the national forests were declared off limits around flagstaff until it gets some more rain so I headed west as I figured the BLM land near peach springs would be the closest legal place to park...the temperature there was about 90 a week ago but yesterday it was 105 degrees which is getting into the fatal range for humans...so I packed up this morning and headed west.... got to needles and the temperature was 115 degrees...now at 9;30 at night it is 105 degrees....but I got a room...really didn't want to spend the $77 bucks but really didn't want to burn up the engine on the truck and possibly have a stroke and the price of the room when compared with the price of a truck and a stroke seems like a pretty good investment... the last time I got a room in this town it was $37 bucks...but this is a much nicer room....
I keep reminding myself that the weather extremes are now going to be normal...floods, drought, wind events...and maybe pandemics also...I had been reading a few very good books while sitting quietly in the shade of a juniper tree and listening to the only radio station I could pick up...it was the official radio station of the Wallop-Eye tribe who own about a million acres of land near peach springs...the station plays everything from hip-hop to rock and roll and classic country....real classic country like old hoyt axton and such as that...i heard where Jay Z got inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame...I have not listened to a lot to rap music but I have a Jay Z DVD and several Tupac DVD's and a DVD from a tour of several hip hop artists...Snoop Dogg, Eminim and some others...as a genre of music it is so different from Rock and Roll I can't see why they would think Jay Z could qualify as a rock and roll hall of famer...he has enough expendable income you would think he could build a HipHop hall of fame...some of the hip hop I hear (like on the Wallop-Eye station) is pretty "artistic" but much of it is pretty self-indulgent drivel... I picked up a Herbie Hancock DVD a while back and the fellow is so talented I don't see how most Rappers could even look him in the eye and call themselves musicians. I picked up a hardback copy of "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac...which I have never read and now I have about finished it and the main "protagonist" in the book is a guy named "Dean" who is actually a fellow named Neil Cassidy who drove the bus "FURTHUR" when Ken Kesey et.al went across the country...Cassidy's wife wrote a book called "Off The Road" about what it was like to be around a bunch of acid head, speed freak, stoner types...it wasn't very complementary of the "Beats" and proto-hippies...and she has a few pictures of Neil Cassidy after his already close to edge self did acid a few times...he looks like a man who has seen the devil...in his own brain...he lay down on a rail-way track in Mexico and was killed...maybe a suicide maybe an accident...but definitely the result of a person who was not in complete control of his mental faculties. Another book I have been reading is called "A War Like No Other" by Victor Davis Hanson and it is about "...how the athenians and the Spartans fought the Peloponnesian war..." they fought for about 27 years and during the second year of conflict they had a pandemic which killed tens of thousands of people living in the walled city of Athens...a lot of the main leaders in the city died ...Pericles being the most prominent, and the attitude of the citizens was altered a great deal...the people became mean spirited and vicious and there was a lot of cruelty...Hanson likes to compare the Athens of that period with the USA of our time...I suppose if things start to fall apart health-wise and with weather events and possibly even some military conflicts this countries "moral fiber" might be stretched to the breaking point...I was just watching the head of the FBI in a lengthy discussion about the multi-faceted challenges facing the nations law enforcement...in a country which is heavily armed...the ancient greeks had thousands of troops who could fling a rock with a sling and kill a person at a few hundred yards! I may have to get myself one of those slings and practice...anyhow society seems to be slip-sliding into changes in attitude which may not bode well for "peace, love and understanding"...but my own life gets closer to its finish every day and I just need to live it one day at a time...
"A lot of people think they are good...but they are not good they are just well behaved..." Mike Tyson from the DVD "2-Pac 4 Ever"
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