First Day of Quest, 25th of Autumn, 525 M.E. (Deneb): I'm not good with unstructured time. I've known this for years. Back when I was a working stiff, if I parlayed some vacation days with a three-day weekend and managed to take a week away from the job, I would fall into a dissolute state of listless entropy, unsure what to do with myself from one hour to the next.

When I retired, I devised a daily schedule of activities to keep my time structured. That schedule lasted maybe a week, if I ever followed the whole thing through for even so much as a single day. But eventually, and especially after the covids lockdown, a schedule has organically emerged, centered around my alternating days of walking and sitting, but also including time for meals, crossword puzzles, reading, shopping, video games, and blogging. The schedule isn't necessarily time based - I don't have a specific hour set aside for, say, posting to this blog - but is more of a sequence of activities: first this, then that. But breakfast isn't eaten until after morning coffee and no sooner than 10:00 am, dinner after 7:00 pm, and no gaming before 5:00 pm.

It all might sound a little ADD, but I find the routine gives my days the structure I need, and when I depart from the routine and the structure is gone, I feel adrift.

As I said, writing something (anything) on this blog is apart of that daily routine, but yesterday I forgot to post something here for the first time since September 29, 2023. Almost two years of daily blogging without missing a single day and, no, I don't remember the reason I missed posting back on 9/29. I think the reason I missed yesterday was that the Georgia Bulldogs football game (3:30 - 7:00 pm), the first game of the season, threw me off my schedule, although I did manage to post about the game to the sports blog. That organically derived daily schedule didn't have a 3½-hour window set aside for football, and I got thrown off my routine.   

Today is First Day of Quest in both Angus MacLise's Universal Solar Calendar and my New Revised USC. The 50th day of Autumn (September 25th in the Julian calendar) is the Last Day of Quest, so apparently we're on some sort of 25-day quest for something. Who knows what that might be - the meaning of life? A new daily routine? A new route to the Orient? The Epstein list?  

I guess we'll know when we get there.                

 

Listening, 23rd Day of Autumn, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Just look at the headlines. Stable Genius to Ban VA Abortions for Veterans Even in Cases of Rape and Incest. A third of all female veterans are sexual assault survivors.

Stable Genius Moves to Cancel $4.9B in Congress-Approved Foreign Funding. Republican senator Susan Collins says the move is a "clear violation of the law;" while Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren called the Stable Genius a "wannabe king."

Pentagon to Restore Confederate General Robert E Lee Portrait at West Point Library. The controversial painting of Lee and an enslaved man was taken down after a 2020 law to remove Confederate tributes. (Also, didn't Lee lose the Civil War? I hate to tell you, but I like generals who win wars, not losers.) 

Stable Genius Looks to Tighten Visa Durations for Foreign Students and Journalists. The Stable Genius claims the proposed change is necessary to "monitor" visa holders amid his immigration crackdown.

Having secured his grip on the capital, the Stable Genius is now sending troops to several rebel-held cities, claiming to be restoring order there. The move follows raids on the homes of leading dissidents and comes as armed men seen as loyal to the president, many of them masked, continue to pluck people off the streets.

This is happening here, in the United States, and yet it's not talked about that way. Sober-minded people are wary of sounding hyperbolic or hysterical - their instinct is to play it down rather than scream at the top of their lungs. Could it be that the Stable Genius' march towards authoritarianism is so steady, taking another step or two every day, that it’s easy to become inured to it? 

His dictator-like behavior is so brazen, so blatant, that paradoxically, we discount it. As  Jonathan Freedland notes in The Guardian, it’s not unlike waking up in the middle of the night to a burglar wearing a striped shirt and carrying a bag marked “loot.” We would assume it was a joke or a stunt or otherwise unreal, rather than a genuine danger. So it is with the Stable Genius. We can't quite believe what we are seeing.

But here is what we are seeing: He has deployed the National Guard on the streets of Washington DC, so that there are now 2,000 troops, heavily armed, patrolling the capital. The pretext was fighting crime, but violent crime in DC was at a 30-year low when he made his move. The president has warned that Chicago will be next, perhaps Baltimore too, and his vice-president made remarks here in Atlanta that our fair city should be made more safe. 

He signs executive orders daily that are becoming increasingly bizarre and unconstitutional, banning all VA abortions, canceling congressional funding, decreeing architectural styles for all federal buildings. He "jokes" about a third term or cancelling the 2028 election altogether, and that some people maybe want a "law-and-order" dictator if that's what it takes to reduce crime. 

It's real, it's happening now, and we need to wake up and face the reality. We should all be screaming at the top of our lungs.

 

Waymarks of the Otherland, 22nd Day of Autumn, 525 M.E. (Aldebaran): "If it sounds to you like I am an alarmist," Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said, "that is because I am ringing an alarm."

I catch myself sometimes thinking that maybe I'm overreacting. I've lived 70-plus years on this blue marble and despite all sorts of dire warnings and breathless political hyperbole, the nation hasn't turned communist, or fascist, or fallen into sinful decadence like some Babylonian empire. Every election, we're told, is the most important of our lifetime. People say a lot of shit, I say a lot of shit, but the next day the sun always rises in the east, people get up and go to work, and the world is an awful lot like it was the day before.

So am I really witness to the end of the amerikan democratic republic? Is the Stable Genius really a wannabe fascist dictator? Does it matter that he says he isn't? Will future elections be either cancelled or rendered meaningless by voter suppression like in some tin-pot foreign autocracy?

After deep consideration and carefully looking at the available data, I have to say the answer is "yes." This really may be the end of our republic. My skepticism is only based on my conditioned reflex that "Everything will be alright." But like cancer or a heart attack, everything is alright until suddenly it isn't.

Congratulations readers, we've lived long enough to witness the end of amerika. We're watching, as Burroughs once said, "The last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams."

Despite Pritzker's explicit statement to stay away, the Stable Genius still plans to send more than 200 Homeland Security officers to a Navy base outside Chicago to begin a sustained immigration crackdown there. He fired a member of the Federal Reserve Board, despite the fact that he has no constitutional right to do so and jeopardizes the Reserve’s independence, and hence credibility. RFK, Jr., the Stable Genius' Secretary of Health and Human Services, fired the Stable Genius' newly appointed head of the CDC for not going along with recommendations to restrict access to proven vaccines, despite the fact that a Secretary has no right to fire a Presidential appointee. Each of these items are bad, but individually, none of them are end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it bad. And when is the news ever not all bad?

But Pritzker really put it all into perspective. Regarding the Chicago occupancy, be said what the Stable Genius is doing is "unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American." Then he really got to the point. "This is not about fighting crime," or the Fed's interest rates or vaccine safety, for that matter. "This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections."

"This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story," Pritzker said. "This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see, where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse-race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab."

"Mr. President, do not come to Chicago," he insisted. "You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy. Most alarming, you seem to lack any appropriate concern as our commander-in-chief for the members of the military that you would so callously deploy as pawns in your ever-more-alarming grabs for power."

Pritzker conceded, "This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year."  But then he added an explicit warning to the Stable Genius, "You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law. As Dr. King once said, 'The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.' Humbly I would add, it doesn't bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go." 

"This is one of those times."

 

Day of the Iron Gate,  21st Day of Autumn, 525 M.E. (Helios): The good news came back from the lab regarding Eliot - he's in quite good shape for a cat his age. No leukemia, no kidney disease, no liver problems. 

We still can't rule out cancer of the tongue, however. He's desperately thin and it may be because eating hurts his mouth. The matted fur may be because it hurts to lick his paws while grooming. There were black stains on his front paws which the vet thinks may be from drooling, and I've seen him drool on several occasions. A lot of indications all point to something wrong with his tongue, and the vet saw a sore there.

They gave me some pain meds for Eliot (Gabapentin) but I haven't given it to him yet, some 24 hours since we returned from the vet. First, he doesn't seem to be in any pain. Second, it's a sedative and I've  read that it makes cats drowsy and dopey, and I don't want to sedate him if there's no problem. Also, some doctors question whether it actually dulls the pain cats experience or just sedates them into not exhibiting any symptoms of pain. The old guy has enough problems without being dazed and confused all day.

Of course, he may not be in pain, but his mouth might still be sensitive and it hurts to eat or groom. But I'm not sure being zonked out all day will improve either (junkies aren't noted as voracious eaters or to be fastidious about their personal hygiene).

Whatever the case, the vet didn't try to argue for giving him the meds.

The next step is probably a dental cleaning and oral examination. He'd be under anesthesia and this would be the best way to examine the sore on his tongue. In the worst-case scenario, if the sore is a cancer, we would have to move on to quality-of-life care, as the vet euphemistically put it.       

 

Day of the North Sea, 20th of Autumn, 525 M.E. (Electra): I almost didn't sit today because I shaved my pussy. That sentence might need some explanation.

Eliot, my surviving cat, is 16 years old (84 in human-equivalent years). He's been desperately thin for years now, but the vets say there's basically nothing we can do about that. But lately, his fur has been matting, big chunks of stiff fur all over his back and sides. I ignored it for as long as I could, but when I saw an open sore next to one of those mats yesterday, I made another appointment with the vet for noon today.

No diagnosis yet - we're waiting on the blood work to come back from the lab. But in the meantime, they shaved off the matted fur. In fact, they shaved off all his fur - his back, sides, legs, paws, and tail, everything except for his head. They gave him an antibiotic shot in case the sore gave him an infection, added his (overdue) rabies shot, and drew blood. 

He looks ridiculous. I'd post a picture, but honestly, I don't want to remember him like this so I won't. The fur will grow back and we'll have to watch to make sure he grooms and doesn't let it become matted again like before.

It all shook the little guy up, though. He hasn't been to the vet since '22, so getting crated and riding in the car was all a new (and unpleasant) experience for him. Not to mention the strange people poking and prodding him, sticking him with needles, and worst of all, shaving off his fur. We were back home less than two hours after we had left, but it was the most traumatic two hours in Eliot's life in a long time.

Of course he got treats when we got back home and of course I let him cuddle on my lap. As the afternoon wore on, I  realized that instead on my alternating-day meditation, my practice today might just be empathic care and affection for a traumatize, furless cat. I could just sit there on the couch quietly giving my full attention and love to Eliot sleeping on my lap instead of sitting on a zafu in the other room staring at a wall. 

But after less than a hour on my lap, Eliot got bored and jumped off, and walked over to his usual sleeping spot on the other couch on the other side of the room. As he curled up to sleep off his trauma, I snuck off and stared at the wall in my home zendo, so I got my sitting time in anyway, with plenty of loving kindness still left for my little pet.

Now it's back to comfort and care for my shaved pussy. The lab results tomorrow will tell us more about his condition. Worst case: mouth cancer (the vet noticed a sore on his tongue). The matted fur may be because it hurts for him to groom himself with lesions on his tongue. Best case: not cancer. The vet told me as gently as she could that there's not any treatment for mouth cancer for an elderly cat, other than hospice care. 

Impermanence is swift. But so are cats, and we'll see if Eliot still has more of his lives to spare.

 

The Brother Heart, 19th Day of Autumn, 525 M.E. (Deneb): Next year, I'm going to have to change the name of the fifth day of Autumn in my New Revised Universal Calendar from Swept Into to The Brother Heart, and call this 19th day Swept Into instead.

The reason is the fifth day of Autumn is August 11 in the Julian calendar, which also happens to be my late brother's birthday. He passed away last year on the 39th day of Autumn (September 14, 2024) and I could rename that day Brother Heart, but frankly and not to be too blunt about it, I'd rather celebrate his life than his death. Also, the 39th day of Autumn is now titled Have Gone Out, which sounds like the extinguishing of a flame, which itself is a metaphor for nirvana, so it already has an appropriate name. 

Impermanence is swift. It's also inevitable. 

It's been quite the 18 months for impermanence. My cat, Izzy, died on December 12, 2023. My brother passed away on September 14, 2024. My mother left this world on January 16, 2025. I'm still here, cursed with having to witness others fall away around me. 

It's my brother's passing that still hits the hardest. Sure, I'm sad about Izzy, but a cat, however cherished, is still not a human. My Mom passed at age 91, living far longer than anyone expected, even her, and no one was surprised when she passed, even her. I'm not so sure I want to be around for that long. But David was my little brother, 10 years younger than me, and it upsets the natural order of things that he's gone and I'm still here. It doesn't seem right. He was 11 when I turned 21, 30 when I was 40, and so on. As Jens Lekman could have sang in Wedding in Finistère: 

Like a five-year-old watching the fifteen-year-olds shoplifting,
A ten-year-old watching the twenty-year-olds French kissing,
A fifteen-year-old watching the twenty-five-year-olds chain-smoking,
A twenty-year-old watching the thirty-year-olds vanishing.

Dude should still be with us.

Anyway, we're roughly halfway now between his birthday and his last day, and we come across The Brother Heart and I'm crying all over again.

 

The Deserted Garden, 18th Day of Autumn, 525 M.E. (Castor): There's crime in Atlanta, no doubt. There's crime everywhere. Just this week, there were numerous incidents in my very own neighborhood of someone rifling through parked cars late at night. One person reported that he had a handgun stolen, which brings up the question how fucking stupid do you have to be to keep your gun in the car overnight? 

But crime doesn't define our lives here. I don't worry going to the supermarket about getting jacked or mugged. I don't worry walking alone on the Beltline or on the Chattahoochee trail. I know better than to walk alone in low-income residential neighborhoods at say, 3:00 am, and if I were to find myself at a bar or nightclub at closing time, I'd be mindful of my surroundings, but crime and crime avoidance aren't a big part of my existence. 

Statistically, Atlanta is experiencing an overall drop in crime, including a decrease in homicides. According to the Atlanta Police Department, there was a 23% drop in the number of homicides in the first four months of this year compared to the same period in 2024, a bigger drop than the national average. The city has also seen a 39% decrease in vehicle thefts. 

Despite that, the Stable Genius decided that we need National Guard troops on the street to help assist the police, and sent his goony bird of a VP to Atlanta last week to talk about how bad the crime is here, and how we (meaning "we white people") deserve better.  Pentagon officials confirmed that up to 1,700 men and women of the National Guard were being mobilized to 19 states, including Georgia, to assist ICE with “logistical support and clerical functions” (yeah, right).

1,700 troops to 19 states means about 90 per state. Ninety goobers in fatigues hanging around checkpoints and high-visibility positions (you know that at least half of them will be right out in front of CNN's headquarters) won't make a difference in the already declining crime rates here. 

But we all know it just starts with a few military personnel and then escalates from there. We've seen this movie, this (un)reality TV show, before. We know how this one ends and we don't like this tired old script. 

Where are all those Second Amendment gun nuts right now? They didn't do jack shit about kids getting killed in schools, that's apparently okay with them, but wasn't the whole point to oppose tyranny - don't tread on me and all that shit? They're okay with federal troops on the streets of our cities? Of course, here in Georgia (probably elsewhere, too) the gun nuts are mostly out in the country and don't consider the dirty streets of Atlanta as "ours" - it's a "them" problem to them, not a "my" problem. "If you don't like the troops, get a job and stop jacking cars." 

But just wait until Stage II when more troops arrive, checkpoints become commonplace, and no one leaves home without their papers. By the time the outrage builds up, it will be far too late to do anything, as if some redneck and his AK were going to turn the tide of justice, anyway. Dumb-ass peckerheads.

Elections have consequences. The consequence of November 5, 2024 was the end of the United States as a free country. This nation built on the twin pillars of African slavery and indigenous genocide is meeting its karmic fate. Don't say we didn't warn you.      

 

Entryway of the Dipper, 17th Day of Autumn, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse):  That trough of low pressure located northeast of the Leeward Islands has become Tropical Storm Fernand but is  moving toward the North Atlantic, so who cares? 

However, the tropical wave located about 650 miles east of the Windward Islands continues to develop as it moves quickly to the west toward the Caribbean. Locally heavy rainfall and gusty winds are possible Sunday and Monday across portions of the Windward Islands, but the National Hurricane Center maintains that conditions over the warm waters of the central Caribbean are unfavorable for further development. 

We'll see. I'm not so sure about that one.

I didn't get my walk in today even though it's a Betelgeuse. Rain. That's my alibi. It was probably possible to have gotten a few miles in after three o'clock, but by that point I had lost all my enthusiasm and energy. Third missed walk this month. I'm blaming climate change for all this rain and all the missed miles.

I did terribly on the NY Times news quiz yesterday, missing three of the 11 questions. Here's a news-quiz question: why are there always 11 questions, and not 10 or 12?  Seems pretty sus to me. Anyway, I apparently didn't realize that Zelensky's outfit at last week's meeting in the White Hose was a black suit, and not black military jeans and t-shirt like I had guessed. I also didn't know that an advisor to NY Mayor Eric Adams handed some reporter a potato-chip bag full of cash for some reason. And finally, I apparently missed the story about an Air Canada flight attendants' strike. If I'm being honest, I got lucky on the last four questions: what the new acronym MS NOW stands for (I got it right by eliminating the other, silly answers), which WNBA player just scored 44 points (Paige Bueckers), one about a robotic athletic contest in China, and a lucky guess at the names of two coyotes in Central Park (Romeo and Juliet). 

Finally, TIL that the Stable Genius is deploying an additional 1,700 National Guard troops to 19 states, including Georgia. "Georgia" means Atlanta, with its black mayor, Democratic voters, and urban setting. National Guard troops patrolling the dead-end cul-de-sac traps and poorly lit streets of Atlanta - what could possibly go wrong?

These violent delights have violent ends. Just sayin'.

 

Lion of the Virgin, 16th Day of Autumn, 525 M.E. (Aldebaran): Hurricane Erin has become a post-tropical storm and is on its way northeast to go fuck with Iceland. The trough of low pressure located northeast of the Leeward Islands still appears conducive for further development, and is likely to develop into a tropical storm by this weekend. However, it's moving north-northwestward over the Atlantic and similar to Erin, is unlikely to make landfall. 

However, there's a third system that concerns me. While Erin and the low-pressure trough both tracked more or less along the same path and got swept out to sea without making landfall, the third system is crossing the Atlantic further to the south and could possibly enter the Caribbean without being caught by the Gulf Stream and getting deported to somewhere in the North Atlantic. 

Erin grew from a tropical storm to a category 5 hurricane in about 24 hours, one of the fastest rates ever seen in the Atlantic. Only a handful of hurricanes in history have strengthened as quickly into as large and as intense a storm as Erin. The waters in the Caribbean are far warmer than those of the Atlantic that fueled Erin, and if the third system manages to dodge the Gulf Stream and makes it into the Caribbean, it could quickly develop into a dangerous storm, with little to prevent it from making landfall somewhere on the Gulf coast in Mexico or the U.S. 

Hurricane season anxiety. Meanwhile, FBI agents raided the home of John Bolton, former Secretary of State and outspoken critic of the Stable Genius, this morning, a move that no one doesn't think is anything but political revenge by a weaponized Justice Department. Meanwhile, the Stable Genius has decreed that the national guard troops patrolling the streets of DC should be armed, and has threatened to expand his military takeover of DC into New York and Chicago. “When ready, we will start in Chicago . . . Chicago is a mess,” he said, adding that he will also "help" with New York. Ominously, his vice-president was here in Atlanta yesterday, and described Atlanta as a place where families cower in fear of criminals and “cross the street” to “avoid a crazy person yelling.” 

“Those are your streets, paid for with your tax dollars, and you ought to be able to use them like any other citizen of this country,” he said. Like DC, Chicago, and New York, Atlanta is a Democratic-voting city with a Black mayor, making it a prime target for a hostile takeover by the Stable Genius' stormtroopers. Personally, I'd rather cross the street to avoid a crazy person yelling than to avoid armed, masked militia members illicitly occupying my city.   

Here's a fun little news bit: the pastor of the church of our black-out alcoholic Secretary of Defense has said that be believes there ought to be public executions and that the Bible is “pro-ICE raids."

Finally, an accelerated increase of tourism in Antarctica has heavily increased the amount of heavy metals and other pollutants present there, threatening the continent's fragile ecology. In 40 years, the concentration of metals has increased tenfold in areas with increased human activity, mostly due to fossil fuel combustion by planes, boats, and other supporting vehicles. The number of tourists visiting Antarctica has increased from 20,000 to 120,000 per year over the last two decades and shows no sign of slowing down, so we can expect pollutants of all kinds to continue accumulating in this once untouched ecosystem.

 

Source of the Danube, 15th Day of Fall, 525 M.E. (Helios): I'm a vegetarian, or at least very nearly so. While there's no slabs of beef in my diet or any meat dishes on my dinner table, small amounts of chicken occasionally appear in my salads. Also, I like Progresso's Chicken and Sausage Gumbo - I have a can of that mixed with some brown rice for dinner about once a month (it usually lasts for two meals). But other than that, I'm pretty much meat free.

Why can't vegetarians eat meat, anyway? Carnivores eat vegetables - it doesn't seem fair that they have a dietary freedom that's denied to vegetarians. 

I've known Buddhists who are adamant that Buddhists shouldn't eat any meat. It you're not a vegetarian, they insist, you're not a Buddhist. But I understand that the Buddha himself would eat meat if that's what was given to him when he was out collecting alms. And Tibetans ate meat - living in the Himalaya, you'd starve if not for the occasional yak.

There's a Japanese story about a band of hunters lost in the woods. One gets separated from the others and nearly dies of exposure, but a she-bear comes along and takes pity on him. Gently, she carries him back to her den, nurses him on bear's milk, and keeps him warm by cuddling up with him through the cold mountain nights. Once his strength is restored, she allows him to leave the den. 

Heading back to his town, he encounters another band of hunters. They ask him if there's any game in the area, and he tells him there's a she bear in a den just up the trail. They find her, kill her, skin her, and bring the meat back to the village.

When they learn, though, of what happened between the bear and the man they met in the woods, they decide it would be evil to eat the meat, so instead they sell the fur and then donate the money earned and the bear meat to the local Zen monastery.

The moral of the story is that Zen monastics would eat meat if it was donated to them.

The Mississippi Delta, 14th Day of Fall, 525 M.E. (Electra): The Deep South is baking from weeks and weeks of 90° degree weather. Torrential downpours occur late every afternoon as the climate grows more and more tropical and if it weren't for the rain, the landscape would probably resemble a dried-out husk.

Accelerating climate change is disrupting the water cycle, and freshwater loss from the continents is now contributing more to sea-level rise than melting ice sheets. Zones experiencing severe drying are expanding by an area twice the size of California each year. We are also mining groundwater at unsustainable rates, causing land subsidence and depleted aquifers. While some areas of the planet are getting wetter, these are vastly outnumbered by areas that are drying up and we can expect the water cycle to continue to go haywire as climate chaos continues.

Hurricane Erin is now a massive monster over 800 miles across as is churns its way up the Atlantic Ocean off the East Coast. Good news: the system behind it appears to be turning to the north now, too, probably avoiding any impact with the U.S. It's still too early where that third system, currently chugging across the Atlantic from Africa, is going to go.

Meanwhile, on dry land, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia are fully out in the open all across the South. MAGA mentality is out in full force and the KKK has been actively reforming since the Stable Genius' election. White Christian Nationalists are emboldened, cheering on ICE raids, and people are routinely stopped at police checkpoints looking for undocumented farm workers. Police are even reportedly investigating anti-Republican and anti-MAGA statements made on social media as crimes and even terrorism. 

Who really won the Civil War? Despite progressive gains of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, we've moving backwards on voting rights, reproductive freedom, and civil liberty. Military forces, many masked and in unmarked vehicles, are  patrolling the streets of D.C. The Stable Genius is trying to have history rewritten in our schools, our museums, our national monuments, and our libraries. He even pardoned the thug who was rampaging in D.C., spitting on the police, and carrying a Confederate flag through the Capitol on January 6.

 

The Endlong Ride, 13th Day of Fall, 525 M.E. (Deneb): And still, these languid days and nights continue to pass as in a dream.

Deneb is a walking day, and today I walked a mere Monroe (5.8 miles) before I was turned back by an incoming thunderstorm. I got in the house just in time to avoid getting soaked. 

I'm thinking I may cut back a little on the length of these alternating-day walks, as they're taking too much time. At 3.1 mph, the Monroe itself only took about two hours, but before I head out I have to change into walking clothes, eat and properly hydrate, and make sure my bladder and bowels are evacuated. When I return, I need to rest and sometimes even cat-nap, and then shower and change back into street clothes. All told, if I decide at say, noon, to walk, it might by 4:00 pm before I'm out of the shower and dressed again. And that's a Monroe in my own neighborhood. If I opt for a nine-mile Harrison along the Chattahoochee, not only are there two more walking hours, but also the time driving to the trailhead and back.        

The long and short of it is I find myself resisting the walks, reluctant to commit half the day or more to the effort, or unsure that the weather's going to give me a four- to six-hour window without rain. If I just went out the door and walked a two-mile Adams, I'd be done within an hour and wouldn't need nearly as much prep or cool-down time. 

Today, when I wasn't out walking, I finally finished reading Ulysses. I liked it, at first, but as it went on and on (and on and on and on), I gradually grew irritated, then frustrated, and ultimately resentful. Having completed the book - every page (all 768) and every chapter (they're not numbered, but 28) - I can honestly say it's the most pretentious, self-indulgent, tedious bullshit I've ever wasted my time on. I mean, sure, I get it - Joyce is a genius, a highly intelligent, well-educated man - but he rubs your nose in that on every page, stuffing the pages with the most recherche references and vocabulary, stylistic posturing, and pointless flights of fantasy. Not to say that there isn't literary merit to the book  despite all the self indulgence, wankery, and endless digressions. I'm glad that I read it (really), if for no other reason than I can confidently say I'll never do that again and wouldn't recommend it to anyone else. 

If you haven't read it, let me spoil it for you my revealing the plot. A man, one Leopold Bloom, who's catfishing some woman responding to a non-existent job offer so that he can exchange dirty letters with her, gets up in the morning, burns the kidneys he was frying for breakfast, goes to a funeral, masturbates in a public park while staring at a teenage girl, and then stalks a young man in the red-light district, bringing him home in order to seduce his own wife, whom he knows slept with another man that day. He fails, the young man leaves, and Bloom crawls into bed with his wife, his head buried down at the foot of the bed. The end. 

It takes Joyce nearly 800 pages to tell that story (Hemingway could probably reduce it to one sentence), those 800 pages overstuffed with run-to-the-thesaurus phrases like "agenbite of inwit," angular sentences like "Before born bliss babe had. Within womb won he worship," and nonsense onomatopoeia like, "Imperthnthn thnthnthn." Not to mention his frequent and casual use of the notorious n-word.

To be sure, it was fun trying to decipher the first hundred or so pages, but after a while it just became fucking preposterous.   

What else is going on? Oh yes - a third storm system has developed in the Atlantic, behind Hurricane Erin and the system discussed yesterday that's tracking along the same path as Erin. That third system is currently just off the coast of Senegal, but has a 30% chance of developing into a tropical storm and is heading towards us to the west. 

 

Day of the Great Roots, 12th of Fall, 525 M.E. (Castor): What concerns me about Erin isn't her trajectory. The Gulf Stream, that great protector of North America's east coast, is carrying her off onto the Atlantic, away from these shores. She won't make landfall here.

What concerns me about Erin is the speed with which she practically exploded into a Class 5 hurricane. The ocean waters are so warm that a tropical depression became a major hurricane within 24 hours time. Even if Erin won't land here, that thermal energy could fuel the next storm, and we may not get so lucky regarding trajectory.

Already, a tropical wave located over the eastern Atlantic is producing showers and thunderstorms, and environmental conditions suggest a tropical depression could form toward the end of the week. The system is moving westward across the Atlantic in almost the exact same path as Erin, and once it hits that warm water off the Leeward Islands that fueled Erin, it could likewise develop into something big. 

Will the Gulf Stream save us again? Or did Erin sap all the current's energy, leaving us vulnerable to what comes next? Or will this next storm be powerful enough to cross the Gulf Stream or what's left of it and make landfill on the southeast coast? 

Paranoia during hurricane season. I sit and look out upon the ocean and all the tempests of the sea.

Day of the High Cities, 11th of Fall, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world and upon all the oppression and shame. 

I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done. I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate. I see the wife misused by her husband. I see the treacherous seducer of young women. I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love attempted to be hid. I see these sights on the earth. 

I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny. I see martyrs and prisoners. I observe a famine at sea and observe sailors casting lots over who shall be killed to preserve the lives of the rest. 

I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like.

All these - all the meanness and agony without end - I, sitting, look out upon, see, hear, and am silent  (Walt Whitman, 1855).

Day of the Sledge, 10th of Fall, 525 M.E. (Atlas): Let's take the sledgehammer to the Stable Genius. He is grifting in plain sight. He is selling sponsorships to White House events. He has taken over the Kennedy Center and is programing his own tacky entertainments to be hosted by, of course, himself. He is selling federal buildings. He is attacking institutions. He is defying court orders. He has manipulated the stock market. He has weaponized the DOJ. He got rid of food safety. He got rid of disease control. He has weakened environmental protections. He is doing everything possible to accelerate climate change. He wants to destroy public lands. He wants to mine sea beds in international waters. He is extorting minerals from other countries. He gave an unelected oligarch access to sensitive government files. 

He has broken trust with our allies. He has weakened global confidence in amerika. He has weakened amerika. He has done all this in a little over six months. amerika cannot survive another 3½  years of this.

The Stable Genius must be demolished. Grab your pitchforks, your sledgehammers, your hammers and your sickles, comrades, and let's get rid of this evil, corrupt, pedophile motherfucker. 

   
 

 

Ninth Ocean, 9th Day of Fall, 525 M.E. (Helios): More liberties with MacLise's Universal Solar Calendar - the ninth day of autumn was Day of the Antler in the original version, but I liked having the Ocean days fall on multiples of 12 and today is the 228th day of the year (with leap year day included), the 19th dozen. Also, who could resist having Ninth Ocean fall on the ninth day of the season? Too good to pass up, so I swapped Ninth Ocean and Day of the Antler in my New Revised USC.    

I walked a hot Jackson today - 7.6 miles in 95° heat. 90% humidity with a dew point of 71°, but it still didn't feel as muggy as last Monday. I didn't walk on Wednesday - I let the heat and humidity and threat of rain intimidate me into staying in, although in actuality a walk would have been quite manageable.

I'm still bulldozing my way through Ulysses - I'm almost done (page 722 of 768) and about to start the infamous, last "yes" chapter. I actually read that chapter years ago, maybe 1973, from the same hardbound copy I'm reading now, a book handed down to me from my grandfather, the grandson of the slave Eli of Cashua Creek Plantation. 

I laughed to myself as I recognized some of the text of the penultimate chapter before "yes" - "the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump," and the wordplay of  "Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer" and so on to "Xinbad the Phthailer." Apparently, I looked back at the chapter before "yes" in 1973.  

Speaking of Yes in 1973, back then I was still listening to Jefferson Airplane, and now all these years later I've finally read enough of Ulysses to understand the lyrics to their song, ReJoyce:

Molly's gone to Blazes

Boylan's crotch amazes

Any woman who's husband sleeps 

With his head all buried down at the foot of her bed

It's Friday by the Julian calendar, which means it's time for the weekly NY Times' news quiz. I scored a disappointing eight out of 11 - apparently, I didn't know there was some sort of political issue in France over air conditioning, that social media has been abuzz about the size of Cristiano Ronaldo's girlfriend's engagement ring, or that AOL dial-up internet has finally been discontinued.

Let's all hope that the Stable Genius doesn't give Alaska to Putin today in exchange for pulling out of Ukraine. 

 

The Three Faces, 8th Day of Fall, 525 M.E. (Electra): Thus I have heard: The other day, I was kicking back, preparing to fall down some musical rabbit hole while listening to an NTS Radio show on American cellist, composer, producer, and singer Arthur Russell (1951-1992), when I unexpectedly heard someone chanting the Buddhist Heart Sutra. The precise wording they used was different than what I was used to, but with a little research (i.e., a quick Google search), I learned it was based on a Tibetan version of the Sutra. That version goes:

"Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva practiced deep highest perfect wisdom when perceived the five fields of consciousness all empty, relieved every suffering. Sariputra, form is not different from emptiness. Emptiness not different from form. Form is the emptiness. Emptiness is the form. Sensation, recognition, conceptualization, consciousness, also like this. Sariputra, this is the original character of everything: not born, not annihilated, not tainted, not pure, does not increase, does not decrease. Therefore in emptiness no form, no sensation, no recognition, no conceptualization, no consciousness. No eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of touch; no eye, no world of eyes until we come to also no world of consciousness," etc.

Additional Google searches informed me that Russell was a practicing Buddhist (I did not know that) and that Buddhist philosophy had guided much of his music, although I don't think he ever recorded a version of the Heart Sutra. 

If you're unfamiliar with the Sutra, I only quoted the first third or so in the interest of brevity. Also,  "Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva" is an honorific name for the person most widely known as the Buddha (which itself is an honorific name given to Siddhartha Gautama). The Sutra is from instructions he gave to a monk, Sariputra. The first line takes the form of a narrative and the rest are the words of instruction from the Buddha. Technically (grammatically), there should be a quotation mark before the first "Sariputra." Speaking of grammar, there are some serious verb-tense issues and other errors in that first, narrative sentence above, but I copied it just as printed, and as it was chanted in the NTS show. 

I find it interesting how different translations bring out different meanings to the text. Whatever the Buddha said or didn't say would have been in Pali, a language now extinct and which had no written form. The teachings were handed down verbally by rote memorization from teacher to student until they were finally transcribed into Sanskrit, and from there into Tibetan, into Chinese, into Japanese, into English, and into nearly all other languages on Earth. As the words traveled from language to language and from teacher to teacher, they changed - morphing and evolving to suit whatever the needs were. 

The version I'm most familiar and comfortable with, one of many English-language versions, goes: 

"Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva when deeply practicing prajna paramita clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering. Sariputra, form does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form. Sensations, perceptions, formations, and consciousness are also like this. Sariputra, all dharmas are marked by emptiness. They neither arise not cease, are neither defiled not pure, neither increase not decrease. Therefore, given emptiness, there is no form, no sensation, no perception, no formation, no consciousness, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind, no realm of sight, no realm of mind consciousness," etc.

"Prajna paramita" is the Sanskrit term for the perfection of wisdom. Personally, I prefer the word, "conception" instead of "formation" (which sounds too much like "form") and is less wordy-sounding than the "conceptualization" of the Tibetan version up above. Of course, "conception" also implies birth or intercourse, so there's that.

To give you an idea of how different the translations can be, and the different nuances of meaning revealed in the different translations, an English translation of Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh's version goes:

"Avalokiteshvara, while practicing deeply with the insight that brings us to the other shore, suddenly discovered that all of the five skandhas are equally empty, and with this realization he overcame all ill-being. Listen Sariputra, this body itself is emptiness and emptiness itself is this body. This body is not other than emptiness and emptiness is not other than this body. The same is true of feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Listen Sariputra, all phenomena bear the mark of emptiness: their true nature is the nature of no birth-no death, no being-no non-being, no defilement-no purity, no increasing-no decreasing. That is why in emptiness, body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness are not separate self entities. The eighteen realms of phenomena which are the six sense organs, the six sense objects, and the six consciousnesses are also not separate self entities. The twelve links of interdependent arising and their extinction are also not separate self entities," etc. 

I like the use of "this body" instead of "form." It makes it feel more tangible and real. "Formation" or "conceptualization" is here translated as "mental formation," which is accurate but sounds awkward. The "form" translated as "this body" could be called "physical formation" to distinguish it from "mental formation," but what do I know? When chanting, "formation" or "conception" rolls off the tongue more easily than "mental formation." Similarly, the chant picks up a lot of energy as it catalogs the "no eyes, no ears." etc. portion, so it seems like a buzz-kill to chant "the eighteen realms of phenomena which are the six sense organs, the six sense objects, and the six consciousnesses," which sounds unnecessarily pedantic and scholarly.

So this rabbit hole - different translations of the Heart Sutra - is not at all the one I expected to fall into when I started the NTS playlist, nor what I think Arthur Russell would have expected of his future listeners.

 

Day of the Antler, 7th of Fall, 525 M.E. (Deneb): To justify deploying armed federal troops in the streets of DC, the Stable Genius claimed, "Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever. They say 25 years, but they don’t know what that means because it just goes back 25 years.”

Cool story, bro, but it's not true. FBI crime stats indicate 274 homicides in DC in 2023. That's bad, that's a problem, and was the largest number in over 25 years, but not “ever.” In 1997, the total number of homicides was 301, which, scientists say, is a larger number than 274. And since then, the number of homicides has declined to 187 in 2024, about two thirds the 2023 level. The declining trend is apparently holding - as of August 12, there have been 100 homicides in DC, compared with 112 at the same point last year. 

But the Stable Genius was talking about murder "rates," not total numbers. The 274 total homicides in 2023 occurred at a rate of 40.4 per 100,000 people, which was the highest rate since 2003, when there were 44 per 100,000. But even as the city's population grew in the year since then, the number of homicides declined, so that the homicides rate in 2024 was 26.6 per 100,000. Again, scientists insist that 26.6 is a smaller number than 44.  

The Stable Genius is also wrong about the record going back only 25 years. Records dating back to the 1960s show that Washington’s homicide rate peaked during the height of the crack epidemic at more than 80 per 100,000 in 1991, or about double the rate of 2023.

My point in bringing up all this smart-assey fact-checking isn't to claim that there isn't a crime problem in Washington, DC (there is), but just to remind the gullible that the Stable Genius just makes things up as he goes along and says whatever's the most convenient to him at the moment. Also, I'm not convinced that stationing National Guard troops in photo-friendly locations around DC landmarks is necessarily going to lower the homicide rate, as many of the murders are committed in residential neighborhoods, in bars and nightclubs, and in private homes.  

The media, especially the more liberal outlets, are so primed to refute the Stable Genius, normally a useful reflex, that they could fall into the trap of arguing that crime in DC isn't an issue. It is, but not in the numbers the SG claimed during the conference, and sending in the Guard isn't the solution. 

They also want to keep their eye on the ball and are quick to claim, like Al Sharpton, that the SG is sending in the troops and spouting false statistics to distract us from the Epstein files. Personally, I'm more concerned about armed Federal troops patrolling the street of our cities than I am about whatever embarrassing revelations are contained in the Epstein files. It can even be argued that the media frenzy over Epstein is merely a distraction from having to discuss the creeping authoritarianism the SG is unleashing on America. "Don't think about the tariffs, martial law, or extrajudicial deportations," the media seems to insist, "the real story is the Epstein sex scandal."  

And almost no one is talking about climate change. While the Stable Genius is sending in the troops and the media is obsessed over what headlines the Epstein file could produce, in the name of deregulation, the EPA is rejecting the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases threaten public health. The Stable Genius' budget eliminates funding for a Hawaiian lab that has collected climate data for 70 years. It shutters the Agency's scientific research arm. It also retires an extreme-weather project that tracked the costs of natural disasters and said it would stop updating a database that companies use to calculate their emissions. That's what I'm worried about.

Oh, and by the way, don't think I don't see you, Erin. A Tropical Storm that formed of the west coast of Africa has crossed the Atlantic and is continuing to the west. It's current track has it moving north of Puerto Rico and possibly missing the Bahamas, and its unclear right now whether or not it will make landfall on the eastern US or follow the Gulf Stream north into the Atlantic.

Be careful out there, friends.

Rustle of the Prey, 6th Day of Fall, 525 M.E. (Castor): I got an email today with a playlist for the "Dog Days of Summer." Never mind that the songs are all about actual dogs - canines - and not the heat of the summer's Dog Days, and that the songs are almost all shitty pop music, from FKA twigs to Taylor Swift. The worst part is that the Dog Days are already over, both in Angus MacLise's Universal Solar Calendar and my own New Revised USC. Too little, too late, but nice try New York Times music critics.   

Last Friday, a 30-year-old man from Kennesaw, Georgia, who claimed the covids vaccine had made him suicidal, killed a police officer and then himself at CDC headquarters here in Atlanta. People believe what they want to believe about the vaccine. A former coworker of mine developed a blood clot in his leg, and no amount of argument will ever convince him that it's not because of the covid vaccine. Before the vaccine, he didn't have the blood clot (although he had already been obese for years), and some time after the vaccine, he did. The Kennesaw gunman believed the vaccine had made him suicidal, and then he launched a suicidal attack on CDC headquarters. Must be the vaccine, right?        

In response to the attack, the local division of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents CDC workers, called on the leadership of the CDC and DHS, which is led by vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to condemn vaccine disinformation. The union said the incident was not random and "compounds months of mistreatment, neglect, and vilification that CDC staff have endured."

There must be a "clear and unequivocal stance in condemning vaccine disinformation" by the leadership. "This condemnation." they union claims, "is necessary to help prevent violence against scientists that may be incited by such disinformation."

A grassroots group of former CDC employees who were terminated this year also released a statement calling for Kennedy to step down. "Kennedy is directly responsible for the villainization of CDC's workforce through his continuous lies about science and vaccine safety, which have fueled a climate of hostility and mistrust," they said.

Kennedy visited the CDC headquarters yesterday and observed the shattered windows in multiple buildings, including the main guard booth. He visited the DeKalb County Police Department, and met privately with the widow of the slain officer. He offered his condolences to the officer's wife and children and while condemning the specific attack, said nothing to condemn vaccine disinformation. 

Kennedy has to go.  

 

Swept Into, 5th Day of Fall, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): For the record, Dog Days End was originally the fifth day of Fall in the Universal Solar Calendar and Swept Into was the 73rd and last day of Summer. But in my New Revised USC, I switched the two dates, "Dog Days End" sounding more apt to me for the last day of Summer than the fifth of Fall.

It would have been ironic, as it turns out, if today were Dog Days End, as the cool, comfortable weather of the past week to 10 days has passed. I got my walk in today, a Jackson, but it was cut a couple miles short by the imminent threat of rain. The day was hot (85°) and humid (76%), with a dew point of 74°. I was soaked with sweat by the time I got back home and had to drink a half liter of water and take a 10-minute power nap to recuperate.

Today, the Stable Genius, surrounded on stage by a corps of his most sycophantic cabinet members, ordered the national guard to Washington DC and seized control of the city’s police force. By invoking martial law in the nation's capitol, the Stable Genius takes us one step closer to total authoritarianism. 

In a rambling, hour-plus press conference, he claimed the city had been overtaken by "violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs, and homeless people.”  Those words echoed the "roving bands of wild criminals" description he used back in 1989 to describe the Central Park Five.  

He is obviously deranged, possibly by syphilis-induced dementia. He seems incapable of coming up with new thoughts or any ideas formed after Y2K, if not the 1980s. He claimed he was rescuing DC "from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor and worse" and imagined underage criminals spitting in the face of the police. "You spit, and we hit, and they hit real hard,” he said, echoing the unhelpful remarks he made during the 2020 George Floyd riots ("when the looting starts, the shooting starts") and encouraging police brutality. 

Echoing comments from his 2024 campaign about what we would allow Putin to do in Europe, he vowed to allow the police to “do whatever the hell they want.” 

Oh, how he rambled! He described DC as “one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the world,” claiming its murder rate is higher than Bogotá or Mexico City, even though violent crime is actually at a 30-year low. He talked about his upcoming meeting with Putin "in Russia" (when it's actually scheduled to take place in Alaska). He talked about his plans to install a tacky, Versailles-styled ballroom in the White House. 

Regarding the press conference, Al Sharpton said the Stable Genius “was inspired to take this disgusting, dangerous, and derogatory action solely out of self interest. Let’s call the inspiration for this assault on a majority Black city for what it is: another bid to distract his angry, frustrated base over his administration’s handling of the Epstein files.”

 

Day of High Happening, 4th of Fall, 525 M.E. (Atlas):  In chocolate town all the trains are painted brown (Elvis Costello).

Cashua Ferry Road (South Carolina Route 34) starts near the intersection of Cashua Street and Society Hill Road near Darlington and extends east past Murphy Farm, New Providence Church, and Mechanicsville Baptist Church. It crosses Fountain Branch and continues west past Montrose Cemetery to the Great Pee Dee River at Cashua Ferry Landing. Thereafter, South Carolina Route 34 is simply called "Route 34." From the cemetery to the river, the pancake-flat road runs in a straight line for two and a half miles over the old oxbows and braided alluvial valley of the Great Pee Dee.  

In Folk Etymology in South Carolina Place Names, published in the journal American Speech by Duke University (1966), Claude Henry Neuffer claims that the first owners of the ferry on the Great Pee Dee called it "Cash-way," meaning that all persons who crossed had to pay a cash fare. The name became "Cashua" in the local pronunciation, and although the ferry has since been replaced by a (non-toll) bridge, the name remains. 

Captain Thomas Edward Hart Sr. began acquiring property in the area starting in 1817 and continuing through the late 1830s.  He built a schoolhouse and then a general store, and in 1838 he established a Post Office inside his store for the aptly named town of Hartsville. In August 1815, Capt. Hart married Hannah Lide; her father, Major Robert Lide, was a hero of the Revolutionary War.

Capt. Hart owned slaves to work his lands.  When one says he built a school and he built a store, one really means he used slave labor to build a schoolhouse and a store.  Years later, the Captain lost most of what he had acquired in the financial Panic of 1837, caused in part by a crash in cotton prices.  His spirit crushed, he died in 1842. His widow, Hannah, and their eldest son, Dr. Robert Lide Hart, continued to develop the area and ran several prosperous plantations, including the Cashua Creek Plantation.

Following the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, the Darlington Field Office of the Freedmen’s Bureau documents contracts for 35 former slaves at the Cashua Creek Plantation. Some were as young as Furman, a 9-year-old field laborer. Another field laborer on the plantation was named Eli, born into slavery in 1835. The contracts don't list last names of any of the laborers, but it was a common practice for freed slaves to be given the last name of the owners of the plantations on which they worked. Eli "Hart," the field laborer and former slave, was my grandfather's father's father, my great-great-granddad. 

Hannah Hart died on October 2, 1875. Dr. Hart, her son, continued to operate the family plantations until his death on January 24, 1879. Eli outlived them both, passing away at the age of 59 on June 13, 1894. As far as anyone knows, I'm still alive.  

 

The  Deep-Sea Alien, 3rd Day of Fall, 525 M.E. (Helios): I can't believe I'm saying it, but I wish that it would rain.

I was up late last night, playing a video game (Dying Light 2). I was stuck trying to complete a ridiculous parkour stunt on a windmill involving at least three jumps in quick succession, a grappling hook that didn't want to cooperate, and movements timed with the overly complex mechanisms of the windmill (Spruce Windmill in Lower Dam Ayre in case you've played the game). I kept missing my jumps, or the grappling hook wouldn't deploy, or I'd find myself just dangling on the end of a rope with no momentum, and my character kept either falling or dying or both.  

Look, I'm 71 years old and don't have the reflexes the game designers had in mind when they created the game. Plus I'm playing on PC with a keyboard and mouse on a game designed for PlayStation or PC with a game controller. But I'm hardheaded and wasn't about to let the game beat me, so I kept at it, over and over and over again, until I finally completed the maneuver. I must admit, however, that I believe that the game took pity on me at some point, because I missed the landing on a jump but instead of plummeting to my death as on the previous 20 attempts, this time I found myself standing on an elevated platform high up on the windmill that I hadn't even noticed before and within easy reach of the goal.  

In any event, overjoyed to finally complete the maneuver, I played on to collect the loot at the top of the windmill, and then for a while longer as my adrenaline levels and heartbeat subsided. It was well after 2:00 am and probably close to 3:00 by the time I finally went to bed. 

Which meant that I slept in until nearly 11:00 am this morning, and didn't finish my coffee and toast until noon. I then piddled about online looking at sport scores and updating the sports blog and generally putting off today's alternating-day hike, even though it's officially a walking day. I'm still too tired and rundown to walk a Jackson today, much less a full Tyler. The weather's warmed up from last week, but it's still pleasant outside and I have my new Bluetooth headphones to keep me entertained, but I just don't want to do it. So therefore, here I am, wishing that it would rain so that I would have an alibi to not take my walk.

To everything there is a season, and just because it's a walking day doesn't mean I have to walk. I mean, it's not like I'm hard-headed or anything. 

 

The Moving Hand, 2nd Day of Fall, 525 M.E. (Electra):  I sense I'm breaking an unspoken rule with this post, but I can't keep quiet any more. I've been disturbed and outraged for nearly two years now about Israel's genocide against the Palestinians, and yesterday, I listened to a deeply affecting podcast conversation between Jon Stewart and Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha. Today, I read the words below written by British musician Brian Eno, long a cultural hero of mine, in an email to American musician David Byrne. So today, rather than subjecting y'all to my own blather and thoughts of the day, I'm sharing Eno's letter in it's entirety. We'll return to my own usual bullshit tomorrow.  

Dear All of You:

I sense I'm breaking an unspoken rule with this letter, but I can't keep quiet any more. Today I saw a picture of a weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic carrier bag of meat. It was his son. He'd been shredded (the hospital's word) by an Israeli missile attack - apparently using their fab new weapon, flechette bombs. You probably know what those are - hundreds of small steel darts packed around explosive which tear the flesh off humans. The boy was Mohammed Khalaf al-Nawasra. He was 4 years old.

I suddenly found myself thinking that it could have been one of my kids in that bag, and that thought upset me more than anything has for a long time.

Then I read that the UN had said that Israel might be guilty of war crimes in Gaza, and they wanted to launch a commission into that. America won't sign up to it.

What is going on in America? I know from my own experience how slanted your news is, and how little you get to hear about the other side of this story. But - for Christ's sake! - it's not that hard to find out. Why does America continue its blind support of this one-sided exercise in ethnic cleansing? WHY? I just don't get it. I really hate to think its just the power of AIPAC… for if that's the case, then your government really is fundamentally corrupt. No, I don't think that's the reason… but I have no idea what it could be.

The America I know and like is compassionate, broadminded, creative, eclectic, tolerant and generous. You, my close American friends, symbolise those things for me. But which America is backing this horrible one-sided colonialist war? I can't work it out: I know you're not the only people like you, so how come all those voices aren't heard or registered? How come it isn't your spirit that most of the world now thinks of when it hears the word "America?" How bad does it look when the one country which more than any other grounds its identity in notions of Liberty and Democracy then goes and puts its money exactly where its mouth isn't and supports a ragingly racist theocracy?

I was in Israel last year with Mary. Her sister works for UNWRA in Jerusalem. Showing us round were a Palestinian - Shadi, who is her sister's husband and a professional guide - and Oren Jacobovitch, an Israeli Jew, an ex-major from the IDF who left the service under a cloud for refusing to beat up Palestinians. Between the two of them we got to see some harrowing things - Palestinian houses hemmed in by wire mesh and boards to prevent settlers throwing shit and piss and used sanitary towels at the inhabitants; Palestinian kids on their way to school being beaten by Israeli kids with baseball bats to parental applause and laughter; a whole village evicted and living in caves while three settler families moved onto their land; an Israeli settlement on top of a hill diverting its sewage directly down onto Palestinian farmland below; The Wall; the checkpoints… and all the endless daily humiliations. I kept thinking, "Do Americans really condone this? Do they really think this is OK? Or do they just not know about it?".

As for the Peace Process: Israel wants the Process but not the Peace. While "the process" is going on the settlers continue grabbing land and building their settlements… and then when the Palestinians finally erupt with their pathetic fireworks they get hammered and shredded with state-of-the-art missiles and depleted uranium shells because Israel "has a right to defend itself" ( whereas Palestine clearly doesn't). And the settler militias are always happy to lend a fist or rip up someone's olive grove while the army looks the other way. By the way, most of them are not ethnic Israelis - they're "right of return" Jews from Russia and Ukraine and Moravia and South Africa and Brooklyn who came to Israel recently with the notion that they had an inviolable (God-given!) right to the land, and that "Arab" equates with "vermin" - straightforward old-school racism delivered with the same arrogant, shameless swagger that the good ole boys of Louisiana used to affect. That is the culture our taxes are defending. It's like sending money to the Klan.

But beyond this, what really troubles me is the bigger picture. Like it or not, in the eyes of most of the world, America represents "The West." So it is The West that is seen as supporting this war, despite all our high-handed talk about morality and democracy. I fear that all the civilisational achievements of The Enlightenment and Western Culture are being discredited - to the great glee of the mad Mullahs - by this flagrant hypocrisy. The war has no moral justification that I can see - but it doesn't even have any pragmatic value either. It doesn't make Kissingerian 'Realpolitik' sense; it just makes us look bad.

I'm sorry to burden you all with this. I know you're busy and in varying degrees allergic to politics, but this is beyond politics. It's us squandering the civilisational capital that we've built over generations. None of the questions in this letter are rhetorical: I really don't get it and I wish that I did.

 

Day of the Mantle, 1st of Fall, 525 M.E. (Deneb): Still relatively cool in these post-Dog Days. High of 82°, well below our average of 90 for this day. I walked a Tyler today, 9.7 miles along the neighborhood Beltline and connecting trails.

The Stable Genius hasn't figured out a way yet to monetize my walks, or the sitting meditation I do on the days between my walks, but if there is a way you can be sure that he'll exploit it to the max. Already, new sneakers will cost me more when my current pair wear out, as will the energy cost to keep my house cool for when I return. Shudder to think of what heating costs will be come winter. 

Yesterday, I bought a new pair of Bluetooth headphones ($39) for podcasts and music as I walk. Headphones worn outdoors have limited lifespans due to weather - the sun and rain taking their toll over time - and you can be sure that the next set will cost substantially more.

BTW, they worked great today, thanks for asking. On my Tyler, I listened to Claire Eauvin's This Guy Sucked take down the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, Jon Stewart interview Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, and Rachel Maddow's weekly show. My alternating-day walks have become my allotted time for podcast listening.         

 

Dog Days End, 73rd Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Castor): Have they ever! Maybe not gone entirely - no one in Georgia thinks we won't see a return to 90-degree weather in August - but the past several days have been refreshingly cool. Rainy, but cool. The high temperature yesterday was but 73° and I managed to walk a Van Buren (8.9 miles) without breaking a sweat. The previous several days it was even cooler, in the low to mid 60s, albeit too rainy to get in my steps.

I'd say that old Angus MacLise knew what he was doing when he named the 73rd and final day of summer as "Dog Days End," but in fact he didn't. His Universal Solar Calendar actually has the 5th of Fall (August 11th by the Julian calendar) as "Dog Days End," but I took the liberty of moving the name to the last day of Summer in my New Revised Universal Solar Calendar. It seemed more fitting, if more that a tad optimistic, as hot temperatures here in Georgia can continue well into October.

In any event, whatever you call it, today is the last day of Summer in both MacLise's USC and my NRUSC. Fall starts tomorrow with Day of the Mantle. New season, new icon - no more Sun Girl but an AI version of my own autumnal face.

Summer's over - we're 3/5ths of the way through the year, summer vacation has ended for thousands of Atlanta children and their teachers, and the school year has started. Now we face Fall - the fall, the decline, the autumn of our year.