Welcome


I believe that everything is connected as if by invisible strings. And it is through these connections- sadly unfelt and unperceived by most- that the true and forever paradoxical meaning to life is derived. There are many connections within this homepage: some vague, some pretentious, some obscure, some perhaps relevant to your own breathing. There is only so much I can reveal about myself, however, and there is only so much I feel should be done with this homepage. What you have at your disposal, then, is merely a collection of thoughts, memories, and fiction tidbits that- taken together- provide a short walk through an informal museum that bears my name, a museum probably not unlike the one that bears your own. We are all constructs of perpetual memory: landscapes, faces, experiences, lessons, tribulations, sights, smells, expressions, nights, days, mornings, dawns, dusks, and twilights, not to mention pain and sorrow and the constant conquest of both. So make of this what you can. If you have any questions or comments, write me. Providing that I ever make it again to my e-mail, I'll get back to you as soon as I can. I hope you have as much fun exploring this 'digital room' as I did furnishing it. So please read on. You might pull a string or two.

Note: All works and manner of words are copyrighted 1992 by Victor M. Salcedo.

Victor Salcedo


Welcome To The Vine

The Vine is an exercise of the spirit and mind. Its single purpose is to cast as best as possible a quick reflection of both myself and others so that any variety of meaning may be drawn from it. It began when a I asked people at Queens College to complete a series of open-ended preambles as part of a free association exercise. People were not expected to reveal anything beyond what they deemed socially appropriate or understandably private. The only thing that was asked of them was to follow their creative thoughts-- like stepping stones across a field that bore their name-- as honestly and revealingly as possible. As they progressed, I told them, they may even discover that a story was slowly being told; if not, I told them to consider it poetry.

We are unique individuals with thoughts, opinions, and feelings particular only to ourselves. It has taken years of experience- both 'good' and 'bad'- to shape us into who we are today. Our thoughts, feelings, and opinions, then, are of daily importance; we fill rooms, we stand next to people, we inhabit public spaces, we contribute to the daily landscape of buildings and streets that would otherwise be closer to a mausoleum without us. As sentimental as this may sound, you are life. And life, on a wholly indeterminate scale, would surely be different without you.

The Vine That Grows: Personal Thoughts


  • Excerpt From The Book of Eden

    Two Short Stories, One Shorter Than The Other


    Poems of My Own, or Epiphanias Solemnicas


    Axioms, Aphorisms, and Aphrodisiacs


    Architext and Archetypes

    Imagine a home designed with self-sufficiency in mind, albeit a home of glass and steel and stone, but not as ordinary: a home of truly applied thinking. Solar energy and geothermal dynamics heat your water and many of your rooms; glass elements actually add to your winter needs by focusing, trapping, and dispersing light energy to immediate heating needs; and the undercelebrated virtues of the earth around and beneath your home's foundation and walls shield you from the rain and snow, from the cold and whatever winds might blow your away. Imagine a a life whose sources of independent satisfaction are experienced daily-- through the harvesting of aquacultured fish, through the tending of year-round hydroponic drip gardens, through the maintenance of wind- and water-powered generators synergistically incorporated into the overall design of your home, your property, your ultimate freedom. Imagine now a world redefined by such applied concepts, a world potentially unleashed from the frequently harmful interdependence between resource exploitation and excessive consumption.

    Thomas Jefferson envisioned, perhaps too romantically, a nation of great citizen farmers, a world built on common sense, something we frequently feel is in short supply. But the 21st Century equivalent of the great Jeffersonian vision can be achieved, supplying the most basic-- but frequently compromised-- needs of existence (food, shelter, comfort, and their increased resultant happiness) through the application of middle-level technologies readily available today on the open market. It is then possible to engineer for ourselves-- immediate resources permitting, of course-- a life satisfyingly separate, and therefore different, from the routine, the mundane, and the impersonal, all of which have come to define the life of over-institutionalized man.

    The original intention of this section was to provide at least a rudimentary list of Internet-accessed resources to architecture, energy efficiency, home resource management, and modern alternative living, but all this homepage can really provide, because of time and space constraints, is more a call to act on the presence of such information (easily sifted through an Internet search) than an actual cross-listed resource tool. Below, then, is only a short and by no means comprehensive list of several interesting sites on the Internet that give a taste-- if even that-- of what interesting and potentially revolutionary possibilities await us in the 21st Century.

    Good luck, then, in your search toward a greater-- if even imagined-- sense of modern independence. And if you can, reduce your 60-year sentence to the RatRace by engineering it out of immediacy; grow a bushel of tomatoes (without the carbon dioxide treatment) and build a home dreamt by the sun. Go ahead: make my day.