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Sunday, January 18, 2009 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM

New soles on the old slippers, January 18, 2009
New soles on the old slippers, January 18, 2009

When I made these slippers 3 years ago I went to the effort of figuring out how to them from one piece of leather and the leather I used (a lightly sanded leather like nubuck) was not very tough. With some patching I managed to get an extra year out of them but they were now way past the need for new soles. Yesterday I put on some tough old horsehide. Gaudy be danged - let them soles LAST!

Night camp

Site 7 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM

Life is to be Lived, Not Controlled

No indeed, the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me. I lived a public life and attempted to function under the assumption that the world was solid and all the relationships therein. Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health. Hence again I have stayed in my hole, because up above there's an increasing passion to make men conform to a pattern.

.... Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? - diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that were to happen. .....Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.

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