Captain's Phlog                          2020.06.19
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     Some first musings on something I really
      need to clarify... if only for myself.



   Here at home we'll play in the city
   Powered by the sun
   Perfect weather for a streamlined world
   There'll be spandex jackets one for everyone"
                                   -Donald Fagen

I worked the summer of 1982 as a courier. Soon to 
begin my sophomore year in high school, I was paid 
to ride the subways of Manhattan lugging tools, 
software, and hardware to installs. The company I 
worked for leased and sold Jacquard mini 
computers. In hind-sight they were in their death 
throws. The IBM 5150 had ripped the industry a new 
one only the year before.

That summer found me on a Chinese philosophy binge 
and the book most likely to be found in my pocket 
as I headed uptown was Laozi's Tao Te Ching.

The Daoist themes of naturalness, spontaneity, 
simplicity, detachment from desires, ziran, and wu 
wei carved new channels through the thought of a 
Catholic boy from Queens.

At the time, Donald Fagen's I.G.Y. and his 
follow-up New Frontier were important to me. The 
world of Star Trek, after all, was the inescapable 
future and that future would be composed of equal 
parts compassion and chromium. What a wanker.

Somewhere between now and then, those songs rotted 
and their stench of irony makes me wretch. They 
might as well be solerpunk anthems for all of it. 
Don't misconstrue. I don't stand in opposition 
to solerpunk - I'm too easy going for that - but I 
do feel that it's predicated on the Myth of 
Progress. That's the same fallacy that underpins 
Capitalism.

It was my time on Mastodon [of which I will say no 
more] that makes me queesy. Maybe it was a gross 
misrepresentation of solarpunk by it's proponents 
at the time, but invariably any problem-solving 
discussion reduced itself to selecting the best 
product of Industry to solve the given issue. 
Reflecting on this for many months now has brought 
me to a seed of a thought.

I've never been one to embrace a doctrine that is 
underpinned by opposition - for example, I'm a 
Humanist and not an atheist. I prefer Libertarian 
Socialist to Anarchist but in the US, the right 
has co-opted the Libertarian name. Obviously I 
wasn't going to call my idea DarkPunk (which 
sounds like a Goth thing anyway) and I really have 
little in common with the Primitivists.

Only this morning did I realize the good fit 
Taoism makes with my position and I must settle my 
thoughts in text soon...

But this entry has gone on long enough.

Be well. Be Safe. Be Gopher.