The Endlong Ride, 49th of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Deneb): The weather wasn't as obnoxiously hot today as earlier this week and I got my steps in - 20,914 of them on a nine-mile Harrison at a leisurely 1.5 to 2.9 mph. 717 calories burned while walking, 1,194 so far on the day.  

There's nothing like the 106° heat index earlier this week to make a 92° day with low humidity feel downright comfortable.

Today's walk was the first in six days due to rain last Helios and oppressive heat on Betelgeuse. Friendly reminder that the days of the six-day week in the New Revised Universal Solar Calendar are Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Castor, Deneb, Electra (ABCDE), and Helios. I managed to get my sitting in on the intervening Aldebaran and Castor, but I notice that it's more difficult to motivate myself to sit if I hadn't been walking. One practice nourishes the other.

There's no virtue in difficulty finding motivation, but a practice without difficulty doesn't prepare one for difficulties in life. Overcoming discomfort to downright pain while sitting prepares one to deal with the inevitable pains in life. Letting go of the expectations of a reward for sitting sets one up to deal with the lack of rewards in existence. Thoughts like these are what drew me to Stoicism, and why I now consider myself a Contemplative Stoic rather than a Zen Buddhist. 

Just before the last mile of my usual walking route, there's a turnoff that would get me back to my house in about an eighth of a mile. My feet were getting sore, my legs tired, and I was wet with sweat, and it was tempting to take that short cut. But the same willpower that allows me to sit for all three of my 30-minute sessions during meditation motivates me to walk that last mile, or the willpower that motivates me to walk that last mile allows me to sit for the third period. One practice reinforces the other.

          

  

 

Day of the Great Roots, 48th of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Castor): I accidentally discovered the cure for teenage cell-phone addiction: slow chargers.  

In a California trial against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, Meta is accused of covering up internal research showing Instagram is addictive for teenagers. The plaintiffs, representing 29 states, say the company knew its products were harmful to children but hid that information from the public.

I've fallen down the Instagram rabbit hole myself, realizing that I wasn't paying attention to whatever I was purportedly watching on television but instead mindlessly scrawling through post after post as the algorithm kept feeding me whatever it was that it determined was engaging my interest.  

But then my 10-year-old charger, a relic from the days of iPhone 6, started losing its potency, taking longer and longer to charge the battery. Even after being on charge overnight, it was only 65 or 70% recharged when I got up in the morning. And the charge works like gasoline in an old v-shaped fuel tank - the lower it goes, the faster it drains. So each night, I was starting the slow recharge at lower and lower levels, and waking up to lower and lower partial recharges.

You can't spend hours on end on a dead phone. I started recharging during the day, plugging it in and leaving it on recharge for hours and hours during the day. Even after I finally got it up to "high" levels, like 80 or 90%, then I was prudent with its use, as I didn't want to drain it back down again.

Long story short, I bought a new charger and everything's fine. But if Apple, Meta, or some other company sold slow chargers to deliberately maximize off-line time, teenagers might start doing other things with their time while their phones recharge. Like, maybe, you know, sex and drugs. 

I might need to think this through a little more.

 

Day of the High Cities, 47th of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Man, is it hot! Still 96° F at 6:00 pm, with a heat index value of 104. The high today was 97°, which felt like 106. Needless to say, I didn't get my steps in today. My alternating-day walk can wait until Deneb. 

Yesterday's high was 98, just a few degrees shy of Atlanta's record for that day of 101° set back in 1954. They say it's going to be a little bit cooler tomorrow (92°) with a heat index of 97, so that's a relief. 

The a.c.'s been working overtime, and last month's electric bill was in the triple digits. I happily paid the bill, because if I lose power for any extended period of time, I might roast to death. 

People (well, some people, mostly Yankees) mock Southerners for being "slow," but that slowness was a learned adaptation from the days before Willis Carrier, the patron saint of the South, invented air conditioning. To stay cool and to generate as little caloric heat as possible, people started doing things with an almost exaggerated slowness. You'll be just that little bit less hot if you took 30 seconds to walk to the bedroom than if you made it in 15. People started to do everything in a sort of slo-mo fashion, from placing a folder in a filing cabinet in front of an oscillating desk fan to chopping some Vidalia onions in the kitchen. The adaptation became a sort of cultural affectation, a sign of being a true Southerner, and it's been handed down through the generations even though Carrier's gift to the world now keeps us comfortable. 

But you can't have air conditioning without electricity, and you can't have electricity is areas that rely on hydroelectric power without water. And one of effects of the heat and associated drought in much of the U.S. (and the world) is that major sources of hydroelectric power, like Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are so dangerously low that power may have to be rationed in certain Southwestern cities like Phoenix, which hit an unbelievable high of 113° F today. The drought is so severe in Panama that water may not be available to operate the locks in the canal, and disruption to the canal could limit global trade and impact economies. 

According to data from the AAA, the national average price of gasoline was $4.06/gallon on Monday, $0.05 higher than last week and $1 more than a year ago.  The U.S. gas prices this month are the highest ever recorded for August and have been elevated since last February when the war with Iran began and the Strait of Hormuz closed. Meanwhile, even as peace talks between the the United Snakes and Iran have stalled, the Stable Genius has made new military threats against Oman, because use of military force against Iran worked out so fucking great.

It's not the meat, it's the humanity.

 

Day of the Sledge, 46th of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): What's important to take away from Kodo Sawaki's statement, "there is no use to doing zazen," is that Kodo isn't discouraging the practice but rather just encouraging us to practice without expectation of a reward. "Really do zazen that is of no use."

In the ordinary world, everything we do is for some purpose or another. Everything has some use. We get out of bed to start our day, we go to work to earn money, and we earn money to obtain the goods to meet our needs. The purchase of that cup of coffee at Starbucks works for all parties involved because we want that coffee more than we want that dollar in our pocket, and Starbucks wants that dollar in our pocket more than they want that cup of coffee. Both parties are exercising their free wills to meet their individual needs. 

One dollar for a cup of coffee, of course, is a rhetorical simplification to make that example flow a little easier. As Garrison Keillor once said while broadcasting a remote episode of Prairie Home Companion, "Ah, Seattle, home of Starbucks and their great experiment to find out exactly how much an ordinary American is willing to pay for a single cup of coffee."

My point is we do everything for the expectation of an outcome, from our daily routine to financial transaction to exercise and even leisure (if I don't expect to be entertained by a movie, I probably won't go to see it). But Zen teachers repeatedly say that in the spiritual practice of zazen, we should not expect anything in return. Don't practice to seek enlightenment, don't practice to become a Buddha, don't practice to find relaxation or to become more mindful. All of those or none of those may or may not happen. but we're encouraged to practice just for the sake of practice, to do a zazen that is of no use.

The big question, of course, is how. How can I sit still for five, or twenty five, or ninety minutes or more and not expect anything in return? "Oh, I get it," we think, "don't expect anything and then I'll get everything." No, that doesn't work either, as you're still thinking that eventually you'll get something, if not "everythng."

Granted, you need some motivation to start a spiritual practice, but once on the path the trick is to lose whatever it is that motivated you. My approach has been to incorporate every-other-day mediation into my daily schedule to the point where it's now automatic and I don't think about motive or reward. Brushing our teeth before bedtime is a good habit for dental health and to prevent tooth decay, but we don't weigh the pros and cons of toothbrushing each night or even decide whether or not to do it. We just automatically brush.  

Maintaining a daily schedule that includes regular sitting and staring at a wall for some length of time is a deliberate act, but after some time, maybe weeks, maybe months, maybe even years, one stops thinking of "why" or "for what," and just sits. For no purpose. Of no use.

 

Ninth Ocean, 45th of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Helios): Today is the 228th day of the year, if we include the leap year day we don't recognize this year. 228 is the nineteen dozens, and some dozenth days are recognized in the New Revised Universal Solar Calendar as Ocean days. Today is the ninth of those Ocean days, even though its the 19th dozen and not the ninth dozen. The next Ocean doesn't occur unto the 44th day of autumn.

Autumn seems like an eternity away from now, in these hot, sweaty Dog Days. We're under another heat dome and another heat advisory today, with hear index values forecast to be up to 109° F. The good news is that as predicted, both tropical waves in the Atlantic have fizzled out without turning into hurricanes, and no tropical storm activity is anticipated in the Atlantic for the next seven days. Hawaii is having a rough time of it right now, however.

I wasn't looking forward to my alternating day walk in this stifling heat, and felt relief when a helpful rain shower appeared to give me an alibi not to walk. 

Here are some random quotes I've gathered to make it look like I actually have something to say today:

Woman has hitherto been treated by men like birds, which, losing their way, have come down among them from an elevation: as something delicate, fragile, wild, strange, sweet, and animating - but as something also which must be cooped up to prevent it flying away. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Pursue the good ardently. But if your efforts fall short, accept the result and move on. - Epictetus

What is the use of doing zazen? There is no use in doing zazen. Until this penetrates your thick skull, and you are really doing zazen that is of no use, it is really of no use. - Kodo Sawaki

   

 

The Three Faces, 44th of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Electra): When a person is alone, they're not so bad. When they form a group, a sort of mental paralysis occurs and they become so befuddled they can no longer differentiate between right and wrong. Some people deliberately join a group just to experience mental paralysis, sometimes even paying a fee, because group think and hive mind are so much easier than thinking for oneself.

Don't take my word for it (you probably don't anyway), but test it for yourself. Go to a sporting event and see if you can find anyone not on the opposite side of the field who doesn't think the home team is the best team ever. Go to a concert and see if anyone in the audience doesn't adore the band on stage and doesn't think they're the best band ever. Go to a Republican gathering and see if anyone will admit that the Democrats might have some good ideas worth sharing, or go to a Democratic convention and see if anyone supports Republican principals (just kidding, Republicans don't have principals). 

As far as spiritual matters are concerned, I think its best for an individual to go it alone. Forget your popes and pastors, your swamis and gurus, your rabbis and imams. Avoid teachers, avoid experts, and most especially avoid scholars - scholars are the worst.  

I'm convinced I'm on to something by being a self-described, self-defined urban monk. I live among the people but allow myself to be lost among the crowd. A hermit, a recluse, a lifelong bachelor, whatever label you want, I live among the people but not with the people. Some might call it misanthropic, but I like individual lower-case people - it's the upper-case People I distrust. 

The tropical wave over the central Atlantic continues to produce disorganized showers and thunderstorms. While environmental conditions are conducive for some development over the next few days, the system is expected to encounter strong upper-level winds next week, decreasing its chances for further development into a hurricane.     

 

Day of the Antler, 43rd of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Deneb): I'm available to be the Stable Genius' next press secretary, if he can accept a candidate who'll tell the truth, thinks Christianity is bat-shit crazy, doesn't trust White people, and hates his fucking guts. 

But I'm free Tuesdays through Thursdays (Mondays and weekends don't work for me).

 

Rustle of the Prey, 42nd of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Castor):  Deneb, Day of Destruction, 31st of the Dog Days, 526 M.E., or as you probably call it, August 1, 2026, was the warmest day ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere. And the El Nino is just getting started. 

A former co-worker of mine, an arch-conservative and climate-change denier, adamantly insisted there was no credible evidence that carbon dioxide affected atmospheric temperature. He would insist that I read some pot-boiler fiction by Michael Crichton, and when pressed on the issue, would hold up  a set of cassette tape lectures he owned titled Water, Not Carbon, Determines the Climate, or some such other drivel. I reminded him that the Eocene had the highest temperatures in the geologic record and the highest levels of carbon dioxide, but he just took that as evidence that nature, not man, controls CO₂ levels, but ignored the correlation between temperature and carbon.  

As for water controlling the climate, I reminded him that Venus can reach an average temperature of 850° F, and if it ever had any oceans, they dried up long ago. However, it is covered by a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and clouds made of sulfuric acid, which, together, trap heat and warm the planet. He insisted that it's self-evident that the only reason Venus is hotter than Earth is that it's closer to the Sun.

I pointed out that the Moon is just as far from the Sun as the Earth,  and can reach temperatures of 250° F in the sunlight. At night, temperatures on the moon drop to below -200° F because it lacks an atmosphere to trap heat after the sun goes down. "Trivia," he sniffed, and walked off with his comforting copy of Water, Not Carbon. 

To be fair, he wasn't a particularly bright man. He also lived in the far exurbs and relied on his cars (he owned several) to get around, get to work, shop, worship, and socialize. His existence was dependent on gasoline-powered internal combustion engines. He took any discussion of climate change as a prelude to limiting CO₂ emissions, and any limitation of CO₂ emissions as an existential threat to his way of life. 

Anyway, tl/dr: it's hot out.

The Brother Heart, 41st of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): In the 1979 Stephen King novel The Dead Zone, an ambitious and corrupt demagogue grabs a young child on stage at a campaign rally and hoists him up as a human shield after an assassin opens fire. A photograph of the act gets picked up by the press and destroys the politician's career. 

That's fiction. In real life, the Stable Genius was in Ankara, Turkey last month for a NATO summit. Concerned about his proximity to Iran and the Islamic Republic's death threats against him, he boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras to leave for England, and then snuck into an airport catering container and was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane, not Air Force One or the new Boeing 747-8 gifted by Qatar.

The press corps and White House staff flew in the Old Air Force One as human decoys in case Iran tried to launch a missile (they didn't). They were told to keep the window shades down, but believed the President was on board the plane with them.

Hiding curled up in a little catering container mounted on a mobile scissor-lift is hardly the macho-man symbol of strength the Stable Genius thinks he projects. Letting the press and his staff serve as unwitting decoys may not be as viscerally shocking as holding up a child as a human shield from an assassin's bullets, but it's just as cowardly.  The ethical thing to do in that situation would have been to secretly board the third plane, and then announce that the Air Force One flight was unexpectedly delayed and keep it on the ground until the Stable Genius appeared publicly in Britain, so that would-be assassins knew their target wasn't on the plane.

But just imagine - curled up in a ball in the fetal position in a catering container, sweating your balls off in the summer heat of Ankara while smelling your own farts and adult diaper during the bumpy ride from one plane to the next, all because you're too afraid to fly in the Eastern Hemisphere.

When the news leaked that he wasn't flying home in the new Qatari gift jet that he had flown on to Turkey, but it was still believed that he had left in the old Air Force One with his staff and the press, the Stable Genius sought the telephone records of several New York Times journalists and their relatives, including one reporter’s mother, in its effort to unmask the confidential sources of the leak. Now we know why he was so sensitive and so freaked out by the reports - the truth of the matter unmasks not only his own cowardice but the lies that he and his black-out drunk Secretary of Defense keep telling about the war in Iran. 

They insist that they've won the war, that they have air supremacy, and that Iran has no military assets left after their relentless bombing. If that were the case, what were they so afraid of? Hiding in a little caterer's cart from one plane to the next sure doesn't look like "winning" to me. It looks like weakness. It looks like losing. It looks like cowardice. 

That act alone should be enough to derail a person's political career, but in this anything-goes, "grab 'em by the pussy" Age of the Stable Genius, it's just another news cycle.

 

Day of High Happening, 40th of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): As we sit and watch the planet die, it's now official: July 2026 (i.e, the first thirty of the Dog Days) was the hottest month ever recorded in the history of the United Snakes. Last month's average temperature was 76.9° F, topping the 76.8 mark set in July 1936, and 3.3° F warmer than the 1901-2000 average 

The average global sea surface temperature, outside of the polar regions, was the highest on record for July, beating the previous high of 2023. Surface air temperatures around the world in July were cooler than July 2024 by just 0.01° C, leading scientists to consider the two months as the joint-second warmest Julys on record.

In Washington and Oregon this year, more than 2.9 million acres have burned as extreme conditions fueled the fast-moving fires that draped the region in toxic plumes for weeks on end. Oregon has suffered more burned acreage this year than any in recorded history, while Washington is in its most destructive fire season. ever, and the dangers are far from over. There are still months left to go before the highest risks to the desperately dry landscapes begin to subside.

In Spain, officials are worried that the hundreds of thousands of people heading to the hills and beaches to get a better view of Wednesday's solar eclipse will increase the risk of renewed fires. Meanwhile, water levels in the Danube River are at record lows, exposing Roman-era bridges and World War II German warships. 

 

In China, fears over flooding and landslides forced authorities to evacuate more than a million people from their homes last night as a powerful typhoon made landfall. In addition to the torrential rainfall, the typhoon has also fueled a heat wave and Hong Kong recorded its hottest day ever. 

A large area of showers and thunderstorms a few hundred miles southwest of the Cabo Verde Islands is moving lowly westward, and a tropical wave emerging off the coast of west Africa is expected to interact with the system in a couple of days. A tropical depression could form during the latter half of this week while the system moves westward across the central Atlantic toward the Caribbean.

Showers and thunderstorms associated with a separate tropical wave are located about midway between the coast of west Africa and the Lesser Antilles. Some gradual development of this system is possible through mid-week while it quickly moves westward across the central Atlantic toward Venezuela.

Another tree fell in my neighborhood, this one blocking the path along my local walking trail about a mile from my house.  

As Jim Morrison once put it, "I want to get my kicks before this whole shithouse goes up in flames."

 

The Deep Sea Alien, 39th of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Helios): A planned power plant for a new Amazon data center in Texas could become the United Snakes' largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Five people in Louisiana and two in Florida have died from Vibrio vulnificus, a flesh-eating bacteria that thrives in warm coastal waters. Vibrio are most common from May through October where seawater tends to be warmer. Due to climate change, however, outbreaks have occurred in recent years in places once thought to be too cold to support the bacteria, such as Chesapeake Bay and the Long Island Sound. 

When you order something from Amazon, you increase the risk of a crabber in Maryland or an oysterman in Patchogue being devoured by flesh-eating bacteria.

You monster.

 

The Moving Hand, 38th of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Electra): Much of the problem with trying to talk about consciousness is the word itself is so fluid. "Consciousness" could mean mere awareness, of it could mean sentience. It could mean the creation of a richly detailed mental model of the ego-self, or the luminous experience of that rich creation, including memory, preferences, emotions, and thought. 

In Buddhism, consciousness usually means only awareness, and specifically the awareness associated with each of the six sense organs (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind). They've even gone so far as to define 18 forms of consciousness, three for each organ, such as eye consciousness, sight consciousness, and the realm of vision consciousness. 

The focus in Buddhism, or at least Zen Buddhism, is more on "mind" than consciousness. "Mind" isn't the brain, mind is a function of the brain. Just as sight is a function of the eye, and vision the result of sight, thought is a function of the brain, and mind the result of thought. The brain is just another organ, one that secretes thoughts just like the spleen secretes bile and the pancreas secretes whatever it is the pancreas secretes.

I once heard a Zen teacher object to the phrase "I can't get my head around that." Of course you can't, the skull is hard, thick bone, not exactly noted for it's flexibility. Brain matter is softer and probably more malleable, but I wouldn't recommend trying to physically wrap the organ around an object. It's the mind that moves, as they say, and it's the mind that wraps or doesn't wrap around an object or a concept. 

So, are plants conscious? They seem to respond to light and to rain, so they must have some sense of awareness of those phenomena, so I suppose you can say that a plant possess some form of body consciousness and it's corollary, touch consciousness. Whether their reaction to light and rain is in response to sensation or is just a biochemical reaction to photons or water is debatable, but aren't all of our thoughts and feelings and sensations reducible to mere neurochemical reactions? But when that form of potential sensation in a plant is simply called "consciousness" and lumped in with all the other forms of consciousness, confusion begins, and others argue that a plant can't be conscious because it doesn't have thoughts (or at least an organ to secrete thoughts), but they're talking about different things. It's like saying a blind person can't have memory because they don't have sight. 

Today, Electra, was a sitting day. There are among the thoughts my mind secreted as I sat. Now, if I could only get my head around those ideas.