The Last American Man

or maybe the next to last.

“Living on the road my friend, is gonna keep you free and clean
Now you wear your skin like iron,
Your breath as hard as kerosene.
You weren't your mama's only boy, but her favorite one it seems
She began to cry when you said goodbye,
And sank into your dreams.
Poncho was a bandit boys, his horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his gun outside his pants
For all the honest world to feel.”

When I heard these lines from the Townes VanZandt tune Poncho & Lefty after I’d finished the Elizabeth Gilbert book about Eustace Conway I thought, hmmm, those lines could be about him. Too early to tell whether the next couplet (about no one hearing his dying words) will be as true or not.

When Eustace showed up in NYC in his buckskins, he was called Daniel-f*cking-Boone. My mother used to say to us, “I don’t know why in the world you all want to live that Daniel Boone life.” You could say I felt a connection.

I guess if I just got down to it, I’d say that you have to read this book. Really. But it is complicated for me because the author is a bigot at the beginning of the book and that horribly irritates me. Examples? She describes Eustace’s neighbors as the “aptly named Hicks clan” and goes through this thing about red necks in SW Virginia not knowing where Maine is when clearly it is that they do not give a sh*t about a man walking from Maine but do care about a man walking to Georgia. I’ve read her other work and she does not engage in such bigotry about Italians, Indians, Balinese, the poverty stricken or uneducated of any area, hell, not even her fairly hated ex-husband . . . just about hillbillies. I am so sick of it being ok to malign hillbillies. Hillbillies are the very last niggers, or at least we are the very last people you can cop derogatory attitudes toward and still be pc and "inclusive". Then too, there are some simple mistakes that irritate me because they show her ignorance in ways that Eustace would understand -- a passive solar office building with room for two work spaces could not possibly be 20 sq. feet (this is like checking out in the supermarket with 3 items that sell for $1/each and the total coming to $13 and you not noticing that something didn’t add up right) but must be 20 feet square. Or that Eustace’s horse is not a Standard Breed but a Standardbred.

So there’s that. Which pretty much disappears after the first one-third of the book. But then in the last one-third of the book she takes on the doctor/counselor role to diagnose our beloved Eustace, to tell us what is wrong with him, when frankly what is wrong with his is just as obvious from his story as what is so right about him. Just tell his goddamn story already.

But, if you can read this book and get past the author, well, Mr. Eustace Conway is a character, a most admirable character. Both perfect and perfectly flawed.

What I really admire about Eustace is that he lives with reality. The author says he’s the only person she knows who doesn’t live in metaphor but is the real deal. Yeah, that. Nature doesn’t say, “let’s reach an agreement here.” With nature, it really is, lots of times, one way or the other. You screw up, you pay the price. I totally get Eustace’s hard-ass-ness. Because nature, and life really, is hard-ass. But life is also forgiving -- like the bread is edible even if it isn’t perfect and at least as this author portrays him, he doesn’t quite get that. You don’t want to try to fillet a squirrel but, you know, maybe you can relax on some of the other stuff.

And maybe there is some problem in talking more about your life than you live it. But considering that most people don’t even have a life, considering that most people pay lip service to tons of things without really living any of it, considering that people are not human if they are not in touch with the earth, I think Eustace’s life says quite a lot.

I am also amused that he seems to have quite the following who don’t like him. That in itself is a testament that he actually stands for something.

What Are We Doing With So Much Cargo?

oh looklooklook! I'm not old blogger anymore! I finally got migrated! Was I the very last person? I'll never actually go back over 400+ posts and tag them all, but it could be a fun exercise in categorizing my mind!

Anyway, I finished it! You don’t know how many nights this book has put me to sleep. It has been on the top of my All Consuming list for so long that I thought it deserved its own blog post.

Jared Diamond is one fascinating thinker. He teaches in a medical school, has done biological research for as long as I've been alive, and yet his best known books, this one and Collapse, are really history. And anthropology. And a lot of other disciplines all combined into something new. He calls it “history’s broadest pattern” and I get that as I am a person who sees patterns and connections that other people too often (according to me) overlook.

Guns, Germs and Steel looks at the last 13,000 or so years of human history and asks why it has been dominated by Europeans. Diamond doesn’t believe it is because of any innate ability or intelligence. The title of the book comes from the proximate causes of the domination but what Diamond is looking for, arguing for, is what is the ultimate cause. And that is fascinatingly environment. Put in way too simple of terms, environment enhanced agriculture which increased population which increased invention which increased the engulfment of the rest of the world.

The lessons from that are fascinating when applied to the modern world and even to the world of our own making. I looked at the old husband and said, you know, we're just iron age farmers. And we could easily enough be stone age farmers. And a huge large part of what we've done with our lives is try to withdraw our support from the kleptocracy.

My favorite quote from this book is, well, I can't find it right now so I'll paraphrase: "Invention is the mother of necessity." Think about it. Gasoline was a dangerous by-product . . . until someone came up for a use for it in the IC engine. And this computer, necessity? Naw.

This book did take me forever to finish because it is like a text book. Diamond does not write in a fluid, organic way, but in an overly academic way. You know, he says, "In this chapter we will look at blah blah blah." Couldn't we just go ahead and look at it without the preamble and the summation and the redundancy in later chapters too? Ok, the style has its uses but I wish the man had a touch of the storyteller in him.

So now, maybe I'm on to read Collapse. Or maybe not quite yet.