I Remember Winter

And a brief review of Severance.

It’s Monday in North America, and winter. February 10 and we have a foot plus of settled snow on the ground, and another deep cold moving in later this week. Once my sleep disease resolves itself, I typically wake up before the sun, but today I notice the sun almost beats me. [Sleep disease, explained in an earlier post, is a strange, perhaps just personal phenomena in which I find myself requiring large amounts of sleep as early winter sets in and again as spring begins to turn towards summer. It seems to follow the equinox on both sides of the calendar and typically lasts a few weeks to a month but then fades away so that in mid-winter, like mid-summer, I have a normal sleep pattern.]

It’s a nice 17F degrees this morning, which as I step out on the porch with my bare feet to feel it, does not feel terribly cold, regardless of being in nothing but pajama pants and a t-shirt. This week will be bringing colder temperatures though; when it gets below 10F I seem to feel the bite more.

It has been a very nice winter here in Montana. We always want more snow, but at least our mountains have a good mid-winter covering, and unlike last year, more than enough snow to cross country ski and get out and enjoy a true winter.

The creek has been frozen over for a couple weeks now, making finding my winter swim holes more interesting with less routine. I have to find new spots. Walk a bit further up or down stream, but there is always a window into the creek somewhere. And walking a distance up a frozen creek is a wonderful winter thing, pausing to listen to the sound of water moving beneath your feet, listening to the ice, and making sure that you do not find the weak spots that can break through. Some days I put skis on and head straight up the frozen corridor. It’s been frozen and snowy enough to do so this year. I always seem to find the most cat prints when I’m in the creek corridor, as opposed to when I ski up and over another mountain ridge I like to frequent on skis. I always think I’m going to see prints up there because it is much more remote, full of deer and occasional elk, but the cat prints and cat kills seem to be by the creek. Last week Acre and I happened upon the blood alone remains of some animal, already eaten in its entirety by both a cat and birds; Acre found the spot in fact, and was excitedly sniffing out the bloody snow, which was all that remained. I could see some fur remnants, but nothing more. It was something small. Probably a rabbit. A deer makes a much larger scene.

The winter light in combination with snow makes everything prettier in the winter. Puffs of rolling snow in the settling light offers the eye subtle contrasts in the contour of the trail as you head further up into the woods alone into the evening. There is a narrow corridor I ski uphill in and with every twist and turn I further enter the land of Narnia, away from the voices, the train sounds, the people that remain below in the valley. Once up on the ridge there is no one. The wind blows tufts of snow dust off the upper branches and they catch light as the fall and then disappear on the darkening ground, the light remains only on the sky. But then, as darkness settles, and I’m heading back down hill, the light seems to rebuild again, now emitted from the snow like a diode, glowing an evening color into the sky, a color that wasn’t present when the sun was shining, but now that it’s hidden behind the horizon has come out to play before the darkness settles. And there, the moon, just to the east, with that and the snow, it will not ever be totally dark tonight. That is all the light we need.

The skis slide in near silence, though the with speed I’d rather have more control over, but these are cross country skis and this grade is slow and long, so I let them catch their speed and focus on just staying in the two tracks I created while going up hill, and now faster and further into the dark tunnel of trees, but I have no breaks, and no need for them, the slope will eventually tame and then it does and I slow to a walking pace again. I love the silent sounds of winter woods. Two deer flush out ahead of me. I know there are cats up here and have my camera in my pocket ready, but I only occasionally find their paw prints crossing the trail, and have never seen one up here. In fact the only mountain lions I’ve ever seen, apart from one that jumped across the highway, an entire two lane highway, down in Arizona in the 1990’s, has been up in the trees above the creek where I go swim now. That winter was a heavy one, and two cats lurked frequently near our house. A couple neighbors lost their dogs that winter, to the cats. Little dogs that went out to investigate in the night and never came home. I spotted them up in a tree, high up, and ran home to get my camera, hoping they would still be there when I got back, and sure enough, they were waiting until the dark to come down and I got the only picture I’ve ever gotten of a mountain lion. They are such incredible animals and for their supposed numbers, so infrequently witnessed.

I’m sipping my coffee, and look up out over the screen to the window directly in front of me. Three windows in fact. One looks directly into the trees in the front, a juniper and a pine, both filling the window, both with snow hanging heavily and brightly on their limbs. The middle window looks further and the trees closest to it are more open allowing me to see past and all the way across the valley to the ridgeline that makes Mountain Jumbo. Same with the third window, partially blocked up close by a pine and a crabtree, but with a secondary window of tree branches that allows me to see the far slopes of Jumbo and the pines on the side of the mountain make a winter texture of evergreen, snow, and meadow.

And in between it all snow is starting to fall and small breaks in the clouds letting in more light, not direct light, but simply brighter spots in the clouds that make for a dual contrast of heavy gray and yellow. Everything else appears to be shadowed in wintergreen blue.

I think I’ll go for my swim. I’ll report back shortly.

-

It’s 9F and 10PM. The snow outside is glowing under a moon’s light. I’m brushed and in bed, watching Severance.

Have you seen this show?

I definitively did not like the first half of the first episode and abruptly quit watching it during my first go around with it. Then over coffee a friend told me I should stick with it. Being a friend who’s aesthetic I trust, and who knows my love of David Lynch and the like, I decided to give it another go, and I have no regrets. And while I agree there are components that are Lynchian, there are other components I find quite along the style lines of Stanely Kubrick. But also, it’s just very much its own thing.

Severance seems like a perfectly timed show for our moment in history. It is about people who spend their day’s in a corporate state that is mentally severed from their evenings, two minds essentially, in one body. The mind away from work knows nothing of the mind at work, and vice versa. Which is an amazing premise that is executed quite well. But it’s more than that I take it in. It is a show about humans severed from the natural world and working blindly for a sort of Ai.

This goes in line perfectly with a larger piece I’ve been working on, but that I’ll dip into here. The importance of people starting their own businesses this day and age. And the importance of people supporting small businesses this day in age. Is it for everyone? No. Not everyone wants to become an entrepreneur, I totally understand this. The risk is not a thing many want to undertake, but there is a value in understanding and recognizing the value of small business to society. Small businesses are the pathway to societal freedom. Freedom from an overall, all encompassing mono-corporation that seems to be taking over the world. At this point something like 85% of all assets and wealth are owned by three multinationals, State Street, BlackRock, and Vanguard. The world is slowly being made generic. Ownership is slowly passing into fewer and fewer hands. We need small businesses. We need people to start small businesses, and support small businesses. We need to see the value in looking beyond cheaper and more, and see the benefit that comes with less/better.

Every major corporation it seems is trying to bottle up the nature we don’t get enough of, and sell it back to us in a unique, marketable manner. Everyone is getting in on the game. From nutrient additives to eco resort lodges, it shows the cravings we all have for nature, the natural world, and natural things. The truth of it is an irony, the same ones selling it to us re the ones who are taking it away from us. It’s the folks in Data Refining.

I see Severance as a picture of the modern world. A world in which people working at the biggest companies, which is most people, are asked to severe their day’s into two minds…

In the tv show, there is a sort of humorous reoccurrence in which mid-tier managers are asked from time to time to meet with “the board.” This meeting happens when a certain character appears. She plugs in a speaker and stands beside it, herself connected to “the board” via a private headset as she faces the person being told they are having a meeting with “the board.” The person invited to the meeting is asked, always by her, to go ahead and address the board, even though they were the ones asked to be at the meeting. A small speaker resonance is all there is to acknowledge that there may be someone listening at the other end of the speaker. She then, in a very generic way, akin to how an Ai video model might, speaks for the board. The person brought to the meeting never hears any voice of any board member, only the voice of the generic woman who relays their supposed message.

This is becoming life in America. Life for the multinationals. The life under a government that has become a generic, ambiguous, too distant, and too big to be personal entity in some far away place. Utter disconnection.

It feels like a glimpse into a future when those that do not work for themselves or another small business will ultimate live working for an Ai bureaucrat in either government or a multinational. “The Board” will be Ai driven. It will have inspirational meetings with us via teleconnected speakers, voiceless, faceless, and interpreted by an anonymous automatron or animation.

“You can earn an 18 minute visitation with your ‘outie’ wife” the Ai tells one of the characters in the show, when he is allowed to take a break from his day to day to be visited by his wife, an entity this corporate version of himself never sees or interacts with otherwise, because of his “severed” connection upon arriving at work.

I’m still working on this piece about the importance of small business, but it keeps evolving and I still haven’t gotten it near completion. I think I may start all over. Or maybe it will just get added in small bits to pieces like this, accumulatively. But the gist is this: To ensure life keeps going on earth, we need to continue living on earth. Life on earth constitutes more than just the goal of leisure. It necessitates work, and embracing of work, things that make our lives, and our communities better. We need to find a balance between living comfortably, and improving our culture. We need to embrace contribution to society. We can not lean back and let Ai and the ever narrowing corporate structure take care of us. We need to do things. For the last few decades there has been this strange underlying voice or principal circulating that work some day will vanish, and we can just let the system take care of us. It’s fiction. It’s a false reality. Humanity will never survive if we just sit back and watch. Other factors will destroy us, be it the natural world or an Ai technology that will calculate it no longer needs us. Life is not just recreation. Life is the challenges and pleasures. It’s the work and the play. It is taking pride in what we do, and contributing.

This is where small businesses come into play. They are what will keep the world from turning into one giant Walmart. Yes, they are a lot of work. But look at how boring cities become as they begin to look like every other city around them. Cultures are geographic and my ultimate hope is that we reclaim geographic personality in our world. If BlackRock has it’s way, we will all live in identical houses, drive identical cars, walk on identical streets, and wear corporate smiles with no regards to our individual loves, pleasures, wants, and desires. That is the furthest things from freedom. That is the furthest thing from life on earth.

That is what Severance brought to mind watching it. Curious if any of you have seen it and what you think.

-

It’s already Tuesday. Monday’s swim commenced at 17 F by the creek in a subtle swim hole after I’d decided to bike down with Acre for a little morning exercise. I wasn’t planning on swimming, but I found a hole that looked too good to not get in. I wasn’t in my normal state of preparation as I’d planned on going later and to another swim hole I sometimes drive too, but there I was, staring at this swim hole as we walked along the top of the frozen creek. With absolute no one anywhere near bye I just stripped down and hopped in, slipping my wet feet into my mukluks worked fine afterwards and while I was still in fact a little wet on the surface layer, I made it home just fine and dried out.

The day passed and then this morning. 0F. Too cold for Acre’s paws on a bike ride down, so I drove to my other spot, which is deeper for sitting and has a nice quiet place to sit. At zero degrees there is no masking the cold. No pretending. The water freezes to my back before I get a chance to dry off once I’m out. And as I’m sitting in the water slush washes all around me. This week’s cold snap is supposed to set in several days. It’s going to be a fun week. More cold coming. I love it.