Stone of the Dawn, 30th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Impermanence is swift.

That's what I always say when learning that someone has died. More than just a glib, offhand remark, like Kurt Vonnegut's "So it goes," it's a sincere acknowledgement of the ephemeral nature of existence. It's also a reminder to myself that death isn't just something that happens to other people. 

Our life changes moment by moment, it flows by swiftly day to day. Everything is impermanent and changing rapidly. Even old Zen Master Dogen acknowledged we "do not need to wait for the teaching of masters or sutras to see it. In every moment, do not expect tomorrow will come. Think only of this day and this moment." Elsewhere, he said,

"It is not a matter of fabricating in our heads that which does not really exist. Impermanence is truly the reality right in front of our eyes. We need not wait for some teaching from others, some proof from some passage of scripture, or some principle. Born in the morning and dead in the evening, a person we saw yesterday is no longer here today - these are the facts we see with our eyes and hear with our ears. This is what we see and hear about others. Applying this to our own bodies and thinking of the reality of all things, although we expect to live for seventy or eighty years, we die when we must die (Shobogenzo-zuimonki, 2-14).

Impermanence has been teaching me a some sort of master's class over the past 24 months. Following the death of one of my two pet cats, my little brother died. To be sure, he wasn't "little" any more; he was 60, but that is still too young and at some level he has always been my baby brother. My father died 18 or so years ago, but last winter my elderly mother finally passed away, not at all unexpectedly and at the age of 92. Then my other cat died. Then my younger sister told me that she had cancer. She went through surgery and chemo, radiation, and immuno-therapy and it seemed like she it "beat," but it recently has returned, with swelling and brutal headaches. I'm not giving any prognoses, but impermanence is swift.

Today I learned impermanence is now coming for me as well. I finally saw a doctor about that pain in my chest I was feeling last August, and the test results came back today. Myocardial ischemia, insufficient blood flow and oxygen getting to the upper chamber of my heart. Not a terminal prognosis in itself, but the first of the mileposts on the road to impermanence. The next milestones are medications, beta blockers, blood thinners, and other pharmaceuticals to tide me over until a cardiologist can perform cardiac catheterization or other examinations (the third milestone). The fourth milestone may be angioplasty, stenting, or even bypass surgery, and the fifth and final milestone is death.

Impermanence is swift.

 

The Clear Streams, 29th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Castor): As if we don't already have enough to worry about on top of the erosion of our democracy and the decline of the amerikan economy, diarrhea lettuce, collapse of the AMOC, masked goons with electric gloves, rogue AI agents, and Cornell University frat boys, now scientists are raising concerns about an ocean phenomenon known as the Kelvin wave. As the Super El Niño supercharges storm surges and flooding in the coming months, a  Kelvin wave could raise sea levels along the California coastline by up to a foot 

Unlike crashing waves at the beach, Kelvin waves are planetary in scale and span thousands of miles. A Kelvin wave is created when trade winds that usually blow from South America towards Asia die down or reverse in El Niño years, setting off a massive, slow-moving slosh of water. When that eastward slosh of water hits the high Andes along the South America coastline, as one such wave did last August, it has nowhere else to go and the water surges north towards the Pacific coast of the United Snakes. 

The wave could reach coastal California within the next few days and when it does, sea levels may raise by up to a foot for months as El Niño lingers and keeps the warm water trapped along the coast.

"The major cities of the world are being destroyed, one-by-one, by the monsters: Moscow by Rodan, Peking by Mothra, London by Manda, Paris by Baragon. And here's a special news bulletin: Kelvin is now in L.A. The city is being invaded by Kelvin!" - Destroy All Monsters, 1968 (adapted)

 

The Oblong Web, 28th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Now the Stable Genius has rolled out his plans to reduce fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles, reversing a Biden-era rule to encourage electric vehicles. Specifically, by 2031, cars will need to meet an average fuel efficiency of only 34.8 mpg, down from the previous goal of 50.4 mpg.

Not only will this result in more air pollution and the associated increase in illnesses and death, but also result in more greenhouse gas emissions. Consumers will pay more at the pump than they'll save from a lower cost to the manufacturers, and the United States will fall further behind China in EV technology and market share. 

The megalomaniacal narcissist insists on taking our country to some imagined alternate reality based on his 1970s-based misconceptions of how things actually work. He has insulated himself from reality with sycophants and yes-men, and there's no one left to show him how his dumb-ass ideas are not only bat-shit crazy but also fucking stupid.

He's not going to live that much longer - we're literally watching him die as his body rots from the inside our right before our very eyes - but there's no telling how much damage he can still do before aome combination of coronary disease, poor nutrition, and dementia finally do him in.

The Stable Genius is a malignant polyp on the undescended testicle of the American body politic.              

 

The Breathing Hills, 27th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): All music, without exception, is a direct expression of the buddha-dharma.

The buddha-dharma, it is said, extends everywhere and there is nowhere in the ten directions that it does not pervade. 

If music is the buddha-dharma, and the buddha-dharma is omnipresent, then it stands to reason that music fills the entire cosmos. All sounds, therefore, are music if you listen closely enough.

Today was a sitting day. I can best hear all things as music when I'm sitting in zazen. The sounds of this old house, the a.c. or heat, depending on the season, cycling on and off, the distant buzzing of leaf-blowers in someone's lawn can all be parts of the music. Today, it was children laughing with the sheer joy of being alive as they were playing outdoors in the cool, crepuscular autumn hours, a distant siren somewhere out on the highway reminding me of the fragile impermanence of existence, a low-flying plane passing overhead. Sounds arising and falling like some sort of conceptual ambient soundtrack. The evening's crescendo occurred when a barred owl chimed in, "Who cooks for you?," repeated about eight or ten times, and just as I was starting to count my breaths between the hoots to get a sense of its timing, it stopped and the bell sounded on my timer, signaling that sitting time was over.

It's easiest to hear reality as music while sitting, but with a little effort, one can hear the everyday sounds of the world as music. A radio broadcast of a baseball game has a certain rhythm and tonal range, quite different and unique from a football broadcast or a televised golf game. Those are all their own genres of music. Televised news and the 24-hour CNN/MS NOW coverage are other genres of music, but with their deliberately disruptive and annoying commercials competing for your attention, it's a genre that I don't particularly care for. The sounds of the supermarket are a form of music; I hear a music while driving in my car even with the radio off; laying in bed at night reading, hearing those delicious words in my mind, is music. If there's something you don't hear as music, just stop and examine it for a minute, identify what's different and unique about its sound, and if you're in a receptive frame of mind, it can become music.

Pro tip: if you don't hear it as music, it's probably a you issue, not the thing you're hearing.

Anyway, I've been informed that at 6:17 pm today, some little girl somewhere in the low-laying coastal state of Delaware received her Barbie doll set. Payment was billed to a credit card that's not my account. To be sure, I don't know that it was a little girl that received the set and not some 45-year-old man still living in his mother's basement who likes to collect dolls for some reason, but I prefer to imagine a happy little girl rather than some pervy dude. To my ears, her squeals of joy would make the better music.

Now that the shipment's complete, I can try and remove my email address from that random Walmart account.

 

Day of Discovering Neverness, 26th of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Helios):  I had to pull on a blanket last night, and slept with more than a sheet over my body for the first time since last Spring.

I once heard a joke - more of a humorous story, really - about a married couple heading overseas for a long-planned vacation. But just before they left, the wife's business suddenly required her to delay her departure by a couple of days. She told her husband to go on without her, no need for both of them to miss vacation time, and that she'd catch up to him at the resort in a couple of days. "Be sure to email me and tell me how you like the lodgings," she said.

The husband arrived and found the accommodations delightful. After a day, he dutifully sent his wife an email, but klutz that he was, he mistyped but a single letter in the email address and inadvertently sent the email to the wrong recipient. 

By sheer coincidence, the email went to another woman, who by chance had just lost her husband to an untimely death. So she was understandably quite surprised to receive an email that began, "My dear wife, greetings from the other side. After a long and arduous voyage, I have finally arrived here on the other side." 

"The accommodations here are fine," the email went on, "and I'm surprised to find that they have wifi here. It's also quite a bit hotter here than I was expecting. Still, everyone here is quite helpful, and they tell me that I can expect your arrival here in a day or two. Love," it ended, "your husband." Later, the medics found her in a state of shock, her hand still clutching the phone.

I think I received one of those misaddressed emails today. I get no shortage of scam emails, warnings that subscriptions I don't have are about to expire, that my Amazon driver needs an address for a package I didn't order, that my Netflix account will be cancelled unless I immediately update my credit card info. Scams all, and most of the times quite obviously bogus (typos, Cyrillic letters, etc.). 

But this morning I got an email that really and truly seemed to genuinely be from Walmart saying my new account was ready to use (I don't have a Walmart account or shop at Walmart for that matter). No typos, no weird grammar, no demands that I contact anyone immediately with some information or another. Nothing was required of me at all. Then I got another email thanking "me" for an order, a Barbie doll set ($45) which was being shipped to an address somewhere in Delaware. Fortunately, the last four digits of the credit card for the order didn't match any cards I carry. The Barbie doll is scheduled to arrive tomorrow.

I checked my credit cards and bank account, and there was no fraudulent activity or suspicious transactions. I believe that someone, apparently in Delaware, set up a Walmart account to buy some Barbie merch, and mistyped but a single letter in the email address, and the details of their order are going to me. Which means that someone, apparently in Delaware, is unaware that their order has been received and shipped, and is arriving tomorrow.

I'll try to cancel the account or at least unlink my email after the order is delivered. I wouldn't want some little girl in Delaware not to get her Barbie doll because of my paranoia.

 

The Endlock Series, 25th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Electra): Welcome, Gonzalo! That area of low pressure a few hundred miles south the Cabo Verde Islands now has a name, and that name is Gonzalo. No need to be concerned though - Tropical Storm Gonzalo is barely moving and shows no intention of taking the long voyage across the Atlantic. It's forecast to dissipate to a tropical depression by the end of the weekend and still be in the same general area as it is now. Likewise, Fay.

I was in the fourth grade when The Beatles made their American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show (why pretend to segue from the paragraph above to this one?). I was a little too young to get it, but the performance had all the kids on the school bus the next morning all riled up. "Did you see that?," and "the hair!," and "yeah, yeah, yeah." The driver had no idea what had us so wound up that day, and one kid had somehow managed to produce a Beatles wig and total mayhem broke out as we all fought for turns to try it on.

But despite the excitement I was still a little too young to get on board and took my cultural cues from mediocre t.v. variety show comedians and newspaper columnists, who were pretty much in agreement with my parents who thought is was all just noise. "All they do is scream," my Mom concluded. I didn't develop my own tastes in music until the following year and by the sixth grade I was a full-blown Beatlemaniac.

In 1966, I would make a weekly pilgrimage to the local record store and buy my 45-rpm single of the week. My tastes were informed solely by AM radio, 77 WABC in New York City, Cousin Brucie and whatever other disc jockeys they carried. So I was buying singles like We Can Work It Out by The Beatles (backed by Day Tripper) and Good Lovin' by the Young Rascals (backed by Mustang Sally) and Happy Together by The Turtles (I forget the B-side). 

The only LP album I owned was a Christmas present from my parents, The Best of Herman's Hermits, and I listened to it over and over and over again because it was the only album I owned, which was awkward because of the track Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter. Our next door neighbors were the Browns and they had a daughter, one year older than me, and my parents, hearing the track repeatedly playing in my bedroom, thought I was developing some sort of obsession with her. I wasn't, and to this day I wish the song had been titled Mrs. Jones You've Got a Lovely Daughter. Smith, Johnson, anything - why did they have to choose Brown?    

The picture I'm trying to paint here is a typical 12-year-old teeny-bopper in suburban America, but then one day everything changed. My radio, a crappy battery-powered transistor, broke one day ("the switch broke 'cause it's old," Elvis Costello, 1980). My parents kept an FM radio in the kitchen in order to play classical music during dinnertime and as far as I knew, classical was the only music on FM radio. But burned out on my collection of 45s and meager selection of albums, I searched up and down the dial for some rock 'n' roll to listen to. To my surprise, I found that WABC also had an FM counterpart. They played the same Beatles and Rolling Stones hits as their AM counterpart to be sure, but they also played "deep cuts" off the albums in addition to the singles and the hits. And they also played other bands, like the Jefferson Airplane and Buffalo Springfield. Listening to FM wasn't a compromise like I had expected, but actually an improvement.

Not only was the music better, but the whole vibe was cooler. AM radio was all manic, fast-talking DJ's, jingles and promos, zany sound effects (car horns, cuckoo clocks, gong, whistles, etc.) and lots and lots of commercials. FM jocks talked slower, naturally, and without all the gizmos and noise. George Carlin does a great routine about the difference between AM and FM radio that is probably incomprehensible to anyone under the age of, oh, sixty. 

After a few weeks, I got curious and explored the dial some more and came across WNEW-FM, which was even cooler than WABC-FM. Beatles and Stones, sure, as well as the Airplane and Buffalo Springfield, but also The Doors, Moby Grape, Tim Buckley, and more. A whole new universe of music had opened for me, and just like Jenny in that Lou Reed song, I had put on a New York station and couldn't believe what I heard at all. 

Over the following years (I'm probably in the seventh or eighth grade at this point, 1967 or '68 and in my early teens), I explored the dial further and found even cooler stations with even wilder music (Hendrix, Traffic) and even earthier, more organic, non-commercial vibes. Each successive new station made my previous stations sound juvenile, trite, and outdated. The lesson I learned was that there's always something a little better out there, that one had to keep seeking and never settle for complacency in some comfort zone. Think Steppenwolf rocks hard? Well, listen to Led Zeppelin. Think Strawberry Alarm Clock are psychedelic?  Here's Quicksilver Messenger Service. 

Always deeper. Always something further out. Your 1968 cutting edge is passe by 1969. It was that experience, that broken transistor radio, that started me down the long, never-ending rabbit hole I'm still following today. I'm one of the very few people I know who's musical taste didn't crystallize at some point in their lives. Some people my age never got past The Beatles and the Stones.  Some got as far as Hendrix and Zeppelin, but that was it. The Talking Heads and the B-52s are the epitome of "modern" to some, while others even went so far as to embrace goth, post-punk, and noisy, angry 90s alternative, but then stopped there. 

I kept going. I keep going. There's always something new and exciting out there. Jazz, experimental, improv, noise. Minimalism and neo-classical and ambient. Electronica, techno, IDM, krautrock. Indie rock, indie folk, indie pop, indie folk-rock pop. Power pop. Hip hop. Bebop, post-bop, hard bop, free jazz, modal jazz, Miles, Monk, and Mingus. The AACM, the AEoC, the JCoA, Anthony Braxton, Mary Halvorsen, Patricia Brennan, Sylvie Courvoisier, Myra Melford. 

I weirded out my college roommates with my music and alienated more than a few girlfriends. On the other hand, I was introduced to new music and new artists by record-store clerks  ("have you heard Mr. Bungle yet?"), the alternative press (Yo La Tengo and Sunburned Hand of the Man), and strangers at shows ("man, you gotta check out Jim O'Rourke"). On-stage, St. Vincent encouraged us to give another listen to The Pop Group. It never stops.     

Never rest. Keep listening. Dig deeper. Work harder.

It's worth it.

 

The Final Knowledge, 24th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Dog Days End, the last day of the Dog Days, may have been 24 days ago, but it was only today that it felt like they were finally over. This morning's low was a refreshing 63° F, and the high was only 71. This after weeks of heat domes, hot weather alerts, and heat indices in the high nineties. Somewhere, the great meteorological switch in the sky has been thrown. I know I talk about the weather here a lot but the weather is the overlap in the Venn diagram between climate change and my lived experience. 

With the weather so comfortable today, I walked a 9.3-mile Harrison, my first walk in six days. 

Tropical Storm Fay is still somewhere out there in the mid-Atlantic, but doesn't seem to be going anywhere and is rapidly losing strength. The area of low pressure a few hundred miles south the Cabo Verde Islands is moving north for some reason (who knows what goes on in the mind of a tropical storm?) and is apparently no threat to North American shores. 

Despite "both-sides" press coverage, the reality of climate change, aka global warming, is undisputed science. Yes, there are some scientists who are skeptical of some aspects of the complicated interactions between the atmosphere, the oceans, the land masses, anthropogenic CO₂ emissions, etc., but even the vast majorities of those simply want more research into some specific mechanism and don't reject the whole framework just because, say, the role of biota in buffering ocean acidification isn't fully understood 

Unfortunately, it's become part of the gospel of the far right to deny climate change, or at least man's involvement in the process.  The Stable Genius has called it a "hoax" and even specifically a "Chinese hoax," while other deep thinkers on the lunatic fringe thinks its only a wild theory dreamed up by Al Gore or Greta Thunberg, and the only reason that liberals believe it is that they're blind followers of Algore and Thunberg like they are of the Stable Genius. 

But the theory isn't something new, or even of just the last 30 years. Fifty years ago, back when I was an undergraduate geology major (could it really have been that long ago?), I was taught that the Eocene was the warmest period in Earth's Cenozoic Era, and we know that because geochemical analysis of Eocene sediments indicate the highest Cenozoic levels of atmospheric CO₂. That, and lots of swamp-marsh style fossils near the polar regions of that time and very few diamictites (glacial deposits). Even in the mid-1970s, long before Algore or Greta, freshman-level Geology 101 taught that the Earth is warm when atmospheric CO₂ is high, and cold when CO₂ levels are low.

Last night, I was reading Ursula K. LeGuin's 1969 science-fiction masterpiece, The Left Hand of Darkness. It's set on a cold, distant planet fittingly called "Winter." Most of the planet is covered by ice caps, and humanity exists only in a relatively narrow, equatorial band between the two massive caps. However, at least one character recognizes that "the volcanic activity in N.W. Orgoreyn and the Archipelago has been increasing during the last ten or twenty millennia, and presages the end of the Ice, or at least a recession of it and an interglacial period."

"CO₂ releases by the volcanoes into the atmosphere will in time serve as an insulator, holding in the long-wave heat-energy reflected from the earth, while permitting direct solar heat to enter undiminished. The average world temperature . . . would in the end be raised some thirty degrees, till it attains 72°. I am glad I shall not be present."

That was published in 1969, so LeGuin must have been writing in in 1968 or earlier, and reflecting her understanding of the state of the science in the mid-sixties. It's as concise a description of the greenhouse effect as any, and specifically identifies CO₂ as the driver. Yet, in 2009, I had a conservative work colleague who kept a set of cassette lectures on his desk titled, Water, Not CO₂, Determines Climate. I don't think he ever listened to the tapes. He just kept them on his desk for totemic purposes and to head off any argument or discussion on the topic. I know that I never brought up the topic, because if I did he'd tell me to listen to the tapes and then I'd have to pretend that I did.

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports that the fossil fuel industry secured an estimated $190 billion in tax breaks and subsidies over the next decade after responding to the Stable Genius pre-election request for campaign donations. U.S. taxpayers will have to shoulder the higher bills as the people endure the public-health risks and the effects of climate change associated with the pollution, including but not limited to 451,000 additional deaths from extreme, Dog-Day heat.

Under the Rose, 23rd Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Castor): During an address to the United Nations General Assembly on Aldebaran, the Stable Genius dismissed concerns about the safety of artificial intelligence and the threats of climate change. He claimed that the planet was actually cooling rather than warming and asserted that "nobody was dead" due to climate change.

By Stable Genius logic, since regulation of the environment and of greenhouse gas emissions isn't necessary, regulation isn't needed for AI, either. See how simple it is? Ignore one problem and all the rest can go away, too. Except for immigration, of course. We need masked federal troops on the street for that one. Stable Genius logic.  

That's certainly one take. Another take was expressed by a group called the Climate Impact Lab, a consortium led by academics (Berkeley, Rutgers, Stanford) and climate advocates.  They recently completed a report that concluded the Super El Niño forming on the Pacific will lead to 451,000 additional deaths from extreme hot days. Nearly a half million dead, on top of the deaths that will result from droughts, wildfires, and flooding. 

The report also identified the regions where the greatest number of people are projected to die with enough granular detail that I was able to note that of the 3,500 additional heat deaths in the United Snakes over the next six months, 74 of those additional heat deaths are expected here in Georgia, with the majority of additional deaths this month. 

Note that they're talking about "additional" heat deaths. A certain number of people die from heat everywhere and in every year, but the Super El Niño will significantly increase that number.

The worst impacts will occur across the Global South, notably Nigeria (31,400 additional deaths), Sudan (17,500), Niger (10,000), and Chad (8,000). In southeast Asia, the extra heat is projected to cause an additional 19,400 deaths in the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia, and 19,300 deaths in Indonesia alone. Other highly impacted regions over the next six months include India (15,800 deaths) and Brazil (13,300).

"Nobody was dead" because of climate change. Yeah, right. The human toll of the warming planet is well-documented. Extreme weather, severe heat waves, wildfires and associated poor air quality, and climate-driven diseases cause thousands of deaths around the world every year. I hope the Stable Genius is forever haunted by the ghosts of the 32 little girls that died in the flooding at Camp Mystic on the Guadeloupe River in Texas last year. 

It's true that rivers have always periodically flooded and always will, and it's impossible to ascribe any single event to "climate change." That's true, but it's like arguing that guns don't kill people, it's the bullets that kill. The flood on the Guadeloupe is one of the bullets fired by the gun of climate change. The Super El Niño will be like the burst of bullets from a fully automatic assault rifle.       

The Stable Genius' irresponsible and patently false statements at the UN follow his other reckless and dangerous actions regarding the climate, including the rollback of environmental regulations and the reversal of the EPA's finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health.

Fuck that guy!

 

The Lines Displayed, 22nd Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): The autumnal equinox will occur at 8:05 pm tonight. When I was moving day names around in the Universal Solar Calendar to come up with the New Revised USC, I thought the equinox was going to fall on the 21st and assigned it the name "Day of the Blood Sun" as that sounded sort of celestial. But then the cosmos pulled the rug out from under me and the equinox fell on today. 

In any event, today the hours of daylight and the hours of darkness are equal. Perfectly balanced. In equipoise. I've already noticed the evening's dark arriving earlier in the day, and the equinox reminds us that it will arrive even earlier in the months ahead. 

It's as easy take to interpret the increasing darkness as a negative omen. "The forces of darkness overtaking the forces of light," etc. That's one way of looking at it. Another is to recognize that things are stiller, quieter, at night. The hustle and bustle of the daytime's business hours are behind us and the long evening hours provide more opportunity for quiet reflection and introspection. Daytime chores behind us, we can lean into practice and contemplation. Nighttime is the right time, as the song goes.

Human civilization has developed over the past 10,000 years or so due to a relatively stable climate and natural resources that sustainably provide us with food, shelter, and a safe living environment. Under the auspices of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, an international coalition of sixty scientists conducted an analysis of the planetary life support systems that keep the climate relatively stable and sustain the natural resources relied upon by humans. The group identified nine key indicators, or "planetary boundaries,” that help determine whether life can flourish on Earth: change in biosphere integrity, climate change, freshwater change, introduction of novel entities, land system change, modification of biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, and stratospheric aerosol loading. 

Only the last two of those key indicators, ozone depletion and stratospheric aerosol loading, have shown improvement over the last decade. Amid ongoing pollution and habitat destruction, the other seven indicators have deteriorated to their worst levels ever recorded.

Among other threats, the ongoing release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels and the mass disposal of plastics and other pollutants into the environment are degrading the planetary life support systems. The Potsdam report warns that ability of landscapes and water bodies to cope with this degradation and to act as a buffer to the worsening climate crisis is weakening and may be significantly overestimated. 

Habitats such as forests and wetlands are being torn apart, flattened, and fragmented to make way for agriculture and urban areas, imperiling the animal species and natural systems upon which we depend. It has been separately suggested that the remaining ecosystems with minimal human activity be protected from intrusion by agriculture and urbanization. A planetary diet change (less meat, and more whole grains, fruits, and vegetables) could ease a lot of the pressures negatively affecting the environment, although a change at the scale necessary is nearly impossible to implement. In addition, a significant reduction of food waste and a full decarbonization of the agricultural sector, including food production, transport, refrigeration, preparation, machinery, and manufacture of all resources used in farming, would also be helpful.

As would voluntary human extinction. Involuntary, too. The planet may arguably be better off without this one species actively destroying its own life-support systems like a virus killing its host. AI, with its threat of human extinction, might be onto something after all.

Fay is now officially a tropical depression, but a new tropical wave was developed off the west coast of Africa. It has a low probability of developing into a hurricane, but its location near the Cabo Verde Islands is where the hurricanes that eventually do make landfall on North America tend to originate. 

 

Day of the Blood Sun, 21st of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): Fay is still a tropical storm, still heading west toward Nort America, and still expected to peter out before it gets here. For a few hours there, wind speeds were in the low 70s mph range, just below the 75 mph threshold for a hurricane, but it failed to meet the criteria. It's forecast to be degraded to a tropical depression by Castor (Wednesday), while still hundreds of miles offshore.

The polar vortex now forming over the North Pole is starting out stronger than last year, with rapid stratospheric cooling and a pressure drop already visible. That's good news, but the long-range forecasts suggest a notable slowdown of the vortex around mid-winter. That's bad news. It's highly unusual that a significant mid- to late winter vortex weakening is forecast this far ahead of time. 

The polar vortex is a huge area of very cold air that spins high above the North Pole during the colder months like a big spinning bowl of cold air. Strong winds circle around it and usually help keep the coldest Arctic air bottled up near the pole. When the polar vortex is strong, the winds around it are fast and fairly smooth. The coldest air tends to stay far north. When the vortex gets weaker, stretched, or split apart, the jet stream can become more wavy. Big dips in the jet stream can allow very cold Arctic air to move much farther south into parts of the United States.

The very strong Super El Niño now developing in the Pacific is predicted to peak as maybe the strongest El Niño ever recorded. El Niño events usually lead to more extreme weather shifts, amplifying normal seasonal changes into high-impact weather events. But a Super El Niño can also affect the stratosphere and decelerate the vortex, which could ultimately lead to very cold air over much of the east, all the way down into Florida. 

If the long-range trends hold, such events can strongly increase the chance for more cold winter days and snowfall over the United States. We're in for a cold winter, folks.

The ill-conceived and even more poorly executed war in Iran is disrupting exports of petroleum, oil, and liquified natural gas. However, economists project that the price for natural gas in the U.S. for the coming winter months to be approximately $3.28 per million BTUs, down from the previous winter ($3.43).  Natural gas inventories are relatively high, approximately 5% above the previous five-year average and 1% above October 2025 levels, due to increased fracking production. However, deregulation, market demands, exports, and good old corporate greed may all keep me from paying Atlanta Gas Light Company anything less than I paid last winter, when my cost spiked as high at $650 in the chilly month of March.

Fuck the cold. I hate the cold. Hot, humid weather may be uncomfortable, but cold weather can kill you.

 

Day of the Radiant Spiel, 20th of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Helios): Tropical Depression Six now has a name, Fay. Out in the mid-Atlantic, Tropical Storm Fay now has sustained winds near 65 mph with higher gusts, and could approach hurricane intensity tonight. Although a gradual weakening trend is expected to begin tomorrow, there's a chance Fay could yet become the first hurricane of this season. However, it still isn't expected to reach North America, and certainly not as a hurricane.

Helios is a walking day but I didn't walk today. The weather was fine and all but fuck it, I didn't feel like walking, okay? Got a problem with that? I'll get my steps in on Betelgeuse.

I asked ChatGPT to throw the I Ching for me today. I know, I know, I know - it's going to cause human extinction by the end of the decade (as if that's a bad thing), data centers are a scourge, AI uses up inordinate amounts of energy, water, and computer chips that could (and should) be used for gaming computers. But if we can use AI for our Google searches and it insists on summarizing my emails for me whether I want it to or not, if I can use it to generate daily pictures to match the names of the days in this blog, why can't I use it for the I Ching? Old meets new, East meets West, etc. 

It came up with hexagram 29, The Deep, with one moving line. Two identical trigrams, the deep above and the deep below. Water fills the hollow places, ChatGPT told me, it follows the terrain rather than tries to overpower it. This is the hexagram of moving through something that cannot be avoided. The image speaks of uncertainty, of being in a territory where the usual landmarks aren’t reliable. The counsel is to remain sincere and steady rather than becoming overwhelmed by the difficulties.

The moving fourth line reads, "A jug of wine, two bowls of food, and earthen vessels simply handed through the window. There is no blame." When circumstances are difficult, don’t assume that the answer has to be grand. Something simple, offered sincerely, can be enough. We don’t need to solve everything at once.

ChatGPT reads the teaching as follows: Don’t fight the difficult terrain. Move through it simply. Pay attention to the small things that bring you back to yourself. The I Ching isn’t telling me that everything is about to change. It’s suggesting something subtler, that I may be the one changing.

 

I had been warned by others that if I use AI images in my blog, people will assume the text was generated by AI as well. It's not. Even the text above, although based on what I read in ChatGPT, is still my own words and interpretations. I never have, and never will, post written AI content without explicitly saying, "What follows is what the AI said to me," or something to that effect. 

Also, and let's be honest here, this blog has gotten weird. The New Revised Universal Solar Calendar, "I'll get my steps in on Betelgeuse," obsessive hurricane surveillance. AI tries so hard to sound "normal" that I think it's incapable of being this weird. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that weird, for lack of a better word, is good. Weird is right, weird works. 

You can trust weird.

 

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.