Unwinding – Smart City to Country Roads

I recognize going on and on about my personal situation may be rather tedious. I really don’t mean to make it all about “me,” because I feel like each of our journeys are part of this unfolding multi-dimensional tapestry.

Since this is my blog, it seems like an appropriate place to tell the story from my particular point of view. For now, I’m giving myself leeway to share these loose, stream of consciousness “notes” – observations, pictures, mullings over – a work in progress. If this upsets or bores you, feel free to take a break from my blog and check back later in the summer or fall. Hopefully by then, I’ll have found my new footing.

On the way down to the Shenandoah yesterday, I was listening again to the biography of Elizebeth Friedman, a skilled codebreaker, who with her husband William laid the groundwork for cryptanalysis in the twentieth century. They were initially based at Riverbank Labs on the Fox River outside of Chicago, a stone’s throw from the future site of Fermi Lab.

The secretive Colonel Fabyan founded one of the first Defense Department think tanks in the 1910s (pre-Alfred Loomis), cultivating ties with the University of Chicago. He used his fortune to underwrite private research into plant and fruit fly genetics , bone structure, x-rays, and acoustics, the latter in partnership with Wallace Sabine. You can still purchase precision tuning forks from Riverbank Labs.

What took up much of the Colonel’s attention was research into the Baconian cipher, supposedly encrypted messages about Elizabethan England hidden in Shakespeare’s first folio. It was work on this cipher that eventually led to Elizebeth and William’s future careers in codebreaking.

Consider William’s involvement in plant genetics and codebreaking later in this post in relation to the Matter CBD sticker and the push to blockchain cannabis genetics…

William went on to found the NSA. As a team, he and Elizebeth solved complex puzzles – uniting as an extended complementary mind. That, I think, is what is intended with AR LARPy civic gaming. Maybe we can get out ahead of Niantic, Nvidia, the CIA, the Vatican…and untangle some interdimensional knots on our own?

I invite you to to consider my oversharing in that context. It’s an invitation into a collective puzzle-solving game. The one trick is we don’t have the box top image, and we don’t know what we are supposed to be making with all of these seemingly random loose parts.

Anyway, I’m going to make these notes for myself at the very least. I know looking back months or years later with more context, makes all the difference.

Qualia – it’s a topic Stephers has been digging into – personalization, biophysics, digital ledgers, umwelt, creating a big picture – the BIGGEST picture. I hope to talk more about that after I get settled.

Settlement was yesterday. I guess shouldn’t have been surprised that the office where we were to sign the documents to finalize the sale of the family home was in the Penn Mutual Life Insurance Building, founded in 1847. Think of the probability and stochastic modeling upon which the industry was built, as well as its ties to web3 through parametric deals that run on ubiquitous sensor networks.

The massive complex takes up an entire block and sits on the south side of Walnut (tree, choice theory) opposite Independence Hall (sovereign agents). It was in a Berkshire Hathaway Real Estate office, evidently they are under The Trident Group. As the notary quipped, “Warren Buffett owns us all.”

A close friend of my husband’s grandfather, Phil Carret, was a role model for Buffett. Carret, then in his 90s, came to our wedding. He helped create the world of mutual funds and was a solar eclipse chaser all his life. I continue to think automated financial markets, linked to collectivity and mutualism, are part of the superorganism emergence trajectory. Gates, Buffett, and their “Giving Pledge” is, in my opinion less about philanthropy, and more about using open source software, sensors, web3, and social impact data, to catalyze new forms of informational “life.”

https://youtu.be/KOqr17GNTJ8?feature=shared

A section of the Penn Mutual complex incorporates the Egyptian Revival facade of another nineteenth-century insurance company. Remember insurance was the brain child of inventor, publisher, electricity explorer, diplomat Ben Franklin, a supreme consciousness engineer.

The facade of the Pennsylvania Fire Insurance Company features palm columns and lintels of winged suns, both linked to longevity and the soul.

Out in front is a random sign for “The Bagel Factory,” but there was no retail store anywhere on the block that I could see. It reminded me of the symbolic everything bagel in the Academy Award winning film “Everything Everywhere All At Once.”

Nope, we can’t control everything.

After it was all over, my not-quite ex husband, and I parted ways surrounded by the bronze reliefs that comprised a massive narrative portal. An auspicious place, I suppose, to step forward into what comes next.

I couldn’t not cross the street to take one last look at the iconic symbol of freeDOM with its clock and its bell giving form to how we perceive “reality.” After taking the photo below, I turned to walk back to the car when I spied a piece of Bitcoin sticker art stuck to a pseudo-colonial lamp post, above it (upside down) was another sticker for Matter CBD, an organic cannabis outfit based southern Oregon where the growers, Cleve Backster-style, sing and talk to their plants.

Upside down matter in an era of prescribed plant medicine for altered consciousness where tokens masquerade as money, but are perhaps actually cells of some as yet indescribable life form jumping off bibliometry (Eugene Garfield) and maybe geoengineering? How to account for this sticker – a slightly blurry Bitcoin stencil on a scan of an old library check-out card (also upside down with multiple dates from the height of altered state / human potential 60s and 70s) with a jet plane flying below it all? Folks who know more about numerology, do the featured dates have any significance to you?

I kept walking, on past the American Philosophical Society, an off-shoot of the Royal Society laying out what is proper/acceptable science, while keeping esoteric objects like Kelpius’s Horologium of Achaz away from prying eyes. There you have good old Ben in the alcove, Philadelphia’s business, civic, and intellectual patriarch.

And in the next block, flanking Independence Hall to the east is the Bourse, once a commodities exchange, now an upscale tourist food court. The xoxo sculpture out front reminds me of Galia’s digital heart tokens – part of “the city that loves you back” PR campaign I suppose. Affection as tradable commodity. Boy, I got shorted this round for sure. As if to further sour my entanglement with the city, I came back to a parking ticket on my windshield. I’ve maybe gotten one other in my thirty plus years here, and I still had a half hour paid up. Stupid “smart” parking tech. I guess their sham will be the final dues I pay for my “freeDOM.”

After packing the last of my things into the car, and giving my honey locust street tree one more big hug, I headed to I-95 south. There’s part of me that hopes the children who will grow up in its lacy shade will decorate the sidewalk with chalk art as my child once did. For a time, 24th Street was a wonderful place to be.

I ended up pulling off at the University City exit to say good-bye to Bartram’s Garden where I worked for seventeen years until the lockdowns started stealing things from my life. I wanted to get a jar of local honey to sweeten the parting and see my favorite trees. The tide was in, so no mudlarking this time around. I gathered a bit of compost from inside the ancient yellow wood and rubbed it into my hands, I found a walnut with a hole that looks like a twinned portal and put it in my backpack as a keepsake. When I found my favorite, a majestic London Plane, there was the trickster energy, again. It was hosting a piece of outdoor art featuring a fox with a quizzical expression. Well played Philadelphia, well played.

For the past two nights I have been camping at Bear Den off the Appalachian Trail outside Blumont, VA. The site was the former summer estate of a wealthy DC OB-GYN and his opera singer wife. It sits on veins of milky white quartz. A few miles south is Weather Mountain, a Cold War bunker for the federal government. According to a local history write up in the lodge, Mahlon Loomis, a rather visionary nineteenth century Boston dentist conducted experiments transmitting wireless communications between two hills nearby, decades before Marconi, using gilded kites!

It’s been cold for May, and rainy. But my tent stayed dry and between the showers I explored the grounds and went out to the rocky overlook and gathered up plants to make a heart. I spied a fire pit with lots of charcoal. So, I decided to make one with that in honor of my friend Sean and his family who use biochar to feed the garden beds on their small farm in Washington State.

The lodge’s volunteer caretaker found it and was excitedly telling me about it. She said she took photos to send to her boyfriend, and was pointing it out to the incoming hikers, including a couple who said they’d recently relocated to Harpers Ferry from Washington State, which closes the circle. This heart has rose petals, wood sorrel, bramble blossoms, sassafras, puffballs, hemlock cones, fern, and quartz.

I need to pack up my tent and head a bit farther down the road to Bayse. I hear conversations of families across the clearing hauling dripping blankets and debating the merits of camping after a wet, cold night. I remember those days. I’m not sure we ever had a camping trip with good weather. Now I am a solo traveler with my stuffed bear and my house plants. I will see what it feels like to be on my own reconnaissance, finding my own grounding and my own views.