the timboucher experience

My friend and co-conspirator on the Monument City Project (a local historic geotagging outfit) and I recently went to the ENOCH PRATT FREE LIBRARY down by the cathedral. I had a blast there as a lady in the periodicals area kindly showed us in detail how to use the microfilm machines to look up any old articles we wanted in the Baltimore Sun and other old newspapers going back many decades. In some cases, over a hundred years.

It’s got me thinking: imagine we lived in a society where you could walk up to any public building, and a complete stranger would teach you a practical skill. For free. No expectation of compensation or reward. It, of course, would run on a completely voluntary basis. If you had a shop of some kind, you might keep a couple open hours each week for compatriots to come in and learn for free. We’re entering the kind of historical time period where this sort of universal hospitality and brotherhood/sisterhood will become extremely important. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s looking like money is about to fail us. What is money anyway, beyond the objectified image of a symbol, an experiential state common to the human condition: exchange, approval. Making things right. Giving and getting. Setting the balances. Maybe the problem we’re really seeing with banks and the financial collapse and all that other bullshit is simply that we fetishized dollar bills - the object, the prop. We wrote the word GOD on it and then treated it that way, and forgot what it was we were measuring, what was really important to us. In historical time periods where people forget basic truths, the hammer of universal justice is always quick to swing back in and remind us: gravity is there to teach us about the consequences of our actions. What goes up must come down. It’s a “law”, but the Law is a metaphor sent to teach us how to live right, how to minimize the squeaky out of alignment wheel elements of dukkha and to just be operating right and smoothly in the old worn out grooves of the weihuti. It’s not so hard. It’s easier than what I was doing before. And more fun.

• Holding Onto Pain
• Software Radio, Universal Communication
• Jack Schwarz: Human Pin-Cushion
• Electronic Value Transfer Systems
• Anamnesis