Day of the Stop Gap, 19th of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Electra): That new low-pressure system located southwest of the Azores that I thought was heading toward Portugal is now Tropical Depression Six - still not a hurricane and still not yet named - but now appears to be heading toward some sort of u-turn in the mid-Atlantic and will head instead southwest toward the Caribbean. Fortunately, the National Hurricane Center doesn't expect it to develop into a hurricane.

It's fortunate that Six is expected to peter out and that it won't be heading east. Hitting Portugal would be bad enough, surf conditions in Nazarre aside, but if it went a little further north and hit Ireland, that could have spelled real trouble. A study in the journal Natural Hazards identified the west coast of Ireland as particularly at risk of sea level rise and future storm surges. They wrote that “approximately 40% of the population live within 5 km of the coast and over 130,000 people reside in areas less than 5 m above mean sea level.” Yikes!

A heat wave moved through Europe this month, smashing temperature records across Central Europe. In the Middle East, Bahrain hit 115 °F, its hottest September day on record. In southern India, a heat wave continued with temperatures around 104 °F in what one climatologist termed the region’s “longest heat wave in history.” Summer 2026 will probably end as earth’s warmest on record, and August may be the planet’s wettest month so far.

During my van Buren yesterday, I listened to a podcast interview by Jon Stewart of writer Lindsay Owens, President and CEO of something called the Groundwork Collaborative. Alarmingly, she detailed how retailers are using AI and digital surveillance to price gouge specific customers based on their purchasing history, even changing prices on groceries while the shopper is in the supermarket. For example, if programs like Smart Cart, where you ring up your purchases in the cart without going through checkout, notices that you just bought, say, tuna fish, your price for mayonnaise will suddenly shoot up. It will charge different prices for different customers based on the highest price the algorithm thinks it can get for each item from each shopper. Bought some electronic item? Your cost for batteries just went up 50%.  Bought a lamp? Guess what light bulbs cost now. 

Have you noticed that price tags or stickers are no longer on items at the supermarket? When you get home, do you compare the cashier receipt to the prices you saw in the aisle for each individual item? 

I thought I was being paranoid when Amazon ads for smoothie ingredients suddenly starting popping up in my social media feed right after I just bought blueberries and frozen strawberries at Publix, but Lindsay Owens' research indicates that if anything I'm underestimating the market manipulation to which I'm subject. An email ad from Amazon recommend a book for me "based on your browsing history." They're not even trying to hide it anymore.

For various reasons, some people are quite paranoid about having their internet browsing history made public I've heard of people making pacts with friends that in the case of death, the friend will hurry to the persons home to delete the browser history from their computers. But guess what? Your computer apparently isn't the only place where your browsing history is being recorded. Amazon's watching, too, and so are others, probably. If you're really concerned about privacy, make a pact that in the case of your death, a friend will blow up every data center in the country like Tyler Durden in the climax of Fight Club.

 

Their Shadows of Hearsay, 18th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Deneb):  That  small low-pressure system east of Bermuda is now gone. Poof! Vanished, as if it never happened. Now we have a new system located southwest of the Azores. The National Hurricane Center gives it a 70% chance of developing into a tropical storm, if not the first hurricane of the season, but it's heading toward Portugal so who cares? Wax your boards and head to Nazaré I guess, because Water Dissolves Water gives it a 70% chance to create the fabled 100-foot wave. 

Fortified with supplemental Vitamin B-12, I went out today and took my longest walk, an 8.8-mile Van Buren, since my 9.1-mile Harrison back on the 49th of the Dog Days. 

Meanwhile, as if there wasn't already enough on our plate to worry about along with AI, climate change, the Stable Genius, microplastics, and brain-eating amoebae, now scientists have announced that they just discovered a new species of cat. 

Leopardus tilcayo is native to the cloud forests of Bolivia and is the first new feline species discovered since 1923. The tilcayo, or tigrino, is just as adorable as its name implies. Tiny - only three pounds - and orange with leopard spots and a pair of parallel stripes that run from the top of its head down to its nose. No word yet on whether its adoptable, although a Bolivian family apparently kept one as a house pet for a year before realizing it was a wild animal, ill-suited for domestic life. It may still want to rip off your face despite its size, but I don't care. 

I want one.

 

Rapt Fear Belief, 17th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Castor): The doctor was right. My tongue color was the giveaway. The bloodwork indicated that I was, in fact, B-12 deficient. My B-12 level was 186 picograms per milliliter, at the very low end of the "normal" range of 180 to 914 pg/mL. B-12 deficiency is most common in people over 60 (like me) and who follow a vegetarian diet, as it occurs naturally in meat, poultry, fish, eggs, and milk. I'm not strictly vegetarian, but on a daily basis I eat very little to no meat, eggs, or milk. I'm more a nuts, berries, and leafy greens kind of guy.

The vitamin is important in the formation of red blood cells and in the maintenance of the nervous system. Low levels can result in anemia and even to dementia. Like my B-12 levels, my red blood cell level (4.47x10⁶/𝜇L) was also on the low end of the normal range (4.3x - 6.1x10⁶/𝜇L) and has been steadily declining over the last three years from a level of 5.32x10⁶/𝜇L in July 2023, right around the time I drastically changed by eating habits.

So it's time to kill the fatted calf and start eating some bloody, red meat, right? Wrong. Time to start taking some B-12 supplements. The doc recommended taking an over-the-counter, under-the-tongue, liquid supplement, which I easily found at my local supermarket. 5,000 𝜇g, which I gotta assume is the whole bottle, as the RDA is 2.4 𝜇g/day. $13.59 (cheap!). 

Doc wants me to come back in twelve weeks to recheck my B-12 level. I assume he means 12 weeks of the Gregorian calendar, not 12 weeks in my New Revised Universal Solar Calendar, so I guess I'm back on December 9 (The Open Stages, 8th Day of Hagwinter).  I'd like to check my red blood cell count too while I'm at it, to see if the supplement is reversing that downward trend.

What a drag it is getting old!

 

Gesture to the Declining Sun, 16th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): bottles, needles, knives. That's the title of the chapter in John Barth's novel The Floating Opera (1956) where the protagonist, Todd Andrews, visits his doctor. Today, my own personal bottles, needles, knives chapter occurred while I was in a doctor's office in Atlanta, Georgia for my annual Medicare wellness exam while my sister was simultaneously - as in, the same time of the same day - in a doctor's office in Lowell, Massachusetts. 

My visit was routine and preventative. My sister, who had surgery for oral cancer late last year and completed her chemo-, immuno-, and radiation therapy earlier this year, was at her doctor to learn whether her recent PET scan indicates that her severe headaches and swollen tongue were the result of the cancer spreading through her mouth and possibly to her brain. I think it's fair to say that of three two of us, I had the least stressful visit.

Her results are inconclusive, although it seems highly unlikely that the cancer has reached her brain or other organs. She has two PET "bright spots" in her mouth, which could indicate cancer but could also be merely infections or inflammation resulting from all the surgery and post-surgical treatment. More tests are needed and more doctors need to look inside her mouth. 

My doctor looked inside my mouth and noted that the back of my tongue was unusually dark, possibly indicating a B-12 deficiency. He included B-12 in my bloodwork and will get back to me on that. I didn't have the heart to tell him I drank a blueberry-banana smoothie before my visit. In any event, even in my worst-case scenario compared to my sister's best-case, I absolutely have the easier road ahead.

The small low pressure system in the Atlantic is now but a couple hundred miles east of Bermuda and has become better defined over the last 24 hours. It could continue to develop over the next few days while it slowly continues westward over the Atlantic. 

This year is on track to be the first year without an Atlantic hurricane through mid-September since 1941. The reason is the historically strong El Niño in the Pacific that is generating wind shear that is suppressing Atlantic storm formation. The El Niño is currently about 3°C above baseline temperatures in the Pacific and stronger than any seen on record this time of year. 

The El Niño is already disrupting Panama Canal shipping and threatening rice harvests across Asia, with famine risk as one possible outcome. Worse, El Niño's warming effect on global temperatures lags by several months, so this season's calm is effectively banking heat for a brutal payout. 2027 will almost certainly be the hottest year on record, with severe Northern Hemisphere summer heat to follow.

Climate-related  headlines in today's The Guardian tell us that fossil-fuel advertising contracts in 2026 are at an all-time high as agencies build Big Oil’s image as integral to family life and security. A recent study found that plastic surfaces form hotspots with increased amounts of antibiotic-resistant genes, and microplastics in soil pose a global threat by acting like a Trojan horse to deliver toxins. A separate study by the Natural Resources Defense Council found that people in the United Snakes will spend an extra $30 billion (with a "B") each year on electricity by 2035 due to the Stable Genius’ policies, which favor fossil fuels over renewable energy, although his unqualified, no-nothing head of the EPA claims deregulating power plants will lower the cost of electricity. Finally, The Guardian reports that the global data center rush could create a tsunami of discarded electronics, tripling toxic e-waste annually in 25 years, a quantity that, as they colorfully described it, could fill enough shipping containers to circle the globe six times.

I should have asked the doctor for anti-depressants instead of a vitamin B-12 supplement.

 

Day of the Brainstorm, 15th of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): I'm at Publix Supermarket. I buy some frozen strawberries, some fresh blueberries (Publix recalled their frozen blueberries because of e coli), and plain, non-fat yogurt. Staples for my daily smoothies. I pay with my bank card, no Publix member or reward program ID, and I have never given Publix my phone number, my email, or any information linking my bank card to my identity. 

When I get home, I receive an email from Amazon promoting their "sale" on frozen strawberries, fresh blueberries, and plain, non-fat yogurt. How the fuck did Amazon know what I had just bought? 

Digital surveillance, supermarket surge pricing, and consumer manipulation are getting out of control. Was my phone sending Amazon data on where I was in the supermarket, down to not only the "Frozen" and "Produce" sections, but even specifically to the frozen fruit shelf in the freezer and the berries bin in the produce section? Or was it digital surveillance and facial ID using hidden cameras?

All that sounds so paranoid when said out loud, and ten years ago you'd be considered a kook for even suggesting it, but in these days of AI, Flock cameras, and digital tracking, it no longer sounds so outlandish. To say it was just a coincidence, it's still summer and Amazon was merely promoting it's seasonal groceries - it's no more sinister than seeing an ad for candy after buying some in the days before Halloween -  sounds as naive as wondering about surveillance sounds paranoid.

Now the Amazon ads are also showing up on my Facebook and Reddit feeds as well. If this blog (owned and operated by Google by the way) are somehow the link between my buying habits and my Amazon ads, let me say, fuck you Amazon! I'm never buying your filthy berries or worm-infested produce! Never! And the more you push them, the less likely I am to buy anything from you, even a USB-C connector cable or replacement running socks (let's see if those turn up in my ads). 

The unnamed trough of low pressure is now 800 miles east of Bermuda, continuing it's movement across the western Atlantic, where it's expected to develop into a tropical storm. It still looks to me like it's far enough north that regardless of development, the Gulf Stream will whisk it away to the northern Atlantic, where it will become disorganized before eventually dropping some rain on the British Islands.

 

Have Gone Out, 14th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Helios): It has come to my attention that Google's Blogspot, aka Blogger, Water Dissolves Water's host site, is now considered quaint and passe. A site for older people nostalgic for their own little personal web sites, like back in the days of MySpace. The cool kids are posting elsewhere now. 

I don't want to seem trendy and wagon-jumping, but then I don't want to be the last person still on this forum, either. I may have to move eventually if and when I find a new forum and format I like.

Meanwhile, a study by UCLA claims that the Energy Transfer facility near Shreveport, Louisiana is the biggest single emitter of methane gas in the U.S. From January 2025 to June 2026, the facility released an average 1.56 tons of methane per hour, a rate 15 times greater than the threshold defined by the EPA as a "super emitter." Not surprisingly, Kelcy Warren, Energy Transfer’s CEO, is a major financial supporter of the Stable Genius, donating millions in the last presidential campaign. 

Meanwhile, power plants are the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the U.S., but the Stable Genius plans to no longer limit greenhouse-gas emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants. The announcement was made by Lee Zeldin, the lightweight, no-nothing head administrator of the EPA with no environmental education or background, during a meeting of Group of 20 energy ministers in Houston. He accused Obama and Biden of waging a “war on coal” and suggested that the Stable Genius might roll back even more restrictions on fossil fuels.

That trough of low pressure located about 1000 miles east of Bermuda continues to produce disorganized showers and thunderstorms. Environmental conditions will become more conducive for development by the middle of this week and a tropical depression could form late this week as the system moves slowly over the Atlantic.

I walked a five-mile Monroe today. The weather was far more pleasant than Saturday. Although the temperature was in the low 90s, the dew point was a less-oppressive 67°, compared to Saturday's after-the-rain humidity of 84%. 

 

Meditation on the Flaw, 13th Day of Autumn, 536 M.E. (Electra): A trough of low pressure over the central Atlantic is locally creating disorganized showers and thunderstorms, although strong, upper-level winds are discouraging further development. However, the trough is expected to move into a more  favorable environment for some gradual development by late this week. I don't expect the system, organized or not, to make landfall in North America. 

According to something called the State of the World’s Birds report, one in nine migratory birds are threatened with extinction and 45% of migratory species such as cuckoos, turtle doves and Arctic terns are in decline. Seven migratory bird species have been confirmed or are suspected to have become extinct over the last 150 years, and the slender-billed curlew was officially declared extinct last year. The threats to the birds are overwhelmingly caused by humans and include pollution, invasive species, global warming, intensified farming, and unsustainable hunting. 

Another unvaccinated woman died of measles in Pennsylvania.

Electra is a sitting day, but as my alternating-day mediation practice moves into its third year, it feels like every day is a sitting day. Not in a bad way, mind you. It just that each time I light the incense and settle down to sit, it feels like no time at all has elapsed since the previous time. Ditto walking on the walking days. If one maintains a short enough schedule over a long enough period of time, it all blurs together. Where once it felt like "sitting day" and "walking day," it now just feels like "today."    

Drastic Chapters of Crypt, 12th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Deneb): It rained today. A lot. It started in the morning, and before I was even out of bed, the radio had broken into those three grating, anxiety-inducing buzzer sounds to announce a flash-flood warning. Meanwhile, my phone was exploding with multiple warnings and alerts. The authorities, such as they are, were really concerned about this one, and didn't want anyone out on the flooded streets except for the direst of emergencies.  

It did rain, and hard, all morning. The National Weather Service recorded 0.61 inches or rain today in Atlanta, 1.7 inches at Peachtree DeKalb Airport a little east of here, and 2.66 inches at Fulton County Airport just west of here. For the record, the record amount in Atlanta for this date was 0.88 inches in 1964 when Hurricane Dora passed by. 

Peachtree Creek crested at 12 feet, just a foot below flood stage, between 12:00 noon and 1:00 pm. 

 

By 2:30 pm, the sun was out and I got in my steps, although I kept it down to a 3.5-mile Jefferson due to a late start and the high, after-the-rain humidity. It was a little cooler (85°) than the past several days, but the humidity insured that I wouldn't enjoy it. But I did make sure to see Peachtree Creek at near-flood stage - it was noticeably higher and wider than usual and moving much faster, but there were no whitewater cataracts or other dramatic visuals associated with the flow. It's tributary, Tanyard Creek, is rockier and had more little waterfalls and eddies around its many sluices and rockslides, and I saw a blue heron trying its luck hunting food in a calm pool near the bottom of the creek's run.      

To paraphrase Eihei Dogen's poem about a white heron in a snowy field, 

The whole of the river cannot be seen.
In the still water,
A blue heron is hiding himself
With his own form.

 

She Moved Under, 11th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Castor): Happy 911, folks. 

Everyone has their stories of where they were on that fateful day and how they heard about it. Personally, I was on day four of a week-long Zen meditation retreat on the 11th of September, 2001. The leader of the retreat encouraged those who wanted to leave to go and see to their families and loved ones, and also encouraged those of us who wanted to stay and continue our practice even in the wake of the tragedy to stay. I was in the latter group, and missed out of the non-stop, 24-hour cable-news orgy of anger, hatred, and Islamophobia, the hateful propaganda psy-op preparing a nation for war. The country and the world seemed very different and intolerant to me after the retreat was over and I re-entered a changed society.

Following the retreat, the leader, who was the Roshi at my Zen center, said to the assembled sangha the next Sunday that the victims of the attack "were 50% responsible for their own deaths." It was the wrong thing to say at that sensitive time, and many people reacted volatilely to the statement, receiving the statement like a slap across the face. He meant they were 50% responsible by virtue of being born and by conceiving of themselves as separate identities, but there was no taking it back or undoing the shock the statement had caused. Many people stopped attending the center after that, although I continued practice there for another dozen or so years. I knew what he meant, but he also had inadvertently taught me that speaking a truth at the wrong time could be as harmful as telling a lie at other times.

Coal. I could try a clever segue but none comes to me at the moment and besides, it would still come off as a half-assed attempt at a clever segue. The Stable Genius, who could always be counted on to do the worst possible thing in the worst possible way at the worst possible time, had repeatedly issued orders every 90 days requiring that the aging J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant in Michigan remain open past its scheduled retirement date, because who doesn't want more coal emissions in this hottest month on record in this hottest year on record?  

It's one thing to oppose stricter regulations on greenhouse-gas emissions (a bad enough thing to be sure), but its another to actively force emissions even when the operator/polluter was planning to stop. It's like not only saying, "I won't ban cigarette smoking in my place of business," but also requiring that all employees and customers continuously chain smoke as long as they're in your shitty establishment.

Fortunately, the U.S. Court of Appeals struck down the latest order to keep the wheezing coal plant running, ruled that the Stable Genius overstepped his use of emergency powers (imagine that).

TGIF (THIC?). It's a sitting day and the weekend's here. Enjoy.

 

Day of the Crooked Spirit, 10th of Autumn, 526. M.E. (Betelgeuse): This is fun: according to the New York Times, the Stable Genius' Iran War and specifically the closing of the Strait of Hurmuz is pushing the global use of coal to record highs. Five years ago, virtually every world leader agreed to phase down the use of coal for climate reasons, but the disruption of oil and natural gas shipments through the strait is causing them to go back on their pledges. At the same time, the powerful El Niño in the Pacific is expected to drive up the use of coal this year in countries like Vietnam and India by increasing the demand for air-conditioning while simultaneously reducing output from hydropower dams.  

   

Today, it may not have been as hot here as in recent days and there were no dire heat advisories, but today's humidity (56%; dew point, 71°) made it quite uncomfortable during my alternating-day walk. There's a 60 to 90% chance of rain over the next three days, and the humid air today was probably the moist Gulf air moving into the region. In any event, I cut my walk down to a 5.3-mile Monroe as it was quite fatiguing to be outside.

During my walks, I usually wear headphones and use my time to listen to podcasts. My five-mile Madisons to eleven-mile Polks have become my podcast listening time. But recently, I've become somewhat tired of a lot of the 'casts to which I usually listen, so I recently switched over to listening to audio books. I started with an old favorite that I read way back in high school, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, narrated by James Franco because why not? 

I was impressed by how much of the book I remembered, even these fifty-plus years later, and  how much of my current thinking aligns with Vonnegut's ideas from 1969. Of course, all of my impressions from Slaughterhouse may not have been from that one book alone, as Vonnegut freely recycled ideas and characters in his novels, and I'd read many of them over the years (Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Breakfast of Champions, etc.). In any event, it was interesting to re-examine the seeds of my current thoughts and opinions. I finished the entire reading in three walks - a Madison, a Van Buren, and today's Monroe, while I sincerely doubt I  would have finished the book in three sittings.

Realizing What He Was Doing, 9th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): Artificial intelligence could cause human extinction by 2030, according to three researchers from Anthropic, one of whom has quit his job in protest.

I thing we can all agree that's a small price to pay if it could increase the short-term profits of some tech bros and oligarchs in the meanwhile. 

 

Metropolis Death and Being, 8th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Helios): Here's another thing about contentment. When you settle for contentment rather than strive after happiness or joy, happiness and joy can still arise in your life. In fact, they might even arise more frequently than in a life spent constantly pursuing happiness and joy. 

Here's the secret to happiness, folks: just enjoy the spontaneous moments of happiness as they arise, and don't try to cling to them or make them last longer than they naturally occur. Clutching happiness is like trying to hold water in your hand - the tighter you squeeze, the more it slips away. 

A life spent in constant pursuit of happiness and joy is a life of discontentment - you're either not happy at that moment, or you're not happy enough, or you have a lingering suspicion that you could somehow be still more joyous or ecstatic. Ultimately, it's discontentment.

Of course, choosing to try contentment in order to experience more happiness and joy is a trap, as it's still seeking out the latter. It's not really contentment. True contentment is accepting life as it is, warts and all, in sickness and in health, taking the good with the bad. Contentment is enjoying a book, laughing with your children, kissing your beloved, a rainy day, and receiving a bad health diagnosis. It's accepting life as it is.        

Stop trying to be so fucking happy all the time. Just be happy when you're happy and sad when you're sad. Just be whatever life hands you. Just be.