Yay for cyclical futurology! Readers of the Fourth Turning have been waiting for an honest crisis for years– and hoping that 9/11 wasn’t it (or at least wasn’t the main, defining one!). But I think we’re here! A world-wide race toward socialization of the financial market– it would have been inconceivable a month ago! And Europe finally forcing America’s hand financially. Maybe next we can get some world-wide green-development agreements to recreate the economy.

I want to write sermons. I’m writing them because I need to write, not because I think you’all need my sermons! But sermonizing is a tough skill, and what better place to learn than amongst friends?

But in these plethoric times when there is too much coarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbor’s eye, there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves or stark beauty, we find ourselves by accident. Always before these times the bulk of people did not overeat themselves, because they couldn’t, whether they wanted to or not, and all but a very few were kept “fit” by unavoidable exercise and personal danger. Now, if only he pitch his standard low enough and keep free from pride, almost anyone can achieve a sort of excess. You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities the sweat on your deathbed. — H.G. Wells

I was walking through a cemetery in São Paulo last week, thinking about the lives of the thousands of bodies laid there. Many there experienced waves of depression and military rule; the world wars and their lopsided aftermaths; and life-shattering changes from the rise of capitalism and information. Even if any of them could have been sheltered from these, they no doubt had their own stories of unrequited love, self-fulfilled betrayal, lost childhoods, and nights of drinking they wish they forgot. Life is complicated, parts full to overflowing and others empty and walled shut, full of trials and hard-won wisdom, and then its over.

As with many people working in technology today, aspects of my life are deadly comfortable. I’m in debt, but not burdensomely so. If there have been weeks I could only afford Ramen, they’re far-outnumbered by the times I’ve eat out. I can travel and live in economically stifled areas, and the only personal cost to me is in sympathy to others who don’t have my privileges.

It seems that technology and economic stability also teaches us to be miserly with our emotions. So much of contemporary life is the life of an ant. Most of us are asked to behave and produce at the will of impersonal systems for our jobs. Almost every interaction we have except amongst friends is through roles we’ve learned to play, like the public transportation passenger and the store goods purchaser. To bring personal emotions into these situations– that is, to act human– would be a social crime.

But we crave more: the life of true danger and true potential. And everywhere companies are happy to oblige. Cars, sports, cruises, and beer all promise to give us the thrill we seek. They each promise to introduce us a new, wonderful god into our lives, for a price.

We’re in the middle of an economic crisis. For many people, that means less opportunities to purchase outlets from the drone of life, and more time lost to patterned money-making. Money has stopped making money, so we horde as much as we can, to brace for the uncertain times ahead.

But the economic crisis is just a cog in a far more dire crisis happening now. The world-wide environmental crisis is all around us, and it promises more death and misery, more life-altering and culture-stifling changes, and longer and further-reaching ramifications.

It’s likely that the world population will drop dramatically– at least 20%– in a generation. That means wide-spread famines, water shortages, and break-downs of civilization– if not huge natural disasters– across the globe. Our eco-system is falling apart, and it’s getting worse fast. Last year’s increase in CO2 was more than many “worst-case” projections. Half the people I’ve talked to who should know say that Brazil’s rain forest will be gone in 50 years.

Every moneyed transaction you engage in is part of a world-wide system, and much of that system is bent to stripping the world of its natural resources. If the economic crisis means cutting corners to save money, we’re going to accelerate our doom. If we direct our savings in conservative investments, it will stifle the changing action that needs to happen now.

I have friends who have been hoping for the right answer to come from a Marxist or anarchist revolution– saying that capitalism is the problem (I agree it’s one of the problems). Other friends point to improving technology as the answer.

But we can’t wait any more.

These are the days told of in legends. We are knights and kings, and there is a maiden of great beauty in distress. A dragon of our own making is ravishing our countryside, and we can no longer spend our time merely preparing to fight. Every day now we will be asked to exercise deep courage and wise judgment.

The choices we make now will, in no uncertain terms, determine the fate of the world. The solutions are known, but they need to be used– to be invested in, in the deepest sense.

Everyone of us needs to take a hard look at how our choices– our jobs, our money, our leisure time– are impacting the world. The world needs all our help, and all our skills. How can the institutions we work for be bent to saving the environment and promoting justice (for they go together)? How much can we afford to give to charity? The US has the strongest economy in the world, so why is it the second biggest polluter? We need to not simply pollute less, but use our power to offset developing nations. What can we do in our free time? With the amount of time people in the US watch TV, the whole of Wikipedia could be reproduced (every edit, every line of code) 2000 times a year. There are thousands of projects that need our time, and they’re easy to find. The resources of the world are beyond sufficient, but they need to be better used, and we’re the ones guilty of their misuse.

Don’t ask yourself what you can’t afford to give. If you give more than you can afford, the gods will provide. If you don’t, they may leave you dead even if they keep you alive. It’s time to stop the life of “fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never [being] really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred” or you’ll lie on your deathbed, wondering why you didn’t do more.

This last week in Rio has been a blast. I’ve been staying with my cousin’s girlfriend, Purebreed, pretending to understand Portuguese, and hanging out with two couchsurfers from Belem, Rabbit and Late Period, who came here to pursue their respective intimate interests and have their birthdays.

For Late Period’s birthday, we went hang-gliding over Rio– *awesome*. We flew across Floresta Tijuca, in the middle of Rio, past a favela and high-class homes, and out over the ocean briefly before a soft landing on the beach. Sadly, they don’t let you glide your own hang. You help take off– by running off a cliff, wheee– and you help land, and otherwise you just hang around.

On Wednesday, I participated in a small “Free Hugs” campaign, in the middle of Rio. We took over a spot between a metro station and a busy intersection, all with “Abraços Grátis” signs, and hugged away. A local magazine seller advertised us as a side benefit to buying his merchandise. At our most, we had five people, which was fun for the energy, but the time I was doing it just with the organizer was fun for the challenge.

And Friday night, I went partying in Lapa, an region known for its Bohemian nightlife. An area about three city blocks on a side was absolutely swimming with partiers, sizzling meat, drink stands, tequila pushers, hippie artisans, and dancing to loud music that never left-off before the next began. We bobbed to Samba under a bridge, shifted under strobe lights to electronic, and danced Salsa right below– everywhere was packed, but never so much that you couldn’t move. Purebreed turns out to be a fantastic learn-by-doing teacher of Salsa, and I learned a bunch.

My Belém friends left this morning, and I just want to see Copacabana’s gay pride parade today before heading down to Curitiba!

Floresta Tijuca	Group before gliding	Over Floresta Tijuca
Hang-Gliding over Rio
From the beach where we landed
Art in the Museum of Contemporary Art
View from Copacabana	My good friend, Rabbit	A Famous Statue
Views from Pedras Arboador

I returned to São Paulo, to the same hostel I slept at when I arrived by plane three months ago. I was surprised by how reminiscent everything felt. The way I struggled with my Portuguese with the deskworker felt the same, with few new strengths and few fewer weaknesses. I went to the large grocery store, and if I could feel that my sense of bewilderment was less, it wasn’t much less: I moved through those aisles with similar confidence and similar confusion three months ago. I spoke with the same mouth, heard with the same ears, saw with the same eyes.

I was there for a week and met a bunch of travelers, but balancing in work and preparing for the beta release of the Travelers Network, I didn’t have so much time to explore the city. The last few days, however, I met some folks from England, and played the tourist with them. Except, now I was the one explaining Brazil: showing them what to try, telling what I knew of the elections happening this weekend, translating words around then city. When they wanted to try a comida-por-kilo, I just went and asked some locals where one was. When they went the get tickets, I tried to explain the dizzying array of options and help them at the counter. I was their first Brazilian.

I’m now back in Rio, and glad to be out of the smog.

I was also reunited with my camera! Here are some pics:

São Bento Stained Glass	São Paulo, from high up	Catedral de Sé
Goldleaf in Catedral de Sé	Lake in Parque de Ipiranga	Out a Window
Hotel Unique	Green-Covered Wall	Vila Madalena Mural
Vila Madalena Mural	Vila Madalena Mural	Vila Madalena Mural
More murals we can’t see	Vila Madalena Cemetery	Expensive “Poor Family” Monument

I want to start keeping the Sabbath/Shabbat– on Saturday or Sunday, to dedicate my time to thinking and writing on the gods, eating vegan, avoiding the bustle of modern life, etc. Here’s a product of my first attempt: a statement of my religious beliefs. I’m probably missing huge swaths of religious-belief-areas, so tell me your reactions!

The gods:

There are uncountably many gods. These include the gods of every religion, gods of love-lost, apathy, physical strength, and evolution, the god of the last light over Rio, of Google, and of professors who sleep with their students.

The gods have enormous power: they mediate all interactions between us and other people and the world; the determine how situations progress (they produce effects given causes); and they compose the consciousness we experience. They do all this in tandem, by their cooperation and their conflicts.

We have the capacity to evoke new gods into any situation. When we pray or leave sacrifices, take pills or smoke pot, listen to an advertisement or consider a philosophical idea, we attract the attention of certain gods. These gods– and our history with them, for some gods keep grudges– effect both our and other’s perceptions and actions.

No god is evil, but some are inappropriate to some situations. For example, the god of romantic love is one of the most misunderstood of gods. Because of this, he is summoned to many situations he does not belong in, and causes more suffering than he would wish.

The purpose of life:

The gods want everyone to be happy and fulfilled. The good life is the ethical life: if you are happy, you will give best and most to the world. A wide knowledge of the gods, good relations with several, and an aptitude evoking them are all important tools for living a good life.

The way to be happy is to pursue your deepest desires in all things. Desire is a many-faceted and changeable thing, because both humans and the gods can be fickle, and both are more complicated than can be comprehended. Expect the apparent object of your desires to reveal itself to be an less-than-fulfilling bridge to a truer desire only after you have attained it.

Never restrict another s beliefs and treat every creature with dignity. There are many ways to understand what is, what is right, and what is good. They are all wrong, incomplete, or both. But each provides information about and the words for evoking new gods, and in that way each is very powerful.

The ethics of an action are in its means. We cannot know its results, but we can choose which gods we evoke, and they determine its ethical content. However, it is important always to try to understand the full effects of our actions, because this is the key to understand the behavior of the gods.

The right purpose of technology and government lies between facilitating self-governance and liberal egalitarianism.

The universe:

Everything we experience is created by the gods we evoke. The limitations we experience in ourselves and things are similarly described by gods. The true capacity of everything is beyond its known capacity, because a different set of gods will describe different limits. Everything is over-determined, by many gods, and by nurture, nature, and choice. Through the gods you evoke, you create all of the facts of your existence.

Every process has self-awareness. The sum of all awarenesses is the awareness of the gods.

Your awareness, your sense of self, and your self itself, are a piece of the gods. In the same as a wave is part of the ocean, you are part of the gods, by being composed of them.

When you die, your awareness ceases to be distinguishable from the joint awareness of the gods. You become one with the universe.

The only moment is now. The past and the future are equally dreams. This moment is holy, magical, and full of gods– as is all our experienced world. Many of the gods present now are hidden to us, even when it is our beliefs that evoke them; hard personal work can reveal them.

Do not fear death. What you consider to be “you” has already died uncountably many times. This “you” is only a moment old.

I have so much to tell you! I’m in Manaus now (capital of Amazonas), a little hung over, but feeling great.

Heading into the Amazon has been *wonderful*. Maybe it’s some kind of learned association, but the moment you set leg in a hammock, with the wind whisping across the deck and the slow rocking of the boat, you enter this incredible calm revere. I had plenty to read, work, and think on, which kept me busy when I wasn’t watching the forest. I just finished the interesting stuff as the boat began it’s final approach into Manaus International Harbor.

The land along the Amazon river is gorgeous, and much more varied than I’d been told. Everywhere, the forest is a collage of a gazillion kinds of trees, but it varies from a dense green that overflows the banks, to awkward Dr. Seuss trees, to Lake Mendocino-like brushland, to treey farms. One day, the boat was passing floating water plants; the next it was inundated with endless yellow butterflies; the next night, huge swarms of moths clouded around every light.

The food on the boat looks great, but its as bad as everyone says. I have a fairly iron-clad stomach, and I felt sick after every meal. In part, it’s because I am sick. I can’t tell if it’s the Malaria pills, or if the pills just gave my body a way to express a disease it already had. In any case, it’s the sort of under-the-weatherness that I can ignore.

Mid-way to Manaus, I stopped in Santarém and bussed to Alter do Chão, a small chicken-roamed village on a fantastically beautiful lagoon, with a large white-sand island 100 meters off shore. I met two pairs of Europeans, and we found a nice Pousada (small hotel) and hung out.

I took a kayak out on the lagoon and there was not another soul there. It would be inconceivable elsewhere for such a beautiful lake to not be covered in boats, but I’m in the middle of the freaking Amazon. I found my very own flooded forest– it even had a sign that said “Property of . No Trespassing!” I wandered all around it and saw a big fish– it looked like a gourami, but I bet it was a parahna. One of my trees had a bunch of vines hanging from it– I gave them some tugs to see if I could swing on them, but they didn’t seem very structural. I would have tried harder, but I was worried about being eaten by the paranha. Right next door was another flooded forest, property of — I’d always wanted to kayak in her forest, so I wandered around there too.

In Manaus, my couchsurf fell through. It was my fault– I forgot how to make long-distance calls in Brazil. But I ended up at a great anglophile hostel, with some cool Europeans. One girl had a birthday, and we went to one of the best restaurants in the city, where endless waiters with long sticks of meat (FYI, I haven’t returned to veggieness yet– it’s tough to do here) filled out plates as long as we wanted. We came back and got trashed on cachaça and beer and a little 3-man (not my idea), and talked third-world politics and sex.

Now I need to see some of this city before I have to catch my flight to São Paulo, tomorrow morning!

I know I’m supposed to be reassuring and all, but this is too good.

I leave today at 6pm on a riverboat up the Amazon. I’ll hang up my hammock, surrounded by other hammocks, and watch the forest float by. There is no wireless on the boat, even if I thought it was safe to take out my computer. So I will be totally out of contact for the next week (until next Thursday)!

I started taking Daraprim two days ago to prevent Malaria, and it’s killing me. It’s known for its strong side-effects– like getting just a touch of Malaria– everything from dizziness to losing red blood cells to seeing things. My muscles hurt, my throat is dry and scratchy, I’m just a bit out of it, and I woke up three times last night from vivid dreams.

Also last night I had a fantastic going-away/birthday party (more like three…), at a cool bar I’d never been to with great music and many fond “you’ll always have a home here”‘s. A friend asked how I was going to Manaus– there being either boats or planes. I told him I was taking the boat. A look of fear pass over his face and he said, “Good luck,” in a voice that said, “Man, I hope you make it.”

It sounds like a great adventure to me! I’ll talk to you again when it’s over!

27! Woot! It feels good to be alive!

The rest of this post I wrote Sunday, but I’d been too busy to finish and post it.

Today was Pará Pride! Belém hides its alternative side pretty well, but not for the parade. We took over two of the biggest streets and filled them for over a mile. People overflowed the street and climbed up the fences on either side to dance to four huge sound trucks. The parade ended at a large square which we packed with music, club lights, and discarded beer cups. The designated bathroom was a dark red wall with the words “proibida urina nesta lugar”. It was an absolute blast– but not the subject of this post– and one of those parties that most people who come alone leave together– which is.

Sexual Difficulties

Here’s what I’ve been working on, the last few nights. It’s going to go on my wall, because it fits with my floor. It’s made only of kissing circles (but multiple fractal systems of said-circles with complex color patterns, so maybe it’s not really circles).

The whole thing, shrunk down:

One little part, full-resolution:

I think it’s pretty.

Everything is a little different here. Chocolate tastes different (at least the grocery store impulse-buy stuff). Tomato sauce tastes different. Bananas are big and savage, avocados are smooth, round, and light-green, and limes are sweet. Pot is totally different– it comes brown and packed in chunks. Trash is a little container you have on the counter, and there are three trash days a week, but people still throw it in big piles on the street. Doing laundry usually involves a basin and a sponge.

And then there are paradigmatic differences. People here (at least in Pará) understand the world differently. Some viewpoints are enlightening, some curious, some based on claims I have no basis for judging, and some are simply different. But there are some that seem flat wrong. Certainly in this point in our relationship, I have hugely more to learn from Brazil than it does from me… but sometimes I can’t help soapboxing. It may be just cultural differences, but these are big enough differences for me to see beyond. I’ve heard from quite different sources, so I suspect they’re widespread.

“Brazil (and particularly the north) has the greatest share of natural resources in the world, so it’s eventual success is natural.”

This belief holds that Brazil’s poverty is to be alleviated by cutting down the rainforest, and the resulting success ought to topple the unnatural economic rule of more urbanized south. Maybe in theory, but in practice, exploitable resources, especially poorly managed ones (and only Norway, to my knowledge, manages theirs well) are the surest path to a corrupt government and an impoverished populace. Resources are like shit to capitalist flies. Besides, exploiting resources is the worst way to make wealth today: its ineffective, damaging, and out-dated.

“Our combination of black, yellow, and white didn’t work out in many ways, particularly for modern democracy and consideration for others.”

Brazil has a vibrant culture, which draws remarkably well on its integrated European, Africa, and Indigenous backgrounds. But people look at the rampant two-faced populism in politics and the large-scale effects of each-for-his-own-clanism and blame their genes. It’s time to wake up from history. Even if our culture and our genes make us, so do our choices, and I’ve seen every seed of a more enlightened deep-democracy growing here, in some of the most fertile soil in the world. Creating our culture is our full-time job, and sometimes its hard work, but it may be our sole god-given right and duty.

“The poor people here are very simple.”

In my experience, no lack of education, wealth, or social status makes you less cognoscente of the complexities of being. Interestingly, it’s easier to recognize an uneducated person in portuguese, because for every right way to do something, there are two wrong but colloquially conventional ways. Like substituting “a gente” (the people) in for “us”, and then just using the third-person form. Or dropping the future tense, except by saying somebody “is going to do” something. But colloquialism doesn’t beget simplicity, it’s just the counterpart of elitism.

“Brazil might be moving in the right direction, but it will take a hundred years to cleanse the country of corruption and raise its populace out of abject poverty.”

Says who? Whistle-blowing is approaching a tipping point here.
Brazil went from a military dictatorship to one of the most vibrant democracies in the world in 30 years. In another 30, its GDP will pass the US’s. At the rate life-changing technology is being developed, and the rate at which Brazil is adopting it, I give it 20 years to rival Europe in mean standard of living.

“Jealousy is an important part of love.”

I could write a book on the problems in Brazilian relationships. A classic Brazilian couple does everything together; the real couple does most, but the guy can hang out with his friends but will get mad if the girl does the same. Guys in Brazilian typically don’t know how to cook; their mother cooks for them until their girlfriend takes over. Love is, apparently, wanting your partner to not have any fun without you there, and intentionally crippling yourself to ensure it. But Jealousy is just Fear’s child from her first marriage to Desire. If Desire could dump her, why can’t Love?