Friday Homestead Dispatch

Dowdy Fastidious Guimpe

Quote for the week from William Gay’s novel The Long Home:

Down fabled roads reverting now to woods Winer felt himself imprisoned by the dark beyond the car lights and by the compulsive timbre of Motormouth’s voice, a drone obsessed with spewing out words without regard for truth or even for coherence, as if he must spit out vast quantities of them and rearrange them to his liking, step back, and admire the various patterns he could construct: these old tales of love and betrayal had no truth beyond his retelling of them, for each retelling shaped his past, made him immortal, gave him an infinite number of lives.

1.
In 2017, when travel was easy and relaxed, Connie and I did a loop up through Navajo country (which includes the Oljato-Monument Valley), on to Cortez and Durango, then through southern Colorado where we looped south to northern New Mexico, all while seeing three sets of friends, eating good food, sightseeing, and relaxing in a private tub and sauna at Ten Thousand Waves in Santa Fe.

Somewhere on highway 160 or 163 on the Navajo Nation we ran across this mural. It seems there will always be those who create and share beauty to balance out those who have a need to desecrate and destroy beauty.

This piece was but one of the many murals installed for the Painted Desert Project. In 2009, Navajo Nation physician and artist Chip Thomas began wheat pasting some of his work onto the abandoned structures on the reservation. At first it was without consent of the building’s owners but that soon changed when his work started attracting viewers and attention. Since 2012, visiting artists from all over to schools and youth programs in Cameron, Shonto, the Chuska Mountains with Navajo Youth Empowerment Services and Navajo Mountain have been contributing to the project.

This article from Citizen Brooklyn tells the story.

2.
Now to get busy with reading Anthony Bourdain’s list of 39 Books To 'Unfuck Yourself.’ As a a lifelong fan of the printed word, Bourdain said, “This will be a line of books for people with strong voices who are good at something—who speak with authority. Discern nothing from this initial list—other than a general affection for people who cook food and like food. The ability to kick people in the head is just as compelling to us—as long as that’s coupled with an ability to vividly describe the experience.”

He was apparently a Graham Greene fan as there are three on the list. The only book I actually own is a signed copy of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Read on!

3.
Crooks and liars have once again banded together (why aren’t these people behind bars?) to dissuade Congress to act in favor of any economic help for the American people, instead focusing on lining their own coffers. Ironically, it’s called the “Save America Coalition.”

Doing the math, it was reported that “The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s nonpartisan tax scorekeeper, found in an analysis published this week that the Democratic tax committee’s proposal would lower the average tax rate for all income groups earning under $200,000 per year. The analysis found that it would rise by 0.2 percent for those earning between $200,000 and $500,000; by 1.6 percent for those earning between $500,000 and $1 million a year; and by 10.6 percent for those earning more than $1 million per year.”

Conservative groups maintain that corporate taxes hurt economic growth and are passed onto consumers and workers by the firms that are affected, once again playing the ‘trickle down’ card which has been proven over and over to be a wheelbarrow of horseshit. Naaaayyyyy….

And now…