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. 

Selective Mercies

“The trick, as always, the key to human success and domination, is to be selective in your mercies.” Ian McEwan, Saturday

I haven’t had time to write anything new for the Balcony. Semi-retirement is busy, a different routine, but still a routine. One thing that has changed is the way I wake up in the morning. No alarm, for one thing, and no rolling out of bed like a soldier roused from sleep. Even when I work until 10:30, p.m., I wake up between 6:00 and 7:00, but now I have the luxury of laying in bed until I’m fully awake. I usually stretch and flex my feet, and then perform eye exercises, glancing from left to right, right to left, up and down, and then rolling them one way and the other. I don’t know if these daily exercises provide any benefit for my vision, which is wonky to begin with, but they feel good. Then it’s off to the bathroom. 

There’s something optimistic about brewing a pot of coffee, pouring that first cup. I’m sure I drink too much of the stuff, just as I drink more wine than is good for me. I sit down at the dining room table with my laptop and notebooks, read some news and watch a few videos on YouTube. Like coffee and wine, I know I need to reduce, if not eliminate, my consumption of political news; it puts me in a foul, defeatist and bitter frame of mind which sometimes stays with me for several hours. We’re living in an age of idiocy, of treason, of cruelty, of misplaced anger, of political malfeasance, of endemic corruption and stupidity. No samaritan is coming to winch us out of the ditch. As Hunter S. Thompson would say, we’re well and truly fucked. I wrote here after Trump’s defeat that at best all Joe Biden will be able to do is slow the slide. The Democrats are on course to lose the House and possibly the Senate in 2022, which could very well pave the way for a return of the Orange Menace in January 2025. 

I’ve been off for a couple of days but return to work tonight for my usual 2:00 - 10:30 shift. My partner, Jose, is on vacation so I’ll be the only maintenance person on duty for eight hours. The electronic minder I carry will remind me of the hourly inspections of aisles, bathrooms, and the front of the store. Being midweek there’s bound to be lots of cardboard to bail. The bailer is the color of a battleship, a huge piece of machine powered by hydraulics. The U-boats that line the narrow hallway that run behind the store will be loaded with product and empty cartons. If my average holds, I will walk between 12 and 13 miles. The pain in my left foot that I’ve been dealing with for a while has been alleviated with stretches for my lower back. I suspect I suffer from sciatica. The test now is to see if I can work pain-free regardless of the shoes I decide to wear. 

My other physical problem is my left shoulder. It has been bothering me for a while, and might be the result of bursitis, tendonitis, or a rotator cuff tear. My mobility isn’t terrible, but it comes with pain, and I don’t have much strength. I’ve got a series of exercises that I do that have helped some, but I need to see a doctor. I had a rotator cuff tear in my right shoulder in 2012 that had to be surgically repaired. I see how the kind of work I’m doing now can break a person’s body down over the long term. Long hours on your feet, standing, walking, bending, twisting, reaching, stooping, pushing and pulling. I must be weird, but I enjoy the physical aspect of the work, even with these nagging ailments. The challenge is to ward off the incredibly repetitious nature of the work. I’m very fortunate to only have to do it part-time. I’m not sure I could handle 40 hours a week. My injuries haven’t kept me off the job, and I can work safely provided I’m conscious of what I’m doing and my body mechanics. Where the shoulder issue really plagues me is when I sleep; I’m a habitual side sleeper who must now sleep on his back. 

I’m writing book reviews for the California Review of Books, the website I co-founded with David Starkey and Michelle Drown. The latest one I’ve got in the hopper is Humane by Samuel Moyn, a brilliant analysis of how the US has made war more humane but at the same time never-ending. It boggles my mind to think we spent two decades fighting in Afghanistan, longer than the Civil War, World War II, and Vietnam, combined. I just received John McWhorter’s Woke Racism, and this morning I finished reading the novel Saturday by Ian McEwan. I’m about fifty pages into Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose. 

Change is constant, time is finite, and suffering is unavoidable.