The Mavericks 1994 album “What a Crying Shame” mostly reminds me of Dwight Yoakam, which is probably why I love it so much. Dwight Yoakam will always be my favorite country singer. But the Mavericks are more than that–proof of which can be heard in their wonderful 2020 album “En Español”. 🎵

We have reached that point in the annual audit that I feel like an old-timey telephone switchboard operator during a gossip emergency.

Well look at this: actual newsprint. From Heartwood, a forest protection org. Newsprint, by the way, is far more compostable than the full color glossy magazine you might get from the more bougie environmental groups.

Added “Sketches of the Goat God in Albion” by Gyrus to my collection of sources on Pan. Excellent essay with some good stories to tell.

So here I was listening to Sleep’s “Holy Mountain” while compiling a statement of cash flows when I decided to learn more about the band. One of the original members left? To become an Orthodox monk? And started what is surely the most metal zine ever created by Christians, let alone monks? Wow…

To be involved in the economy is to be materially implicated in corruption, destruction, and any number of evils. There are no morally pure enterprises. Follow the money long enough and you will find the corruption.

There is no standpoint of purity. What you can do, however, is keep your conscience alive. You will still be implicated in evil, but you will at least face the fact and do what you can. While it will never feel like enough, it’s better to struggle than to become one of the herd animals.

Erik Davis:

Sometime it really pays off to be a perpetual student of religion and the occult. Travel, especially, can be unexpectedly transfigured if you equip yourself with a well-honed sacred radar, especially one tuned to animist and esoteric frequencies. With this sort of spirit-tech in hand, or in mind, even banal and hyper-touristy environments can pack a spectral punch.

[… T]he sacred is in the eye of the beholder. I’ve also had convulsive epiphanies at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, the gritty bare-bones ruins of Eleusis, and a James Turrell Skyspace in Seattle. There is a lesson in this for the sacred tourist: the entire earth is filled with portals.

Lovely post from Elizabeth Oldfield on “the ordinary grandeur of the ways we love each other”

My “make things, not content” t-shirt gets a surprising number of compliments. The number of people who see the sickness in the usual mode of life online and the need for a more embodied experience is not small.