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  • Oh. We live in interesting times.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Moon of the New Year (and the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter)

    Saturday gratefuls: 32 days. 32! Nearly finished with the cds. A snowy, snow globe day. Rigel and Kep, our bed warmers. Kate. A wise woman. Smart, too. Vaccines. Coming to an arm near you. Soon. That light in the tunnel went up a bit in brightness. The star over Bethlehem explained? The Winter Solstice. Soon. Staycation.

     

    Complex feelings. Friend Tom Crane talked a couple of days ago about the feelings that come up when considering climate change. Made me think about all of us right now. I’ve been labile this week, up and down. Unusual for me. If I get melancholy, I stay there a while. Up and bright? Ditto. But. Covid. Trump. Kate’s long illness. Climate change plus the long road ahead for our nation. Isolation from friends and loved ones.

    Bet I’m not the only one experiencing complex emotions. Up. Vaccines. Down. 377,000 deaths. 250,000 + new cases a day. Up. 32 days! Down. Still 32 days left. Up. Renewable energy. Back into the Paris Accords. Down. Baked in heat. Record carbon emissions this year. Up. Jon and Ruth and Gabe on Google Meet. Down. Having to see them on Google Meet. Up. Many good days in a row for Kate. Down. Sudden fatigue yesterday. Up. Good days mean no nausea, no fatigue beyond the usual. Down. Stamina poor.

    And these are the big drivers. Every day has mood changes. That unexpected money from the oil well! That crabby e-mail from a relative. Work or relationship stress. Kids. Dogs. Weather. Feelings of self-worth or self-worthlessness. Whatever triggers you. And we all have triggers.

    Point. A complex web of stressors has us all dangling in our silken cocoons and each shake of the web warns us that the spider might be coming for her next meal. This is not normal. Where do we go? Out to eat? To a movie? Have friends over? A sabbath service? Take a vacation? Not for most of us. What’s the right metaphor? See-saw. Spider web. Thin ice with cracks. Fingernails on chalkboards. Whatever it is, this is a fraught time. An interesting time.

    I’m giving myself permission to feel these movements, up and down, and to react to them. To not be hard on myself for not maintaining an up feeling in down times. Perhaps you need this permission, too.


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  • Debates. From first principles.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Moon of the New Year (2021!)

    Tuesday gratefuls: VRCC. Doggy care at a high level. Dr. Timian, Rigel’s doc when she was hospitalized. Rigel. Amber. And, Amber’s special bandages. Ruby and her heated seats. A now gone, happily, feeling of illness. Diane, from her sanctuary in San Francisco. The hermitage here on Shadow Mountain. Fresh Snow. A plowed driveway. Feelings, low, lower. Comfort in the loft. Games Kate and Charlie play. A raw version of life, hard and relentless. A joyful version: committed, cheerful, resilient. Fluctuating between them. 36 days.

     

    When conservative columnists like George Will and Michael Gerson write provocative columns skewering Republicans and fellow conservatives (see this by Gerson, The moral hypocrisy of conservative leaders is stunning, as an example) and a politician like George Romney condemns the administration, next year’s trajectory becomes clearer. At its optimum liberals, radicals (I don’t like progressive. It hides.), and conservatives will all examine themselves beginning with first principles.

    The conservatives, right now anyhow, seem to have the most honest dialogue started. May it continue. Liberals will have to admit that their “desire to govern” will gut meaningful change in at least three important areas: racial justice, radical police reform, and addressing economic inequities. Radicals will have to admit that their insistence in all or nothing too often, usually, results in nothing.

    Of course, Covid must get our full attention until it abates, but that shouldn’t stop us from going into our respective camps and chewing the fat over a miserable four years of the American Experience. What about liberal leadership, policies, general stances, left the door open for a Trump? What needs refocusing? Especially following a decidedly liberal, world hailed Presidency, like Barack Obama’s.

    I have three areas where liberalism has failed. The lackluster and Republican conceived medical system fix, Obamacare, or the ACA, did not fix or even mend a broken system. Yes, it delivered health insurance to some folks who needed it, but that’s a very low bar when you consider the mess of the public/private chaos we insist on calling a system. If you’ve had any frequent dealings with it, you’ll know the financial, bureaucratic, and logical hurdles required to get care. Not smart enough to know if Medicare for All is the solution, but I know that whatever we do must look more like a National Health Service than a cafeteria of options whose costs and efficacy we can’t determine.

    How do we keep the public safe? The whole public, not just middle and upper middle class white neighborhoods. (The upper classes build walls and hire their own private security.) This is a debate that must be radical in its starting point. Bracket police. What do complex urban societies need to investigate and prosecute crime? To stop criminal activity while it’s happening? To attend well to mental health crises and in-home medical emergencies? To keep buildings safe from fire? To manage traffic, large events, disasters? Let’s put all solutions on the table from crazy dreamy to harsh and pragmatic ones. We need to rethink community safety and how to achieve it.

    Economic inequities. A Green New Deal? OK, by me. Job retraining. Earned income tax credits? Guaranteed annual income? Reparations. A truly progressive tax code. Tax the wealthy at a level closer to the 1950’s and 1960’s. Put in place a reasonable inheritance tax to ensure against aristocratic pretensions. Rethink the value of work and workers. Shore up the union movement. Give employers incentive to hire under and inexperienced workers. Perhaps their first year or half year of salary could be subsidized.

    We must have these debates. Conservatives, liberals, and radicals must gather among themselves and debate them. There must be a public dialogue. I use the word must. Why? Because these are core issues which speak to the safety and security of all Americans.

    Are there other important issues? Oh, yes. Climate change. Foreign policy. Infrastructure development. To name three. And, yes, debates about these must go forward, and quickly, too.

    There is much democratic work to be done. And much tin-pot dictator work to be undone. I see Trump’s time in office as a cry for help from a country in which certain bedrock matters like health, safety, and work have all been damaged by years of neglect and false promises. Let’s pay attention. Let’s insure neglect and false promises are not part of agenda. Beginning now.


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  • Holiday Spirit(s)

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Moon of Thanksgiving

    Friday gratefuls: Sleep. Cribbage. Kate, always Kate. Rigel, who kept me warm last night. Kep, just because. Nordic Advent calendar by Jacquie Lawson. Advent. The days of our lives. Covid. 46 days. Ruth. Gabe. Jon. Jon’s birthday on the 10th. 52. Hanukkah begins the same day. Santa Claus. Yule logs. Christmas trees. Lights. Ornaments. Holly and ivy. Christmas music. Corny and classical. This wonder-full time.

     

    Bloomberg. The magazine. Peak Oil is Suddenly Upon Us. Yet another reason Covid is a blessing. If climate change matters to you, this article is a bit of good news. It features the conclusion that peak oil is behind us by British Petroleum, BP. May it be so. And may we push it along.

    Feeling glum has passed. Still ready for that holiday spirit though. That pagan holiday spirit. After all: Evergreen tree, lights, drinking and feasting and gifting, mistletoe, holly and ivy, being with family and friends. None of that in the New Testament. Well, ok. Gifts. The three wise guys. Otherwise it’s Saturnalia and Northern European traditions. Gotta get those decorations.

    Cribbage. Playing more of it now. Something Kate and I enjoy. Will try rummikub, too. Just got two two player games: The Twilight Struggle and the Duel. Two more in the mail. Expecting a good while still until the all clear, go breathe on your neighbors without killing them. Keep changing things up a bit.

    Kakun thoughts. In conversation with Kate. Trust first. Two leggeds all equal. Life precious. Stay at it. Learn. Serve. Protect. Educate. Create. Work as part of nature, not on it or in spite of it. See. See. Hear. Hear. Clunky so far, but maybe it’ll get smoothed out. I do have a family crest, somewhere. Not sure if it has a motto or not. I’ll try to track it down.

    No election fraud. Ballots cast included President and down ballot races. Republicans did ok on down ballot, but the Presidential race is suspect? Come on, guys and gals. Geez.


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  • Speak Across the Years

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Thanksgiving Moon

    Tuesday gratefuls: The Clan. Gathering in an hour. Tom and his gift book. His thinking of Ruth. The morning darkness lit by the Thanksgiving Moon. Orion and his great Dog pursuing the hunt toward Mt. Evans. 50 days until Trump leaves. Vaccines. The holidays of light. Needed to dispel the four years of ethical darkness. The gas heater here in the loft/studio. Emerson. Lao Tze. Camus. Hesse. Aldo Leopold. Wendell Berry. Wes Jackson. Thomas Berry. Rilke. Saints in my short, very short, tradition.

     

    And your world, it’s rapidly changin’. Wow. Trump defeated. Vaccines looking good. Kate with almost a month of good days. Add your own spectacular news here.

    However. Even rapid change is sometimes not enough. This month, this December, will require all the good feeling we can muster. For ourselves, those we love, those in our neighborhoods and communities. It will require all the festivals of lights we celebrate: Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, New Year’s. It will require an extra effort to avoid a, “I’ll be dead by Christmas.” holiday season. Going home for Christmas may take on a new meaning unless we stay. at. home. wear. masks. distance ourselves from others. worship virtually. Flu. Covid. Cold. Holiday celebrations. = Potential disaster.

    Why? Because the surge, that one where the Covid infections became a hockey stick graph like climate change? Is about to surge. According to the NYT this morning, all of California’s intensive care beds could be overwhelmed by mid-month. We’ve not seen the uptick from Thanksgiving travel. It’s coming. The same article says that we hit four million infections in November, more than double the previous record. 1.9 million. When? October. Both before the Thanksgiving holiday visits.

    We’re in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. We can cross the bridge of death to a vaccine and Biden future but first we have to say just how fast the unladen swallow can fly. Or, Come up with capital of Assyria. If we’re wrong, well… I’ll give you a hint. Tell the gatekeeper that he needs to stay socially distanced, get his vaccine, cheer Biden at his inauguration (virtually), and, close the bridge, go home, and stay there.

    Rereading some Camus. I’m mostly with him. His notion of the absurd. The universe rolls on with or without us. There is no meaning to life. In other words the universe does not have an Easter egg for us that, if only we look in unlikely places, will reveal itself, as in a computer game.

    I part company with him on the notion that we cannot give meaning to our life. I believe we can give meaning to our own lives. We can choose, a critical idea in existentialism, to live for others, with others in spite of that ultimate absurdity of our situation.

    Thanks to Tom for sending out this poem, Wendell Berry’s XI.

    We can choose, as Wendell Berry asks us, to:

    “Come,
    willing to learn what this place,
    like no other, will ask of you
    and your children, if you mean
    to stay. “This land responds
    to good treatment…””  Wendell Berry, XI

    He addresses this plea to these persons:

    “The need comes on me now
    to speak across the years
    to those who finally will live here
    after the present ruin…”

    This is crossing another bridge of death, the one after Covid, the burning of our planet. I agree with Berry that there will be a life after we’ve ruined this one. It will be. So different. Not recognizable to us. Our grandchildren will know. And their children will know nothing else. Not that far away in human terms.

    Go to a new tab, quick. Look up how fast an unladen swallow can fly. It just might save your life.


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  • Happy and Pleased

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain and the Moon of Thanksgiving

    Sunday gratefuls: Alan. Tom. The Ancient Ones. Honesty. Clarity. Friendship. Kep and Rigel keeping us warm over a cold night. When I woke up this morning, Kep’s head was next to mine. Orion and his great dog headed over Black Mountain to hunt. The great bear pointing to Polaris. The North. The West. Two directions I know personally, deeply. Adulting. The isolated Covid life. Buh bye orange one. Old friends, docent friends. Art. All of it. Ode’s. Jimmie’s. Rembrandt’s. Noguchi’s. (first thing that has impressed me about Melania.) Coltrane’s. Mozart’s. Nabokov’s. Tolstoy’s.

    Resolved. Happily. Detriangulated. Whew. Being an adult can be so damned hard. Even at 73. Key? Trust. And, a helpful Kate.

    I’m getting there. Trying to understand why 70,000,000 plus of my fellow citizens voted for he who shall not be named except in an indictment. Trying to understand what that means for the future of our nation. This week I’m going to start sorting through the tea leaves. 538. Politico. NYT. WP. Even Newsmax, the new go to conservative (wacko conservative) news site. Books like Upswing by Robert Putnam. Seeing what my conservative friends post on Facebook. Listening to the wind. Where will it go? This may be he who will not be named except in an indictment’s true wall. A wall dividing the American people rather than that other one stiff arming the poor and the suffering.

    Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”:

    “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
    What I was walling in or walling out,
    And to whom I was like to give offense.
    Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
    That wants it down.’”

    A quick reference to this poem pointed out that what doesn’t like a wall is frost. Or, Frost. Or, me. Or, maybe, you.

    It will be decades before these wounds can be mended. Like Frost’s neighbor there are so many of us who believe “Good fences make good neighbors.” So many who insist each time a fence or wall gets breached, we have to run, repair it, make it tight. Perhaps if we weren’t so quick to defend our field. Maybe this field we could let lay fallow for a few years. Let the wall stay down for awhile. Maybe it would stay down. We could walk back and forth, visit each other’s farms. Yards. Political parties. Find a way that supports the nation rather than our faction.

    I say that, yes, and mean it. But, I also say, burn their house’s down, salt their fields, and deport all of them. We are none of us one thing.

    Let’s tear that Blue wall down. Replace it with a renewed culture of protect and serve. Yes, really. That slogan’s good enough already. Let’s figure out how to implement it for real in our cities.

    Raise the minimum raise. Put a wall between our fellow citizens and poverty. Yes, wall it right out of our country. We can use the stones from taking down these other walls. This will require rethinking capitalism. I’m a fan, as I’ve said before, of a mixed economy*. Read Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life. The question is the mix. We’ve not got it right here. And, we need to.

    We’ll build solar farms, windmills, geothermal sites. We’ll switch off the internal combustion engines and leave the oil in the ground. Change the offshore drilling platforms to research laboratories, small countries, hell, even hotels. We’ll use carbon capture technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere. We’ll stop putting up a carbon wall between ourselves and space. Cool ourselves down.

    That South Dakota nurse. Did you read her story about dying patients who still don’t believe in Covid? Well, here’s the wall we need right now. A wall around each home until at least January 2nd. Get the holidays behind us before we get over our self-imposed or state-imposed lockdowns. Or, maybe a wall until the vaccines have been given at least to us old folks and medical personnel. Or, maybe until, this is the one that makes the most sense to me, we flatten the curve. We’ve never done it. We can do it. We need to do it.

    So. Let’s build a few walls, tear down others. Get to the point where we don’t need them. Soonest. But, hard.

    *A mixed economy is variously defined as an economic system blending elements of a market economy with elements of a planned economy, free markets with state interventionism, or private enterprise with public enterprise.[1][2][3][4] While there is no single definition of a mixed economy, one definition is about a mixture of markets with state interventionism, referring specifically to a capitalist market economy with strong regulatory oversight and extensive interventions into markets. Another is that of an active collaboration of capitalist and socialist visions.[5] Yet another definition is apolitical in nature, strictly referring to an economy containing a mixture of private enterprise with public enterprise.[6] Alternatively, a mixed economy can refer to a socialist economy that allows a substantial role for private enterprise and contracting within a dominant economic framework of public ownership. This can extend to a Soviet-type planned economy that has been reformed to incorporate a greater role for markets in the allocation of factors of production.[7] Wiki


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  • Colorado

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Fall and the Moon of Radical Change

    Thursday gratefuls: Kate’s stoma site looking good. Rigel off antibiotics. Her gut can relax. Rigel early in the morning, barking as loud as she can. Why? Oh, why. No idea. Mac and cheese with ham. Comfort food. The East Troublesome Fire. The Cameron Fire. The Calwood Fire. Reminding us that climate change is real and not tomorrow.

    Wildfires are us. The West is burning. Precipitation blocked by warming oceans. Trees dried by low humidity, killed by pine bark Beetles. Grasses squeezed dry, lying ready for ignition. Rabbi Jamie’s home in Granby. The East Troublesome Fire. Evacuated. He posted pictures on Facebook. Scary.

    Clouds this morning red from the Wildfire refracted Sun. We have moisture on the way. Hope it comes in time to wet down our Very High fire hazards. The National Forest Service closed the Arapho National Forest, the one in which we live, citing dry Trees and strained fire-fighting resources. This means no Denverites, no other out-of-towners at Lower and Upper Maxwell Falls. Well, it means there should be none.

    Speaking of Colorado. Here’s a video from near Telluride.

    Could have been worse. Think if the Jeep with the camera was a tiny bit further along on the trail. The woman who drove the falling Jeep is in a Grand Junction hospital with serious injuries. She bailed just before it went over.

    Then, too. An election is coming. Like Winter. Did I say vote? Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote. Vote.


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  • A Second Act

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa and the Labor Day Moon

    Thursday gratefuls: Kate. Amber. Rigel. Kep. Cool morning. The Pandemic. Trump. BLM. Prostate cancer. Lung disease. Sjogren’s. CBE. Mussar. Tara. Electric cars. The dying of the extractive fossil fuel industries. Climate change. The Book of Revelation.

    Predicting the end of the world is a parlor game played by intellectuals and cranks. It never fails to terrify, alarm, or make someone laugh. Think of all the cartoons with the bearded man and the sign: The End is Near.

    Apocalypse. It’s hard to put the word aside these days: Murder Hornets, Covid, Trump, Climate Change (remember climate change?), that asteroid, Hurricane Laura. It has me checking the clouds for a guy in a flowing robe and an angry tilt to his eyebrows.

    Remember 2012? Y2K? The first models of what the Coronavirus might do? Evangelicals support Israel because they think it will encourage the second coming. No, really.

    Instead, I hear T.S. Eliot, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.” Our sense of drama wants, needs a bang, but I’d say the most likely scenario for the end of humanity comes after centuries of an Earth made too hot for us by our own actions. A self-destructive species, us Humans.

    You’ll probably not guess where I’m going with this. It means to me that our nation will survive the Donald, will take him, the pandemic, even the Asteroid and murder Hornets, and recreate ourselves.

    There may be no second acts in America, but I believe there will be a second act for America. The last four years, colored even darker by the “if it were fiction, it wouldn’t be believable.” nature of the last few months, have had certain oddly positive effects.

    The racist (and, classcist) strands in our history have been written clearly in blood and anger. Black Lives Matter and its counter protesters in the alt-right have put on a medieval morality play in cities across the country. See Kenosha. Portland. Minneapolis. The reactions of police and the denizens of the right-wing demimonde have clarified what’s at stake for our nations future. I believe we will see positive policy changes in cities and in our nation, especially after the election.

    The orange excrescence has performed a similar service for the small d democrats here. Who are, I believe, most of us on the left and right. We now know how important not only the constitutional nature of our government is, but the norms and traditions it has developed over 200 years of history as well.

    That’s why I’m seeing a sign on a Brookforest yard that reads: I’m a Republican, but I’m no Fool: Vote Biden. That’s why all those national security folks have gone on record as supporting Trump. Even George Bush. George Will. Many other prominent members of what used to be the GOP.

    We will have an opportunity, if we choose to take it, to reimagine this nation. Our founding documents and our founders will play a strange role in this reimagining.

    That 3/5th’s “compromise.” Sally Hemmings. All those George Washington owned slaves. The white, male, property owner requirement for voting. Not who we want or need to be anymore. Let them now live on as the sins of the fathers that were visited on our generation, but finally expiated.

    I’ve taken mild liberties with the text, but this should serve as a template for the next four years:

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men of us are created equal, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men all men and women, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

    We gray beards and gray heads have a role to play in this exciting time. Just what it is, I’m not sure, but it has something to do with insisting on our better natures. Will you join me as we search for Rumi’s field out beyond right and wrong?


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  • Bloody Sun

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa and the Labor Day Moon

    Tuesday and Wednesday gratefuls: Kate’s DEXA scan for bone density. Ruby’s a.c. for the drive. Euphoria on HBO. Ruth’s new favorite show. Rigel’s improving appetite. Amber. Mountain Waste. The blood red morning Sun. Teenagers. The complexity of their lives, made even more complex by Covid. The orange excrescence and what he’s showing us about our country.

    The dawn Sun here bleeds for the Fires burning through the West. The clouds show their concern with reflected color. Northern California and the Western Slope of Colorado are aflame. Their smoke and ash foul the Air we breath even up here on Shadow Mountain.

    We live in the Arapaho National Forest, filled with Lodgepole Pine and Aspen stressed by drought, valley meadows with a summer’s growth of Grasses, also dry. The National Forest Service warning signs have pegged their highest mark, Extreme, for weeks now.

    Western life. Punctuated by drought. Rejuvenated by Fire. Relieved by heavy Mountain Snows. For thousands of years. “Go, West, young man.” We did. But we white folk are not nomadic. We do not know where a village can be safe. We just build. Glass and steel. Hardie board and shingles. Permanent. As if there were no fire. No drought. These are strategies of the humid East, dangerous in the arid West.

    As Greeley’s famous invitation flooded the West with people from the East, pushing out, slaughtering the people who knew how to move with the seasons, we made the same mistakes over and over. I’m living in one right now. It’s beautiful here on Shadow Mountain, but this house will burn. And that’s what Lodgepole Pine Forests do. They burn. All the Trees. Leaving fertile ground for a new Ecosystem.

    Humans make mistakes. Often. And the consequences are sometimes horrific. Sometimes wonderful. Human life is one long unintentional adventure in empiricism. Oh, if we do that, this happens. Some of our mistakes lead us to lives otherwise impossible. Like our life here on Shadow Mountain.

    Kate and I understand that we might be living here when the Forests catch Fire. That our home may be temporary. We choose to stay for the same reasons populations of us Eastern folk spotted all over the Mountains and Intramontane regions out here do. It’s beautiful and close to the Wild Life, a reminder of a world not controlled by humans.

    Oh, yes, there’s a paradox. Live where it’s not safe. Why would we do that? We’re mistake makers, non-linear decision makers. We’re human.


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  • A New Covenant

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer and the Moon of Justice

    Wednesday gratefuls: Mountain Waste. The Claussens, coming for my pallets. The much improved back. Mowed. Most of the detritus picked up and moved. Photographs from Scott of the Woollies at George Floyd’s death site. Sjogren’s, not Covid. Pork ribeye. Napa Cabbage. The heat. The coolness of the morning. Garbage bags.

    And then the world came crashing back into my consciousness. Been following the coronavirus spikes, unable to shed the schadenfreude that accompanies the horror. All those people sick and dying because of Trump, Fox News, sychophancy. The Master Race putting its own head on the guillotine. Fixated on this, like looking at a fire in the fireplace or a gently moving fan.

    Opened up the email from Woolly Scott. Pictures of my long time friends at the site of George Floyds’ death. Long arcs of dead and withering flowers freshened up by new bouquets. A line of soft toys, teddy bears and rabbits, looking both sad and sweet. Mark Odegard in an orange shirt, a mask, looking at the George Floyd mural. These are friends who lived through the sixties, who understand this holy site in the context of MLK, Malcolm X, the Civil Rights Act, The Voter Registration Act. All that.

    Statues falling. Folks going after not only the Confederate memorials, but Founding Fathers like Washington and Jefferson. Or, later, Woodrow Wilson. The screeches of foul play coming from the dotard in chief. His allies revving up their motorcycles, donning their leathers, taking their automatic weapons off their racks and out of gun safes. Heading out to protect the constitution and their way of life. Their white privilege. A complicated time.

    Here I am on the mountain top. Moved, but unmoved. A latter day Noah on his ark, Ararat below me. Can this earth flooded with hate and hope create a new world? Maybe I need a dove.

    What might be the sign of a new covenant? A bonding among all humans agreeing to live sustainably on our only home, in peace with each other. I can still see the double helix as the trunk of a tree of life, its crown, its keter, in the heavens, its roots dug deep below the soil. This covenant I can feel.

    Let’s all cut our fingers, slash our palms, swear a blood oath that we will live as if all of it, you and me, the Lodgepole, the Whale, the Mountain, the Ocean are holy. Worthy. Precious. Loved. That should do it.


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  • Que serait

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Summer and the Moon of Justice

    Tuesday gratefuls: Seoah in Singapore (and quarantine) 6 days. Rick, the stump grinder, reasonable prices. David and Ray not so much. But the lawn will get cut. Moving the pallets. Giving the log cutter tool to Derek. Kate’s idea. At more ease with cash. Work happening. The clan.

    Venality, denial, racism, support for white supremacists, demeaning the disabled, grabbing pussies. And, now, the worst treason of all: ignoring Russian bounties on U.S. troops. Outrage seems far too mild a response. This man is, and has been from the start, not only unfit for office, but a radical dismantler of its authority. No wonder the world has shaken its head, laughed, then cringed. Beginning to move on from us. A world without us. America cannot take getting much greater. Too much winning.

    United StatesOn June 2914-day changeTrend
    New cases40,041+80%

    This box from this morning’s NYT follows Covid 19. In the last two weeks Covid cases have jumped 80%! So much winning. This man has actively caused the deaths of thousands of U.S. citizens. Ignored a James Bond villain, Vladimir Putin, who authorized election tampering and pay for slay in Afghanistan against American soldiers. Not to mention tweeting positive utterances about white supremacists. No, not only the “good people on both sides” remark, but new ones. Including the pink shirted man and the barefooted woman holding guns on protesters outside their St. Louis mansion.

    Who would rid us of this troublesome President?

    On a more upbeat note I scheduled my third Lupron influenced PSA for July 7th. I see my oncologist, Dr. Eigner, on the 17th and Dr. Gilroy, who managed my radiation, on August 3rd. A year ago I was in the midst of the 5 day a week drives out to Lone Tree. Lying down on the altar of sacrifice, listening to the Band.

    Nope, I don’t think about cancer much. Life goes on until it doesn’t. Freezers go bad. (ours continue to chug along for now) Yards need mowing. Seoah’s in Singapore. Wildfires are possible. The future’s not ours to see.

    Meanwhile, carbon emissions.


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