Author: K. L. Homme
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Field Note 1.R: The Coup Clux Clown Rides Again
You see, I was in Russia the night Putin took power. It was New Year’s Eve, 1999, when Yeltsin resigned and appointed the former KGB agent as Acting President of the Russian Federation. Putin’s campaign against the free press began almost immediately.
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Waypoint 2.4: The Soul, The Strongman, and The Second Sex
Venus was more than that — she was an institution. An aging one, whose will was carved, it seems, in stone tablets. And like all aging institutions that feel their power waning, she longed to reclaim old glory — to make herself great again.
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Waypoint 2.3: The Birth of Pleasure
“Who are you?” she asks. With an infinitely tender voice, the stranger replies: “That, I can never say. Nor do you need to know who I am — if you love me.” Night after night, he returns to this room — to her. And night after night, they make love in the moonless dark. Invariably,…
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Field Note 2.2: Of ICE and Men
In this Field Note, I follow the ghostly echoes of California’s past — from Miwok and Chumash place names to masked raids by modern ICE agents. In a land shaped by snowmelt and migration, we ask: What happens when old names remain, but new dispossessions unfold? The rivers carry more than water. They carry tears.
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Waypoint 2.2: Of Wings, Words, and Sacrificial Hearts
“Every time we speak one of these words, an ancient Nahuatl spirit is let loose to circle on the wind. Speech is a kind of resurrection.”
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Field Note 2.1: The Wind Has No Papers
Not long after, we found ourselves witness to the tail end of the annual migration of California tortoiseshell butterflies, lifted upslope on Lassen’s invisible updrafts. Many had journeyed from northern Mexico and Baja California — without proper papers, their wings notwithstanding. And yet we do not call them “illegal.”
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Waypoint 2.1: To Gain the Wider View
From Chapter 2, “The Soul’s Ascent” “Expectations are the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, we lose today.” — Seneca The fresh fall air of mid-September — for fall does begin early at this elevation, now more than 9,000 feet above the Central Valley floor — was crisp, cool, and it grew slightly…
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Waypoint 1.4: The Map Is Not the Mountain
What is knowledge, really, but a certain something that works? Something woven from within, spun out spider-like, from the silken stuff of experience, stories, legends, and dreams?
No Shortcuts to Now 