The Humming Cloud

The U.S. EPA banned most uses of the chemical methylene chloride today under the Toxic Substances Control Act. Methylene chloride is a carcinogen that affects the liver, lungs, breasts, brain, blood, and central nervous system, as well as a neurotoxin. EPA’s intent is to protect people from health risks while allowing key uses to continue safely with a new worker protection program. 

Methylene chloride is used as an aerosol degreaser and in commercial adhesives and sealants. It is also used industrially to make other chemicals, such as refrigerants. In my career, I have managed numerous environmental clean-up projects at sites with multiple solvents in the groundwater, and often methylene chloride provided the greatest carcinogenic risk of all the chemicals present. At sites contaminated with solvents, it was more common than not to find methylene chloride among the chemicals present.  

Although EPA previously banned one consumer use of methylene chloride in 2019, use of the chemical has remained widespread and continued to pose significant and sometimes fatal danger to workers. Most workers who have died from acute exposure to methylene chloride were engaged in bathtub refinishing or other paint-stripping operations. 

Today's ban requires companies to rapidly ramp down manufacturing, processing and distribution of methylene chloride for all consumer uses and most industrial and commercial uses, including home renovations. Consumer use will be phased out within a year, and most industrial and commercial uses will be prohibited within two years.

Some highly industrialized uses of methylene chloride that are important to national security and the economy will continue. These uses include production of refrigerant chemicals that are important in efforts to phase out climate-damaging hydrofluorocarbons, and production of battery separators for electric vehicles. In those cases, EPA's worker protection program establishes new rules and regulations intended to restrict exposure to methylene chloride.

The Crimson Delight

Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny and Professor of History at Yale University points out that the standard objection to right-wing justices considering granting immunity to twice-impeached and multiply indicted former one-term "president" Trump is that this would make him a king. In Snyder's opinion, it's actually much worse than that.

A king can still be subject to law. Even George III was subject to law. The American Revolution was justified by the notion that he had overstepped the law. But today's justices are not envisioning any constitutional system at all, even a constitutional monarchy. Instead, they are flirting with the idea that a single person can be outside any constitutional system, totally outside the rule of law.

What justices seem to find appealing is dictatorship, specifically a fascist dictatorship, for a person that attracts them. That is the basis of Nazi legal theory, Snyder argues - that law and the constitution are there just so we can find the person, the Leader, the Führer, to break them.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that in a November 2019 speech to the Federalist Society, former Attorney General Bill Barr, ignoring the Declaration of Independence, which is a list of complaints against King George III, argued that Americans had rebelled in 1776 not against the King, but rather against Parliament. In his view, Barr argues, Congress today has grown far too strong and the president should be able to act on his own initiative and not be checked by either congressional or judicial oversight.

That theory is known as the theory of the “unitary executive,” and it says that because the president is the head of one of the three unique branches of government, any oversight of that office by Congress or the courts is unconstitutional. However, presidents since George Washington have, in fact, accepted congressional oversight and constitutional checks and balances. 

The theory stems from a 1986 proposal by Samuel Alito, then a 35-year-old lawyer for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, for the use of “signing statements” to take from Congress the sole power to make laws by giving the president the power to “interpret” them. In 1987, Ronald Reagan issued a signing statement to a debt bill, declaring his right to interpret it as he wished and saying the president could not be forced “to follow the orders of a subordinate.” 

In April 2020, to justify his demands for states to reopen in the face of the deadly pandemic, Trump told reporters, “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total….” In the summer of 2020, furious that the story had leaked that he had taken refuge in a bunker during the Black Lives Matter protests, Trump called for the White House leaker to be executed. 

Now, in 2024, Richardson reminds us, Trump’s lawyers are in court arguing that the president has criminal immunity for his behavior in the White House, possibly including his right to order the executions of those he sees as enemies. 

In 2019, Barr explained to an audience at Notre Dame the ideology behind "unitary executive" theory. Rejecting the clear words of the Constitution’s framers, Barr said that the U.S. was never meant to be a secular democracy at all. When the nation’s founders had spoken so extensively about self-government, he said, they had not meant the right to elect representatives of their own choosing. Instead, he maintained, the founders meant the ability of individuals to “restrain and govern themselves.” And, because people are willful, the only way to achieve self-government is through religion. 

Those who believe the United States is a secular country, he claimed, are destroying the nation. It was imperative, he continued, to reject those values and embrace religion as the basis for American government. Just last Friday, in an interview on CNN, Barr said, “I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”

The idea that the United States must become a Christian nation has apparently led Barr to accept the idea that a man who has called for the execution of those he sees as enemies should be president, apparently because he is expected to usher in an authoritarian Christian state.

The Taught Lists

Hundreds more protestors have been arrested at college campuses across the US on Saturday as student uprisings continued against the war in Gaza. The protestors are demanding institutions boycott companies and individuals with ties to Israel. The protests were sparked by anger at Israel's offensive in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians.

The Israeli military launched the offensive after about 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, mostly civilians, were killed and 253 others were taken to Gaza as hostages, when Hamas attacked Israeli communities near Gaza on October 7 last year.

Tents first appeared on the college green at Columbia on April 17. The protests then spread across the country after police in riot gear were sent to clear the tents, arresting more than 100 students. Shortly after, students erected another protest camp at Yale University in Connecticut.

The protests have seen in-person teaching cancelled and graduation ceremonies postponed. California State Polytechnic became the latest university to announced it would move to remote teaching. 

On Saturday, over 100 protestors were arrested at Northeastern University in Boston for trespassing by the Massachusetts State Police after refusing to clear their tents from college grounds. Protest leaders strongly reject allegations that the demonstrations had been infiltrated by professional agitators with no connection to the university and that anti-semitic slurs were being used. 

At USC, pro-Palestinian demonstrators returned to campus days after police were called to clear a protest at the university's Alumni Park. The protest was mostly peaceful but the university administration reported "vandalism" to campus property "by individuals who are part of the group that has continued to illegally camp" on the campus.

Twenty-three people were arrested at Indiana University on Saturday. Other campuses, including Columbia and Emory University in Georgia, were reportedly quieter Saturday.

A luta continua.

The Arriven Power

Sympathy and compassion for the innocent Palestinian men, women, and children killed in Gaza by Israeli military forces is not anti-Semitism. Anger and outrage over the genocidal killing of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza by Israeli military forces is not anti-Semitism. A desire to see regime change in Israel and accountability over the genocidal killing is not anti-Semitism.

The media has seized the term "anti-Semitism" and weaponized it against any criticism of Israel's actions. I've heard anchors and talking heads on the news complain about "disgusting displays of blatant anti-Semitism" on college campuses, but when I watch the footage of the campus protests I don't see swastikas or hear chants of "Jews will not replace us." I only see and hear those from white power bigots, or as Trump refers to them, "very fine people."

The news has capitalized on a statement by a 20-year-old Columbia University student who said something to the effect of "Zionists don't deserve to live" and "Be glad I'm not out murdering Zionists." "Zionists," the news is quick to explain, means anyone who supports the existence of the State of Israel (although I do not believe that was the protester's working definition at the time). The news keeps calling him "the leader" of the Columbia protests, as if all the other protesters are out there only at his beck and call and not their own outrage over Israel's actions.

Regardless, the news is acting like, "Aha! We got one on tape! There's your clear anti-Semitism!" and use the statement to smear an entire national and international protest.

There's so much wrong with that. First, I'm not so sure the young man is a "leader" of the protests. He may or may not be an active organizer of the specific events happening at Columbia - I don't know, I'm not there - but he's not the one raising consciousness about what's happening and issuing a national call to protest. The other protesters aren't out there because of him. He's not Abbie Hoffman and this isn't 1968.

Second, I've heard his entire statement. Sure, he went too far, and for the record I don't agree that "anyone supporting the existence of the State of Israel" deserves to die. War is not the answer - never was and never is. But he started off by saying that racists have no place in society, Nazis have no place in society, and Zionists (radical pro-Israelis who hold their right to occupy land over the rights of any others to occupy other land) have no place in society. He then went on - taking it too far, in my opinion - saying that racists and Nazis and Zionists shouldn't live. His point was that he was trying to equate hard-line Zionism with racism and fascism, but he went too far. Hey, he's 20 year old and got too worked up emotionally and said something stupid. I can assure you that not every protester at Columbia and USC and Berkley and Emerson College and  Emory believes all Zionists should die, even if "their leader" said so in some random sound bite.

For the record, that 20-year-old has now been banned from Columbia, even though he apologized for the remarks and admitted he made a mistake.

Police dressed in riot gear here in Atlanta have used tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons against peaceful protesters at Emory University. There's a viral video making the rounds on social media of a professor at Emory being thrown to the ground by the police with her head against the concrete just for demanding an explanation of why they were beating a student. This is police brutality, plain and simple, and violent repression of free speech.  

If protesting against the brutality and genocide by the Israeli government is somehow "anti-Semitic," why isn't police brutality against those sympathetic to the plight of innocent Palestinians "Islamophobic?"  

The man-on-the-street attitude toward the "Stop-Cop-City" protests seems to be bewilderment why some people don't want to see the police get better training. The evidence right before their eyes shows them what the police are being trained to do - act as paramilitary suppressers of free speech and protests, and ensure that the ruling class isn't questioned or made to feel uncomfortable.

Day of Vestiges

Okay, let's see if I got this correct - lawyers for a former president of the United States, who's also a candidate in the upcoming presidential election, are arguing in the Supreme Court that a president is immune from prosecution if he orders the assassination of a political rival? And the reason for that immunity is that such an order would fall into the category of "official acts" of the president? And the Supreme Court seems inclined to agree with his lawyers, "within limits"? 

Let's be explicit about what this really is - Trump is trying to set the stage before taking office to let him do whatever he wants without consequence, including the murders of those he so chooses.

If that doesn't fucking terrify you, I don't know what will.

Vote for Biden, 2024 - he won't murder you in your sleep.

Cardhouse of the Awaited

Two simultaneous trials proceeded today regarding the twice-impeached, multiply indicted, former one-term "president," and cable news was besides itself in the coverage. Over in the Supreme Court, the justices heard arguments that a president is immune from criminal prosecution regardless of his (or her) actions and that federal charges accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election must be thrown out.

The partisan gang of bubblehead hacks who currently comprise the court appear to agree, at least in part, and are expected to rule that at least some of the charges against the defendant be dropped. Words can't express how strongly I disagree with this or the amount of anger I feel contemplating the forthcoming decision.

The other case is in Manhattan where the same defendant is on trial for separate charges of plotting to cover up a sexual encounter with a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election. Today, a grown man named Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, testified he bought and buried stories that could have damaged the defendant’s 2016 campaign ("catch and kill").

In other news, Harvey Weinstein's 2020 rape conviction was overturned in another court. On college campuses across America, disruptive but peaceful demonstrations are occurring against the on-going genocide in Gaza, and some Republican senators and governors are contemplating using the National Guard against the students.  

On so many levels, I feel that this once great nation of ours is on the verge of collapse - either into autocracy or anarchy or both.  This makes me sad and fills me with anger, as I believe it does for millions of others. Sooner or later, the whole thing's going to explode, and this whole shithouse is going to burn to the ground.

The High Road

I was streaming a New York radio station (WFUV) earlier today and they played Cracker's 1992 song Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now). I hadn't heard it or even thought about that song in years, but it sounded great and brought back memories.  I cranked it up and sang along.

I'm not a big nostalgia fan of 90s music, although I know many who are. Don't let your mind go to the opposite extreme - I don't hate 90s music. I just don't post Facebook memes saying the 90s were the best decade in music ever, and my Spotify playlists aren't exclusively songs from those years. 

As someone who came of age in the '60s, I don't really understand it. Teen Angst was recorded 32 years ago, but I can assure you that no one in 1968 was listening to music from 32 years earlier (1936). "Squares," people totally out of it and completely uncool, were listening to music from the '50s - doo wop, surf, Elvis, and crooners. Music from a mere 10 years earlier. If you were listening to music from the 1930s back in the '60s, you were either a) a contrarian, b) an accordion owner, or c) Robert Crumb.

But today, I know many people in their 30s and 40s who absolutely swear by 90s music, and are relatively uninterested in anything post-Y2K. 

Personally, I think every decade had some great music as well as a lot of commercial shlock. Some decades just had more of one or the other than other decades.  To me, the greatest decade in popular music was probably the years between 2005 and 2015.

I  always felt that split-decades - measuring 10-year intervals between years ending in -5, made more sense.  The music of 1968 had more in common with the music of 1973 than the year 1963, even though both '63 and '68 were literally "the '60s."  The roots of a lot of '80s New Wave and post-punk can be heard in the late '70s. Similarly, the music of 2013 sounds more like the music of 2008 than it does that of 2018.              

From time to time, what composer Anthony Braxton calls "restructuralists" turn up in music and change everything - they alter the structure of music. The early '60s British Invasion bands were restructuralists and music was forever different after them than before. The punk bands of the mid- to late '70s were restructuralists - there's music before CBGBs and then there's music after CBGBs. 

But the reason that music from the 1990s still sounds relevant 35-odd years later is because there haven't been any restructuralists in popular music in the intervening years. Various musicians and bands, what Braxton calls "the stylists," have expanded on various styles of popular music and cycled through various modes and fashions, but no one's come forward and turned everything on its head and made the music prior to them sound irrelevant. There have been restructuralists in other genres - mid-60s John Coltrane in jazz, for example. Arguably, metal has had several restructuralists, but their impact has been limited to that specific genre. But there have been no resructuralists in pop/rock music since the punk rockers.

I feel we're due for something soon - we're right on the cusp of the next big thing. The pop divas are having their moment right now, but they sound more like swan songs than the torch that will carry things  forward. I have no idea what the next thing will sound like after the next restructuralists, but I guarantee you'll know it as soon as you hear it.

Day of the Field

We tend to imagine the worst and cause ourselves to suffer anticipating what we think might happen. But more often than not, things weren't as bad as we thought they'd be.

I had an appointment with a urologist today, a referral from my GP. I'm at an age when I was convinced he would recommend removing my prostate, and I was all set to tell him that was a line we weren't going to cross - if my prostate is what ultimately kills me, then so be it. I'm not going to live forever, but at least I'll know what my cause of death would be.

If he argued, I would demand a second opinion from a different urologist. I went in girded for battle.

As it turned out, surgery never came up in the conversation. I didn't even have to suffer the humiliation of a finger-up-the-butt prostate exam. We talked about my symptoms, reviewed my meds, and took some blood. The doctor took me off Flo-Max and put me on Cialis. Boner city, here we come!

I was in and out again in a half hour, and the ordeal was far, far less than I had imagined. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, as Hamlet said. All that worrying, all that anxiety for nothing. Of course, it will get worse and someday I'll even die, but for now it's all pissing anywhere I want to and pharmaceutically enhanced erections.     

Day of the Frontier

Happy Earth Day, or as the Universal Solar Calendar calls it, Day of the Frontier. For some inexplicable reason I still don't fully understand, on the original Earth Day in 1970 I was invited to sail on Pete Seeger's Hudson River sloop, Clearwater. If I recall correctly, we only sailed a short distance - barely left the dock - but we were allowed to participate in some "experiments" (mostly sampling and testing river water) and listened to a few speeches and lectures by Clearwater crew (I think Seeger himself was down in D.C. that day). Did it have an effect on me? I can't say, but I did eventually settle into a career of environmental consulting, and either personally collected or directed literally thousands of water samples.

My formative experience was probably a year earlier, though, when three friends and I took a cross-country camping trip from New York to Texas, and then back along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Hiking in forests almost every day, swimming in the Mississippi, catching turtles and lizards and snakes. We watched the first moon landing from a bayou campsite in Louisiana on a small battery-powered, b&w tv. Maybe telling my teachers about that experience got me nominated for the Clearwater trip the next year, but I don't know - I was just a kid. Things happen and you don't ask why.

In related news, the NY Times reports that last year, global levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide rose to 419 parts per million, the highest annual average yet recorded and around 50 percent more than before the Industrial Revolution (1750). In addition to carbon dioxide, the levels of other potent greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide are also on the rise, which further contribute to warming. 

Also, EPA recently allocated over $125 million from Biden’s Investing in America agenda for Georgia drinking water and clean-water infrastructure upgrades. One of the priorities will be to remove lead pipes from drinking water distribution systems. The EPA has also allocated $1.5 million to Dalton, Georgia's public utilities to conduct pilot projects to test the effectiveness of various PFAS removal and destruction technologies.

The Listening Path

Everybody looks at the media in this time period as if their political positions, their dynamics, their focuses, are normal and natural. . . In fact, nothing is separate from how it's interpreted; there's no such thing as an existential event. As soon as you interpret something, you're interpreting it with respect to your values and, as you know, everyone is walking around with different values. But this is not manifested on the TV news or in the university system, where so many sectors are denied access; we're just getting one value system from these places, and it's not healthy - for Africans, Asians and Europeans, for women and men.

            - Anthony Braxton, from Forces in Motion (1988)      

The Whispering Legions

Happy 420! It's the 111th day of 2024 - 111 backwards is still 111 and 4/20/2024 backwards is still 4/20/2024. Strange, huh? It's The Whispering Legions in the Universal Solar Calendar. It's also Adolf Hitler's birthday (1889) - so much for any hippy-dippy, good vibrations, 420 feel-good vibes.

Congress finally broke a months-long stalemate today and approved an aid package to Ukraine to continue their first against Russia's invasion, but not until after discrediting America's credibility as a reliable defense partner (We'll help defend you until a minority faction in our legislature decides it's not to their political advantage to continue").

The other night, I finally finished playing the Guardians of the Universe game. I didn't like it, and if anything it got worse with time. I could go over all the specific things I didn't like about the game but doing that would just be reliving the experience and I don't want to reopen that wound. Let's just say it was repetitious and unimaginative, and near-constant combat and battles made it feel more like an arcade game where you paid a quarter to just shoot, shoot, shoot for two minutes than a modern video game. I stuck with it out of sheer stubbornness and a competitive nature that didn't want to quit a game that I knew I could beat. But as soon as I finished, I uninstalled the game off of my computer - I'm never doing that shit again!

I'll breathe for a few days before starting my next game.

Day of the Overseer

Day of the Overseer.  If this isn't the most appropriate time to discuss the Jonathan Nolan Fallout television series, then what is? 

As you've undoubtedly heard, Nolan and Lisa Joy, the people behind the HBO series Westworld, have produced a new series for Prime Video based on the Fallout video game franchise.  As I pointed out the other day, according to our Steam statistics, we've played 1,094 hours of Fallout 4, 346 hours of Fallout 76, 199 hours of Fallout - New Vegas, and 117 hours of Fallout 3. That's 1,756 total hours in the Fallout universe, or 73 full 24-hour days. 

From what I've read, Nolan is a gamer and enjoys the Fallout series. From what I've seen, I know this to be true. The series is a love letter to the games, a Valentine to the franchise. The fidelity of the sets to the games' environment is amazing, down to little details the casual fan might not notice but the obsessive fan will pick up on.  There are, for example, power armor repair stations at the appropriate spots - Red Rocket gas stations, of course - that are never used, discussed or explained in the dialogue, but there they are. 

The dialog is witty, the plot is original but feels like it's straight from the games, and the action balances over-the-top comic-book gore with cartoonish invincibility. On so many levels, the show is just pitch-perfect and I commend Nolan and Joy for their effort.

But then there's always the certain breed of noxious fanboy that will never be satisfied. It's one thing to pay attention to details and it's another to obsess over those details to the point where you miss the forest not for the trees but for the twigs and berries - the tiniest, most minute of details. Some fans feel that a faux historical timeline visible in a classroom in one scene has a date that contradicts the canonical sequence of events in the games. From there, paranoid conspiracy theories have evolved that the showrunners are trying to "retcon" the games' lore so that the events in the game Fallout - New Vegas are no longer canon.

Sure, that must be it. The fully grown adults who've produced, written and directed dozens of first-rate movies and shows hate your favorite game so much that they spent years and literally millions of dollars to produce a rich and lavish television series just so that obsessive-compulsive gaming geeks have to give that game up as "canon."

"I hate this," someone wrote on Reddit. "They're literally just shitting all over the entire franchise and everything I love, and there's nothing we can do about it.  It makes me so angry I want to do something, but I don't know what I can do to stop them."

What I saw as a loving Valentine he saw as an enormous dump on the franchise.

I've read patient explanations from fans on line and from the show-runners themselves reconciling the dates in question and assuring everyone that, yes, New Vegas is still "canon." But even if thee were minor discrepancies between the games and the show, so what? It's just a video game and a sci-fi serial. Relax and take a breath.  It's just an entertainment, it's supposed to be fun. Why so serious? There are big problems in the real world - take some of that anger and focus it on climate change, genocide in Gaza, or discrimination of any sort. Don't take it out on the artists providing you with an entertaining expansion of your favorite game.    

Anyway, ignore the static and if you have access to Amazon Video and 10 or so hours to spare, watch this show, okey-doke?  It's a fun ride.

The Inlet The Reddening

Officer: Sir, are you okay?

Me: Mmmpff

Officer: Are you hurt?

Me: No. I'm okay.

Officer: Are you sure? Are you all there? What day is it today?

Me: The Inlet The Reddening

Officer: What? What day is it?

Me: The Inlet The Reddening

Officer: Sir, Do. You. Know. What. Day. It. Is?

Me: The Inlet The Reddening

Officer: (thinking the old man is delusional) Sir, I'm asking you what today's date is?

Me: I go by the Universal Solar Calendar and today is  The Inlet The Reddening. You probably call it April 18 in your calendar.

Officer: (thinking the man is a crackhead or something) Huh? Are you on something? What are you on?

Me: Right now, I'm on my ass, sitting by the side of the road.

Officer: (speaking into his police radio) Hello, dispatch? We got a possible 10-50 here. Requesting social worker and a shrink. Over.

Okay, that conversation most definitely did not happen. A work of fiction, totally made up. But seriously, I don't know what old Angus MacLise was thinking. It's one thing to name a day Day of the Lemur or Day of the Whale or Day of the Sparrow. First, Second, and Third Twelve are also all acceptable. But The Inlet The Reddening? How does that even remotely sound like a day? I mean it's lovely and poetic and all, but c'mon, it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue as a date, does it?

I suppose I should be grateful that this imaginary confrontation didn't happen on a May 24, when I would have had to answer the officer, "Shutup and Changeover."   

Cryptic Tailgate of the Mourners

Metal fatigue is a euphemism. The same vibrations express sympathy or illness depending on their target. At night the broken glass looks like a field of stars. Seen from the towers, the tail lights of a car cruising for prostitutes can spell out short words, like L-U-V.

- Notes, actually the first "fiction," for track 1 of Jon Hassell's 1990 LP, City: Works of Fiction   

The name for today reminded me of this passage from almost 35 years ago.  I had been a big fan of Hassell's ever since I heard his Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics with Brian Eno back in 1980. In Boston, I used to listen to Possible Musics with girlfriend Mary Ellen in our Comm Ave. apartment. I put the record on one afternoon while we were smoking marijuana in the living room with our friends Rich and Annie, The conversation trailed off and we all sat in silence, lost together in the music, until Annie realized that for some reason a rash had broken out all over the neck and arms. Weird. 

A decade later, I still loved Hassell's sound. I was living in Pittsburgh in 1993, and copied the passage above in a fax to a co-worker in Albany, N.Y. This was just before the widespread availability of email.  I had to send him some reports, data, and other work documents, and my options then were U.S. mail, Federal Express, or fax.  I chose the latter, and copied Hassell's short fiction to make the transmittal cover interesting. I think there might have been a cartoon or something, too. Dressing up my cover sheets with odd marginalia was kind of my "thing" back in the early 90s. This was still the age of fanzines and photocopy art.

Anyway, an administrative assistant intercepted the fax - lifted it off the machine and instead of taking it to the co-worker, reported me to Human Resources for sending "inappropriate" interoffice messages about prostitution. She claimed she felt sexually harassed by having to read my text. I protested that it wasn't addressed to her to read, and besides, the content and tone of the fiction was far from harassing. Still, I got reprimanded, but I could tell my supervisor's heart wasn't into it. He knew the complaint was lame bullshit, but he had to follow through and do what Human Resources had decreed.

A year later, I transferred (voluntarily) out of the Pittsburgh office and back to Atlanta, and away from that toxic administrative assistant and lame supervisor.

Old men have a million stories, and every comment heard and passage read dredges up a million memories. 

Day of the Sparrow

"The day was forecast hot and muggy, but its A.M. was still fresh. Red-winged blackbirds rasped in the reeds. Blue herons squawked in for gawky landings at Shorter Point, across Sherritt Cove, from which rose wraiths of mist. Resting her feet on a footstool and a clipboard on her belly, Kath gave the next half-hour to another sort of exercise: First-Level Improvisations from a drill book . . . 

A wise old owl sat in an oak.

The more he saw, the less he spoke,

The less he spoke, the more he heard. . .  

Let's emulate that wise old bird."

- John Barth, from The Tidewater Tales, pg. 36 (although the final line of the quatrain doesn't appear until page 542). 

The Zen of Barth, or the Zen of tidewater wisdom.   

Day of the Whale

The first batch of potential jurors has been sworn in on the hush-money, election-interference trial of twice-impeached, multiply indicated, one-term ex-president Donald Trump. Since the jury's been sworn in, the trial has officially started.and Trump can add to his list of accolades that he's also the first US president, former or present, to stand criminal trial.

This trial will be nothing if not entertaining. Among the characters will be a porn actress, a pugnacious "fixer" who's been convicted of perjury, and the publisher of the National Enquirer, or as Trump once put it, "only the best people."

Day of the Lemur

I always knew WWIII was coming and I've accepted that fact since at least the late 1960s. I just never thought it would be caused by a corrupt Israeli president willing to do anything, including initiating Armageddon, to avoid being held accountable for his corruption, and an American president so stuck in 20th Century retail politics as he seeks reelection that he feels compelled to back and support Israel no matte what, even as they march the world off the edge of a cliff. 

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a "Doh!" 

The Spirals of Elsewhere

Today, April 13 by your calendar, is The Spirals of Elsewhere according to the Universal Solar Calendar. The name sound like it could be a Sun Ra song title or the name of a Pete Namlook album. 

On Wednesday, April 10 (Day of the Boar), the U.S. EPA established national limits in drinking water for six types of so-called "forever chemicals." Two types of the chemicals, commonly used in nonstick or stain-resistant products such as food packaging and firefighting foam, won’t be allowed to exceed 4 parts per trillion (ppt) in public drinking water under the new rule. Three additional chemicals will be restricted to 10 ppt. 

The "forever chemicals" are per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a group of man-made chemicals that include PFOA and PFOS as well as GenX, a newer generation of chemicals created as a replacement for PFOA. Since the 1940s, PFAS have been manufactured and used in a variety of industries around the globe, such as nonstick or stain-resistant food packaging and firefighting foam. Both PFOA and PFOS are very persistent in the environment and in the human body, meaning they don’t break down and they can accumulate over time (hence, "forever chemicals"). 

Manufacture of PFOA and PFOS began in the 1940s, but the substances have been largely phased out of U.S. chemical and product manufacturing in the mid-2000s. They have mostly been replaced by newer types of chemicals within the same class, however, the older chemicals still persist in the environment.

There is evidence that exposure to PFAS can lead to adverse human-health effects. One of the biggest health concerns associated with PFOA is an increased risk of kidney cancer. Exposure to high levels of PFOS has also been associated with an increased risk of liver cancer. GenX chemicals have been shown in animal studies to damage the liver, kidneys and immune system, as well as liver and pancreatic tumors. The EPA estimates that the new limits will prevent thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of serious illnesses. 

The Safe Drinking Water Act was established to protect the quality of drinking water in the United States. Wednesday's rule established legally enforceable Maximum Contaminant Levels and health-based, nonenforceable MCL Goals for six PFAS.

The EPA’s 4 ppt limit reflects the lowest levels of PFOA and PFOS that laboratories can reasonably detect and public water systems can effectively treat. But, according to the EPA, water systems should aim to totally eliminate the chemicals, because there are no safe levels of exposure. The EPA also set a limit for mixtures of GenX chemicals PFNA, PFHxS, and PFBS. Public water systems will have to use an equation developed by the EPA to determine whether the cumulative concentrations of the chemicals exceed the agency’s threshold. 

Regulatory standards for PFAS in drinking water have already been established in eleven states. Unfortunately, those 11 states don't include my home state of Georgia. The EPA estimated that 6% to 10% of the country’s public water systems - 4,100 to 6,700 systems in total - will need to make changes to meet the new federal limits.

Public water systems that don’t currently monitor for PFAS will have three years to start. If they detect PFAS at levels above the EPA limits, they will have two more years to purchase and install new technologies to reduce PFAS in their drinking water. The most common way to remove PFAS from water is through an activated carbon filter; other options include reverse osmosis or ion exchange resins. But even once water is treated for PFAS, it can take between two to eight years for the amount in our bodies to decrease by half, so it may take many years for substantial decreases in our exposure to occur.

In September 2022, the first proposed rulemaking relative to PFOA and PFOS designated them as hazardous substances under CERCLA (commonly known as "Superfund"). EPA additionally issued a notice of proposed rulemaking seeking public input on whether to designate other PFAS as hazardous substances under CERCLA.  This proposed rulemaking was open for comment through June 2023. After reviewing the public comments on the proposed rule, EPA made the limits official on Wednesday.

The implications of EPA’s rule are far-reaching and will not be limited to public water systems. An estimated 66,000 public water systems will be subject to this rule with compliance costs expected to range from $772 million to $1.2 billion annually. The drinking-water limits are a significant next step in the regulation of PFAS in the environment and likely are the first in a series of standards as EPA continues its push to regulate and reduce exposure to PFAS.

In addition to the requirements on public water systems, the new rule will require PFOA and PFOS to be considered at the cleanup of Superfund sites. This could potentially include the addition of new potentially responsible parties to existing Superfund sites and new sites added to the Superfund National Priorities List based on PFAS contamination, as well as the possible reopening of previously closed sites under the five-year review process. The rule will also trigger the release-reporting requirement under both CERCLA and the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act. 

Litigation will likely increase as additional cost-recovery and contribution claims are filed. Some public water systems have already sued companies that manufacture or previously manufactured PFAS, aiming to hold them accountable for the costs of testing and treating for PFAS. One such lawsuit resulted in a $1.18 billion settlement last year for 300 drinking water providers nationwide. Another lawsuit awarded $10.5 billion to $12.5 billion, depending on the level of contamination found, to public water systems across the country through 2036.

The addition of PFOA/PFOS and other PFAS as CERCLA hazardous substances poses several challenges, including the following:

• Limited testing methods and lab capacity
• Lag in development of remediation/treatment methods
• Absence of clear guidance for disposal/destruction of PFAS remediation wastes
• Environmental justice considerations for disposal/destruction sites

I would like to note that these same concerns were and will be present any time a new substance is added to the CERCLA list of hazardous substances.

Industry groups such as the American Chemistry Council argue that the new regulation isn't based on sound science or realistic economic data. The ACC argues that EPA has relied on an assessment of potential health effects that is fundamentally flawed; overstated the non-cancer risks associated with PFOA and PFOS exposure; failed to demonstrate that the benefits of the proposal justify the costs; and significantly underestimated the costs of complying with the proposed standard and the number of systems that will be impacted.

Assessments of health risks associated with exposures to chemicals are extremely complex and complicated studies, and disagreements will always be found among experts, consultants, and advocates looking for reasons to discredit the results. However, EPA risk assessments are peer-reviewed and subject to public review and comments, and a consensus is reached on controversial aspects and findings. While all may not agree on every aspect of each study, a majority does, despite the concerns by industry groups trying to discredit the results.

Virtually all health risk assessment overstate the cancer and non-cancer risks by design. As we're dealing with human health in these assessments, and the studies they rely on are based on limited populations and carry inherent uncertainties, the only prudent approach is to overestimate the identified risk, usually by a factor of 10. To reduce the risk to the lowest possible level would leave the public vulnerable to risks only revealed by subsequent studies, or expose the most sensitive receptors (young children, the elderly, etc.) to concentrations tolerable only to the healthy.

The challenge to prove cost-benefit demonstrations seems moot when dealing with potential deaths. While it could be argued that, say, $1M is too much to pay to avoid $100k in additional health-care costs, is it too much to pay to avoid deaths? Your death? Your child's? What is the bottom-line, profit/loss price of a human life?  

I have no doubt that if a Trump administration, or any Republican administration for that matter, comes into office in the next few years, these and other environmental regulations will be taken off the books and voided in short order. The country and our drinking water will be that much less safe, as businesses avoid costs of compliance and litigation. That's one trade-off I don't want to see.    

Into Another

 

I think at this point I've finally understand how to generate the same character across different AI images using Midjourney. But if I'm to use a single avatar, the Thin, White ROM in the autumn of his life is probably not the best representative of the spring season.

Today being Into Another in the Universal Solar Calendar is as good an excuse as any to present a new avatar for the spring, the Earth Mother, emerging, Athena-like, from the brow of the Thin, White ROM.   

The Dull-Gleam Monody

The 11th day of April, the 102nd day of the year, is known the The Dull-Gleam Monody in the Universal Solar Calendar, which begs the question: what the hell is a monody?

If you're curious, I'll let you Google the answer for yourself. My point in bringing it up, though, is that we've been looking forward to April 11, um, The Dull-Gleam Monody, for a while.  

The Sports Desk is excited because The Dull-Gleam Monody is the date of the semifinal game of the NCAA's Frozen Four - the college hockey championship. It's been a while - the quarterfinal game was back on March 30, The Topaz Glove. Boston University beat Minnesota, 6-3, that day and advanced to today's semifinal against Denver. Today's winner will go on to play in the Championship Game, most likely against Boston College. These games are kind of a big deal here at WDW.

Meanwhile, the Gaming Desk is excited because The Dull-Glean Monody is also the premier of the show Fallout, Jonathan Nolan's television adaptation of the Fallout games. Nolan was the person behind the HBO series Westworld, and collaborated with his brother, director Christopher Nolan, on the films Memento, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, and Interstellar. The Nolan brothers are kind of a big deal to WDW.

The Gaming Desk is also a big fan on the Fallout games. According to our Steam statistics, we've played 1,094 hours of Fallout 4, 346 hours of Fallout 76, 199 hours of Fallout - New Vegas, and 117 hours of Fallout 3. That's 1,756 total hours in the Fallout universe, or 73 full 24-hour days.  

We watched the first three episodes of the show on Amazon today, and are pleased to report that the series is good.  It doesn't indulge in the Nolan narrative-time-POV twists that made his Westworld adaptation frequently bewildering, but it's still quite interesting. It doesn't slavishly follow the plot of any one particular Fallout game the way HBO's The Last of Us followed the game, The Last of Us Part 1. But it is faithful to the lore of the game, especially the post-apocalyptic set designs, outfits, Pip-boys, soundtrack, and monsters. So far, we've seen ghouls, a radroach, a Yao Guai, and a gulper. It's an original story, centered around vault 33, but the narrative feels very much in keeping with the writing of the Fallout games. We're enjoying it.

Anyway, the hockey game's starting now, so we gotta run.  After the game, we'll probably watch another episode or two of Fallout.

Day of the Boar

If I'm going to stick to my new exercise and diet regimen to fend off diabetes as well as for general health, I'm going to need two things: a routine and positive feedback.

So far, the routine's come pretty quickly.  A few trips to the supermarket and some comparative nutrition shopping has got me on a daily menu of almost totally sugar-free and low-carb food. Plain Greek yogurt and berries for breakfast, leafy green salads for lunch, baked chicken breast or fish for dinner. Nuts and fresh fruit for snacks, black coffee and water as beverages.  My cupboards and fridge are now appropriately stocked and I'd actually have to venture out if I wanted to break my diet.

I was working my way toward the exercise routine even before the prediabetes prognosis came down. I now don't even have to push myself or think much to go outside every other day for my four-mile, 10,000-step walk.  I plan to gradually increase the distance and the frequency as the year progresses.

As for positive feedback, well, my fat-ass body still looks about the same to me. But since last July, I've been taking daily blood pressure readings every morning. Despite taking an angiotensin-receptor blocker (ARB) for most of that time, my blood pressure has bounced all over the place, from normal to elevated and up to stage 1 and 2 hypertensive, and then back down again.  But since returning from Big Ears and pursuing my new diet and exercise in earnest, my blood pressure has been much lower, generally in the normal to elevated range.

To be more specific, last year my elevated blood pressure averaged 143/86. The doctor put me on the ARB meds, and after 8½ months, my blood pressure averaged 140/84 - a decrease, to be sure, but still higher than I wanted considering all those months of medication. I was convinced there was something going on in my body elevating my blood pressure rather than unblocked angiotensin receptors, but my doctor insisted the medication was working ("Look, the average is lower!"). 

But in the two weeks since starting the diet and exercise regiment, my blood pressure has averaged 128/77 and dropping.

Blood pressure is not an indicator of diabetes, but is an indicator that my diet and exercise are having a positive effect. It gives me motivation to stick with the new routines, and even to step them up to see if I can keep my blood pressure down. or even lower it further. No more pork or pizza, no more barbeque or beer, but who knows, after enough time, maybe I could tolerate the occasional indulgence. 

Maybe after a long enough period of conscientious eating and exercise, I might even be able to do away with the prescription drugs altogether. Now there's a goal!

Seething Center

 Reasons to be cheerful (if remakes of monster movies make you cheerful):

1. Robert Eggers is filming a remake of Nosferatu starring Willem Dafoe and Lily-Rose Depp.
2. Guillermo del Toro is filming a remake of Frankenstein starring Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, Charles Dance, and Christopher Waltz.
3. Maggie Gyllenhaal is filming a remake of Bride of Frankenstein starring Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley.

In related Frankenstein news, HBO Max is currently streaming 2015's Victor Frankenstein with Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy, and 2014's I, Frankenstein with Aaron Eckhart and Bill Nighy. In related Nosferatu news, HBO Max is also carrying 2000's Dracula 2000 with Christopher Plummer and Gerard Butler, as well as Dracula II and Dracula III (2003, 2005) with Rutger Hauer and Roy Scheider.

I like a good monster movie as much as the next ROM, but Hollywood really needs to work on coming up with some original ideas.

The Long Dim Under

Azathoth is sending America strong signs to tell us to surrender. Falling bridges, earthquakes, eclipses and many more things to come. I pray Cthulhu comes to our rescue! - Marjorie Taylor Redd 

Mid afternoon, at the height of the partial eclipse today here in Atlanta, I could tell something was up just by the quality of light outside my window. It was sunny outside just as always, but the light seemed dimmer and less intense - not like on cloudy days, when the light is filtered, or at sunset, when the low-angle light is fading and colored. This just seemed like the available light was dimmer, like on some other planet with a distant sun. It was light outside, but just not bright light.

Outside, shafts of sunlight between the overhead trees cast crescent-shape beams down on my driveway. Dozens of little crescents of light were all over the shady areas. It was something to behold.

Mt. Katahdin, I've  learned, is closed to visitors in April to protect the floral ecosystem. It's a good thing I didn't travel up there hoping to see the eclipse from the mountaintop. But I did find the Mt. Katahdin web cam, and this is what the mountaintop looked like at 3:34 pm on an otherwise clear and sunny day:

Fifth Day of the Zenith

As you've no doubt heard by now, there will be a solar eclipse over North American and much of the United States tomorrow. The path of totality won't pass over me here in Atlanta, but a partial eclipse will be visible in the mid-afternoon (weather permitting). The current forecast calls for partial clouds tomorrow, so what can be seen remains to be seen. 

Last year, I thought about going up to Maine, where the total eclipse will be visible, to visit by brother and nephew and to see the eclipse. I went so far as to check at the local hotel in the small town he lives in, and rooms were still available (it was October). I even thought about using the time up in Maine to climb Mt. Katahdin again - I haven't done that since 1979. I talked to my daughter and son-in-law about joining me, but they were non-committal (they had an upcoming  six-week trip to Vietnam on their minds). But the trip would have been too soon after Big Ears, and after leaving Eliot, my cat, alone for four days, I didn't want to traumatize him further by leaving again so soon. That's my excuse and I'm sticking with it.

Of course, all of the expected lunacy and foolishness one would expect about an eclipse has surfaced and been amplified on social media.  Some thought the eclipse caused the minor earthquake that recently rattled the Northeast, or vice versa. Others opined that it has something to do with the collapsed bridge in Maryland. Georgia embarrassment Marjorie Taylor Green tweeted the brain fart, "God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens." Me, I'm waiting for one more sign before I repent - the Capitol Rotunda to collapse and crush Madge to death beneath its rubble.

Angus MacLise developed the Universal Solar Calendar back in 1969, and I'm sure he had no thoughts about the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse when he named April 3rd through 7 the First to Fifth Day of the Zenith. Now, zenith by no means implies eclipse, but it does direct one's attention on the skies and to astronomy. He just got lucky, I suppose, just as he did a week ago when Good Friday fell on Day of the Ascendant and Easter on Day of Mourning ("now the son is dead, the father can be born").

Much music has been written on the theme of an eclipse. Tomorrow, boomers will probably be listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon or Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart. Others will pull out their copies of Gustav Holst's The Planets. If you're inclined to listen instead to Sun Ra's Space Is the Place, may I suggest a deeper dive and play Sun-Earth Rock from 1970's Night of the Purple Moon?

Personally, mid-afternoon tomorrow, I'll be playing the Labèque sisters' 2023 interpretation of composer David Chalmin's Eclipse (produced by Bryce Dessner of The National).

Fourth Day of the Zenith

This one's from the Sports Desk.

The Boston Red Sox are in first place in the American League East.

No one had high expectations for the Sox this year. Few people had any expectations for the team at all. They finished dead last in the AL East for the past two years in a row, and haven't made any major adjustments or additions to the team or their pitching rotation in the off season. Lucas Giolito, the one pitcher they did acquire in the offseason, injured his elbow in spring training,  underwent internal brace surgery, and will miss the entire season. After that news broke, the Wall Street Journal declared the Red Sox season was already over before it even began.

I met several Red Sox fans in Knoxville during the Big Ears festival. They're easy to spot by the big letter B's on their caps and the Calvinistic clouds of self doubt constantly circling around their heads. None of them, not a one, expressed any optimism for the team this year. "The front office obviously doesn't care how the team does," one put it, "so why should I?" Anther was convinced that club management was only interested in selling tickets for expensive luxury suites and not concerned about the fan base that supported the team over all these years, and swore he'd never go to another game at Fenway ever again. Their attitude does raise the question though of why, if they're so contemptuous, are they still wearing Boston baseball hats? 

Meanwhile, the archrival and existential enemy New York Yankees have been padding their payroll with superstar players.  They set a MLB record with $31.5 million for slugger Juan Soto, and bought former Red Sox outfielder Alex Verdugo on the free-agent market, potentially strengthening themselves while weakening the Sox. Almost every sportswriter and news site predicts the Yankees will win the American League pennant, if not the World Series.  This is their year, the pundits all tell us.

And the Yankees did get off to a strong start, going 5-0 in their first five games. But they're been 1-2 in the last three, and yesterday, million-dollar man Juan Soto went 0-4 at bat, including two strikeouts, and Verdugo ended the game with a pop fly with two men on base. Their vaunted bullpen walked in two runs in the 9th on a series of wild pitches. 

As if things weren't already bad enough, the Red Sox seemed to have drawn the short straw schedule-wise with their first ten games all road games on the West Coast (Seattle, Oakland, and L.A.). But they split their series in Seattle, 2-2, and swept Oakland, 3-0, and won the first game of their series in L.A. (five consecutive road wins). As of today, the Red Sox are 6-2, the same as the Yankees, and are tied with New York for first place in the ALE. 

A sports newsletter I got this morning declared, "As predicted, Yankees off to a scorching start." Well, fuck me silly with a blow torch, but the Red Sox are off to just as scorching a start as the Yankees. It doesn't fit in neatly with the preconceived schema in the minds of sportswriters, journalists, and pundits, but 6-2 is 6-2, regardless of whether it's the Yankees or the Red Sox. Deny it or ignore it or refute it if you will, but the Boston Red Sox, with their crippled rotation, shallow bullpen, and absence of superstar sluggers, are off to a scorching start in 2024 whether y'all like it or not.

Not that I don't see challenges ahead.  Last night, shortstop Trevor Story made a diving attempt at a line drive, landed on his shoulder, and was writhing on the field in pain. They took him out of the game in obvious distress, and the team is waiting breathlessly to learn if his injury means the end of the road trip for Story, or the end of his season, or the end of his career. We have zero room - none - for any injuries or disappointments from our pitching staff. The team is mud-puddle shallow, paper thin, and virtually anything can send them into a tail-spin to the bottom of the standings.

But all that existed since the season began last week, and they're 6-2, 5-0 in their last five starts.  My prediction is that this October, despite all the challenges, this team will earn at least a Wild-Card spot in the playoffs.      

Third Day of the Zenith

The Ramapo Fault runs from northeast to southwest across the northern part of the State of New Jersey, from the New York State border down to the Round Valley Reservoir near Lebanon, NJ.  Along much of its length, the Ramapo Fault separates Mesozoic-age sedimentary rocks to the southeast from much older Precambrian intrusive volcanic rocks to the northwest. 

Near the Round Valley Reservoir, however, the Mesozoic bedrock occurs on both sides of the Ramapo Fault. In this area, the older volcanic rocks are separated from the younger sedimentary rocks by a series of mostly unnamed faults parallel to and northwest of the Ramapo. 

At 10:23 this morning, a magnitude 4.8 earthquake occurred along one of those unnamed, parallel faults, approximately 3 miles below the ground surface. The earthquake was widely felt in New York City and as far south as Washington, DC.  No injuries or significant damage were reported, but the quake still got much press coverage as earthquakes are relatively unusual in this part of the continent and because so many people felt it.

Scientists can often determine the specific fault that is responsible for an earthquake at well-studied plate boundaries like the San Andreas fault system in California. In contrast, this is rarely the case east of the Rocky Mountains. The New York-Philadelphia urban corridor is far from the nearest plate boundary, which is under the center of the Atlantic Ocean. The urban corridor is laced with known faults but numerous smaller or deeply buried faults remain undetected. Even the traces of known faults are poorly known at earthquake depths. Accordingly, few, if any, earthquakes in the urban corridor can be linked to a specific fault. 

Much of the bedrock beneath the New York-Philadelphia urban corridor was formed as ancient continents collided to form a supercontinent about 300-500 million years ago, raising the Appalachian Mountains. However, the intrusive volcanic rocks northwest of the Ramapo and unnamed, parallel faults are older than the continental collision and are remnants of the earlier, pre-supercontinent land masses. Most of the rest of the bedrock, such as the Mesozoic sedimentary rocks northwest of the fault system, formed when the supercontinent rifted apart about 200 million years ago to form what are now the northeastern U.S., the Atlantic Ocean, and Europe.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, people in the New York-Philadelphia urban corridor have felt small earthquakes since colonial times and have suffered damage from infrequent larger ones. New York City suffered earthquake damage in 1737 and 1884. Moderately damaging earthquakes strike somewhere in the urban corridor roughly twice a century, and smaller earthquakes such as today's are felt roughly every 2-3 years.

Although less frequent, earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S. are typically felt over a much broader region than in the western U.S. East of the Rockies, an earthquake can be felt over an area as much as ten times larger than a similar magnitude earthquake on the west coast. A magnitude 4.0 eastern U.S. earthquake typically can be felt at many places as far as 60 miles from where it occurred, and it infrequently causes damage near its source. A magnitude 5.5 eastern U.S. earthquake usually can be felt as far as 300 miles from where it occurred, and sometimes causes damage as far away as 25 miles.

And, no, the earthquake has nothing to do with D.E.I., Taylor Swift, or the impending solar eclipse.

Second Day of the Zenith

A good habit to acquire, if you re interested in disciplining your strength, is the habit of habit-breaking. For one thing, to change your habits deliberately on occasion prevents you from becoming entirely consistent . . . for another, it prevents your becoming  any more a vassal than you have to. Do you smoke? Stop smoking for a few years. Do you part your hair on the left? Try not parting it at all. Do you sleep on your left side, to the right of your wife? Sleep on your stomach, on her left. You have hundreds of habits: of dress, of manner, of speech, of eating, of thought, of aesthetic taste, of moral conduct. Break them now and then, deliberately, and institute new ones in their places for a while. It will slow you up sometimes, but you'll tend to grow strong and feel free. To be sure, don't break all your habits. Leave some untouched forever; otherwise, you'll be consistent.  

Wise words to live by from the opening of chapter xiv, bottles, needles, knives, of John Barth's The Floating Opera.  

Day of the Zenith

My favorite author and novelist, John Barth, died yesterday. He was 93 years old, but still, impermanence is swift.

In the bicentennial summer of 1976, my college girlfriend, Mara, suggested that I read a novel titled The Floating Opera that she had been assigned the previous semester for some English lit class or another. I think her course was "American Existentialists" or some such thing. Anyway, she said, "I think you'll like it," and I did.

To be very specific, the book she lent me was the 1972 Bantam Books paperback edition of The Floating Opera with a pink cover and a cartoon illustration of three very drunk-looking characters, two men and a woman, wearing Gatsby-era clothing. One of the men, pants-less, is fondling the woman's breast over her flapper-style dress as she has an arm around the necks of each. A bawdy cover picture to be sure, and the text on the cover claims that "Compared to Tristram Shandy, Candide, the works of Celine and Camus! However, The Floating Opera is indisputably a novel by John Barth, author of The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat Boy." 

I got quite a kick out of the book due to its humor and cynical observations on life, love, and American culture. It reminded me of the best of Vonnegut and Twain, and I reread the book that summer and I've probably read it from start to finish at least a half-dozen times since then. Not that the paperback Mara lent me survived the years - I've bought several copies of the book over the years, always and specifically the pink-covered Bantam Books edition. If I ever see a copy in a used book store, garage sale, or whatever, I always buy it without hesitation. I've sometimes had two or three copies of the book on my shelves, and have assigned it to girlfriends over the years with the instructions to read it they wanted to understand me or know how my mind worked.

Jackassy House Speaker Mike Johnson once said if you wanted to know his worldview, just read the Bible.  "That's my worldview, right there," he said. If you want to know my worldview, read The Floating Opera.    

Todd Andrews, the protagonist of the book, was born in the year 1900 and is therefore an embodiment of the 20th Century. The book was first published in 1956 (it's Barth's first novel) but the action takes place in the 1920s and '30s. Andrews had been diagnosed with a heart condition that could either kill him at any moment or just as likely keep on ticking indefinitely - an existential condition - so that he's keenly aware of the impermanence of his life and the futility of placing any value on his future ("Todd" is the German work for "death"). With no reason for living, he decides to commit suicide because, ultimately, there's no reason not to do so, and he decides he'll do it by blowing up a stage show traveling on a barge, the titular Floating Opera, taking a number of fellow citizens out with him. Mind you, this is all established in the first few chapters, so these aren't spoilers.

        

Anyway, most of the book is about Andrews' day-to-day life before his murder-suicide. There's a lot of sex - a menage-a-trois (a frequent situation in Barth's books), a wet dream from which he awakens to find the object of his nocturnal emission sitting on the side of his bed watching him ejaculate, and a hilarious recollection of the first time he had intercourse. As they're going at it, he catches a glimpse of them in a bedroom mirror with "Betty June's face buried in the pillow, her scrawny little buttocks thrust skyward; me gangly as a whippet and braying like an ass." He explodes with laughter at the absurd vision, humiliating poor Betty June. That unflattering image, "gangly as a whippet and braying like an ass," has stuck with me over the years, and on more that a few times the phrase has come to mind and deflated my ego (and more) when I've been in coitus delicatus and imagining myself to be some sort of studly master of sex.

Beyond the sex, the book pokes fun at a great many topics. Andrews is an attorney, and recognizing the absurdity of law, takes great pleasure in turning the rule of law on its head, not for fortune or personal gain, not to win or lose cases, but just to see what bizarre outcomes he might create. Just to see what happens. I didn't practice law in my career, but as an environmental consultant, I've had to interpret state and federal rules and regulations for clients and advise them on strategies to maintain compliance with various acts, statutes, and guidance. I wouldn't be honest if I didn't admit that on more than a few occasions, I advised clients to do something not anticipated by the rules of the game. I never knowingly advised someone to do something against their own interests - that would be professional misconduct -  but I did delight in seeing state and federal regulators squirm and wriggle as I presented them with situations and scenarios clearly outside of their guidance documents and counter to their goals and objectives, just to see what happens. No doubt, I developed this interest from Todd Andrews.       

But most relevant to today, there's a chapter titled bottles, needles, knives (all the chapter titles are stylized in lower-case letters) wherein Andrews discusses his reluctance to see a doctor. I've shared his reluctance to medicine, even though I don't share his myocardial endocarditis, and have avoided the doctor for nearly 20 years until an incident last summer landed me in the Emergency Room. Since then, I'm being treated for hypertension, prediabetes, and benign prostatic hyperplasia. Impermanence is swift. There's a passage in the chapter when Andrews finally does visit his doctor:

"How's the old prostate? Keeping her empty?" 

"No trouble," I said.

"Sure raised hell that one time, didn't it? I swear I wanted to cut her out for you, Toddy; you wouldn't have had another twinge. But that screwball Hodges - remember him? the resident? - he was having a feud with O'Donnell, the surgeon, that year, over politics, and wasn't letting anybody get cut. Goddamn Hodges! I swear he'd have tried to amputate a leg with his damn internal medicine! What a bunch!"  

A great deal of my attitudes, opinions, and outlook on things, as well as turns of phrases, maxims, and mantras, are from The Floating Opera and other books of Barth's. 

I've known he would be leaving this mortal coil for a long time now. He's prefaced a couple of his later books with the observation that he thought this might be his last. I've even checked on Wikipedia from time to time just to see if I hadn't somehow missed his obituary. But still, it feels like some small part of my own mind, some imaginary spot that was my repository of Barth quotes, anecdotes, and wisdom, has passed along with the man.

Rest in peace, Professor.