Snow Day

For the first time in maybe ten years, there’s snow on our mountains, below the 3,000 foot level. It’s a lovely sight and if the forecast pans out snow might be visible for a day or two. We’ve experienced another drenching rainfall, and yet another of the Italian stone pines has toppled on Anapamu Street. Twenty years ago, the Italian pines formed a dense canopy nearly six blocks long. But as the drought went on and on the trees suffered and many have fallen. 

Not much desire to write of late. Cause unknown, but it occurs to me that I have nothing novel or intelligent to say about any of the outrages going on in the world, from Russia’s war on Ukraine, mass shootings in the US, Israel’s strangulation and erasure of Palestinians, climate disruption, crime, inflation, political malpractice, book banning, LGTBQ bashing, to how long it’s taking Donald Trump and his criminal associates to face some indictments. It all saddens and sickens my spirit, but I don’t have solutions. 

I worry and brood, drift far from the present, like an off-course sailboat.

In the past three weeks I’ve been reading mostly fiction. L.A. Weather by Maria Amparo Escandon, and The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. I felt like a break from heavy non-fiction and wanted to read some female authors. I liked both books. I’m going to review them for the other website I’m involved in, California Review of Books. 

I’m going to begin reading Victory City by Salman Rushdie. 

It’s raining again. A full Lake Cachuma is hard to fathom after years of drought conditions. Water always wins, always finds a course to follow. Drops accumulate, pool, puddle, determined to flow. No matter how much we have we can never afford to waste it. We can’t afford to contaminate it, but of course we do. I was thinking the other day about the idea of stewardship, and concluded that modern people are terrible stewards, and that unfettered capitalism is not a system that can co-exist with stewardship. But we have it drilled into our American heads that no other economic arrangement is possible because, well, tyranny! As if poverty itself isn’t tyrannical. We fear godless communism so we created a “prosperity” Jesus to make our Christianity more popular and easier to swallow. We’re also conditioned to accept the idea that the rich are more deserving than the poor and the lazy criminal underclass, which is full of Black and brown and Indigenous people, queers, lesbians, drag queens, and transgender folk. All Muslems are suspect on principle.

What is so alarming about tolerance? What is frightening about knowledge -- general knowledge, political and economic knowledge, religious knowledge? I imagine a white swath of Americans who are scared shitless of “others.” It’s fucking weird. Thirty percent or more of the American population is more scared of drag queens than gun violence or climate change. 

It is strange to be in your 60’s and still uncovering things you didn’t know about yourself? Asking for a friend.