Day of the Two Daughters, 39th of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Electra): I got an email today from my electrical utility, the Georgia Power Company, part of the Southern Companies conglomerate. They congratulated me on allegedly being among the most energy-efficient homes in my area. According to their records, I used 321 kWh of electricity, which apparently is less than the standard for an "efficient home" of the same size.  

I'm not so sure I deserve any plaudits. This drafty old pile of bricks is hardly anybody's idea of energy-efficient construction, and I think whatever efficiencies I'm realizing is because I live here alone. I leave lights on in rooms I'm not occupying, but on the other hand, I only have to do laundry for one, my heat, hot water, and stove are all natural gas, and I disconnected my dishwasher a long time ago (washing dishes by hand is a Zen thing). 

But that's not the part I want to talk about. The email went on and broke down my energy usage by category, starting with the kitchen (28%). It makes sense that my kitchen uses the most power - the room is lit my some half dozen recessed lights which stay on virtually from the time I get up until the time I go to bed. But how does Georgia Power know how much of my total usage is for the kitchen? Are they tracking things by individual circuit breakers? 

They tell me 20% of my usage is for cooling and 12% for laundry, which again, are all on individual circuit breakers. But then it gets creepier - they claim another 20% of my usage is for "electronics." They may be so - I spend a lot of time on my computer, from posting these updates on my blog, to playing video games, to streaming music - but there's no dedicated circuit breaker for my computer and as far as they know it could be in any room of the house. The television is in one room, the computer in another, my stereo system in a third. How can they tell what percentage of my 321 kWh is used by my devices? 

I feel like Big Brother is providing my power, and letting me know they're watching what I'm doing. 

It was a month ago yesterday that I buried Eliot. I'm still adjusting. Living alone in retirement, my routines have become very important to me (preferences become habits, habits become routines, routines become rituals, and rituals begin to take on the feeling of the sacred). Much of my day revolved around Eliot's 7:00 pm feeding time. He would insist on being fed by 7:00 and let me know if I was late. He would have preferred earlier, but got quite loud and insistent by seven. Since I was up feeding him, I would use that time to also scoop out his litter box and take it out to the trash. If it were a Monday, I'd empty the box entirely, clean it, and apply fresh litter, and then roll the trash bins down the driveway for curbside pickup the next morning. And as long as I was heading outside to deal with the trash, I'd also take out whatever recyclables had accumulated in my sink. And while outside, I would also check the mailbox if I hadn't already done so earlier, and if it was Tuesday, I'd roll the bins back up the driveway (if I hadn't done that already). 

This little routine centered around Eliot's feeding time would take anywhere from 5 minutes some days to a half hour or more if it were Monday litter-box cleaning time. So whatever I was doing online, burning 20% of my kilowatt hours posting here or playing a video game, would have to take a long pause and before I started up again, I might as well make my own dinner. And then wash the dishes by hand (it's a Zen thing). Only then, would I settle down with Netflix, or a game, or posting, or whatever.

Now, without a feline mouth to feed, the fixed center of my daily routine/sacred ritual has been pulled out from under me. I can take out the trash and the recyclables . . . whenever I feel like it? That's anarchy! Eat when I'm hungry, not my cat? That's self-indulgent! And pick and choose when to take the trash bins up and down the driveway? That's not very Zen! ("The Great Way is not difficult - just avoid picking and choosing").   

Eliot's grave site is in my backyard garden and I can see it from my kitchen window. The dirt still hasn't settled and nothing yet grows over where he lies. I look out at his grave while making my afternoon smoothies, while washing my dishes, while sipping morning coffee. Impermanence is swift and life-and-death is the great matter, and it's not that Eliot is dead that's so disorienting to me. I always knew the day would come. I just wasn't prepared for how much it would throw me off my schedule.           

 

The Transcendental Outpost, 38th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Speaking of, I rewatched the movie, Midsommar, last night. Weird stuff. . . 

Deneb is a walking day, but it rained all afternoon. Flash flood warnings, the works. I didn't get so much as a Washington in today - my phone credits me with only 0.7 miles (1,876 steps). I compensated by doing a load of laundry and finally took some old, beat-up patio furniture out to the curb for garbage pickup tomorrow. 

Blows against the Empire: A federal judge today struck down the Stable Genius' scheme to charge $100,000 for H-1B visas, which allow employers to hire skilled foreign workers in specialty occupations for up to six years. Roughly two-thirds of H-1B positions are computer-related.

In other news, the bipartisan State of the Nation Project (https://stateofnation.org) ranked Georgia the No. 1 state for freedom of the press. No. 1. We also had the 7th lowest rate of youth depression, the eighth highest economic output, the 10th lowest rate of depression, and the 12th lowest number of fatal overdoses. We were 11th highest in trust in the Federal Government, which blows my mind because we're got no shortage of MAGA and QAnon conspiracy theorists here.

On the other hand, we're 49th in air quality (still better than Texas, though), 47th in incidents of low birth weight, 46th in hourly earnings growth, 43rd in poverty, and 40th in social isolation. So, if you've already been born, aren't relying on an hourly wage, don't mind being alone or a little ozone in the atmosphere, and want to live someplace with happy children, trust in the government, no depression or OD's, and an enviable free press, have we got the state for you.

 

Forming the Inner Ring, 37th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Castor): I miss newspapers. I miss walking through brick-and-mortar retail stores perusing the items on display. I miss used bookstores. I miss owning physical copies of CDs or even vinyl LPs and listening through the entire thing, multiple times. I miss the commitment one used to make to an album when purchasing it. 

That's it. That's all I have to say today. I said what I said, and anything more would be 

   

 

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!