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Remaking To Death

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The Hook of Fishing

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The Hook of Fishing dperu

Cook Inlet, AK- You're a commercial salmon fisherman and you rise in the morning at 5 am. It's clear outside and blue-purple bright because this is summer, it's June. After seven months of numbing darkness, at last you're back on the water, out with the elements. Your outboard motor groan-roars as you throttle, moan-coughs when you slow. Six-inch whitecaps ride shadow-backed swells ahead of you, miles of pine-lined shore melt into the sea behind, and that's glacier-brewed oxygen in your lungs, an intoxicating blend of mountain and stream.

This is fishing again, living again.

Soon the salmon will run to spawn and you hope to trap them, fill your fridge, your freezer and your bank account. Only it wasn't so easy to rise this morning, nor yesterday, nor any morning this spring. Fishing for sockeyes isn't what it used to be in this inlet, not by a longline. Looking at the summer ahead you see a chaos-mined calendar, nasty mounds of moose dropping on every square like:

Pukers, the weekend anglers down from Anchorage and mobile homers up from the states seeking nature in otter-skin waders and canvas vests with sixty ventilated pockets. Pukers invade like NASCAR is in town, popping tents and beer bottles not only on the rocks and sand of your otherwise pristine beach but also on your property, so lock the outhouses. They're called pukers because after the coolers are cleaned of brew and restocked with fresh filets, the tourists disappear and only the barf of their binge remains: bloody, rotting fish carcasses; enough aluminum for several aircraft; six-pack rings and Styrofoam to season the sea; and sinkholes of buried trash left by those hundreds too lazy for Glad E-Z Ties.

Kings, the Chinook, the strain of damn big salmon every puker wants as a trophy. Some fella caught a 97-pounder in 1985, breaking the world record and announcing your fishery to the world, and, ever since, it's been hotels under construction here, restaurants raised there, pukers in your way everywhere. Now tourism and sport fishing dominate the economy, as if you came to Alaska looking for company.

Fish and Game, the limp but lethal state appendage that directs you not only when and where to pee, but also what shape puddle to make. These are the guys running around in brown and green checking sonar river counters, casting test-boat nets and flying above you in a twin-props to make certain they know where the fish are going. Theoretically, Fish and Game works to ensure that a species is sustainable. In reality, they're mediators between competing interests: yours to catch and sell salmon, pukers' to catch and mount salmon, and salmon themselves to reach the lakes and rivers to reproduce. But now that thousands and thousands of pukers literally stand shoulder-to-shoulder for miles in every river around, Fish and Game's been forced to impede your operation so enough trophies will find baited hooks and each puker will leave convinced to return next season. This means you're not fishing as often as you used to be, means you're now allowed only two 12-hour fish periods per week, and means they can take those periods away an hour before you expect to set nets. Furthermore, salmon don't run on schedules. They come like a faucet that pulses on and off, never routinely, so four million might find the inlet one afternoon, then only ten or twenty thousand arrive the next. The result, if Fish and Game has you on shore skipping rocks during a monster run, is doubly defeating: not only do you miss the immediate fish, but too many salmon find their way upriver. When too many salmon make it upriver, then too many eggs are spawned, too many little fish share the lakes and rivers' food supply before entering the ocean, and too many of them aren't strong enough to survive. All of this means less salmon returning to your inlet in the following years.

Theoretically, Fish and Game works to ensure that a species is sustainable -- in reality, they're mediators between competing interests, and less salmon are expected to return to the Cook Inlet in the coming years.

Yen, the currency offered by the Japanese, the world's most devoted seafood consumers. The yen lost its bearings in the Southeast Asian banking crisis of the mid-90s while your American dollars rose on a tech-driven economy. How long ago was 1990? In fishermen's years, far more than thirteen. Back then the imperial island bought so many fish you sold salmon at two and a half dollars a pound. Last year prices dropped below four bits a pound, fifty cents below the twenty-year average. It stings, yes. But even worse, the cash-strapped Japanese found cheaper suppliers to satisfy their enormous appetite.

These cheaper suppliers are Fish farms, conglomerate-run creations in Chile, Norway, Scotland and Canada that breed salmon to exact weight specifications by pumping pills into dockside pens until the normal growth cycle accelerates four years. The farms really took hold in 1992, when the Japanese market peaked but you couldn't sell any fish because Exxon dumped 11 millions gallons of oil into your water. These pens are biological catastrophes where accumulated waste creates environmental dead zones along coastlines. Yes, the pens are also breeding grounds for sea lie and other diseases easily passed onto wild fish. And yes, these farmed fish must be fed your wild salmon -- ground into fishmeal, can you imagine -- in order to obtain any of the cholesterol-reducing Omega 3 oils that before made your sockeyes the most sought after in the world. Moreover, these fish are available year round and cheap to produce. So no, it doesn't appear you'll be reclaiming much of the 90% of the market you lost to these cellar-dwelling sellers.

Of course, if you put all that beneath the rubber souls of your Extra-Tough knee boots, there's still plenty to worry about. For one, there's always the threat of another oil spill and the stress of pursuing and waiting for your initial court-ordered settlement from Exxon. Then there's your back, which isn't getting any younger, and your crew, which now turns over each season. Deal with all of the above, swallow it or squash it, and waiting for you is the sea, which hasn't slowed with age. It still resists your nets with common counteroffensives like legions of knot-covered logs, supernaturally-spreading kelp, twigs, tires and flounder, and it still rushes your inlet with the world's second-fastest tide, giving its very best to topple your skiff with a swell or suck you away under the ebb.

Captain Ron Garrant Dropping Buoys for Another Salmon Run

Why then are you back on the water this summer? What purpose is worth this stress and struggle? Why tolerate being handcuffed on shore while salmon rush past like a frenzied freeway? Why swallow another drop in prices -- this one now a full dollar short of where you swore you'd never sell below? Why provoke arthritis and tendonitis and slipped discs and muscle fever? For what earthly reason do you still battle these disparate forces all prying at your piece of the ever-shrinking salmon pie?

Well, there is no reason when the means to an end become an end themselves.

Ask a fisherman why he fishes, you're asking him the meaning of life. Right now the Cook Inlet fishery is in danger. Fish & Game expects only half of 13,000 commercial fishing permits to be activated this year. To be sure, stakes are being pulled. But visit Alaska in July and you'll still find beaches painted with boats, water dotted with buoys, fishermen setting nets. There's still thousands of locals living off the labor and thousands more like me swooping in for a summer fling.

What it is, we fish to escape. Sure, get off the plane in Anchorage and you'll still find a Wal-Mart, Blockbuster and McDonald's within a few miles. There's malls and movie theatres and traffic cops as well. And in certain areas the black-socks-and-leather-sandals tourists swarm like children under a pi�ata. But it's different.

Right now the Cook Inlet fishery is in danger; Fish & Game expects only half of 13,000 commercial fishing permits to be activated this year.

In Alaska, if you can't see a snow-topped mountain from where you're standing, just climb a tree because one's in range. The towns may be American, but the land is unbound. Work the Cook Inlet and your office is a natural cathedral -- to the south is open blue sea, the edge of the world; east is a pine-lined shore with marbled bluffs; west and north is one jagged horizon where volcanic peaks give way only to glacier-filled valleys. It's awe-inspiring, even without the summer sunsets that wax the water pink, purple and gold for six hours nightly.

So the land itself swallows your heart. Stop by for a tour and you'll leave with some slides and maybe a souvenir. But go there to set nets and you'll leave with something new inside of you: the bite of purple morning air as you leave shore, the rub of the sun off the water at noon, the bitterness of salt water at midnight when you've still three nets to pull, the heavenly smoke of a fire as you finally return to the beach, and, everlasting, the power of knowing you battled the wild and survived to face it another day. It's an escape to revisit the year round, to recall when stuck in traffic or tenth in line at Safeway. It's a feeling that fills and lasts -- knowing there's still a place in this world to work with nature, feeling it on your skin and in your bones and, for once, fully appreciating its force.

Alaskan fishing, of course, is much more than stunning surroundings and wild communion. Set-netting in the Cook Inlet -- rated as the nation's most labor-intensive industry in the early 1990s -- is as primal an industry as you'll find. There are no hydraulic wenches or pulleys or levels in our skiffs to reel the fish-filled nets back into the boat. We work in twenty-to-thirty-foot fiberglass skiffs fitted only with a 55 Horsepower outboard motor, two-hundred-by-fifteen-foot nets, and the muscles under our raingear. Casting a net into the water from a small boat, reeling it in and cleaning it by hand -- it's the same straightforward labor natives used centuries ago to trap the same salmon run.

The Cook Inlet, a body ninety miles long and thirty wide, has the world's second fastest tide. So it floods like a firehose in a bathtub, ebbs like a spilled watertower. All our work is determined by this tide -- how we set our nets, how we pick them, how we pull them out. The challenge is to hang, handle and extract our webbed fishwalls at the same time an ebb or flood wants to rip our nets up-Inlet or out to sea.

It's man against nature in the simplest sense. Sometimes the tide is just too tremendous and there's nothing to do but sit and wait for our lines to loosen up. Usually, though -- or about 90% of the day -- the tide's just manageable that if you sweat and bleed, scream and roar, put your back into it and then your legs and your arms and your quaking hands, you'll be able to catch fish. The work is pulling a recliner-sized buoy out of the tide and into your boat with one hand in one second before it sails away. The work is attaching a two-hundred-foot long net to the buoy by means of a keg-knot before the groundlines tighten and the tide rips everything right out of your hands and downstream. The work is battling your boat across a net from buoy to buoy and picking each seven-pound fish on the way as swells knock you sideways and your lines jerk like swerving semis. The work is dangerous, and the work has absolutely no schedule.

One false move can find your raingear snagged on an outgoing net, your body tossed airborne and then pulled underwater with the tide.

So much of life is spent trying to fulfill potential, to find where we'd be if we went as far and as hard as our full efforts can take us. In the Cook Inlet fishery, it's not your decision -- every fish day you'll learn exactly what you can do. Fish & Game decides when we fish and for how long, which means that when they say go, we go until the whistle blows. Salmon pulse through the Inlet like a mosquito-swarm -- without a schedule, here one minute, gone the next. Often we spend weeks setting countless nets and capturing only logs and bitterness. Then a run hits and we may work one, two, three and, in the past, up to fourteen days straight. There's no consolation for missing a fish period, so we go when they do. Hours on the water turn into days, days into weeks, a season into years. First you'll feel firecrackers in your forearms as they pop and bubble with muscle fever, then your brain revolts -- flashes of escape, quitting, demanding a return to shore -- but the catch is once you've signed on, for a day or a season, there's nothing to do but work until your boss or Fish & Game or the salmon themselves decide the work day is done.

Where Mountains Meet the Sea

The mental strain, of course, is excruciating. Taking to the water means taking your life into your own hands. Now, set-netting doesn't involve one-hundred dead sailors each season like crabbing in the Bering Sea, but one false move can find your raingear snagged on an outgoing net, your body tossed airborne and then pulled underwater with the tide. One unforeseen swell can knock you unconscious against the hull. And one entirely wrong maneuver can kill your engine and leave you drifting in an Inlet that pours into the sea. So we work our bodies as far as they'll go, but beyond that we condition our minds to stay alert and aware, keep our brains from bailing out into daydreams while the task at hand repeatedly tempts us to turn tail and flee.

Set-netting requires a very specific skills set, one a worthy captain displays so well you can't help but imitate. These maneuvers and the right mindset are our protection against the dangers of fishing and the sea. There's a way to tie each knot fast and correctly. There's a way to position your skiff to absorb swells. There's a way to leverage five more inches from that cable-tight groundline. There's a way to pick a fish in ten seconds and another to fumble with it for an hour. There's a way to do every thing right and a way to do everything wrong. Immerse yourself in the skilled actions of set-netting and you can't help but spiral further and further into the moment, losing yourself until the rest of the world slips out of your head, down your back, and skips off your backside to disappear in the puddle of salmon guts and seawater inside your skiff. That's the focus required to handle a monster run on a stormy day, a congruence of thoughts and actions producing one ever-moving and efficient fisherman. It's an experience like no other.

A Skiff Returns at Midnight, Heavy With Fish

And that's just it, there's nothing else like Alaskan fishing. At first, everyone comes North for the same reasons. They heard the labor was extreme but the pay incredible. They heard the sea spit gold if one only invested. They heard if you could do the work you'd win the lottery. Well, the lottery days are over, but the Inlet's still a nest of fishing crews. Thousands try their hand and never come back, but others stay and others return every season. They do so because while chasing fortune they instead found a thrill so flavorful all other pursuits will be damned come summertime. It's the humbling display of this planet's power and beauty, the real and immediate pressure to perform under threatening stress, the journey past all thoughts outside of fishing; this is the escape Alaska offers every summer. This is the pull of the summer tide. This is the hook of fishing.

a-diction.com

INTERVIEW WITH
Robert Ray Hedges - Part 1

Robert Ray Hedges is a resolute proponent of physical immortality, an outsider whose lone voice cries into the void of our technological 'collective consciousness', the internet. His goal ('mandatory immortalisation' for all), his rhetoric ('shall we stop brining all children into this world just to kill them?') and his methods (most recently a large scale occupation of online message posts, guest books and free webhosts) are uncompromising, his logic bewildering and his perspective fearsome. We also found the self-declared 'King of the Internet' to be approachable and genuine. There's certainly no one else like him.

An early phase of Hedge's plan to raise awareness and support for physical immortality was an aggressive letter writing campaign to elected political leaders, heads of media and business people. His letters bordered on threatening as they accused their recipients of culpability in a world-wide conspiracy of infanticide. Unsurprisingly, he received no reply to any of the dozens of letters he sent.

Although Hedges' definition of murder is broader than most, a hard look at the facts shows government and business, with media support, to be pursuing a campaign of death and destruction. The world's leaders, who could effect dramatic change by leveraging even a fraction of their immense resources, were clearly not ready to heed the call action. But such lack of response was no set back for Hedges. His writings make two related points clear: that the drive to death is a form of indoctrination, mass-hypnotism even, that has penetrated deeply into the human psyche, and that most adults have internalized this death wish so utterly that they view dying perversely as 'inevitable' and eminently 'natural'. For him, the silence of the adult world on the issue of physical immortality is only to be expected.

Recently, Hedges has switched his focus and begun to target a wider and more diverse audience. His privileged addressees have become children, his aim is to captivate a younger generation before they are fully conditioned with pro-death beliefs. Employing saturation techniques in a single-minded bombing campaign, he has declared himself alternately the 'King of the internet' and a 'digital messiah'. From a home base of www.physical-immortality.com, Hedges has spread himself out across the web through gratuitous use of free web hosting, guestbooks and message boards. The statement "Robert Ray Hedges is acquiring the collective minds space of all of humanity to create the Children's Immortalisation Network aspect of Mortality Resolution International" haunts innumerable corners of otherwise unrelated sites (I have found his footprints on websites devoted to the preservation of Meigs airport in Chicago, a personal home page of a faerie-loving 14 year-old, and an online class discussion for would-be court-room reporters, to name a few). A recent web search for 'Robert Ray Hedges' yielded 26,300 results and a query for 'physical immortality' produces a Hedges heavy return, with three of his pages in the first ten results.

Image from physical-immortality.com

Following are the direct transcripts of email interviews conducted with Robert Ray Hedges over the latter part of 2002 and early 2003.

Rbt Hedges Interview:

This is my own language and is not meant to impress or confuse....I can be less vague when I learn how talk to a persons' level of understanding, hopefully void of fear. Everything I say can be stolen, quoted and evolved and changed. You never need my permission to use "my" material.

A-D: What methods or technologies do you see as the most useful and realizable ways to achieve physical immortality?

[[[[A movie would be fast! An already famous or famous/rich person, GIVING THEIR LIFE TO THEIR LIFE, would blast a wave of psy energy into the viscous social structures of the poly-cultural opportunity.]]]]

A-D: What is the most significant cause of humanity's unquestioning embrace of the deathwish?

[[[[The Mothers inherited program to breed to kill and its attendant male hypnosis therefore. [Female primate psycho-endocrinal chemo-pavlovian root source attitude dominance creating synthetic charisma at the chemical level......etc. subconscious deception maintenance dynamics( smoke and mirrors)]]]]

A-D: What can people do to retrain their minds and overcome their addiction to death?

[[[Power comes from intention multiplied by will, multiplied by the number of participants (Law of exponential psy-synergistics) multiplied by the intention relevance quotient of the destinial priority [immortalisation efficiency] [[]] Find like kind at higher conscious levels and brainstorm immortalisation socialisation resolution strategies....

A-D: What people and organizations involved in researching immortality do you support or feel are working usefully to achieve physical immortality?

[[[[This is THE hard question....as you are the first person/s in my 6 years of internetting immortality that I have hade a REAL CONTACT! thanks! My sense is that most immortalists are capitalizing on its promise/mystique for material gain. I hope this is not the case. I must also add here that a big sector of science is already well on the right track and for them I created the virtuebios: intention relevance concept, to hone and coordinate their already highly relevant contributions.]]]

A-D: Who are the main enemies of eternal life?

[[[[More like what! The bodies are held captive by the psychical vestigual inertial traditionalisms across the span of our poly-cultural arena. One easy logical answer to that [who] is.....the most famous/wealthy/influential persons now in places of power are abusing their opportunities that they and the world have created for them....but only because of their conditioning and circumstance of arrisal. Yet, I am highly drawn to confront them all, with respect, of course. As, if they could be awakened, they could change the world in ONE WEEK! Surrender.... to lucidiy in the destinial context.]]]

A-D: What is the Quickening Prophecy?

[[[ From my sodium pentatholic dream state prejudiced perspective,(JUNE, 1972) I saw/felt the destinial enertia, sum of all will, as about to explode a time collapse of sorts. As lucidity sweeps the earth, and the singular psychologys' heal from shift-shock, the psy-synergy expands internationally, profoundly, in the grand clarification, where the evolutionary rate of intention efficiency is released from the bondages of confusion and bad attitude (Programming).]]]

A-D: What do you mean by Indigo Children?

[[[ From my present level of clarity, i saw the word (INDIGO) as a projection/confession of a lying parent-hood, filled with confusion and guilt- denied around breeding to kill and then acting like all is well. The phonetics of the words inverted, come out something like.... OUT-LIVE-STAY DERIVE FROM IN DI(E) GO. And as for CHILLED RUN.... well that becomes (warmed _____?) < I need some help here with this one.I suggest that the amount of input in the minds of new people is much higher than it was 25-50 years ago... so their hyper-intuitive aptitude is creating more defiance (protection) regarding the robotic conditioning that occurs in all cultural settings.]]]]

I look forward to learning with you soon,
Robert Ray Hedges,
Age 61,
Sedona Az
Sept 17, 2002

[Continued in Part 2]

Mr. Hedges:

Thanks for the prompt reply! We'd like to follow up on some of the topics discussed in the first round of questions in order to expand and clarify them.

A-D: We're interested in your comments about 'immortalists capitalizing on its promise for material gain'. This is a major concern with immortality research -- both in reference to scams concering 'antiaging' medicine and 'immortality devices' as well as regarding the benefits of real breakthroughs in immortality being restricted to only a small, privileged elite. Have you thought of ways to combat or overcome this? It seems to us that in order to widely distribute immortality technologies, massive economic and political upheveal may be necessary.

[[[In the pre-immortalyzing era of synthetic charisMA, para-culturally, all families use fake emotional gestures and deceitful words as each robotic generation indoctrinates the virgin baby hard-drive mind templates into the futile modality of smoke and mirrors (Psy-Politics at the foundation of all societies); psychical deception-isms are innate, and unsensed, and so the programs are transfered and the psycical subversions cascade undetected down the lineages to keep the future fossils from knowing or causing their fate.]]]

A-D: Your recent methods seem to have shifted away from contacting politicians and the media to focus more on the general populace (and children in particular) by saturating search engines, guestbooks, free webhosting, etc. Can you talk about the motivations and goals behind this shift?

I think you originally found me using the search engine mode if I remember correctly.....Theses ideas (of mine) are so "out there" for most people that attempts to contact the regular matrix types probably gets deleted. This is not an unexpected event.

I mean who wants to think that their parents are in a full on coma and create children to kill them?

So, I continue by evolving old sites and submitting new ideas aka quantum messiah and "how women cause war" etc.

Image from physical-immortality.com

A-D: Regarding 'humanity's death wish', you state that 'the Mother's inherited program to breed to kill' and 'its subconscious deception maintenance dynamics' are its primary instigators. What is the mechanism that set up such programming? Is it biological? evolutionary? Is 'evolution' something which humanity must now 'overcome'? Do you blame women for carrying out this programing/ do you view men as active participants in the death wish or are they dupes of this programming and deception maintenance dynamics?

[[[Man you are deep into it now....this is great!: Blame is complex! The universe punishes ignorance and rewards cleverness and love, in general, so what position does the "messenger/s" play who lives in the double complexity of both worlds as both a victim and an evolving rescuer aptitude. Women first, then men too, seconDAIRILY sucking (Dairy Lie) ......humor is good .....are both by innocent inheritance, co-conspiratorially victims and perpetrators of our dna sponsored unconscious behavioral pre-dispositionisms..... Where I have called it breed to kill. This dna psycho-chemical-endocrinal prejudice modality requires its victims' denial and "sleep" yet, in its fruedian slipness, it leaks all around. That's why there can be the semi-psychics, who read (and misinterpret the leaks).]]] I can go further here.... this part is crucial to get right.

A-D: Can you elaborate on your June 1972 'sodium pentatholic dream state prejudiced perspective'? We are interested in getting more insight into how you developed your views and language and how your motivations for promoting immortality were formed.

[[[ The recovery table dream was rather simple in it's profound 8 minute clarification/implication. My experience became that our atoms are micro-consciousness and they looked like eyeball/brain/hearts-ATOMS elements with differential personality traits (we call it chemistry) and an unceasing following of the laws.... sum of all physics all of the time. "They' Looked over at me when I appeared at their consciousness level and emotion-less-ly "stated" 'Do you know that you are confused?' I responded immediately without nervousness or hesitation, Yes I am confused. At this point they all returned to the flow but kept in the clarvoyance "speaking as..."we only always do this one thing, following the laws. It was as if they were pointing ahead in time and showing me what happened in the future of the destinial priority/inertia/evolution/law/implication. I left the chrono myoptic to visit the lucid is-ness creator-ness and the virtue fire/map which intuition touches and it becomes feelings, then words to match, then writings, it is a destinial decoding essence/aptitude using future memory aerobics and a lot of writing practice to hone the decoding fidelity. Because of the dynamics of psycho-synergistics, your interest enhances my quality of experience and it also amplifies the aptitude....this is why I am so grateful for your making contact. Profound squared!!!!]]]]

[I wait for your return, Truthlove!]]]

Rbt,Sedona
Sept 20, 2002 5:17 pm

It's my 61st birthday today at 9:00 pm central

[Continued in Part 3]

Part 3 (Follow up)

In re-reading the content I sent On Sept 20, 2002, I noticed that I was in a bit of a tangent and didn't answer your question well or at all regarding the whoring of immortalization...you can expect this to happen occasionally, as your question was over-ridden by a pending insight. My 'channeling' must follow its own course, and I try not to interfere.

We can and must discuss, in detail, the oldest profession and how that pre-ethicality pervades most all of human interaction.

Rbt
20 Sept 2002

===============================================

Lately my natural intuition is centered on two points.
1) The context of dna/consciousness arrisal is ETERNAL (ORIGINLESS)Para galactic dna seeds in the solar wind

2)dna is THE chemical/consciousness government of the unbounded universe in space and time.

From this beginningless unbounded space, I am drawn toexplore, to bring lucid, the role of intention and more specifically, intention relevance within self/selves love and preservationing. "Time will tell" has some intrinsic association with the twin helix. A chemical Royalty.

We get a safety depsit box yet we are not amoung the items treasured.....how sad.

Currently, I am not the least bit drawn to carbonic/siliconoid transfer modalities as a probable or even doable form of eternalized consciousness/personalised.

I sense escapism in that vector of persuit. We are Augmented Bioids already. We tend to leave out the role of pure/will/emotional energy as a resource connected to clarvoyance and the synergistics of the pending para-lucidal aptitude igniting seers throughout humanity. The future that "will" or does happen is already leaking hints about its nature across time.

we begin again....
I'll sleep on your inquiry, it's in the oven.
Rbt
Sedona