Plaint of the Host, 30th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): Aldebaran is the first of the six-day week in the New Revised USC, the equivalent to a Monday in the Julian calendar. As I had traveled back from Knoxville and Big Ears yesterday and this is my first full day back home, today feels like a Monday to me. Fitting it's Aldebaran.

I sat today for the first time since the Fourth Day of the Zenith, the 22nd of Spring. I was too busy to sit during the festival - hell, most days I was too busy to eat or sleep, much less sit. Knowing a gap was coming up in my schedule, I allowed myself to also miss sitting on the day before I left, so I could complete some chores like laundry, shopping, packing, etc., so today was my first time sitting in nine days.

It was worse last year. My records show that in 2025 I missed 12 days around the Big Ears festival, and after resuming sitting twice, I missed another two weeks for some reason or another before I got back in the rhythm of sitting every other day again. That gap in last year's schedule is a stark reminder of the need for vigilance to maintain my practice. 

Axios reports that the oil shortage triggered by the Iran war will spread globally in a slow-motion crisis, much like the covids did five years ago. The shock will unfold sequentially rather than simultaneously, a rolling supply disruption moving westward, dictated by shipping times and buffered unevenly by regional inventories. Asia is feeling the pain of lost supply now, but the pain is still muted elsewhere.

The average gas price in the U.S. is $4.02 today, up from $3.06 in January and a preview of the pain to come. Prices could get high enough to force people and companies to stop using oil, eventually taking cars and trucks off the road, ships off the sea, and planes out of the sky.

In his post-apocalyptic, post-peak World Made by Hand novels, James Howard Kunstler imagines the downfall of society and the modern world begins with severe disruptions to the global supply chain. In the novels, the disruption is started by a terroristic act on a container vessel, but in the reality we're all living through now, the disruption is predicated by the Stable Genius' terrorism in Iran and followed by Iran's blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, which could eventually collapse the entire global supply chain.

As you might guess, things don't go well for the world in the novels.

 

The Topaz Glove, 29th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): I'm back from Big Ears, exhausted but happy for all the great music I heard. I only got about five hours of sleep each night since Thursday, so I'm quite exhausted now.  It was tiring, but worth it.

However, please be patient and give me one more day before I resume the usual posting. Thank you for your kindness. 

 

Day of the Ascendant, 28th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): Last day of Big Ears 2026. I actually wrote and posted this several days ago and post-dated it for today, so for all we know I may have ascended myself by now, carried off to the celestial heavens on open-form improvisational music. I may be sleeping off a bender along the railroad tracks under the Gay Street bridge or I may have turned my car around on the way up for some inexplicable reason and never arrived up here. Who knows? I sure as shit don't.

But if all's gone according to plan, today I'm taking in the final day of the 2026 Big Ears festival and will head back home tomorrow, when "normal" (whatever that is) posting will resume.   

 

The Overheard Rites, 27th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Deneb): The Third Day of Big Ears in one possible version of the New Revised Universal Solar Calendar. If I had more time, I might be tempted to write something about all the rites I've been overhearing at the festival this year, but that would be forced and corny so it's probably just as well I don't have the time.  

It's also No Kings Day here in the United States. Find a local protest and get out there are be heard. 

 

Bridge of Dread, 26th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Castor): Big Ears, Day 2. You know the situation - there's a time for blogging and there's a time for music, and this is the latter.  

 

Godsong of the Pale Blue Women, 25th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Often, while I'm in my alternating-day meditation, I'll have a stream of thought that I'll want to post here in this blog. But after I'm done and sit down in front of the computer, I find that either the thought was way more involved and convoluted than I could possibly try to capture in a single blog post, or that I can capture portions of it but can't find a starting point to jump in on, or, most often, that I can't remember the "genius" idea I wanted to write down. The memory is like a dream, vivid at first, half gone by the morning's first cup of coffee, and completely forgotten by noon. 

Leave it to Michael Pollan to describe the ephemeral nature of thought far better than I can ever hope.  Our so-called thoughts, he writes in A World Arises, "are preverbal, often showing up as images, sensations, or concepts, with words trailing behind as a kind of afterthought - belated attempts to translate hose elusive wisps of meaning into something more substantial and shareable." 

Exactly. We understand and know what we're thinking without needing the words to nail it down. I might forget a person's name or a movie title, but I know full well who or what I'm thinking of and don't need a label in my mind to identify them. A smile, a nod, and a simple "thank you" might have made my day, and I recall the sensation without having to tell myself it was, say, Joan White from accounting, and when I tell someone else how much I appreciated the gesture, I find that the name "Joan" is suddenly gone because I didn't need the proper noun for it to exist in my memory. 

Also, while I might use full sentences to reconstruct a thought ("last night, I was thinking about a sunset I once saw in Lanzarote"), when I was actually remembering that sunset last night, my mind didn't form the words "a sunset I once saw in Lanzarote." In my mind, I just imagined the reddish sky over the ocean blue, and felt the fading warmth of the crepuscule sun. Our memories, the stories we tell to ourselves, depend on words, but the faculty of memory, the way they actually arise in our minds, doesn't need language - we already know what we're thinking.  

In Ulysses, James Joyce accurately mimicked the mind's stream-of-consciousness wording, but it's difficult and sometimes annoying to read the words. "Hmm, mustn't," Leopold Bloom thinks to himself. "On the dresser, the letter. Breakfast, eggs. Nearly time." If he were trying to tell someone else what he was thinking right then, he'd say he was trying to not think about what his wife was doing back at home at that very moment, because he saw the letter from her lover on the dresser thar morning saying they would be trysting within the hour. But all those words aren't how thoughts arise, and "Hmm, mustn't. On the dresser, the letter. Breakfast, eggs. Nearly time," is much closer, and that's how Joyce writes it in Ulysses (actually, something like that - with apologies to Mr. Joyce, I'm too lazy to go look that passage up to get the exact wording, but you get the idea).

I'm driving to Knoxville today and don't have the time to post much else here today. I may not return to posting until The Topaz Glove, the 29th Day of Spring (March 30 to y'all), but I may post some late-night or early-morning updates about the Big Ears sets over at Music Dissolves Water and on Instagram, if you know how to find me there.   

Car. Long trip. No time. Music first.

 

The Ant Garden, 24th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): One thing old Angus MacLise would never have anticipated was the four-day Big Ears music festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. I firmly believe MacLise would have appreciated and enjoyed it, and participated in it with his friends Lou Reed and John Cale and La Mont Young (who had a composition premiere here a couple years ago), but MacLise passed away some 30 years before the festival even began.  

But in an imaginary, alternative time line, one wonders if MacLise would have been tempted to add four days of Big Ears to his Universal Solar Calendar (i.e., Day of Big Ears, Second Day of Big Ears, etc.). I've been tempted to add it to my New Revised USC, but the dates aren't the same every year (it's generally the last full weekend in March), and the whole purpose of the New Revision is for annual repeatability and regularity. Can't have a name day that's the 25th of Spring one year and the 23rd another year.     

All of which is probably the most awkward and nerdiest way possible to say the Big Ears music festival starts tomorrow, and I'll be going. There's no single bucket-list, must-see performer appearing this year. However, I'm looking forward to hearing some of John Zorn's sets in his third residency here in the past four years, including the first reunion of his original Masada quartet (1994-97), as well as guitarists Fred Frith, Jeff Parker, Nels Cline, Marc Ribot, and Mary Halvorson, all of whom I've seen at least once or more before at previous Big Ears since 2018. Vibraphonist Patricia Brennan will be presenting her outstanding septet and drummer Ches Smith will be performing with his new Clone Row band. Even drummer Dave Lombardo of the band Slayer will be there for a set with Zorn and keyboardist John Medeski. A first (for me, as well as many others, I suspect) will be the legendary but elusive downtown musician and artist Charlemagne Palestine, a contemporary of La Mont Young who probably knew MacLise. 

Pat Metheny is making his Big Ears debut this year and I haven't seen him since 1987, but I'll miss his 2½-hour set tomorrow night due to conflicts with other performances at or about the same time. Ditto Laurie Anderson, who I saw at Big Ears 2024 and who returns this year for several performances, including a duet with Zorn. But again, conflicts and schedule issues. 

The ghost of Lou Reed hangs over this year's festival. Not only is his widow, Laurie Anderson, performing, as is his pre-Velvets contemporary Charlemagne Palestine, but there will be an installation piece on Sunday at an old Greyhound station of Reed's guitars leaning against amplifiers to create a continuous feedback drone, accompanied by various, as-yet unannounced musicians selected by Anderson. 

The festival is like an ocean - so big you can't even drink half of it in. At any given moment, there may be as more than a dozen performances on separate stages, and one can only be at one place at a time. That can get frustrating, especially if you have FOMO, and the Zen approach is to just enjoy the set you're experiencing at any given moment and not think about all that you're missing. 

The way I look at it is Big Ears in a major event, an international gathering of an astonishing number of world-class musicians, all performing, collaborating, and improvising together in the unlikely location of Knoxville, Tennessee, a mere four-hour drive away. The event is not about me, or any other single listener, but we get to be some small part of the titanic happening. 

And for that we should be grateful.

 

Fifth Ocean, 23rd Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): Fifth ocean of the year, second of this spring. 

It's now almost comically apparent that the Stable Genius had no strategic plan for the war in Iran, and had fully expected Tehran to surrender after the first day of bombing. 

You can't blame him, though. He's used to dealing with the Democrats.  

Fifth Day of the Zenith, 22nd of Spring, 526 M.E. (Electra):  Oh, fun! There's yet another new climate-change study out! Always a big day in the WDW household! 

This one, State of the Global Climate, 2025, was prepared by the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, and documents  the rapid, large-scale changes to Earth's climate, and their impacts on human health and natural systems, including contributions to food insecurity, and displacement of people, i.e., the mass migration of climate refugees. 

Let's start with the basics. The temperature of the Earth changes in response to the rate at which energy enters and leaves the planetary system. That's a common-sense, and hopefully non-controversial, observation - if more energy enters the system than leaves, the planet warms up; if more energy leaves than enters, the planet cools off. 

Greenhouse gases reduce the rate at which energy leaves the system. That's a basic physio-chemical fact, not an opinion or some far-fetched theory, but its inconvenient truth has lead some to try and cast doubt on that. Think of an actual greenhouse - the glass panes let in warming solar energy, but trap the heat inside the structure, leading to an accumulation of excess energy (i.e., heat). The atmosphere works the same way, but instead of glass panes, with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (e.g., methane, nitrous oxide). 

In 2024, the last year for which figures are available, the atmospheric concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide reached their highest level in 800,000 years. The concentration of CO₂ (423.9 ppm) was 3.5 ppm more than in 2023 and 152% of the estimated pre-industrial concentration (in 1750). Based on proxy data (e.g., geology, glaciology, etc.), the current concentration of CO₂ is higher than at any time in at least 2 million years.   The increase is due to continued CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels, increased wildfire emissions, and the reduced capacity of the oceans, forests, and other eco-systems to absorb CO₂. 

The past three years were the warmest three in the 176-year combined record of land and sea-level temperatures. The year 2025 is the second or third warmest year, depending on the dataset used, slightly cooler than the record warmth of 2024, due in part to the transition from El Niño at the start of 2024 to La Niña in 2025. 

However, the warming seen at the surface represents just 1% of  the excess energy trapped by greenhouse gases. The vast majority of the excess energy – around 91% – has been absorbed by the oceans in the form of heat. In 2025, the oceans reached a new record high temperature. As well as absorbing the heat, the oceans have also absorbed around 29% of the man-made emissions of CO₂ in the past decade. Although this helps to buffer the effects of climate change, it unfortunately also alters the chemical composition of the ocean water, reducing  the pH in a process known as ocean acidification.

Another 3% of the excess energy warms and melts glacial ice.  The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have both lost significant mass since satellite records began. The last ten years have seen eight of the ten largest ice retreats of individual glaciers since 1950. 

The extent of sea ice in the Arctic has decreased in all seasons since satellite measurements began in 1979, and the annual maximum extent in 2025 was the lowest or second lowest in the observed records. The extent of sea ice around Antarctica had been showing a small long-term increase up until 2015, but since then has decreased significantly and the past four years have seen the four lowest Antarctic sea-ice minima on record. 

Of course, both the warming of the ocean and the melting of glaciers and ice sheets on land have contributed to the long-term global rise in mean sea level. The rate of global sea-level rise has increased since satellite measurements began in 1993, an is rising faster and higher than previously suspected.

Extreme weather, including flooding, droughts, cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes, continue to drive new and protracted displacement of people globally, with particularly severe consequences in fragile and conflict-affected regions. These events have not only destroyed homes, infrastructure and ecosystems, but also undermine resilience and pose serious risks to people on the move and those already living in displacement  – many of whom are excluded from national preparedness and response plans.

Not mentioned in the U.N. report, but the ongoing war in Iran is not only releasing staggering amounts of CO₂ but will likely result in a rebuilding on the fossil-fuel production infrastructure, locking the world into a renewed cycle of fossil-fuel dependency. While it's impossible to predict all of the regional and global geo-political outcomes of the war, past conflicts have results in mass migrations putting more people at higher risk of the affects on the changing climate.  

 

Fourth Day of the Zenith, 21 of Spring, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Imagine a group of climate scientists trying to verify the record of Earth's temperatures, snowfall, and precipitation for the past 1,000 years. Climate records exist for the past 150 or so years, but I doubt I'm the only one who questions the accuracy and precision of global temperature measurements in the 1870s. So climate scientists examine ice cores from Greenland, tree rings, lake-bottom sediments, and other indirect indicators of climate and temperature.

Now, imagine that those scientists learned that a monastery in Tibet had not only been keeping detailed and meticulous rain- and snowfall records for the past 1,000 years, but also documenting their methods for taking the measurements. I think it's safe to say the scientists would be very interested in examining that record.

But Western scientists, at least, who are studying consciousness seem very unwilling to consider the observations and findings of Buddhist monks in meditation. The remote monasteries of Tibet, China, and Japan have been directly observing human consciousness since the time of the Buddha (roughly 500 B.C.E.) and recording their observations and conclusions, but that's considered "religion" or at the very least "subjective data," and off limits to modern science.

This isn't an "anti-science" screed by any means, but part of the reason that science works and works so well is that it's based on objective and impartial observations, and experiments that are reproducible and findings that can be confirmed by other, independent scientists. But consciousness, by its very definition, is subjective and personal. It's what a person experiences and what it's like to have that experience, and that kind of touchy-feely, intangible, and irreproducible phenomena is complete anathema to science. 

So instead, scientists study neurons and the biological functioning of the brain and learn amazing things about neurology and neuroscience, but don't learn a thing about actual consciousness. They perform psychological studies and experiments on humans, but their observations and findings are reduced to behaviorism, and they miss the boat entirely on consciousness. 

Most of what the West knows about consciousness has come from philosophers, artists, and a handful of renegade psychiatrists. But in Tibet, Kyoto, and elsewhere, there are many monasteries that have functioned like observatories for centuries. Their records are every bit as detailed and precise as astronomical observatories as they study consciousness and the mind, recording their findings and developing theories on their results. 

Scientists have studied the monks, hooking them up to EEGs to record brainwaves and neural activity, etc., but they are missing what it is the monks are observing. It's like an astronomer showing up at any ancient celestial observatory and studying the telescope, not the recorded observations.

Personally, I don't agree with all of the theories that the Tibetans have derived from their observations and study. I think their conclusions are too steeped in Tibetan culture and mysticism, but I'm still intensely interested in what they've observed and even if I find some of their theories implausible, those theories still speak to the experience of their observations.    

 

Third Day of the Zenith, 20th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Castor): I had been wondering about this, but unlike the price per gallon of gasoline, I wasn't sure how to research the answer. But reporting today in The Guardian reveals that the Stable Genius' war in Iran has emitted 5.5 million  tons of greenhouse gases in its first 14 days, roughly the same as a medium-size, fuel-intensive economy like Kuwait and more carbon than the 84 lowest emitting countries combined.

• Destroyed buildings surprisingly constitute the largest element of the estimated carbon cost. About 20,000 civilian buildings have been damaged so far, with total emissions of 2.6M tons of CO₂ equivalent.


• I had thought fuel would be the second biggest source, with US bombers flying in from as far away as England to carry out raids over Iran. However, analysis has shown it to be the second largest, with between 40M and 70M gallons of fuel consumed by aircraft, support vessels, and vehicles in the first 14 days of the war.


• Between 2.5 and 5.9 million barrels of oil have been burned in the war, including the Iranian retaliations on its Gulf neighbors.


• Destroyed military hardware, including four U.S. aircraft, 28 Iranian aircraft, 21 naval vessels, and about 300 missile launchers, resulted in release of 190,000 tons of CO₂ equivalent.


• The bombs, missiles and drones themselves (6,000 U.S. and Israeli strikes inside Iran, about 1,000 missiles and 2,000 drones from Iran, and 1,900 interceptors fired to defend against them) contributed about 60,000 tons of CO₂ equivalent.

In short, the war has been a climate disaster. And just as bad, the disruption to fossil-fuel supplies will probably lead to more oil drilling. Historically, every US‑driven energy shock has been followed by a surge in new drilling, new LNG terminals, and new fossil‑fuel infrastructure. This war risks hard‑wiring another generation of carbon dependence.

This is not a war for security. It’s a war for the political economy of fossil fuels – and the people paying the price are Iranian civilians and working‑class communities in the U.S. and around the world.

Meanwhile, the weather outside is cuckoo-bird crazy pants. Tuesday afternoon, I was out driving in freezing sleet. Today, I walked a 7.1-mile Jackson in shorts and a tee in 80° weather.

 

Second Day of the Zenith, 19th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): The price per gallon of petroleum and gasoline are skyrocketing due to the Stable Genius' war in Iran. The average estimated price in the U.S. is now $3.91/gallon and rising.  "Yeah," the online trolls on antisocial media say, "but it's still cheaper than it was under Obama."

I looked it up. Surprise, surprise, they're not right, but they're also not quite as wrong as I had thought they'd be. 

In 2008, the last year of George Bush's presidency, the average price of gasoline in the U.S. was $3.27/gal, based on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Due to the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, the price dropped by almost a dollar to $2.35/gal in Obama's first year in office (2009). During the subsequent years, the price rose back up to $3.64 in 2012, and I remember Newt Gingrich campaigning for President carrying a five-gallon gas tank around with him everywhere he went to remind voters of the cost of oil. During Obama's second term, the price dropped down to $3.36 in 2014, and then in 2015 and 2016, the oil market crashed due to a global oversupply of petroleum, and the price of gasoline fell all the way down to $2.10 by Obama's last year. I didn't hear Gingrich commenting on that.

So, in summary, during the Obama years of 2009-2016, the average price for a gallon of gasoline was $2.10 to $3.64, with an average cost of $2.93/gal, which is less than the current $3.91, even at its peak. The trolls are wrong. 

During the Stable Genius' first term, the price of gasoline stayed below $2.64/gal, and then fell all the way to $2.17 during the covid pandemic of 2020 due to low demand.  

In 2022, during Biden's presidency, Putin invaded Ukraine, upsetting European supply lines and causing a global panic. The price of gasoline shot up to $3.97/gal that year before settling back down to $3.30 in Biden's last year (2024). So the MAGA trolls could correctly say that the current price of gasoline is still lower than the peak price under Biden, if only by six cents, but even then that was only for one of his four years. And the reason for the current high prices aren't Putin's invasion of Ukraine or anywhere else, but the Stable Genius' invasion of Iran. He brought this down on himself.

If I were a right-wing troll, I would adjust the numbers for inflation. The peak price of gasoline under Obama in 2012 was $4.30/gal in inflation-adjusted dollars, and the peak price under Biden was $4.10 in 2022, adjusting for inflation. Both peaks are obviously above the current price (for now) of $3.91. But aside from cost comparisons, the reasons for the Obama and Biden peaks weren't the reckless actions of those presidents, while the current spike is unquestionably due to the Stable Genius' adventures in Iran along with his black-out drunk, weekend-news host Secretary of Defense.