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It's getting dark, too dark to see. I feel I'm knocking on heaven's door.

Last night I finally saw something I haven't seen in 46 nights: the stars. Night time has finally returned to Alaska. I just ran from one yurt to the next and ran into the bushes on the way. Another week and I suspect day and night will be fully separate entities.
But in the meantime, I've done too much in Homer in the last few days to ever begin to fully describe. First, I've somehow embraced the new name. I've been working a job where I'm on the schedule as Theo. Every single person in town who knows me calls me by the name and I've even had some girls say it in a (ahem) flirtacious manner (which was hard not to burst out laughing at). The weather has been mostly rainy and overcast but yesterday was sunny and windy and me and Sven took out a sailboat and learned how to sail. Pretty mad groovy. I've discovered something called a merchant marine card, which is kind of like an American passport that enables you to work at essentially any port anywhere in the world. Like a pre-approved background check, prequalification that opens any and every sea-related form of work an individual might care to pursue. If discovered a love for the sea, and the realistic side of me knows I'll need to work wherever I travel, so getting one of those cards seems like a perfect pursuit. There are many ways to get one but the main, I believe, is to work on boats a lot and log your hours, go to a vocational school, or join the Navy or Coast Guard. The Coast Guard is sounding like a sweeter and sweeter deal, if you don't mind the whole American military aspect of it.
I've met groovy people everywhere and am starting to become familiar to many around town. I can't make it a day without running into someone I know around here. I feel like a local already and it seems I'm being treated as one. Sven's dad has already suggested I get an Alaskan drivers license (giving up my Colorado one), but gaining the strange and groovy benefits of a true Alaskan.
Anecdotes: Fish Tales Sold Here
Homer has been something of an epiphany factory for me.
1. Class consciousness - The most important thing I think I've learned so far is the question of 'worth' with regards to one's time. This came after a kid I've met named Ben who is a halibut fishing charter boat captain was explaining that now, at the age of 21, he knows his time is worth a minimum of 15$ per hour. "I will not take a job, no matter what it is, if it pays less than that per hour." Be it a welding job, landscaping, mechanics, or fishing. Usually, he makes a lot more, but that's his minimum. That got me thinking about the job I've been doing for $10 an hour. At first, I believed the job was ironic and hilarious: some east coast philosophy major coming to Alaska and putting fish in bags and vacuum packing them, playing fish tetris with trays and then throwing them in a blast freezer. Soon I found the job terribly depressing. After all, I have a degree from one of the top notch schools of the world, I deserve to be making more, doing better, something...I don't know. And that's when it struck me how terribly bourgeois I really am. No matter how much I convince myself I'm turning my back on the establishment and roughing it, I am so caught up in the arrogance that comes with playing by the rules and expecting the rewards from it in the long run.
Luckily, immediately after that burst of indignation, I came to a much deeper and more important realization, that is the value of skills within the context of the priorities of a place. Yes, I am an East Coast intellectual, and am highly educated, and within the system that values education, my time, like Ben's, is worth much more than the average unskilled laborer. But I'm not on the East Coast. I am in a place that is so far from beginning to give a half a fuck about the East Coast, and it's about time I started to understand that. By the standards of value out here, I am an outsider, a completely unskilled pair of hands, and a talker who has nothing to say that the locals actually care to hear. I am nobody. And as such I deserve the bottom of the barrel pay. And that's how it is in every world. You deserve as much as you are capable of providing according to the values of where you are, not who you believe yourself to be. Homer, a quaint drinking village with a fishing problem, has no interest in philosophers and as such, they work in canneries until they can learn the skills that most locals learned when they were 12 years old. Everywhere you go you are green and are treated as such until you can learn the local ladder and climb it by the standards set by those who have that place in their bones.

So I quit my job. I smell horribly of rotting fish, I have no time to groove with the atmosphere and I am not learning anything of value except butchery which brings me to my next point:

2. Butcher/Baker - I found it incredibly interesting how Joyce, in Finnegans Wake divides the brothers, who are the yin-yang, the two opposing forces, or side of the coin, of every different actuality, at one point, into a baker and a butcher. Shem, who is the artist, becomes a baker and Shaun, who is a critic becomes a butcher. He also makes them the prophet and the priest, the visionary and the politician, etc. It has something very fundamental to do with creation and destruction. A baker takes ingrediants from all over and combines them to make something new and delicious. A butcher takes a whole and chops it up into differentiated, usable pieces. When I thought I wanted to be a fisherman, I noted the irony of a vegetarian fisherman and laughed. At this point, I've stopped laughing. I've been covered with so many fish guts and seen so many thousands of pounds of diced up halibut and salmon that the true reality of the industry is setting in in my mind. It consists of thousands of people shipping out every morning, sweeping the oceans clean of their inhabitants, then cutting them to bloody pieces and selling the meat for expensive dinners and profit. The romance is lost in my mind and I'm now, if anything, much more of a vegetarian than I ever was before. I can no longer excuse my hypocrisy and have now quit my job, effective Sunday. So I lasted a week and a half, big deal. At least I have a better understanding of what I believe is important and how I will try and make fewer and fewer concessions, until I'm just living purely and truly according to my own preachings.

3. Slope jobs - Everyone wants one. A slope worker works 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off for a starting yearly salary of $80,000. Not bad. What it is is oil rigging, mining, energy harvesting. Talking with Sven about this aspect of Alaskan culture, we discussed the question of the ends justifying the means. What if you fucked up the planet for a single year in order to get paid, only to turn around and invest that money in fantastic technology for cleaning up the planet. Is it worth it? I've been on the fence for a long time, even considering looking into a slop job myself for a little bit, but I've finally come down on one side. I don't believe it's worth it.
This is a question everyone must answer to themselves on their own time, but my answer basically comes from an argument for consistency. It seems a terrible hypocrisy to me, for someone to contradict their morals with the view of uncontradicting them later. Like, it's OK to murder a few people now so long as I have a bunch of babies in the future. Maybe that's an extreme example, but I'm thinking of how we manifest who we are in absolutely everything we do. Just like we are absolutely everything we eat. If we eat terrible things now thinking we'll do better in the future, then we create a Self built out of terrible things that, like it or not, stick with us. It's for that reason I can no longer be a butcher. I will be a baker or a gardener or a nothing at all. I've found a love for sailing and the ocean, but not at the expense of killing or polluting.
(Interesting side note - Joyce has the baker as the prophet, who creates the Word and the butcher as the priest who cuts it to pieces and manipulates it for political reasons - end of side note)

I met a kid from South Dakota. I told him it was the most haunted place I've ever been. His eyes lit up and he proceeded to tell me about the first night he slept it his family house after moving there, he woke up freezing cold and standing in his bedroom staring at him was the figure of an old woman, white as a sheet, with holes for eyes and a mouth, staring at him, smiling. A few days later he saw a picture of the woman in a hallway and asked his dad who she was and he found out she was his great grandmother. He said he's seen her 4 times since then.

Think about the ambiguities of the words conscious and awake. Think of the degrees of meaning they can have and for whom.

Stoned conversation with a kid named Jazz: All conversations/thought patterns have been proven to be cyclical in nature, what if this extends to cultural trends, patterns of belief (cultures switching gods/back and forth between theism and atheism), Hindu Ages.
"The collective stillness of everything."
-Enlightenment is awareness of exactly what is going on in a given moment, both on the surface and at all depths. To step back and see the entire circle the conversation will follow, objectively before, while, and after it is taking place.
"We are the canvas itself."
A materialist's Nirvana = the cessation of awareness of one's bank account
The only answer to any "big question" is "Wait and see."
-Caught as an archetype, derided by vanity v. seeing them all interacting at once.
Think of the fear motivated by a dualistic worldview (terror of demons and satans and darkness as a force equally powerful to God's that keeps us up, quivering, at night).
Our job is to just cut through the bullshit and give love when we can.
Evolution through apathy (not giving a fuck and just being loving and groovy)
In French they call an orgasm a "little death." I think an epiphany is a mental orgasm, also followed in a way by a "little death."
Chastity? So much of pursuit in life and philosophical conclusions, believe it or not, simply revolve around the question of whether chastity is a virtue or a masochism. Is the master he who has earth-turning sex with spiritually awake lovers or is he the one who conquors sexual desire and gains a Puritan type of purity?
-The engagement of the Enlightened one is as Bodhisattva to direct others toward their own enlightenments.
"You can live in Enlightenment in a monastery or in Portland for God's sake!" - Jazz
Love is giving a headlamp to a stranger because he needs it more than you. (Memory of Zach)
Lyrics from a Felice Brothers song - "Take this bread/if you need it friend/'cause I'm alright if you're alright. Aint got a lot/but all I've got/you're welcome to it/'cause I'm alright if you're alright."
Romantic love? Returns us to the question of chastity.

Finally, I'm probably moving from my yurt to a converted bus in the next couple days. I'm quitting my job to write and meditate and study and exercise full time. As soon as my spirit moves me, I'm peacing out and going to Hawaii for a few months. I've discovered that I'm lacking in supplies. At present I require:
-1 better sleeping bag (mine is too cold, even indoors in the summer time)
-1 better shoes (I've been trekking in Alaska in dress shoes that are slick on the bottom and almost worn through)
-1 tent (totally key)
-1 little bunsen stove
-1 pan
-1 skillet
-1 bowl
-1 spoon
-1 waterbottle
-1 cup

That is all for now.

Seeds of thought: what if I trekked across Siberia this winter in order to get to Ireland to conduct my study in the spring...?

"If you only knew the half of it." -Nick from Georgia
"I didn't come to Alaska to care about peoples' opinions." -Same

Met a chap who offered me any language of Rosetta Stone for free. We'll see if he follows through. I'm thinking about Japanese, Spanish, and French. Maybe Russian for trekking across Siberia...

All my love,
Theo