Stages of the True Field, 36th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): I woke up to two hours of death- and thrash-metal this morning. I was not pleased.

I use an old clock radio as my alarm, and every morning it goes off at 7:00 am to Atlanta non-commercial. free-form radio station WREK. That doesn't mean I get up at 7:00 - most mornings, I just roll over and let the music mingle with near-lucid dreams until I finally decide to get out of bed. 

The weekday programming of WREK is classical from 7:00 to 8:00, and jazz from 8:00 to 9:00, but don't get me wrong. It's not Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven for an hour followed by an hour of Miles, Mingus, and Monk. Their "classical" is mostly avant-garde modern composers - I've heard Ornette Coleman, Harry Partch, and a lot of dissonant piano pounding in the first hour. Their jazz programming includes free jazz  and a lot of squanky saxophone solos. But that's all fine with me, I like a little spice on my morning meatball. 

But Saturday morning programming is more random, generally replays of past shows in various genres. This morning it was extreme metal, which is pretty difficult, at least for me, to incorporate into lucid dreaming. But I did get a crash course in the difference between death, thrash, and speed metal as I lay there stiff as a board in my bed, and was able to pick out Metallica and recognize the drumming of Dave Lombardo of Slayer. But lesson learned, I'm good now, and hope it's some other genre next Saturday.

Today is the 82nd anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy Beach and the start of the major WWII counteroffensive. I marked the occasion with a 7-4 mile Jackson. It was actually eight miles, but I've already explained the problems with my phone's mileage app. The Stable Genius marked the occasion not by honoring the troops but by posting an AI image of the new Obama Presidential Library with a large pile of garbage on top and surrounded by homeless encampments. There's a joke going around: what's the difference between Iran and Vietnam? The Stable Genius had a plan for getting out of Vietnam.

D-Day occurred 10 years before I was born, but it feels to me like a historical event from distant history. The first election of the Stable Genius was ten years ago, but feels like, if not current events, at least recent history. I have yet to process the fact that when I was born, D-Day to my parents was as recent and as relevant to them as the 2016 election is to me today. Strange.         

 

Day of the Chicago Rose, 35th of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): An auction of oil leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ended today with just nine bids covering only about 10 percent of the available land. The Stable Genius predicted that drilling in the pristine wilderness area would set off an economic boom but most of the 58 tracts up for sale drew no bids at all. Nearly half of the sales came from the state of Alaska’s publicly owned economic development corporation and no major international oil companies entered bids.

The Stable Genius campaigned on turning oil development loose in the Arctic refuge ("drill, baby, drill"), promising that extracting petroleum there would lower the price of gasoline and groceries. Friendly reminder that the price of gasoline and groceries are now far higher than when the Stable Genius took office. 

Republicans who backed opening the region said the refuge would generate a multibillion-dollar windfall as soon as drillers were allowed inside the isolated habitat for polar bear, caribou and millions of migratory birds. 

Previous sales during the Stable Genius' first term also drew little interest. The handful of leases that had been sold were suspended, and then later canceled, by President Biden. 

In a separate anachronistic move, the Stable Genius announced the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars to revive the US coal industry. He cited the Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era law that grants the president broad authority to support industries considered vital to national security, to justify the investment.

Some $500M in federal funds would go towards saving 14 existing coal plants and opening a new export terminal in California. The Department of Energy will grant a further $200M to build new coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia, the first new plants in the US since 2013.

Wilderness oil leases and investments in coal at a time when global politics are demonstrating the weaknesses on the global fossil-fuel distribution system and the smart money is going into green energy. In China, the world's undisputed leader in renewable energy and clean technology, non-fossil fuels now make up the majority of the country's power capacity, driven by exponential growth in solar, wind, and hydropower.

The Stable Genius, his decaying mind still trapped somewhere in the 1970s, is taping leaves back on the trees in the hope of avoiding winter.

 

Day of Hell Gate, 34th of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Helios): The good weather in Georgia continued from yesterday, allowing me to enjoy a most pleasant 7.3-mile Jackson this afternoon. The only shade was thrown at me by the health app on my phone, which recorded less than the full eight miles I know that I walked based on the mile posts along my route. Whatever though, it's not a competition.

Peachtree Creek was nice and clear today. After last week's muddy flow, I could easily see the bottom of the creek as I crossed it on the pedestrian footbridge today. The water level peaked on May 29 and has dropped back to normal stage, and we've only had 0.01 inches of rain since then. With the return of clear water, children were once again playing on the rope swing and zip line strung across the creek. Also, following the rain that we did have last month, the drought in this part of Georgia has been downgraded from "extreme" to "severe."

As the super El Nino continues to develop in the Pacific, the Stable Genius' administration has responded by physically removing the system of oceanic monitors and measuring buoys in both the Atlantic and Pacific. No one's going to complain about the collapse of the AMOC if they can't measure it, amirite? It's one thing to ignore science but another to actually dismantle it. The mistakes this administration is making will be felt for decades to come. 

In other news, I'm appalled by the amount of plastic I recycle. Drinks in plastic bottles, salads in plastic cases with plastic inserts to keep the ingredients separate before use, the berries I make my smoothies from are in plastic tubs, my morning English muffin has a plastic wrapper. I try to diligently recycle them all, and can fill a sink each day with plastics ready to be taken out to the (plastic) recycling bin. There's no way I'm not consuming microplastics from all that packaging, and it seems like there's nothing I can do about it.              

 

Spirit Woman, 33rd Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Electra): I realize this site is getting perilously close to becoming a weather blog ("it rained today," "yesterday was a pretty day"), but I feel compelled after bitching about the recent rain to point out that today is as beautiful as Georgia days get. Sunny with clear, cloudless skies, warm but not hot (78° F) and dry (38% humidity, 50° dew point). A day to be outdoors, even though Electra is a sitting and not a walking day. I compensated by doing a bit of yard work and puttering around outside.

Today I learned that the couple who bought ol' Charlie's house have two children, age 2½ and 5½, so  they are young, too young, in my old-school, working-class way of thinking, to be buying $1.23M homes. 

It's a shame what CBS has done to 60 Minutes as well as to Stephen Colbert, but seriously, who watches CBS anyway? As for 60 Minutes, there have been three stories they've covered over the years where I had some level of knowledge, and all three times I feel like they misrepresented the story.

• I'm not going to rehash the whole Barbuda story again, but in their second segment on the proposed development there, 60 Minutes kept referring to the New Order of Aragon, even though they had long stopped being a part of the plan, and kept splicing in humorous clips of Rosanna Brazzi, the New Order's former spokesperson, for comic effect. It felt like 60 Minutes wasn't letting reality get in the way of a more entertaining story.


• Back in 1979, when I was in college, the Boston University faculty went on strike in protest of the policies of the University's right-wing Republican President, John Silber. Those policies were so polarizing that the faculty first formed a union, and then the faculty union went on strike, suspending classes. 60 Minutes sent Mike Wallace, an old Texas colleague of Silber's, to cover the story, and if you watched you'd be excused for thinking it was the students, not the faculty, who were striking. The story was twisted into "no one told the BU students the 60s were over" and "where have all the flowers gone?" (an reference to the old flower-power hippies). They missed the mark completely in an epic face plant.


• Way back in those flower-power 60s, a young indigenous Vietnamese Montagnard boy transferred to my 8th-grade class, sponsored by some American missionaries working there. He didn't speak much English and as a result was quiet, shy and reserved, but well mannered and easy going. 60 Minutes did a segment on him, and portrayed him solely in the polarizing light of the then-current Vietnam War. They mused that although he was a quiet schoolboy now, a year before, he may have been killing Viet Cong, with the word "may" doing a lot of work in that sentence. A year before,  I "may" have been the boy-genius CEO of a multinational finance conglomerate (I wasn't). They expressed no sympathy for the culture shock he must have been enduring, or the cultural and language barriers he needed to overcome. He was just a convenient symbol to them of an unpopular war, and their story missed the mark entirely.

So if Bari Weiss and the Stable Genius destroy 60 Minutes and CBS News, I'll protest because fuck those two, but I'm not so sure those institutions were the gold standards of journalism they're being held up to be, based on my own personal experience.

 

Instead and Else, 32nd Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Another house was sold in the 'hood today. $1.23M, which surprises me, because from all outward appearances it's one of the nicer houses in the neighborhood, with four bedrooms, five baths, and 2,965 square feet. I haven't met the new owners yet, so I don't know if they're another seemingly impossibly young couple or not, but the former owner, Charlie, was an elderly widower and has lived here longer than almost anyone else in the neighborhood. 

Charlie thought that I had tried to kill him once. For the record, I wasn't trying to kill him but I didn't mind at the moment that he might have thought so. Back in 2005, someone stole a box of checks from my mailbox, and was cashing them all over Atlanta. I immediately told the bank and they closed the account, but it didn't stop Walmarts and Krogers all across town from still cashing the checks. One day, as I was returning home from the bank after contesting the latest batch of fraudulent checks, I saw some random man going through my mailbox.

I couldn't believe what I saw, that I was catching a thief red-handed. My mailbox is set in a brick monument, and I brought my car, a Jeep SUV, in tight behind the man so that he was trapped between my car and the monument. I wasn't trying to hit him and deliberately avoided contact, but there were only a few inches to spare on either side of the man.

The man, as I'm sure you've guessed, was Charlie, and he wasn't stealing but as it turned out going around the neighborhood voluntarily putting flyers in each mailbox about some upcoming community social event. We introduced ourselves, I explained my situation and why I was so suspicious and hostile when I saw him in my mailbox, and apologized for scaring him. He said he understood, but every time we saw each other over the years since then, he always brought up that incident. "Remember the time you tried to kill me?"

Charlie. One day, the power in my house went out during a thunderstorm. With nothing else to do other than sitting all alone in the dark, I put on my raincoat and hood, grabbed a flashlight, and went outside to see if I could find the cause of the outage (probably a fallen tree). It was easy to find, not a fallen tree but a fallen branch just past ol' Charlie's house that had taken out a power line. The live line was on the ground, still occasionally sparking. While I looked at the line from a safe distance back, Charlie came out of his house dressed in raingear like me. We exchanged neighborly greetings, confirmed that the branch and the live wire were the cause of the power outage, and then, standing in the rain in the middle of a thunderstorm with a live wire sparking just a few yards away from us, Charlie asks me, "You hear they're coming to take our gas stoves away?"

Too much Fox News. One other time, in a not dissimilar situation (we have a lot of power outages in this leafy community), he told me, astonishment in his voice, "They're going to put Trump in jail!" Sorry, Charlie, but too much Fox News, too much misinformation. The Stable Genius is still roaming free, and at least my gas stove is still in my house (maybe that's why Zillow lists it for less than half the price of Charlie's).

Anyway, Charlie's wife died about a year ago and with five empty bedrooms since the kids have grown up and moved on, I think the empty nest became more than Charlie could bare. He put the house on the market and it sold within no more than a week.

We're still in a rainy pattern here in Georgia with storms of various strength and intensity passing through daily. I managed to squeeze in a 4.9-mile Madison before this afternoon's rainfall arrived. The soggy conditions are forecast to continue over the next ten days.  

 

The Millstone Lure, 31st Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Castor): Zillow claims the house next door to me just sold for $1.52M. Yesterday, I introduced myself to the new owner, a single woman, maybe 30 years old. 

The Democrats are staking their political future on the issue of affordability. Wages are stagnant, prices are up, and inflation is rising. Nearly half of American families don’t have the financial resources to live securely. Since 2017, average earnings have grown about 43 percent, but home prices have increased by 81 percent and rents 54 percent. The lowest-cost health plans on the Affordable Care Act marketplace have risen 77 percent, and child care costs have gone through the roof. 

But how's that issue going to resonate with young homebuyers who can afford million-dollar-plus homes while still in their 30s?  Obviously, economic inequality is a factor here, but politically that can be a polarizing issue - the haves will vote one way and the have nots another. But most everyone would probably like to see lower prices. 

FWIW, Zillow lists my home for half of what they list my new neighbor's, and I bought it for half of that. I think a reasonable market value is somewhere between what I paid and what it's listed at on Zillow, but I don't plan on selling or moving. I'm making my last stand here in this pile of bricks up on a hill, and it will probably take a haz-mat team to come carry me out of it after my new neighbor's dog starts constantly barking about the smell.  

 

Day of the Beachhead, 30th of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Betelgeuse is a walking day, and the weather being cooler and slightly drier than the past week, I walked my full eight-mile course. However, when I got home, the stingy health app on my phone only credited me with a 7.9-mile Jackson, but that's okay - I walk to please myself, not the ghost of Steve Jobs. 

I enjoyed my walk but when it was over, I didn't mourn not walking any longer. Heading out on the trail means eventually finishing. Similarly, I feel, we shouldn't mourn death. When someone dies, we should recognize death as the inevitable result of their being born and celebrate that person's life. That they died merely means that they had lived, and let's rejoice in that life rather than cry and complain over their departure.

As for birth, it only means that another person is going to eventually die. But I'm not saying we should mourn birth (mourn birth and celebrate death - now there's a screwball philosophy for you!), but we should temper our joy with the realization that, along with all the bounties that a good life can provide, someone is also going to experience life's disappointments, sicknesses, despair, and eventually death.

I  miss Eliot, my former feline companion. I miss my Mother, departed 16 months ago now. I miss my brother, 21 months now. But I'm also glad that they had all once lived and the only way they could have avoided death was to have never been born, and I wouldn't have wanted that.            

 

Day of the High Lists, 29th of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): The memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime.

Another memoir, but don't worry, this one isn't nearly as long as before. It's quite short in fact, and didn't actually happen to me, except that it was a story told to me. I didn't believe it then and I believe it even less now, but it's amusing, really more of a joke than a story.

Anyway, an attractive young woman I once knew, who was quite aware of her attractiveness, was pulled over for speeding just outside of Atlanta. As the policeman, a Georgia State Trooper, approached her car, she could see him in her side-view mirror suck in his gut a little and put a big grin on his face. She knew the warning signs that, once again, she was about to get hit on by some random dude, this one a power trip. 

"Miss, just how fast do you think you were going?" he asked, as he leaned one arm on the roof of her car and leaned in close to her face through the open window.

"I don't know, officer, " she answered, "but just let me go and I promise not to go that fast again."

"Miss, Georgia State Troopers don't dismiss offenders on just a promise," he answered. "I'm going to have to issue you a citation."

"Do you really have to?," she pleaded. "It's not all that big a deal."

"We'll let the judge decide how big a deal it is or isn't," he said.

"Look," she said. "What do I have to say? I mean, I bought a ticket to the Policeman's Ball."

"Miss, Georgia State Troopers don't have balls," and when he realized what he just said, his face turned beet red, he turned around and walked back to his car, and drove off without issuing her a ticket.

I mean, cool story, sister, but I still don't believe it. One liners never work out that well IRL.

 

Ladder of the West, 28th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Helios): It was raining when I woke up this morning - a quarter inch was recorded at the NWS station in Peachtree City, Georgia. I'm glad to see the rain - the state of our drought has been reduced from "Extreme" to "Severe." But Helios is a walking day, and the forecast had showers on and off throughout the day.

Worse, different sites forecast different times for the rain. The weather app on my phone, say, said rain from 8:00 to 10:00 am, 2:00 to 5:00 pm, and 7:00 until who cares because then it's too late to start a walk. But weather.com (The Weather Channel) had the rain coming in an hour earlier or leaving an hour later than each of those intervals. On top of that, the forecasts kept changing all day.

After lunch, however, they both seemed to agree that I had an open window between 3:00 and 5:00 pm, and I got a very muggy 4.2-mile Madison in during that interval. Dark clouds made the last half mile feel like it was 8:00 pm while it wasn't even yet 5:00, but the rain held off until I got home.

However, my soggy and sullen day was brightened knowing that the Stable Genius was having a worse day. Today, a federal judge ordered him to take his name off of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and also ruled that he had no authority to terminate its summer schedule. Another judge today barred him from setting up his $1.8B slush fund, ostensibly to pay off insurgents although everyone knows he would have kept all the money for himself. A third judge threw out a law in New Hampshire that would have required new voters to provide a sworn affidavit proving their citizenship. In New Jersey, State Police will replace his ICE goons outside of a detention facility there, and an ICE goon was arrested today in Minneapolis for the shooting of a Venezuelan man. Finally, the cherry on top, one of Jeff Bezos' rocket ships blew up on the launch pad today (no one was killed).

I know my elation will turn to despair when these cases inevitably reach the corrupt Supreme Court, and Keg Stand Cavanaugh, Amy Boney Carrot, and "Uncle Clarence" Thomas reverse the lower courts in their mysterious "shadow docket," but allow me to celebate while I can. TGIF, y'all!

 

Day of the Outer Range, 27th of Midsommar, 526 M,E. (Electra): I'm just a little boy.

Today, at the supermarket, it was my cashier's birthday. She was an older woman, younger than me, of course, but 92% of the Earth's population is now younger than me. but looked like she was certainly a mother to someone and possibly even a grandmother. But she's always smiling every time I see her, she calls everyone "Dear," and always makes eye contact. Seeing here with a ribbon on her vest and balloons at her register to celebrate her birthday, reminded me that not so long ago, in the grand scheme of things, she was a little girl thrilled at the attention her parents gave her on her special day. I wished her a happy birthday, and when she said, "here you go," as she put the receipt in my grocery bag, I said, "Thank you, Birthday Girl."

Yesterday, while I was out on my walk, a young girl, maybe around 10 years old, passed me on her bicycle. As she approached, she called out "on your left" and rang her bell twice, which I thought odd as I was already on the extreme far right of the trail and there was no one else around to impede her path. I saw her again coming the other after I had turned around at the end of the trail, and she did the same thing to another walker - "on your left" and ring, ring, and then again just a few yards further. I realized she was doing it to everyone she passed, doing what someone had once told her to do. She was being obedient to common sense safety rules, she was a good girl, a perfect daughter to someone, somewhere, and my heart nearly burst out of affection. 

There's a  spot several miles further down the trail where some kids had set up a hammock, a rope swing,  and a zip line over Peachtree Creek. I'd seen them playing there in weeks past, a collection of bikes, scooters, and helmets lying on the ground around them, but with the creek now flowing with turbid brown water and the fish kill where the creek empties into the Chattahoochee River, no one was there yesterday. More good girls and boys obeying their parents and adhering to common sense safety rules. 

All these different people, humans in various stages of life, feel to me like one continuous presence as seen through different windows of existence. I'm not different from them, the cashier is no different from the girl on the bike or the kids (not) playing along the creek. Sometimes, it really feels like we're all one.

I'm just a little boy.

Day of the Iron Scepter, 26th of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Earlier this month, I was bragging, raving really, about the wonderful Atlanta weather. I'm glad that I appreciated it when I did because since then the weather's turned to shit. Rain every day, and when it's not actively raining, it's cloudy and humid (79% relative humidity). The cloud cover has kept things relatively cool (average temperature today was 78°F), but the 60+ degree dew points make it uncomfortable.

But at least we've had rain. I managed to get my steps in today (Deneb, a walking day) between the noontime rainfall and the 5:00 p.m. showers, a 6.4-mile Quincy. My route crosses Peachtree Creek four times, and the water was an opaque muddy brown - earlier this month, during the drought, the water was so crystal clear I could easily see the bottom.

Atlantans know to avoid contact with the river water when it's turbid like that. Not only does the rain bring sewage overflows into the river, the runoff from rich people's riverfront lawns carries fertilizers and herbicides to the river. Clear water is fine to splash and play in (I still wouldn't drink it) but any contact with brown turbid water is to be avoided.    

Peachtree Creek is a west-flowing tributary to the Chattahoochee River, and right now the 'Hooch is suffering nothing short of an ecological emergency. Along a 20-mile stretch, from where Peachtree Creek empties into the Chattahoochee downstream to West Point Lake, thousands of dead fish, ranging from massive, 30-pound striped bass to smaller catfish and carp, are completely blanketing the riverbanks. Levels of E. coli have reached over 4,000 colony-forming units/100 ml, over 17 times the acceptable limit. Water-safety experts (i.e., not just me) are calling it the single worst fish kill in the region in over two decades.

Because we had been locked in a prolonged drought, the Chattahoochee's water level had been exceptionally low. The river simply didn't have the volume or the cool temperature needed to buffer a sudden influx of pollution. When last Wednesday's storm dumped up to 3.5 inches of rain in under an hour (the amount of rain that would normally fall in the entire month of May), the rainwater hit the urban asphalt and concrete that had been sitting under the Georgia sun and rushed to the river as a super-warm flood. 

Warm water physically cannot hold oxygen, and it instantly shocked the aquatic environment. The sheer volume of the flash flood completely overwhelmed Atlanta's water treatment capacity. The system overflowed, sending a massive mix of raw sewage and toxic street grime directly into Peachtree Creek and hence to the Chattahoochee.

The fish weren't actually poisoned by the sewage; they were suffocated. When that massive wave of organic waste hit the warm, low river, it triggered an immediate explosion of bacteria. As the microbes decomposed the waste, they consumed every last bit of dissolved oxygen out of the water. The river was essentially choked of oxygen, leaving fish with high oxygen demands completely asphyxiated. River crews reported a foul-smelling black muck coating the entire downriver ecosystem.

This is a catastrophic blow to a magnificent natural resource that will take years to recover.

Pacing and the Unshed, 25th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Castor): Time for a picture post!

My timing on this is terrible, but today, two full days after wrapping up my long story, I finally found the photographs I had taken on Barbuda back in 1984. I apologize for the poor quality, but the pictures are 42 years old, the 35-mm, point-and-shoot camera I used back then was shit, and I was too lazy to try scanning the photos and digitally clean them up and instead just shot pictures of the pictures with my phone (the glare on some of the pictures is reflections off the photo finish, not lens flare). But for better or for worse, here's the island from the air as I approached it with my trustworthy but not necessarily fully sober pilot:

I know I described the island as "a flat green spot out alone in the blue water," but looking at the photo, I realize now it was more of a brown stain in an emerald sea. Here's Codrington, or at least one house in Codrington, showing one of the rooftop cisterns everyone used to catch whatever rainwater they could. Below that are some of the island's children.

This is Bully, my island guide who helped me find the Spanish wells, and below that, the truck he used for taking me around, parked next to a 20th-century well that we came across. 

Here are some details of the old Spanish wells, their adjacent watering troughs, and the horses and burros that would suddenly appear as soon as I started drawing water from the wells. 

And finally, the rugged Barbuda landscape, from the Highlands down to the sea, complete with limestone boulders, scrub vegetation, and cacti. 

See? I told you it was all true. I can't believe that I forgot these pictures existed and I could have been including them in each post, but better late than never, I suppose. I don't have any photos of Charlie or Ralph and am not sure I would post them anyway even if I did, and no one from the glamorous entourage gave me any pictures of the topless volleyball on the nude beach. We'll have to leave that to our imaginations.