there about, so Memo asked his opinion of the most interesting of all the secret places around. The riders mounted up as Memo scrawled off a map to the old man's mysterious designation, remote "grottoes of Indian tombs".
Back at base, the map glowed with irresistible magic, so before return migration north, Memo, Flash, & i rode out to seek the frail elder male's grail trail, as it turned out, Canyon del Infiernillo, by science noted for archaic agriculture. We were awed by the optical communication net of stone ringed fire/smoke signal platforms precision placed as data relays deep into canyons & across sierras. One finds the overgrown circles by studying terrain for distant sightlines. Don Fermin built his ranchito at the key spot with line of sight into the canyon & out toward the gulf. Small solar powered laser data links could bring this ancient net back up, broad-band deep into Shangri-la. At Alta Vista the locals cannibalized their large mesoamerican pyramid (30M dia.) for stone to make things such as a tick bath, corrals, & so on, and, by order of the school teacher, classrooms. These isolated folks have a cold logic in seeking education to face a relentless modern world that has little love to spare such ruins. Despite the opinion of biologists, Alta Vista lugarenos insist that small golden monkeys live in El Cielo, they relate one of them caught one, kept as a pet for some years, & still has skeleton.
The old man's grottoes proved a very mixed experience. No path existed to the triple cave shelter on a cliff face. A military macaw was perched overhead shrieking like some psychedelic Poe's Raven. The cave floor was scattered with ancient human remains, bones, teeth, & the famous little corncobs at the birth of domestification.. The "indian tombs" had been ransacked first by the legendary MacNeish, who gave the idea to the poor locals who continue to dig.
Infernillo's rock art is a red ochre linear style with seeming affinities to distant sites as far away as Utah, & several of the figures resemble the grand Pecos River shaman form, but are small & monochrome. Thru binos, ~10m up a cliff face, i spied a small new-moon pictograph in correct direction & tilt for a spring moon, probable astroskill. Plausibly, the notched pole wild honey collection ladders, still used at these sites, enabled the high pictographs.
Memo & Flash set home by shortest path, the way we came, while i, long wizened, saw the monsoon rain had just engulfed the high sierra, the dry season suddenly over, so i opted to return "the long way", via Ocampo, traversing a wondrous valley weeks before spied in the pearly distance from El Cielos heights. In minutes Memo & Flash climbed out the bone dry valley into torrential rain. The dirt road melted into shit-paste & the bikes mudballed to a halt. They scraped crud every few meters but it was no use, & finally could just barely push or carry the bikes. Drive train clogged, Flash stripped his bottom bracket, a beloved bike dead by massive coronary. While they were quagmired, i glided to Ocampo on a dry improved road. Resting in midday shade where a vendor told me of "gringos" who had a ranch ahead, maybe a fit camp & on i rode. Swooshing down the little Sierra de Cucharas in gold & sapphire sunset was the wildest, loveliest ride of my life, whistling along some 80 km/hr, gracefully threading 'tween pothole & void, delighting ordinary traffic, while my soul swelled in pearly panorama. By final twilight i coasted up to a white mansion, where the gringos lived. They were not the expected hippies, but an old family of colonists, the Taylors, who a century before found paradise. As Memo & Flash suffered the trial of their lives, i was graciously feasted & assigned my own mansion, complete with a small english library, the softest lodgings of all my roaming. After two tortured days, my friends dragged into Jaumauve like clay golems & abandoned themselves to a convent's mercy. The sisters were, like, waiting for just such wretches & resuscitated the victims with hot baths, coffee, & tamales. Flash scored a nun's bike on loan, a cheap double suspension boat anchor that disgusted his very core, & they set out for the big climb over the Sierra Madre backbone. Just short of the summit tunnel, the accumulated exhaustion overwhelmed. Flash broke down & hurled his crippling hiking boots (into the abyss?), raging into the tempest like Lear, tearing at his clothes ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked") Memo talked him down, gave him his extra pair of shoes (seasoned nomads wear their single pair, with maybe featherweight camp sandals, Memo's strange sport shoes (clay court badminton? ) Game over, nature won. They flagged down a pickup headed to V.. The long route proved as fast, & i sailed into V. fully refreshed on a clean bike.
liberation anthropology
Good science is preradicalized, its facts subvert orthodoxy. At Don Fermin's, the gateway to Infernillo canyon, we met a grad student paleoethnobotanist doing fieldwork. Over a three day period he shared his traveling collection of research papers, particularly the work of Richard MacNeish. He cheerily answered years worth of questions with up-to-date expertise. The picture i took away from the area is that for thousands of years the lugarenos have lived cycles of agricultural development & ecological collapse, a combination of ENSO type climate oscillations, dramatic hurricane rain events, & human population surges followed by agricultural decline. The area is currently in a collapse phase.
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Dona R's kitchen that fed all the animals including the visitors to El Infernillo. |
community education & involvement as a priority over actual excavation- training & scholarships, local over remote stewardship no impact survey techniques- tiny samples, site maintenance & damage restoration (rebuild masonry precisely where possible) sustainable field logistics- local foods, nonpolluting services (no trash burning or DDT; solar power over gas generators, etc.), minimal transport (bike & backpack favored)
El Cielo EcoHandbook proposed in discussions with biologists, ecopromotors, & lugareños- often obtuse masters of place & rootedness aka talibanos, birds rule in restricted megafaunal access zones (unhunted logging roads promote megafauna), speciation occurs in such isolating features,
With Mexican colleagues we delivered recycled bikes to communities in cloud forests (El Cielo), urban core (Cd. Victoria) & coastal communities (La Pesca). Bikes were matched to indy media punks, field biologists, low income workers, & experimental ecotourism.
The La Pesca fisherfolk are a model of communitarian individualism. Each family is centers on its small outboard launch tied off in the front yard of a cheerfully painted little shanty or cabana strung along a wide canal; a charming young tropical Venice. These are Jarochos, Veracruzans pushed north on population & pollution pressures. After collectively freezing for a few winters they overnight adopted macintoshes to cope. Newly cheap GPS is, of a sudden, standard. Most problems around the house are solved with expert knotwork. They don't waste this talent to make hammocks from scratch, they have enough stringwork keeping fishnets, but salvage old cotton net for quickie slings comically suited to flip the unwary. Aided by climate change they are establishing coconut palms farther north than ever, the trick, in sweet soil, is to pour saltwater in the hole before planting they won't fruit. While little short range launches are less destructive than the big industrial fishing boats north of the border, the group is gradually growing & gaining productivity & fish stocks are declining, all agree.
Sierra de San Carlos explored, a case of getting lost by following a strange new highway to once famously inaccessible San Nicolas, a place i thought to miss exploring. Getting lost is a safe source of novelty for an adapted nomad.
Quest for the SE Passage: Biking into Monterrey sprawl from the southeast is almost impossible. Because the shoulder disappeared into miles of road construction jumble, signs proclaimed a bike ban on the only highway, crowded with high-speed traffic, no side routes in that mountain valley. After months in the sierras, i now happily urban mountainbiked the scarred dirt & rubble track, bunny-hopping curb-like discontinuities, slaloming war-zone style debris, racing nightfall. The construction zone ended & i was forced to whiz along in traffic on mostly downhill stretches, lights on & reflector spangled, at high risk of a fatal "piñata" hit or arrest. It was essential to get off the road fast but there were no camps or lodges for many miles. Finally i came to a lone "motel" with four hour "honeymoon" rates & a curtained garage beside each room. For the first bike guest, ever, staff gracefully pocketed a smaller fee for "the whole night", since i did not roll over the owner's car-counter bell (worth remembering, as, a few days later, on a toll highway out of Sabinas, i foolishly rolled over the same deal & had to pay the big car tariff. The toll mngr explained, had i rolled down the side they would have winked me on as, again, i was the first bike & no bike policy was in place. "No policy" exemptions work in many contexts, boldness favored.). The next day the crowded highway became deadly where overhead bridge piers cut off the shoulder, i decided to find out if indeed there were no other route. Poking around i found an old country road to a beautiful stream which i forded hopping rock to rock to enter a park-like region with a hike & bike trail full of exercising yuppies. I pedaled thru a second stream to gain this trail & the yups stampeded, jabbering into cell phones. A security all terrain vehicle showed up immediately, & it was clear i had invaded a vast sealed enclave, a private city of people seeking to escape my kinds of people. Security politely hustled me along the path in the direction i desired, a spectacle for the plump wide-eyed joggers. When i got out i was past the bottleneck, so the SE passage was possible after all.
There's a wide range of human response to our strange bike & rough appearances. In urban amerikkka its common to hear a staccato tattoo of doorlocks around us at stoplights. On this trip a chipped front tooth made me equal to the poor. Depending on who saw me, i was taken often as a struggling poor person, a religious pilgrim, a dangerous madman, or divine clown. In rural hamlets people didn't find me strange, they eagerly asked what i was peddling, kids chased me convinced the bike sold ice cream.
wild indians from the future-
& was adopted by Food not Bombs (Comida, No Bombas) anarchist punks & didn't sleep for few days. Vast barrio rooftops at night crawl with fearless young partiers, a strategic high ground beyond control. My hosts led me to a punk marathon of most every band in northern mx. What dark graveyard-watch spectacle when the music ended, dangerous looking punks pouring across a desolate futuristic megalopolis, in fact the usual veggie pacifist suspects rather glad the buses had stopped, all deadbolts, cops, & little dogs in vain. Downtown the punks got a wild mercado, with scores of booths offering every sort of rebellious youth culture, such as slash circle (\) & unslashed swastika patches sold side by side. The scene has a "lala punks" (Lala, the big dairy monopoly), typical enough from afar, patched black threads, chains & studs sparkling, yet, on closer inspection covered with major corporate logos, nonconformity squared. Thanks in particular to the Roderiguez family, of mntry fnb, for letting me crash with his family, even with a new son due right after i left.
wandering ADHD genes, insular lugarenos, the inquisition again overtakes, time to shake them (asymmetry maintenance by strategic retreat). amerikkka
On my longest day (220 km), with temperatures peaking at ~40C, i came to the desert mecca of the most renowned mx. folk healer, Nino Fidencio, & received succor at his gas station, a holy petroasis in the middle of Coahuiltecan desert, where the attendants form a live-in monastery of the benevolent cult of the niño. The wondrous Cuatro Cienegas fossil ocean remnants only 100km off to the west as i passed thru Monclova. Perhaps for the best not to tax that landscape with my presence, maybe next-time. Chump hurry to beat an expiring visa & also skipped a favorite camp outside mty, Cañyon de la Huasteca- upended spread open limestone strata as a literal book of life,
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Something strange happened to me at day's end hiking across the biopreserve. I saw a scruffy burro with a hurt front foot under attack by 3 horses because it couldn't kick in self defense, so i drove off the horses. The poor donkey, love in her eyes, now stuck close, no matter that i shooed her. By last light i lay down under my bug net. First hundreds, then thousands of mosquitoes soon covered the mesh; denied blood, their banshee whine filled my ears. They pulled up at the net, but i held on & was hoisted into the air... then something grabbed my pant leg. The burro was holding me down with her teeth. The mosquitoes pulled so hard the donkey teetered up on hind legs, lame leg in the air. Tugging this way & that i steered us to the village where the donkey got vet care, the mosquitoes tasted mango & papaya & became vegan, & we are all happy ever after.
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| folkfest groundscoring of microbungee-
the elastic marrow in tent-pole bones that mutant nomads
use as ultralight load sinews. Photo by The Gary, Bike
nomad Nick's camp in bckgrnd. chickens eat spaceship-as if popcorn, a favorite food of these particular birds, hence an idea, natural edible foam from popcorn &, say, veggie caramel as a binder, use for leading surfaces of an edible airframe. They munched on the futuristic dumpstered polystyrene foam aero-fairing on the nomad bike shown at right. See the actual chickens below. |
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These are Tio's old spaceship-eating chickens at our base in Cd. V.. Memo took the picture, the biosquat style rat-proof kitchen compost system visible, a novelty in mx.. Tio was an old red, memo's engineer uncle, who mentored us on our early trips, & sadly passed away last year. |
6-'05] Bicycle re-entry to Austin's atmosphere after a six month "mexican space mission" is not funny; too fast & brake pads vaporize as four little puffs **** &, already brown, you overshoot into space shuttle strewn klan kountry to the east, scorched black; or the bike lands just short, a flaming crater outside biosquat. Landing, survived, gets you bike lag, severe chronometric & calendric disability, temporal hallucinations stronger than Einstein warned of, a bike amplified rip-van-winkle/odysseus effect. i'll find ye olde ecovillage all changed. Only the dog will know me. REWIND
migration pattern language- (loaded w/ nerd vitamins)
Warning: contains ROBOT PUKE-
geofluidic migration by natural propulsion (geoflu & self propulsion) creates space-time morphologies like curly drift (floating in vortex field) & curly wave (seasonal wave w/ embedded drift loops). Headwind weary (2004-5 winter migration) nomads, Jennifer & Jesse, resolved to just ride downwind, whatever direction, & found sudden bliss, going on to scout a fine route unknown to the larger group (skirting north face of San Carlos Sierra). In due course favorable winds hooked them into Cd. Victoria base, wafted along like birds & fishes, geofliudics, migration physics, "musical chair", "leapfrog" "mix-master, "bucket brigade", "merry-go-round", braided paths, fan-in/out (forks), water seeking, vertical migration, nomad hub or base-star pattern (i.e. Austin or Cd. Victoria), seasonal abandonment, foggy & sticky constraint webs,
micropatterns- potty-loop- seeking out the compost toilet, &, on a bike, dog-sprint (outrun-dog adrenalin boost allows higher gear for a few minutes) a form of bounding as is truck surfing, torero-carretero), hill bounding, gust bounding, glycemic bounding, shit racing, such as to beat bad weather, repulsion fields in self-propelled spaces, radiative pressure migration, pull wells & social pull (migration), stay upwind of pollution & downwind of perfume, obstacle nets, sticky v. pushy obstacles, preservation by inaccessibility, intermittonomy zones, barricade-enabled autonomy, green barriers, border succession- cycle of strong border condensation & decay into multiple weak borders, deflection boost (orbital sling rather than crash (barrier)), topo-encagement- pinched-off universe by closure or containment, outward "nut-cracking"; self hatching, timeshared habitat, maximal occupancy nets- minimal mass/energy transfer, unrelativistic slowness, recycled spacet-ime such as recuperation of old mexican Camino Real network by drop-out mountain-cargo bikers, isoclimatic station-keeping (ie. permanessent in "eternal spring" isotherms (mobile cuernavaca)), skyisland-hopping (vol bivouac), sketchy migration by innocents or negligents as in the 2nd wave of the 2004-5 winter migration, migration gauntlets, terraphoresis- (remote guru effect) obstacular distillation, obstacle field-computing, high D field computing, dimensions as orthogonal "borders" to other dimensions, striated dimensions, cross-mapped striation models, two-track vehicle filters of posts, columns, brush, monoliths, etc., filtering by relative motion, on a larger scale there are zigzag charliebrown waves for world circumnavigation (roughly a Wv pattern- alaska-patagonia-greenland-southafrica-russia-india-siberia-repeat), seasonal Coriolis loops/figure eights-
| Our migrations generally loop clockwise as does N. hemisphere Coriolus circulation. An interesting route would be to float in the Gulf current making an annual loop. As a counter example an anti-Coriolis track around Padre Is.- keep lee shore within the Norte (NW)/Huasteca (SE) wind alteration every few days in fall-winter-spring. terracking, such as following ridges or valleys, if only we could place ourselves to be a lucky object in perfect drift, road forced when only the road is passable, impulsive bounty questing adds quirkiness to migration tracks, anticipatory browsing (ie. unripe fruit), bounding (punctuated sprint), crepuscular migration to avoid dark & heat, |  |
More ROBOT PUKE
Orozco decried bohemian decay, so lets create sustainable bohemianism where playful activism counters global crisis while living well in the moment. The New Autonomy avoids isolation & consists of things like autonotecture, guerrilla transport, counter-agriculture, radical subsistence, etc., liberation engine- enhanced situation-creation by reactive coupling to existent situation, physics of imagination, change faster- serial diversity x parallel diversity = real diversity, poetic imagination as cultural motor of souped-up evolution or "supernatural" selection, glitch-verse (dog-trot & hatchet-cut rhythms), consciousness reflecting wilderness- self as universal mirror, mandalized human form (humandala) mapped to food, tool, & cosmic mandalas, self-centered universes, universal eigenform of many-worlds hypothesis, verbs as parallel temporal dimensions orthogonal to nouns as spatial dimensions, personaeverses; spaces of ubiquitous personae, virtual "demon haunted" worlds, (see lift-demons) , of facespace painted onto objects recognized by artificial vision; as Mesoamericans superposed personae freely on phenomena(evening star god, plus morning star god, etc). cities as spatially fixed superorganisms, self-centered universes, collective processing by autonomats, megabiophysics favors fluistatic gigantism in low-shear fields, floating in a sea or sky, ultimately self-gravitation giants (of a creature sculpted by its own grav. field) in weak tidal fields, redemptive socio-carbon cycles, trance labor or rave-work allows long energetic tasks to be accomplished without subjective effort. American Indian sacred running & religious pilgrimage transport generalized to extreme sacred sporting, mountain-tumbling in trash armor, rock boarding down talus slopes, white water trash raft, paid ecotourists hike in to gather trash in remote headwaters, fashion a raft from capped bottles & foam wrapped in plastic mesh (estilo Titicaca or rubber ducky), & convey litter downstream to urban recycling & landfill, recuperation of wildness, creation of sanctuary, saneamiento de tierras, social forestry refined, extreme sport spin-off (rad-off), thermoshock regimes in extreme sport such as polar diving, hang/paragliding, cold bathing on treks, etc.; 4 season transit in seconds not unusual, new clothing with closable ram air vents, tube-fan inserts in clothing of, say, sweltering grounded paraglider pilot, the bright side of jumping into cold water- if your heart stops, you can't drown, thermo-kinetic fabric opens and closes in response to temp. change, Tropical marathon dancing, effective mosquito & fly resistent behavior, based on heavy drink & sweat. What an awful beast we were in the heat, hyperactive, able to chase any other animal into the ground. A chilled water ultrathonist outruns all other megafauna, save birds. Only supercooled arctic sled dogs rival such mileage. See trance labor or rave-work. Beyond leave-no-trace (leave-a-saving- or healing-trace)- unlittering, sustainable migration, permacamping, sacred trash trekking as fusion of trash worship, sacred running, & mutant nomadics, un-dumping- unlittering on bigger scales such as trash travois winched up ravines, trash molt- routine decay & changing out of recycled scrap pieces in nomad systems,
feral civilization that's us, imagination as the cosmic ether, radical's lexic root means root, today's radical actions are the baby roots of the growing world tree, victim proofing- augmented objects to behave according to ethical physics; tree no longer falls on child, thunderbolt avoids victim, etc., such physics enables liberation science to emerge from liberation arts, universal liberation system/mundo libre/ cosmos libre- domination v. liberation- being emerges dominated by constraints which liberation systems remove. aire libre- moving out/on outdoor liberation- indoors as prison, oppressor deconstructed, mobile open-cage as minimal-confinement shelter, technical optimization as engineered luck, peace-ships/fleets/flotillas, underground "peace train" (radical migration nets), recuperative or redemptive migration, Ruta Huasteca- our piece of global greenway net, geriatric decline of "snowbird" movement offset by passing torch to young "sustainable" nomads (Oasis RV park, Kingsville), border as biomembrane as firewall as skin- metaphor is pattern filling by cross-mapped fields, consider a natural propulsion "internet" , a human & geofluidic powered "packet switched" (humans & cargo) net, the classic "seven layer model" mapped to nomad reality (imagination layer, body layer, clothing/shelter layer, vehicle layer, route layer, earth layer, cosmos layer) , mothership as server (mothership = peace house) (motherserver, peaceserver), peace house "nodes", greenway "links", nomad blobs, dendriform fan-in/out of North American migrant species as protosuperorganic liberation system model, -cratic command ecologies- ecostalinism & green hitlers, communal domination regimes, prematurity v. precocity of socio-human superorganisms as predisposed to totalitarian, fascist, coercive, violent; remote ultraviolence of consumerism overcome by advanced slowfood-nets- inputs; gardening, forage (invasives feasting), salvage, purchase, barter, etc. output- "slow-foods" -essentials radical gourmet menu planning, slacker munchie bar, special needs, community distribution, compost, recycling, etc., the perfect "high plains" drifter v. propulsive struggle, self-taylorism- voluntary scientific laziness, geotherapist, self-colombianization- the inner outlaw mirrored, atomized or emulsified world mixtures of 1st-3rd worlds in Wash. D.C. or along the border, "its a small world" all mixed up, inner-geopolitics, some really awkward terms- gentfierno v. pooradise or povtopia better cheaptopia; ruta bruta, Rolando's personal & societal changeover (of which many small ones happen all the time). Austin saw a big changeover just five years ago when the finest segment of the radical (bus) circus movement jumped onto bikes (cyclowns).
BikeFix
Dragonflies & butterflies surf the nomad's bike's bow like dolphins. Little Coahuiltecan desert lizards ran alongside for up to ~15m at ~20km per hour. Highways ruthlessly mow low flying migrants who, when not splattered outright, are broken by turbulence to die slowly. Roadkill is continuous along some roads, an Animal Channel version of the Baghdad Hwy in the biker's bowed face. Slow down, grim reapers.
Bike travel presents ironic contrasts; common are tropical fragrance-stink-repeat sequences, like huisache blossoms & carrion. On one stretch pained progress on gray cobblestones was suddenly smoothed by a violet snowfall of flower petals.
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Steel Mule- bike reinvented as a robust triple (incl. seat) suspension of simple fabrication, a suitable high quality leaf-spring salvaged, reforged & retempered, a ram's horn handle bar curves forward to a trailing leaf-spring fork, the springs outer radius are elastomer dampened with nylon or wire rope or strap. |
We have created a new wilderness tourismo on the emergent mountain cargo bike (`05)- fast on highway (fairing, high pressure/smooth road bead tread tire), mountain proven (Viejas Minas w/ mtb team), climbs loaded with mega-range rear sprocket & tiny granny chain-wheel. In summary, the cargo mtb went wherever the unloaded suspension mtbs went, a tad slower. Yet, as the unloaded bikes reached day limits, the loaded bike, with plenty of food & water, was free to just roll on for hundreds of km. Mexico is laced with the centuries old "camino real" network (colonial "king's"roads turned goatpaths)
Sun, salt, & sand.
Sandmasters- Our bikes are proven beachworthy, salt & sand small fuss to savage salvagers such as us, contrast yups dreading fancy bikes near sea. Helpful tricks- do distance with tailwind at low tide on softened tires, use bike stand (bamboo tripod leg) over sand & bike cover against night's briny dew, haul lots of water or solar distill & live in the wondrous dunes a good while. i've never carried a tent but was happy to share one left up by local kids to fend off nightmarish saltmarsh mosquitoes, windblown sandblast & briny dew. sandcastle king, isla padre lugarenos
Suntaming- In delaying return migration into may, the tropic of cancer sun now overwhelmed my short sleeve & gimme-cap sundialing system. At first, sweat-soaked long clothes, though heavy, proved preferable to being toasted crisp. A modern sun suit was needed. Mx mtbers informed me on modern sports clothes of fabrics such as microfiber polyester & lycra. In the Victoria mercado district, i found a cool microfiber polyester shirt with many features such as removable sleeves, for a hundred pesos. i augmented my urban bike-gardener gimme cap with an anarchist blk. kerchief underlay, making a mid-east redneck looking headdress, a trick much used by mx construction workers. Nylon shorts over lycra bike shorts, for social integration. Sunblock daubed on knees & hand backs, will be nice to have handlebar hand shades integrated into the sideforce reduction strakes, also good for tropical shade bike with outboard reverse-dihedral anti-buffet/anti-roll winglets, anti-heel ama winglet for sail bike.
| Concept: the mutant grail- a semi-tall, semi-chopper,
semi-cargo, semi-flying bike shown in sailing mode. Rider
shown in a little wheelie, rig is tilted windward just
clear of ground, countering heel with neutral or positive
downforce. My next bike. Note the image's fine JPG compression artifacts, nebulous little lights & shadows, compressimenti, suggestive of partial quantum decoherence of a multiverse, & the palimpsests & repentimenti of old paintings & texts. |
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Further bike notes- aero-thermal fairing as solar distiller, food & laundry dryer, one-ton cargo bike from front wheel drive compact car front end, burrito-camper tailbox rolled from sleep pad, handlebar console or handlebar buffet (when served)- a suite of visual, oral & tactile interfaces, bike pump (crank attached) compressor from bike windmill, hanging over handlebars w/ bungee straps to offload hands/"spring axle" handlebars, bike as sugar cane mini-mill "burro"...sweet, re-entry slipper- a combo heat shield & landing winglets for an "extreme touring" bike, doubles as brush-popping chapete or scrub sub, side-force reducing strakes as bumpers, weathervaning fairing (rotating down-force counters side-wind buffet) or fly-whisk or pom-pom streamline effect to reduce fairing crosswind force, bike tubes as sleeve-insert inflated structure for tent shelter, inflated bike tire style rockers for "offroad" rocking chair, lee wave rotor bike climbing assist, superfast double thumb shift upon dipping uphill, wheel propelled hill launch- downforce during rollout released for TO. Tested bungee-arm upper body suspension to offload hands
natural aviation notes
Giddy Up: Lean veggie bike nomads are flight preadapted. The grandest soaring zone on the planet runs over our bases & routes, explosive thermals in ass-kicking tailwinds of the western rim of the summer Bermuda High scraping along the front range of the Sierra Madre Oriental/Rockies. This trip confirms that El Dieñte, a Granite dome in the Sierra de San Carlos, Tamaulipas, as fine multidirectional foot or bike launch into Huastecan paraglider superhighway, LZ-TOZ net overlaid onto bike nets (water & food nets), mobile ramp for directional launch on craggy pinnacles, ideally as a smart catapult that adjusts direction, launch angle, & speed to optimal or locks out, wind/sun-angle reflectance/thermal mass interact to produce soaring conditions, AM east slope thermals or light surfaces, PM west slope or dark surfaces, light surface reflection onto dark convection cell bottom, soaring may be possible in powerplant updrafts in cold still air, & what about that convection street that formed just offshore (Jan. Gulf of Mx.) night after night? double "sky-camping"- astrobservation (paleolithic to hubble ST) by vol bivouac, ideally with a big ultralight reflector telescope using a thinfilm MEMs stabilized mirror, fly everything south in the fall- surf cold fronts on giant grafene floppy wings in upward convection zone just ahead of polar front, lift massive payloads hundreds of miles, base inflated rotating ultralight space station on bike wheel design, hot wings- flying wings (tied down yet pan & tiltable) as tracking solar array to a tower focus (mobile elevator tower) by melding parabolic & flight surfaces (upper wing- swept middle trailing surface/lower- concave), pleated longitudinal dorsal bellows for variable volume airship (upside down blue whale gullet)
andersansar@mail4u.com.mm stringwing, ribbon wing, tapewing, wingstrips of almost unlimited length spiraling up convection cells & stretching between them side-slipping like a 3D reel to reel at something like 100km/hr, no crows-path, prototype of two inverted airframes tensioning an arched string wing between, stringwing as bridge, draped across fronts stringwing as monorail run, "peel-off" style TO & L, folding, furling patterns, curled or folded, multi arch landing on land or water, tree canopyable, slitted ribbons, ribs as stabilizer mounts, end docking, notochord topology, batwing style fabric tension trim, variable wing able to reverse & invert foil sections, crudely, twisted tapewing as rotor, walking/skiing/etc. tapewings, self-furling tapewings along high aspect glider wings to provide low wing-loading slowness, ultra low sink with tight turning for soaring small weak thermals, short field ops., emergency descent; installed on a high performance glider for dual range operations
Variable volume/length LTA with "slinky" spiral skeleton, solar cycle night anchored vertical column mode, sea anchored LTA
Nuevo Yatismo Notes
radical yachting as missing link in global greenway system., "coasting" by radical yatismo, equatorial (etc.) doldrum beating solar shuttle boats, deep tether hydrofoil wave or current propulsion, sailing stilts, flapbots (ratchet-flaps), wave-piercing sail "board" (spear pontoon) for chop, giant waterproof stash bags as yacht safety flotation (pumpable),
?Irish Sea Nuclear Free Flotilla? Sea Collectives greenpeace & sea shepard
Superterrainian Gardening
Heads-up to would-be CO2 mitigaters who merely plant trees on damaged land ("future forests" concept). Recovered land may recoup the original CO2 penalty of killing it, but won't create offsetable capacity beyond the primeval condition. Natural succession of weeds, bushes, & trees sequesters more carbon cheaper than artificial plantings for corporate greenwash. Preserve land in its natural state, especially peat/coal forming wetlands, & perhaps focus on run-off retention for groundwater recharge to boost long-term fertility of drylands. Natural succession might be speeded by seedballs rolled from adjacent habitat. Memo to the well-meaning organic gardeners who spread mulch around; most of it will outgas as atmospheric CO2, promoting GW (global warming) with nutrients that would have stayed put if piled deep & planted intensively.
Memo`s spring- a "quenta gotas" diamond dispenser, a slow drip into a bowl matched to evaporation, as watering hole for fauna plus, turned up a bit, soak irrigation under his lime tree, use of old fishnet as garden chicken protection, radial star chinampa bed, cellulose as erasable (compost) medium, Avarice has perverted the mx native horticultural genius, nopalito cultivation is done in and around El Cielo with vertical furrows, so erosional. A well-meaning ejidatario proposed reforestation with canadian christmas trees as a cash crop. An academically initiated shitake enterprise in La Gloria (El Cielo) to support ejidatarios was abandoned just short of production , for socio-cultural reasons, but the inoculated logs might be salvaged by the next bike nomad wave.
Volunteer plants from humanure are good if the plants are the evolved survivors of that place. Eating the choicest bits straight from the garden selects the best volunteers for early & late harvest, pest resistance, etc. Problems occur when outside agribiz species are brought into the volunteer pool & prove unable to thrive. Kitchen compost is less reliable as the cleaning of defective veggies is often not the best seed.
"Wasted sun & wasted shade..." (sung to Freddy Fender tune)- In a mty park i noted deep treeshade preventing grass growth while adjacent sidewalks blazed in the sun all day. Lesson is to use east-west stripes of sunny south-exposed meadow & northward grove shade on walks & patios, saving concrete & maximizing biological efficiency & human enjoyment.
Rat Bomb- inept food hoarding by back-to-nature newbies. Cat-Bomb- result of feral cat feeding without reproductive controls.
chochas de savila, salvadora common name of TP tree whose fruit is a favorite of birds & bats, edible nopal (Optuntia) seems to lean northward counter to other plants spreading south.
Misc.- it took just minutes to conjure up a super-light backpack to cross the biopreserve, starting with a large produce net bag, a used mtb bike inner-tube for shoulders & waist band (a single overhand "bathrobe tuck" stayed tied over my belly), & bits of cord and plastic; it served well during a rough three days & can last indefinitely. Access by a nested menu-like system of colored grocery bags let me reach any item by hand snake. A tour truck full of sightseeing mx. engineers passed me trudging along under this load & took me for a typically resourceful but particularly unfortunate local. Nomad trial foods from traditional sources, roasted gleaned pepitas, moles, dried coconut, guyaba paste, etc.
solar occulus as oculus worklight; wheeled work table (or solar cooker or cold frame, etc.) tracks sunbeam (robophototrope), wheeled furniture shade-tracking, screwdriver conversion to stitching awl, twisted clothesline as tent guy, variable topology (bag theory) double knot plastic bag- tiny corner knot to pour out powders (not to be confused with gramero's palomita knot), use as drink powder funnel in narrow necked bottles, semi-grounded hammock- small hammock supports upper body while lower body rests on ground, maximal hammock patterns in post space, seasonal transformer alpine tent bellows up & out as tropical rain screen room, droopy prop beanie gnat/fly/skeeter chaser hat, landscape scale solarthermaroma generators, herbal wand as gnat whisk, massively parallel bidirectional data- eyecam (sensor) doubles as projector (emitter), solarover "railroad"- planetary rover style 4x4 vehicles, solar electric mass transport on rough roads- steep stretch solar array boost, regen. braking to point of use (water & stone grav. deliv.), grav. powered wheeled delivery- water cargo regen. braking, goldilocked- a validated technical specification between extremes ("too hot", "just right", "too cold"), adaptive polymastery, victim proofing (sandboxing), Native American feather collection from roadkill, Ant-tropic sky islands, acousto-regionalism- El Cielo birds, Gulf of Mx. white noise, highways, chicarras, KFF vibescape, etc., body pixels- animated visual art made of dancers as "pixels", drift dance- the fluidic ballet of the universe, art as tool for furthering art (the study) rather than as commodity spectacle,
kff & Utopia Animal Rescue
Sample 1st wave to 2nd wave scouting notes via email-
Camp & road conditions along new route- Highway 71 reststop 3 miles past Austin airport is good if you are off late and need it but hold out for access road on right that veers off and becomes Farm Road 1029 then left onto Shiloh Road, cross intersection (20? no sign) and shortly turn onto Shiloh Road Cemetery (Black folk) dirt drive, pass first gate to camp outside cemetery gates. Keep outer gate wired up. Owner is James Hart 5xx-xxxx, call to thank and give notice, do a bit of unlittering. Great Camp, get water as you leave 71. Proceed to end of Shiloh and turn right onto 304. Stop to refresh at Bilbos Texas landmark on HWY 304, Chainsaw Massacre location. Campsites on 304(10-15 mi. south of Bastrop) include String Prairie Community Center and then Delhi Community Center. Proceed to Gonzales, try Yang's Super Buffet at first stop light. Owner Robert Yang?. truck stop on south side has showers and you can camp out back or look for "ML" across street rodeo arena. Take previous route to Cuero if desired or choose Shiner route. Fair north facing camp rest stop between Gonzales and Shiner, did not find great campsites along here, good hwys though. Shiner, good buffet lunch at cafe just before brewery, good library; showers on the north end of Port Aransas city beach, enough time and hot water for 2 each dollar. Bikes on beach ride great at low tide, but this is at night right now. A sand filled causeway of granite where padre and mustang meet is a source of sea lettuce, tip, pick early, rinse, squeeze out all seawater, spread carefully out of blowing sand in sun, salt, if needed. Overshoot into north padre proved real chill but added half day worth of ride (where surf glowed blue) Big Bridge to Corpus is ridable in construction lanes, you end up on left side of highway and return thru underpass. There is a bike shop to the right in shopping center just before "Airline" road, where you turn right and hit beautiful ocean view (left into town) to library we used before. on 286 south out of corpus is a abandoned "Gulf Coast" BMX race track on right side. Don't forget chill spot under bridge a few miles before Bishop for a rest stop or camp. A good place in Kingsville to replace dicey stealth camp is the Oasis RV park (on left side first underpass). Manager is wonderful old Marylyn who is having a hard time caring for her husband and needs love. Joe* is trainee and very helpful. camp, bathe, cheap. Don't have a confirmed camp for big group before Brownsville, but got a tip, ask the padre in Sarita, who lives behind big church, just before Border Patrol checkpoint. END SAMPLE Port Isabel. Padre Is.
*Joe at Oasis said two brits had passed thru on bikes just a week before. I caught up with Christine & Michael Speight at the border, who, over a 2 day period, shared inspiring tales of biking India, etc., over cup after cup of strong hot tea.. Given alarmist US govt. travel warnings, for the first time in their world bike travels, they felt anxious & bused past the border region. Riding on, i found the route much improved over past migrations. In fact, mx is generally less violent than tx, with lower murder rates & anti-war foreign policy. "Mutant bike nomads" feel more welcome in NE mx. than in tx. for many reasons, the foremost is the amazing warmth of the people.
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