Saturday, May 12, 2012 - Lake Meredith National Recreation Area, Fritch TX
< previous day | archives | next day >
Camped at Blue West, Lake Meredith National Recreation Area, Fritch TX, May 11, 2012
Dry
Lake Meredith is nearly dry, and has been for years. The Canadian River drainage seems to be suffering a severe drought. Ute Lake, where I camped before coming here, is also a reservoir on the Canadian and it too is nearly dry.
Night camp
Blue West - Lake Meredith National Recreation Area, Fritch TX
- Verizon cell phone and broadband service - good signal and reasonable connection speeds.
- Go to the Lake Meredith National Recreation Area website
- Locate Lake Meredith National Recreation Area on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Beware of Hypnotic Media
To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you — from the cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy, fatally easy!, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.