Welcome to the gulch, Brad and Wendy…

Brad of McBlog fame has penned a thoughtful little piece on living the “Frugalista Gulch” lifestyle - right where you are, in his case. Woohoo to you both, and welcome to the Outlaw crew!

When Wendy mentioned to me her “motivation #2″ for the frugal philosophy — resisting the state — the first thing that popped into my mind was “Galt’s Gulch.” Because what we are doing is very similar to what John Galt and his fellows did when they went “on strike” and withdrew to Galt’s Gulch. We are denying the State and its army of leeches, not the product of our minds as such, but rather our productivity.

And Brad’s conclusion is right on…there are going to be thousands of “Frugalista Gulches.” Perhaps there already are.

(Thanks to Dave Gross at The Picket Line for the link!)

Freedom meme

Thanks, Lewlew, for tagging me on this one: “What motivated you to start looking into Anarchist/Libertarian thought?”

Hmmm.

When I was in second grade and we were learning about Hawaii, the teacher told the boys to cut paper surfboards out of big rolls of construction paper and to decorate them, while the girls were told to make paper hula skirts. I remember going ballistic about that. I didn’t want to have to put on some stupid skirt and dance around in front of people just because I was a girl.

So I insisted on making a surfboard instead. At least I wouldn’t have to feel like a simpering idiot. There were other similar instances through my childhood, all centering, in hindsight, around the issues of justice, individualism, and common sense. So, like Lewlew, I think the predilection existed in me already, but I don’t know why.

In high school I was lucky to have The Fountainhead assigned in English class, and the teacher was a rabid individualist who devoted a whole month to discussion of that book. But I didn’t have any leaning toward or interest in politics then. I was a budding philosopher, though - read a lot of Sartre and Camus, I recall.

It was during college that I got to thinking about the sweeping issues of freedom and liberty. I ventured to Washington, DC and fell in love with the brave words inscribed in the Jefferson Memorial…in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress…in the National Archives. I thought I’d found the real thing and it stirred my soul. I even decided to take some poli-sci courses, because I expected they’d go deeper into the wonders of liberty and the history of how it was intentionally protected. D’oh.

During sophomore year, I also read Atlas Shrugged in three wild, wonderful days, gasping and then grinning at the unexpected but perfectly logical plot twists and turns. I read The Passion of Ayn Rand and learned of the utter totalitarianism that woman had fought and escaped - learned a history that had eluded me until then. This, and my disgust with the poli-sci and other courses in school, gave me to understand that the learning I wanted would not be found in expensive classrooms. Philosophy in college, for instance, was sheer senseless misery - Kant and Hegel, Hume and Marx - forced regurgitation of which did nothing to illumine my life.

After graduation, I floundered. Now I see that I was disillusioned with the world around me versus the world I knew within myself…still am. But one day, wandering through stacks at the library, I happened on a section of DIY books - two in particular, about building one’s own house (one from stone, one from logs). It was like the skies opened and rays of light broke through. “I could do this! And be very happy living this way!” That was the beginning of my journey down the path of gulching, although I wouldn’t call it by any name until many years later. But what a sense of freedom and competence reading those books (and many more) gave me about life, a real life in freedom! It was about this time that I found Claire Wolfe’s early books too - they were a great help to more understanding, and a big challenge to action too.

However, I didn’t have the means then even to follow that simple dream. I’m still striving, in fact. Almost got to that point while I was married, but divorce took away what I’d managed to build. When I was starting over, I figured it would be good to join the LP and meet some likeminded people. But - well, suffice it to say that what I saw in the LP sent me into the anarchist camp. Bigtime.

Only I knew nothing about anarchism - I’d vaguely classified it in my mind with Satan worship and black magic, dark and destructive and dangerous. All I knew was what I’d told myself for years: that I never wanted to be a boss nor to have one. Bingo…things came together as I looked into the subject.

I remain on the cusp now, an anarchist at heart but not always in deed, knowing mostly that the system is rigged against freedom, yet holding out hope for one last change. Not just through Ron Paul, but through the phenomenon of so many individuals coming to understand and passionately to embrace his message. I have no interest in further political action, personally. But I do see that these Paul supporters are at the point I was at a few years ago, and many are beginning to see the man behind the curtain, so all is not lost, yet…even though the election is a longshot.

I’ve been wondering lately whether we’re seeing today the equivalent of maybe 1770 or so, when the Boston Massacre was just beginning to galvanize people of conscience and intelligence. I think of old Sam Adams, for instance, who rabble-roused for years before he got the Sons of Liberty riled up enough to garner serious attention from the powers that were. No, I don’t want to see a war in this country or in any other. What I’m driving at is the mindset, the dawning awareness of insufferable tyranny.

Perhaps, with that awareness growing, a peaceful yet passionate revolution could indeed be in the future. I like to think so, anyway.

See, this is what gets me…

Ran Prieur has written yet another of those posts that get me fired up to go all Outlaw.  I’m copying it here in full for posterity, because posts from his blog “drop off the edge” after about 10 days:

December 1. There’s a lot of buzz about the Homegrown Terrorist Radicalization Whatever Act. According to the script, we’re supposed to respond, “Unthinkable! Outrage! Constitution! Fight through usual channels! Oh no, usual channels not working! American reality different from American ideal! Protest! Ow, stop hitting me!”

If we respond this way, we are going along with the abuse ritual. To an abuser, there is nothing sexier than when the victim expresses shock and outrage and fights back in a way that’s totally ineffective. The next sexiest thing is to grovel in submission, and next after that is total numb defeat. These strategies not only don’t work — they actually feed a demon that inhabits the collective consciousness and many individuals, and they encourage more abuse.

So what can we do about it? As Thaddeus Golas said, “A great deal, if our heads are clear.” The common mistakes of abuse victims and political dissidents correspond exactly to the first four of the five stages of grief. It’s time to stop fucking around and get to the fifth stage.

America has passed from Republic to Empire, and will not go back. We are living in an authoritarian state in rapid decline. The federal government will pass more and more repressive laws, because that is what declining empires do. By all means, we should pay attention to hostile moves by government and business, the same way you would pay attention to rising floodwaters. You don’t get angry at the water. You don’t say “the Constitution forbids water getting this high.” It is not a good idea to march through the water holding signs demanding that it recede. But you might be able to channel the water to where it will do less harm, or pile up sandbags to protect critical areas, or at least evacuate to higher ground.

Moving from metaphor to reality, we can fight big domination systems with little systems that are still democratic. Your vote for president is now worth less than your vote on Reddit, but you could make a huge difference by starting a group to run a candidate for city council, or to connect responsible squatters with vacant houses, or to fix and give away old bikes, or to turn an abandoned parking lot into a garden.

Another thing we have to understand is that the law is a distraction. The highest and lowest classes already know this in their bones: the only thing that matters is what you can get away with. The police will invade your house, kill your dog, and steal your computer if you run a perfectly legal website that scrutinizes the police too closely. But you can flagrantly violate the law by occupying an empty house, raising chickens in your back yard, and providing unlicenced medical care, as long as you maintain good relations with everyone who knows you’re doing it.  (emphasis added)

I know he’s more or less right.  And it just gets me, you know?  Because I have the hugest love and admiration for Ron Paul and what he’s taking on.  Yes, I’ve been supporting him with my plastic FRNs - and I want to see him win.  Just to observe the look on the faces of George Stephanopoulos and Ann Coulter and all those who say “he can never win.”  (How come no one ever makes the so-called expert explain just why he can’t win, when it’s still a month to the first frackin’ primary?)

Dangitall.  I’m stuck in hope.  I love this particular underdog.  I can’t help it.  He’s a dear.  And he’s mostly right.

But my dark side whacks me upside the head with a 2×4 and yells, “So is Ran Prieur right!  Not even a President Paul  can save us now!  You know it - you gotta save your own ass.”

So I guess the best I can do is to support two underdogs with my plastic FRNs - Ron Paul, and myself.  Hedging, I think they call it on Wall Street.

Two bits of bad news for freedom outlaws

First, it was reported the other day that Hushmail, the web-based encrypted email provider, has caved to Canadian federal authorities and turned over twelve discs’ worth of email messages to and from alleged steroid dealers:

However, installing Java and loading and running the Java applet can be annoying. So in 2006, Hushmail began offering a service more akin to traditional web mail. Users connect to the service via a SSL (https://) connection and Hushmail runs the Encryption Engine on their side. Users then tell the server-side engine what the right passphrase is and all the messages in the account can then be read as they would in any other web-based email account.

The rub of that option is that Hushmail has — even if only for a brief moment — a copy of your passphrase. As they disclose in the technical comparison of the two options, this means that an attacker with access to Hushmail’s servers can get at the passphrase and thus all of the messages.

In the case of the alleged steroid dealer, the feds seemed to compel Hushmail to exploit this hole, store the suspects’ secret passphrase or decryption key, decrypt their messages and hand them over.

I’m removing Hushmail from the links list on this blog, partly because it seems that their marketing copy did not make this distinction between the two formats sufficiently clear to privacy seekers.

And second, just this morning, I received news via GATA.org that the Liberty Dollar office was raided yesterday by feds here at home:

I sincerely regret to inform you that about 8 this morning [Wednesday the 14th, apparently] a dozen FBI and Secret Service agents raided the Liberty Dollar office in Evansville, Indiana.

For approximately six hours they took all the gold, all the silver, all the platinum, and almost two tons of Ron Paul Dollars that were just delivered last Friday. They also took all the files and computers and froze our bank accounts.

We have no money. We have no products. We have no records to even know what was ordered or what you are owed. We have nothing but the will to push forward and overcome this massive assault on our liberty and our right to have real money as defined by the U.S. Constitution. [See my own post on that last point here.]

We should not be defrauded by the fake government money.

But to make matters worse, all the gold and silver that backs up the paper certificates and digital currency held in the vault at Sunshine Mint has also been confiscated. Even the dies for minting the gold and silver Libertys have been taken.

All this has happened even though Edmond C. Moy, the director of the U.S. Mint, acknowledged in a letter to a U.S. senator that the paper certificates did not violate Section 486 and were not illegal.

But the FBI and Secret Service took all the paper currency too…

From a letter signed by Bernard von NotHaus of Liberty Dollar, quoted by Chris Powell of GATA.org. Chris adds:

This move seems extraordinarily bold considering that Liberty Dollar’s right to operate already was being litigated in federal court.

Who knows how many individuals have lost small fortunes in this outrage, in addition to the Liberty Dollar crew. This jackbooters’ move wouldn’t have anything to do with Ron Paul’s face on those Liberty Dollars, now, do ya suppose?

Come to think of it, this kind of police-state sh*t is playing into the RP2008 campaign’s hands beautifully. And I’ll bet they soon find ways to milk it.

A matter of conscience

Like you, probably, I’ve been amazed and humbled, in the past week or so, by the story of the Buddhist monks in Myanmar (Burma) quietly and peacefully resisting their totalitarian regime.

LewRockwell.com this morning features an article by Henry Porter, entitled “The faith of the oppressed can topple the worst tyrants,” inspired by the horrifying police-state revenge visited upon these monks who are acting according to conscience. Porter’s thesis is that organized religion often stands as a beacon, and churches as a rallying place, showing their people the way to freedom in dark times of oppression. He uses in particular the Nicholaikirche example from Leipzig, East Germany in 1989 that led eventually to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.

Being a contrarian of sorts, I’d like to tweak his thesis a little. In fact,

Karen Kwiatkowski, Freedom Outlaw

Wow. I’ve never seen such fired-up talk from the passionate Karen Kwiatkowski before - but she is on a roll today at LewRockwell.com:

It’s over. The faithful and the hopeful may carry the corpse of the American republic, hoping that it can be brought back into normality, into life, and into power. I am afraid these nurturers will not survive the present reality of imperialism.

But some of us will look directly at the ugly, dangerous and very real empire. We will stare – with little hope but also with little fear – into the face of the FUBAR nation, and then roll up our sleeves and get started on the only life we may honestly live, as internal dissidents. We will no longer pledge allegiance, we will not obey old rules, we will make do and make it up as we go along. Our minds focused on surviving the empire, our talents and creativity unleashed against the state and its fantasist faithful, we will live as if we are free[...]

We face a modern American state more overweening and dictatorial than even King George III could imagine, yet we have no declaration of independence, no privileged elite to demand it, no interested population to read and debate it. This time, our declaration will be made individually, every day, in calm desperate fearlessness, as we simply live free.

The whole piece is so damned inspiring from the standpoint of living free while one lives. This column is so well phrased, so vibrant, so needed and so true, that I want to jump up and shout “YESSSS!!!”

Warm welcome to the Outlaw fold, Ms. Kwiatkowski (USAF Col, Ret.). Now, about that little matter of a government pension…

Enjoy your freedom, friend Claire Wolfe

After so many years of unique and eminently worthy contributions to the cause of freedom online, Claire Wolfe has closed her blog, shuttered the fictional and feisty town of Hardyville, and decided to wander down some new and different non-netly paths, as yet unspecified and unplanned.

In short, she’s walking off the edge of the cliff, trusting that she’ll sprout wings just when she needs them. She’s off to play the inner game.

And like so many freedom lovers she’s touched over the years, I’m going to miss her terribly.

Her inimitably Outlawish, twinkling, can-do, yet hard-hitting writing style. Her lovable, laughable, Hardy curmudgeons populating (and hotly defending) the last outpost of freedom, somewhere among the tumbleweeds. Her dear doggy devotions, and her determination in disseminating data of dastardly deeds done by dignitaries and desk-jockeys.

But more than anything else, what I’ll miss is the friendship and goodwill she extended.

It was over three years ago now that I arrived on The Claire Files, her discussion forum, as a longtime reader and (I admit!) starry-eyed fan, landed at last in a place I could feel was a home to me. I’ll always remember happily how welcoming Claire was to this newbie, how glad to talk with me as an equal, how encouraging of small personal efforts at self-sufficiency or independent thinking. She noticed what people were doing. She commented. She offered support and humor. She cared, truly and obviously, about the individuals who came into her corner of the world.

She never wanted to think of herself as the Famous Author, and perhaps she was as wise as she is humble. Most people may never know her name. But to a small and stalwart crowd, she will always be the Third Assistant Demi-Goddess of Freedom. As much as free people would ever want such a thing. But the point is that the free people who are attracted to Claire’s sense of life find a wonderful irony in bestowing such a title upon one of our heroines. It might be, along with an occasional, long-saved-up-for, excited purchase of one of her books, the most we can offer her. But it’s heartfelt, with warm appreciation and gratitude. And Claire herself knew this.

It’s very difficult to imagine the internet without new work by Claire Wolfe. I admit that I’m panting with curiosity to hear more about her thoughts on the spiritual aspects of freedom. Maybe she’ll share, maybe not - I respect either choice. Maybe this is the ideal chance to be pursuing similar thoughts on my own for now, whether or not we end up comparing notes later. Maybe this is the next move in the bigger game of living free. I happen to think that it is.

The best tribute I can offer to you, Claire, as you stride off whistling into the new worlds you’re bent on discovering, is that I’ve always felt you to be a true friend. A friend of freedom, without question. But even more wonderfully, and rarely, I’ve always felt you to be a friend to me and to the other good folks - the individuals - who happened into your sphere, you kind and decent and loving soul. It’s easy, somehow, to picture you around the campfire with Thunder and me, sharing a good toke and some good brew, laughing hysterically at the craziness of life. It’s equally easy to imagine you comforting one of us through a hard time, or organizing a potluck for some friend in need. You see, you’ve always been there for people.

And so, as much as we’ll miss your daily manna that has fed us for so long, I’m deeply glad that you’re bent on being there - anywhere - everywhere - for your own self. The best of adventures to you, lady! May your days be magnificent, memorable and many!

We shall miss you. Don’t forget to write.

Prickly thorns and dried-up old ladies

I don’t think I’ve linked to any of Larry Brody’s writing since I left Strike the Root. But I still read him more or less weekly. Sappy sometimes, he is, but heartfelt and true.

And today, this piece about a fiercely independent old woman just got to me. I couldn’t choose just one snippet to quote here. Read it for yourself, if you’ve a mind to.

Maybe you’ll come to feel, as I do, that this old lady’s life story has a lot in common with the things freedom outlaws - PSM, Claire, velojym, OldTiredRN, my own dear Thunder, and so many others - go through.

Choose to go through, even - because the alternative just isn’t ever really an option.  Prickly and dried-up they might be (or feel), but are they down and out?

Not so’s you’d notice, IMHO.

Henry Rollins, you kick ass!

Dude! Rock ON!

Like jomama (to whom I owe the link), I’d never heard of Henry Rollins until now. But I sure as hell am glad that lack on my part has been remedied. This guy seems to be the Keith Olbermann of the younger, hip generation - er, with a bit less restriction on his choice of language.  :-D  (Read: Video below not safe for work, due to obscenity.)

Happy attitude

Well, Gene Logsdon does it again, this time with an entertaining and thoughtful piece on “bootleg” raw milk. You just gotta love this. Mr. Logsdon pokes fun at the “Milk Police” whose mandate has nothing to do with public health.

Selling raw milk, or bootleg milk as I call it, is a crime in some states, if you can believe that. If you break the law, the Milk Police will come knocking at your door. Mind you, they don’t care if you drink it or give it away. You just can’t sell it, which leads me to believe that they are more worried about protecting the monopoly of the pasteurized milk industry than protecting health.

As most of you probably know, dairy farmers who want to sell raw milk to people who want to drink raw milk, get around the prevailing power of the Milk Police by what they call herd share agreements. Customers buy shares in the cows and so as part owners, they are actually drinking their own milk. This subterfuge gives the Milk Police conniption fits. They issue woeful press releases that lead one to believe that civilization will collapse if people are allowed to drink raw milk, even though 28 states now allow it to be sold. The Milk Police try to take producers of herd-share milk to court like they were moonshiners.

Now, I’ve talked about this attitude thing before, but Mr. Logsdon’s blogpost has me thinking about it in a new way. I can’t even really explain how so, but it has to do with the sustained, cheerful humor and the simple choice not to grant the “Milk Police” any legitimacy. It’s a gentle, knowing, thoroughly enjoyable (and enjoyed!) laugh in their faces.

And somehow, it leaves me feeling renewed. Because it’s too easy for me, I realize, to become angered, outraged, offput by the actions of the various Police around today, mushrooming as they are. Mr. Logsdon (and others like him) offer delightful reminders that it doesn’t have to be so.

Hell, no. On the contrary, he gives me a friendly nudge as if to twinkle, “You’re free to dance through life even if ‘they’ expect you to cringe and crawl.”

And it occurs to me that the sustained twinkle is a result, and a function, of long practice and of endlessly repeated acquaintance with the tactics of the other side. It’s grace, born of great wisdom, repeated effort, and formidable patience - with a dash of Outlawish aliveness to spice up the mix.

The tribe truly is widespread

Lately I’ve been astonished and warmed to observe how many people, from widely different walks of life, and even in divergent times, “get it” about the insanity and brutality of those in power.

Some interesting reading I’ve been doing lately - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Why We Can’t Wait, for one - has provided morale boosting of an unexpected and fascinating type. Dr. King writes powerfully, as you’d expect, about the viciousness he and the civil rights movement faced for years. One quote out of many I’ve marked for inspiration:

Nonviolent resistance paralyzed and confused the power structures against which it was directed. The brutality with which officials would have quelled the black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caught - as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught - in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world.

It is true that some demonstrators suffered violence, and that a few paid the extreme penalty of death. They were the martyrs of last summer [1963] who laid down their lives to put an end to the brutalizing of thousands who had been beaten and bruised and killed in dark streets and back rooms of sheriffs’ offices, day in and day out, in hundreds of summers past.

But the world easily and quickly forgets, and the brutality can go on. And Dr. King’s legions had the advantage of a physically evident bond among them, which helped to develop and sustain a feeling of togetherness, an esprit de corps. What we freedom lovers face today is very different, partly because there is no obvious link we share.

Then again, that fact can be turned to advantage if we so choose. And it relates back to my opening paragraph. Freedom lovers are everywhere, among all kinds of people, and always have been. Another book I’ve found intriguing recently is The Hopi Survival Kit by Thomas E. Mails. I picked it up initially because it contained some suggestions on farming successfully in a drought or dry climate, potentially useful for gulching purposes - but found much more than I bargained for.

The book is an in-depth history of the Hopi people’s traditions, and the invasions made upon them by the Bahannas [white powermongers, also called two-hearteds]. As the temptations offered by the whites grew more attractive, more and more Hopi were co-opted to the side of “progress,” and even became oppressors of other Hopi through the tribal council and tribal police. The author speaks on behalf of Chief Dan Evehema, the last Elderly Elder of the Hopi tradition, a man of great courage and simplicity. Doing some further inquiry, I found the Chief’s “Message to Mankind,” in which he says,

Where is the freedom which you all fight for and sacrifice your children for? Is it only the Indian people who have lost or are all Americans losing the very thing which you original[ly] came here to find? We don’t share the freedom of the press because what gets into the papers is what the government wants people to believe, not what is really happening. We have no freedom of speech, because we are persecuted by our own people for speaking our beliefs.

We are at the final stages now and there is a last force that is about to take away our remaining homeland. We are still being denied many things including the [right] to be Hopis and to make our living in accordance with our religious teachings. The Hopi leaders have warned leaders in the White House and the leaders in the Glass House [the United Nations headquarters in New York] but they do not listen. So as our prophecy says then it must be up to the people with good pure hearts that will not be afraid to help us to fulfill our destiny in peace for this world. We now stand at a cross road whether to lead ourselves in everlasting life or total destruction.

My heart aches for these Hopi, whose very name means “people of peace,” as it does for those black Americans who suffered the scourges of slavery and cruelty for centuries. More importantly, though, I honor them for the choice they made to look their enemies in the face and in the heart to see just what lies within, and to learn from it, and to resist it with all their might of spirit and of righteousness.

I’d like to think that one day I might be worthy to be accepted into the freedom tribe with such courageous men and women as these.

Ran’s the man

Just recently, I came across the bloggy website of Ran Prieur. And was hooked. Ran’s the author of How to Drop Out, to which I linked in my farewell edition of Strike the Root last week. He’s also an accomplished Dumpster diver, and a budding gulcher with a piece of heaven somewhere out West, I gather.

Checking in with him this morning, I found him discussing ways to stave off infections under adverse circumstances - good stuff to know. And then he goes a step further - and this is what I just love about his perspective:

Another Atlas shrugging…

You wouldn’t normally think of State Farm Insurance as freedom outlaws. But in the face of what Mike Shedlock calls “failed Soviet command economics” in Mississippi, the insurer has chosen to do a rather Outlawish thing - in the sense of putting oneself outside the laws “they” want to force upon us:

State Farm, Mississippi’s largest homeowner insurer, said Wednesday it has had enough of the “untenable” legal and political climate in the state and is suspending writing new homeowners and commercial policies. The company said the suspension would begin Friday and continue until the business climate in the state is more palatable.

And bravo to ‘em.

Outlaws of the Soil

Pat Gardiner of Self-Sufficiency in Style, whose writing I’ve linked to once or twice on Strike the Root, has written a passionate and beautiful essay on one sort of today’s Outlaws - the self-sufficient farmers determined to preserve their way of life.

Very quickly, the self-sufficient homesteader discovers that the world of work and pay cheque finds it difficult to cope with those that choose to leave orthodoxy behind…

They will simply refuse to obey laws and requirements that make no sense to them.

They have become outlaws in their own small way engaged in a guerrilla war with the forces of law and restriction.

The natural heirs to the pioneers that carved a country out of wilderness with a six-gun in one hand and a cattle brand in the other.

A wonderful must-read for Outlaws and gulchers alike. It does my heart and spirit good to know that the tribe, even internationally, is strong and growing. Thank you, Mr. Gardiner.

Holy Confucius, Batman…

Private property rebellion in Communist China?

‘Chemical Ali’ Massoud at Strike the Root links to an astonishing news article today. And what’s equally amazing - and appealing to Outlaw types - is the manner in which the protesters conducted the whole affair (emphasis added):

Up to 10,000 blockaded the warehouse entrance in the village of Sanzhou, trapping 300 assembled dignitaries, including Guangdong officials and Hong Kong and foreign businessmen inside, the newspaper said.

Around 1,000 police and riot police arrived to defuse the standoff, but the villagers stood their ground, refusing to leave unless the corrupt officials were investigated, the paper said.

It was only when police began firing tear gas the following morning that the crowds dispersed, according to witnesses quoted by the paper.

It’s a shame they only demanded investigation of the government thieves. But wow. Mao must be spinning in his grave. And there must be quite a lot of current Chinese bureaucrats sitting up and taking notice.

New and improved working title

Recently I had a brainwave (believe it or not!) I’ve changed the working title of the novel to Liberty TRAIN (formerly Liberty Rain, which made sense in the context of the story, but presented some ticklish issues and seemed a bit abstract).

And the funny thing is, it didn’t occur to me until just this moment that the new title does suggest the underground railroad that the book is about! I hadn’t thought of it like that before – I was mainly trying to substitute something for Rain so that, as literary agent Dorothy Vincent warned me, the title wouldn’t be confusing for readers and buyers to spell and search.

But I think now that the new title, like the old one, is mysterious. Unlike the old one, it suggests action – and what’s more, this isn’t a train someone else is driving. There isn’t any engineer to get you there. You’ve got to drive the train or be an active part of the crew, because it’s headed for liberty. And the mystery is something I really want to delve into, all the way into the black. What kinds of mystery? The magic, of course, and the invisibility/shield concept [more on this in future posts]. Trains are magical and mysterious and haunting in a way, too.

The vault

Uncomfortable silence lately. The kind of silence that doesn’t know whether to scream truth in the darkest night to the few who might be listening, or clam up and preserve what little I understand within a vault of purposeful quiet. If it weren’t for you few but very loyal and supportive readers, I might even let the blog go into oblivion. And I’ve been considering quitting my stint as Friday guest editor over at Strike the Root.

Why? It’s not despair, not hopelessness - although with the increasingly oppressive news of late, it is partly fear.

Intermezzo

I keep wanting very much to log in here and write a vast, beautiful, memorable paean to the spirit of freedom and outlawry. But somehow it just doesn’t get done.

There’s a very broad spectrum of ideas wafting lately through my brain, and somehow they’re all connected. But it’s all SO broad that I haven’t found the common threads quite yet. It all has to do with breaking through to freedom in every aspect of one’s life - physical, spiritual, political, emotional, intellectual - and how often it seems that people choose only one of these domains to express a passion and need for freedom. And even the expression often manifests in mere lip service, not action.

One thing I did want to post, though, is a link I included in today’s edition of Strike the Root. It’s a statue entitled “Self Made Man,” by Colorado sculptress Bobbie Carlyle. A magnificent male figure chisels his own image out of the stone. Click on the “Self Made Man” link in the page’s left-hand menu to see a front view. Fricking awesome. Ayn Rand would have fallen in love with this statue.

I think I’ll keep looking at him once or twice a day as I continue to sift through the many concepts that want to be brought together. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder what would be possible if a lot more people decided to strive for - and insist on - freedom of every kind, consistently and firmly. I think this statue holds an answer.

Yard sale lessons II - You really do meet all kinds…

Halfway through the day of our yard sale, a truck and trailer pulled up to the curb, the trailer labeled “Antique Auction” or some such. Thunder pointed it out excitedly to me - “Didn’t you want to sell that antique bureau?” Omigosh! We got so busy with the early birds that I forgot all about bringing it outside! So I ran into the house and wheeled it to the door.

Well, the dealer, a friendly fellow, took a look and made an offer. I dickered, and we settled, and moved the piece into his trailer. And off he went.

Four hours later, the sale over and the leavings packed neatly for charity, I lay down to rest. And then it hit me.

Walt’s Gulch - Gotta love it!

Should have posted this much sooner. TCF’s own John DeWitt (Joel Simon) has published his novel Walt’s Gulch at Lulu.com. Proceeds are to benefit TCF.

The blurb on Joel’s Lulu.com page:

Walter Steward has a dream. With his daughter Jessica, he moves to the north country and builds a new home far from the troubles that have plagued and blighted his life. The people he meets there, the friendships he forges, seem blessings indeed. The future seems bright. But one of those friendships brings disaster. Walter has no idea that the closest of his new friends, George Sedlewitz, is on the run for having murdered two police officers in a fit of rage. Walter knows that George is moody, nervous, and quiet. He doesn’t know that he’s a little mad, and that he isn’t done with his killing.

The story is a good, fast-paced read, with sympathetic characters to add emotional punch. I’d really love to know more about Mary and her network. The passages seen through the eyes (and nose!) of the dog Gallatin are beautifully and heartrendingly handled. And Florence is so not the kind of lady you’d expect to see turning Outlaw - which is very encouraging in a way.

Lulu.com seems to do a decent job with print-on-demand production, and shipping was prompt. Unfortunately, the wonderfully apropos cover art photo (by fellow TCFwit cowardly lion) was low-res and came out poorly.

But I’m nevertheless extremely pleased with the value for my money.