Barnegat Bay in New Jersey

Another dream post.  Last night’s dreams were another in a series of dreams in which the events of the dream occur in the same location I’m sleeping in.  For example, three days ago just before leaving for New Jersey I was sleeping in a Chippewa style wigwam which is pretty much what I call home these days.  In this dream several friends had stopped over to check out my new home in the woods.  It was a pleasant enough dream with everybody laughing and their faces lit up by the full moon.  When I woke up everything looked exactly like it had in my dreams minus the visiting friends. It was in fact a very positive dream and put at ease some of the doubts I’ve been having lately about the whole idea of living in a primitive shelter.  Unfortunately last night’s dreams along the Jersey shore were not quite as reassuring.

Strange dreams, if only I could remember them.  Yesterday I woke up in a blind panic after having slept soundly for at least six hours.  When I woke up the world was spinning, I don’t mean like I woke up and felt hung over or a little tipsy.  No when I woke up yesterday I felt like I was descending on a roller costar or trapped in an airplane corkscrewing down to earth.  I was violently dizzy.

Being half asleep I was in a confused irrational panic unsure what universe I had woken up to – all gravity and no bottom, falling, falling…I rolled on to my stomach and got on my hands and knees.    Eventually I made it on to my feet and after about 5 minutes of total confusion I was able to regain some sense of balance and wandered over to LongHall.  Thinking food was the culprit, I ate a couple of bananas.  No sooner had I tried to lie down and relax for a spell then the world started spinning again.  I had to stand up.

All day I felt lightheaded, like I was tripping on LSD.  I even had the thought that maybe I had ingested something sinister, maybe food poisoning.  That was impossible thought because I had just been sleeping of at least six hours.  I found that as long as I was standing or sitting up I could maintain  control but if I lied down and really started to relax I would slip into a kind of trance which would start pleasantly enough but would then escalate into a feeling g vertigo resulting in a panic, a feeling like I was losing control, as though the laws of physics suddenly broke down around me and I was getting sucked into the sky.

Crowley Tarot - The Fool

Finally a rainy day and I can spend some time updating my blog.  As mentioned in my previous post I’ve set put upon a three year journey to see how much I can learn about primitive living and survival skills.  Along the way I’ll be documenting my experience as best I can and providing survival tutorials and updates on lessons learned in hopes of helping out others who – like me – finding the daily grind and routines of modern life unsustainable and are desperate to find some other mode of existence.

While my ultimate goal is to live a full year in a minimalist survival situation without any modern conveniences, for now I’m setting up a home base camp at Lothlorian nature sanctuary in Needmore Indiana.  Lothorien is the perfect place for me right now, a community of nature loving folks with a passion for creating a sustainable community living in harmony with nature.  This may sound like a lot idealistic mumbo jumbo to some but by my reading of the current state of humanity the future – if there is any future to humanity – is much more likely to be arrived at though communal experiments like Lothroien then from Washington think tanks, New York bankers, or LA marketing execs.

As an undergraduate at Indiana University in Bloomington during a discussion on Nietzsche I expressed an interest in dedicating a few years of my life to learning primitive living skills and “living off the land.” My professor, Chris Kerns, then Dean of the Comparative Literature Department at IU, said for a modern person to take on a hunter gatherer life style would be to die.

Alester Crowley's Thoth Torrt Death Card

While Chris Kerns defiantly had a philosophical disposition and a flair for the dramatic, his comment on adopting a hunter gatherer lifestyle by modern peoples seems to me lately to be a valid statement. So much of who we are – our anxieties, pleasures, and pains are so completely wrapped within the context of a consumer culture. It’s very difficult if not imposable to really look at, understand, and evaluate ourselves minus the influence of modernity. So much so that to successfully removal of oneself from modernity would require a complete reappraisal of one’s own identity – and this interests me very much.   And if you agree with assigning death as a description of the changes that occur when one abandons modernity,  and returns to a life close to the earth then on August 9 Aaron Wolf will die.

Running Microsofts Internet Information Services (IIS) and a SQL Server on the same development box as WAMP can sometimes cause port conflicts resulting in Apache not starting. Suppose – hypothetically speaking – you’ve recently decided to spend some time setting up IIS server and an MS SQL server on a Vista box (Windows Vista Home Premium in my case).  Then later you switch gears and after setting up IIS and MS SQL server you decide to do some Apache and PHP development only to find that Apache is blocked on port 80.

I recently retooled a Zend development environment on a mac laptop running OS X. I had been using the free version of MAMP for awhile but found the free version too limited.  MAMP is useful for getting  Apache, PHP, and MySQL stack up and working together quickly on a mac.  One thing lacking in MAMP though is an actual http.conf file like you probably deal with on a production server.

XAMP is another free AMP stack which includes an editable httpd.conf file making configuring Apache to test SSL connections much more standardized if not straight forward.  Instead of dealing with a GUI one deals with the Apache configuration files directly.  While it’s nice to be able to customize XAMPs Apache installation getting the configuration right can take some time.  If your really uncomfortable meddling with Apache configuration files you should consider just purchasing a licensed version of MAMP which does most of the stuff through a graphical interface.  Of course once you go into production you’ll probably going to have to deal with Apache’s httpd.conf file anyway so you might as well front load the pain now and be better prepared when things actually do go into production.

Hello,

Welcome to the Aaron Wolfs new website.  I just finished installing wordpress…looking forawrd to updating my new site soon.