Saturday, August 15, 2009 - Red Rock, East Chatham NY
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The Midnight Striper, August 15, 2009
I spent last night in the Walmart parking lot in Pittsfield MA. About midnight I awoke to the sound of a small engine accelerating and decelerating. Strange. I look out and here's a guy on a beat up old articulated garden tractor with a striping machine hanging out front with a couple headlights carefully aimed just ahead of it. He's out there striping the parking lot. Fast. He'd slow a bit - stripe a line - then accelerate across to the next line, brake sharply and stripe the next line. Back and forth across the lot. He was done in no time flat and put nary a stripe on my rig. Cool.
BTW, that's a Crane & Co papermill steaming in the background - I wonder if that's where Crane makes currency paper.
Night camp
On my property off Less Traveled Road - The Home Place, Red Rock, East Chatham NY
- I used to camp in a few locations on what little I had left of the family farm
- In the driveway by the house
- Across the road where the barn once stood
- On the 20 acre piece off Less Traveled Road
- Now, with the kind support of the friends who now own the place, I camp across the road where the barn once stood.
- Verizon cell phone service - Terrible, barely usable with an amplifier
- Verizon EVDO service - Terrible, barely usable with an amplifier
- Find other references to Home Place
- List the nights I've camped here
- Check the weather here
That's the Point of Emotions: Survival
That's the point of emotions: survival. Normal emotions are essential to staying alive and well. ... To most people this doesn't make sense. We humans tend to think of emotions as dangerous forces that need to be strictly controlled by reason and logic. But that's not how the brain works. In the brain logic and reason are never separate from emotion. Nothing is neutral. That's what you have to remember. ... A lot of people's emotional life is unconscious a lot of the time, especially when you're calmly thinking something through. You feel like you're just using logic, but you're actually using logic guided by emotion. You just aren't aware of the emotion. ... I recommend Descartes' Error to anyone who's interested in emotions, intuition, and decision making. ... Nature seems to have tried to wire animals and people to have useful emotions, useful meaning emotions that keep us alive long enough to reproduce. Emotions keep us alive by letting us make good predictions about the future, and good predictions let us make good decisions about what comes next.