Year in Review

 Um...pass.

I wrote some posts this year that I enjoy reading, which is as high of praise as I can give.

1. Camille Joins the Fam
   
2. Cass has Surgery
   
3. Voting in the Primary, before the Pandemic
   
4. Does the Virus Sleep?
   
5. Society Begins to Dissolve
   
6. Systems Collapse
7. The Western States Burn
   

(Sigh)

I'm getting some work in on my own publishing arm, and maybe sometime soon (like during the next calendar year) I hay have some of it done. Perpetually working on something...

Happy Old Year! Happy New Year!

Just Me and the Boy

 Cass's preschool has not returned to class yet, but Camille's daycare was open for our normal Tuesday, so yesterday the Boy and I went on a tiny adventure.

We went on a drive two towns over to San Pedro, gabbed some donuts and coffee, and started to see some sights, like looking back at our own city, visible behind the port structures:

We made it over to some bluff point lookout that I hadn't been to before, andn Cass made a friend with whom he ran around with for nearly an hour.

Both surfers and the breaker were visible from the spot. The breaker was our next destination, as the anchor for the miles-long breaker that surrounds our own beach and eliminated our surf is down here in San Pedro.

Because it had just rained the previous day, the sky was clear enough that Catalina was very visible:

Not doing justice to how close it looked

Finally down at the breaker and the true dimensions become clear. Each one of the blocks that has waves crashing over it is the size of my car, and they are stacked up like Legos:

Mr. Cool needs his own sunglasses so he doesn't look slightly out of place:

Masks on, and we're walking...

One section of breaker that we can visit with our feet reminded me of the strand at Morro Rock, with waves crashing on one side:

And again, the entire recreational strand visible below, with hilly San Pedro in the background:

We drove around the peninsula to take the scenic route home, a half-hour jaunt of easy-going curves with the ocean on the left the entire time. Eventually you make it to Torrance, meet up with PCH again, and head back to Long Beach.

It was a great little after breakfast/before lunch adventure. We need to do this kind of thing more often, but...times are tough and the world outside in the air is...dangerous?

Just our new normal, that is now no longer new, just "normal."

Making the Most out of Winter Vacation

"Vacation" has a funny ring to it during this pandemic.  

1. So this Happened

One of my family's traditions during this season is a series of baked goods that my mom makes and now, as we've all grown and moved further away than down the hall, mails to us. She sends family recipe biscotti, other cookies on occasion, and a wonderful treat we call "cheesies."

Cheesies are like cookies, but they're made from cheese and flour instead of sugar and flour. I was making dinner one night, removed one from the just-arrived package, and warmed it up on the lid of a saucepot. Babygirl came into the kitchen to "help" as she usually does, and so I let her try the cheesie.

She promptly shoved the entire thing into her gob:

I took that picture and sent it to my mom, letting her know that Camille was a fan. She asked if Cass was also a fan. I was texting her my answer, and then took a screen-capture of my phone because I couldn't believe my eyes on the auto-predictor...

"...regaling Corrie with exploits of his..." TESTICLES?

Also, I can't be the only person to use words like "regaling" and "exploits" in my texts...I even (properly) use semicolons...

2. Trips to the Beach

We try to keep things fresh with neighborhood walks, like to the PAC for photo-ops, or to the beach:

And since the weather generally helps out on these capers, we should be going more often.

On this day, sometime before the 25th, we frolicked and cavorted, without our masks, and for a few minutes it seemed like a regular December day when adults don't have to work and the world is carefree.

That's...unfortunately not the case in our year 2020 (5502 MHs), but sometimes we can fool ourselves.

But then, you know, almost time to replace the mask and go home...

And make dinner and go back to shuttering ourselves inside to beat back our surging invisible foe.

Vacation in the time COVID...where's Gabriel Garcia Marquez when we need him?

Decemberween 2020

We thought it may snow here in LA; that would have made sense for this year. Instead it was beautiful and blue. Poor us.

Like so many others, we held tight and stayed put. And, like so many others, we spent more time on Zoom, first with my family and then with Corrie's, and since I used the same code, we had a virtual window open to our world for about four hours, a digital portal, a vortex of attention. Or nothing but our own living room during the in-between times.

But the kids look adorable.

On the 24th, we went walkabout once darkness fell so we could examine the light show down the street at the Performing Arts Center (AKA Long Beach Terrace Theater). The tree is SO enormous:

Once we put everything together after the kids went to bed, we stood back and gawked at ourselves: what have we done?

Hot Wheels tracks up the wall; triangle wooden jungle-gym that folds up neatly (with slide/ladder); tiny strider bike for Camille.

For wanting to take it easy with the presents, we had what seemed like an unreasonable number of gifts, but the kids know they're loved by their grandparents and aunties and uncles. And that's priceless.

Right?

Quarantine Thanksgiving

 If someone had told us that we'd be relegated to our homes for both St. Paddy's and Thanksgiving, and everything in between, because of a global health crisis...

...I probably would have begrudgingly believed it. My view of how this country duly operates has no blinders, especially since the election in 2016.

Anyway, we celebrated the November holiday at our beach-y apartment in the nice So-Cal weather, like...like...er, every other goddamn day since March?

The turkey was a gift for our starting a butcher box subscription, and I got to work on it once it thawed. I carved the breasts off, and then the thigh/drumstick combo, and then deboned the combos. Next they went into the salt solution to brine for a few days. My brine was a tablespoon of salt and a quart of water, and I was nervous that it may be too heavy for the days it was working on the meat. I had two bags going, one with the breasts and one with the dark meat, and that solution in each: a quart/tbsp in each.

In the end it was perfect. The meat was juicy and flavorful. I tied up the meat so it would cook evenly, and slathered it with the compound herb butter.

Funny thing: with no bones it takes just over an hour to cook.

Days and weeks are still running together, blurring in my brain...

The smoke returned, as swaths of both Orange and Riverside counties are burning:

Morning orange glow

That picture doesn't really do the glow justice...

(Sigh)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Movie for Our Times

Corrie and I watched a movie the other night that shocked me how much it spoke to our time, how much it presaged the youth of today. It was released 35 years ago, was written by a woman (Leora Barish), produced by two other women (Sarah Pillsbury and Midge Sanford), directed by a woman (Susan Seidelman), and gave a pop-star her first movie roll:

"Desperately Seeking Susan" was way more accurate in the depiction of the world, or, rather, the foundation for our current celebrity driven/social media perusing youth culture can be found in this film. I recommend it for anyone who would like to get a sense for how we got to this point.

The first time we see Madonna in this movie, this is what she's up too:

Kids today, and plenty of non-child-aged "adults" are very familiar with the selfie.

This image, and scene, claims that this is Madonna inventing the selfie. Besides being inaccurate, I think that's low-hanging fruit and doesn't discuss the fact that the rest of the '80s depicted here would be recognizable to us today.

Madonna, while playing the titular Susan, isn't actually the focus of the movie. It's really a movie about a bored housewife played by Rosanna Arquette. She reads, rather religiously (if that can be used in this context), the personal ads, and knows some of the social history of at least one of the, er, stars(?) or celebrities(?) of the personal ads.

Now, young people from today are NOT familiar with personal ads, or, "the personals," nor are they familiar with CraigsList, so there you go.

BUT, unsatisfied people who live vicariously through social media and the celebrities created by such, IS DEFINITELY A THING. Sitting around scanning the personals is the same as sitting around scanning Instagram or Twitter.

Madonna is an "influencer" in that era: she's confident in her sexuality, confident in her garish fashion choices that become fashionable simply by being sported by someone with this personality, and she has none of  the ties that normal folks suffer.

I haven't even mentioned the screwball plot; it blends amnesia, Hitchcock-ian mistaken identity, and antiquity theft into a wholly original conclusion.

Throw in early performances for Aidan Quinn, Laurie Metcalf, and John Tuturro, and you've got the makings of a classic, an underappreciated gem that's got Girl Power written all over it.

Also, you may be arruffato if this turns you on:

Sogno di un domani arruffato!

Celebrate First, then: the Work

It was a Saturday morning, with Cass bouncing around, enjoying his second waffle after his cereal. Camille laughing and gazing at her brother, happily alternating between her yogurt and eggs.

I had the curtains open, since it was after 8 and we try to flood the place with natural light. My neighbor was again in her makeshift garden, in a small patch of private space outside their apartment door. Then, a commotion. Her voice from inside her apartment carried...a shriek: giddy and truthful. Then, she was back outside, screaming, "It's over!"

Soon, car-horns and cheers would resonate throughout our neighborhood. People would take to their roofs to shout at the sky. Catharsis. Regime change.

Old-fashioned regime change. The election of 2020 was called on Saturday, five days after the titled Election Day, after it was apparent that Biden would be taking over the Oval Office.

One telling thing from that Saturday was the amount of celebration spontaneously commencing. When people celebrate you losing an election like the Death Star has just been blown up, it SAYS SOMETHING ABOUT YOU OR THE REST OF US. OR BOTH.

But now the real work begins. Does anyone have any illusions to what lies ahead? 

The answer to that emphatically: YES.

While we can celebrate the 74 million folks voting against the dude, we need to soberly try to strategize working with the 70 million folks who were, in the least, not turned off by the racism and misogyny, by the lies and ineptitude, in the glorification of unthinking machismo. The story of this country's ailments goes beyond one-dude, goes beyond one destructive quartet of years. Is Joe Biden the answer?

Would Bernie have been the answer?

How will we move forward with dismantling systemic racism? With dismantling the patriarchy? How much does Biden even care about all that? Kamala, sure, okay, I could be convinced she's an ally.

But the DNC? The RNC is obviously against any altering of the status quo, but so are the Democrats. They torpedoed Bernie, just like they torpedoed Howard Dean in 2000 and tried to torpedo Obama in '08.

I'm afraid they'll take the W for the White House and try to "move forward" while not actually doing anything positive for the greater good.

First order, though, is avoiding the million-cases-a-week projection of this pandemic. And a subset of the the 70 million thinks they shouldn't have to wear masks.

All I can say is: IT ISN'T ABOUT BEING FORCED, IT'S ABOUT GIVING A SHIT ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE.

This is what we're dealing with, and the outgoing regime just made this kind of personality somehow socially defensible and mainstream, a truly terrible and sickening thing that's come out of the last four years.

Meanwhile, we ready the torches and sharpen the pitchforks.

A return to normalcy would be a waste and a mirage at best. The time for civility may have passed, but I'm open to talks about the best way to get the results we need.

Haven't Worn Socks Since

 With so much other shit going on, I thought I'd drop this trivial note here:

My first pair of Birkenstocks in a decade arrived, and I haven't worn socks since. 

"So Much Yucky"

 Each morning is an adventure. Me and the kids get up and have breakfast: the Boy has his cereal or waffle or both, and Baby-girl has her yogurt, waffle, or egg, and in between getting lunch ready for school and making sure everyone is dressed and cleaned up and fed, I get to make my own breakfast.

I've been making what I call "Jacque's Eggs" or maybe "Jacque's Volcano Eggs," named after the venerable Jacque Pepin. They're so easy and delicious and awesome, and because I douse them fairly liberally with my hot-sauce, nobody ever wants a bite:

Two eggs, yolk preserved, in a bowl (this way you don't waste valuable seconds cracking an egg as one cooks). Small non-stick pan, tablespoon of butter, once melted and frothy, pour the eggs in, hit with salt and pepper, and then the magic trick: add about spoonful of water and cover it. It will sizzle up with some ferocity, which is what you should see as yu put the lid on.

The water steams the whites so they'll be totally done. Take a look after one minute. Feel the yolks and pull them when they're where you like them: for me RUNNY. No flipping necessary.

I hit them with hot sauce, then pop the yolks, then hit the yolk again with the sauce. I start my pan with a piece of bread to make toast, then toss in the butter and do the eggs. This takes maybe four minutes, and I leave my plate on the table as it cools and thickens as the other shenanigans transpires.

Cass sneers at it most days, but the other day he said: "Dad, there's so much yucky on your plate."

NO WAY, SON! RUNNY YOLKS AND HOT SAUCE IS MAGIC! The whites being all done is a bonus...

Waning Motivation

Early in Mike Judge's movie "Idiocracy," Luke Wilson's being confronted by one of his superior officers. "When sarge says to lead, follow, or get out of the way, I figure it's a good time to just, you know, get out of the way," he defends himself.

His superior scolds, "When he says that he's just trying to get you to lead, or follow at least." Luke Wilson's hapless Joe doesn't want to lose his position in what looks like an evidence locker/basement spot, and pleads, "But I'm good at this."

"At what? Sittin' on ass?"

Sittin' on ass.

This is a phrase that's been running through my brain for MONTHS now. My motivation has been waning.

I still haven't finished my Tux eulogy, two and years on.

I have been painting, and working out some new book projects, along with my novel, but again. 

SITTIN' ON ASS.

The days drag. We got a lizard whenever ago. It's super cool, and watching it hunt crickets is like watching Smaug go after horses. But now I have to go buy crickets every week.

(Sigh)

What was I saying?

The Dodgers won the World Series! Julio Urias, the great Mexican pitcher who closed out game 6 for the win, had a classic approach to the last batter he faced: fastball; fastball; fastball. I dare you to hit it.

Three pitches, all strikes, and the batter never swung. Game over. World Series over.

SITTIN' ON ASS.

I've been going through an Impressionism phase with the painting right now. I've decided to start an art movement. ARE YOU ARRUFFATO? I've been planning revolution also. I've been so disillusioned with the events set to take place next week that I barely give enough of a shit to go vote. We're going to go for fucking Biden no matter what I did. (I voted nonetheless.)

Sogno di un domani arruffato!

That's the tagline of my art movement, but my Italian work-dad has some issues with it; he prefers scapiglialto to arruffato, but I think "arruffato" is easier for American audiences. We're trying to work it out over Zoom. Because...

SITTIN' ON ASS.

Viewing Habits

In episode 16 of Season 11 of the Simpsons, Moe, afraid he and his new face are about to be fired from a soap opera, enlist Homer's help to steal the script story bible and divulge six months of storylines and plot secrets. Each item Homer reads sounds just like a soap opera hack plot line, and each ends "...with sexy results."

It's a funny nod to the soap opera genre, but at home Marge is taking notes. Lisa complains, but Marge responds, "Who cares? He's dishing out the dirt." The camera then shows her notepad:

This still cracks me up, and I think it's a reality that men FAR too often don't get this. The "sexy results" is the one reason many shows remain on the air.

Corrie has been watching the former CW show "Arrow." I've been listening from afar, catching enough of enough episodes to know who the main players are, and filling in what I know about Green Arrow the DC comic character when I think it may help.

Do you know that part in an action movie that's just past the halfway point? It's in the middle of the second act, and traditionally either at the exact halfway point in the film, or pretty soon after the exact middle. It's the total nadir, the lowest point for our hero, where we the audience think all is lost. BUT WAIT, something happens to create a little hope, some positive traction is gained, and the upswing of the third act comes into view. We haven't had our third act climax yet, but you can sense it should deliver (or hope it will, at least).

That's every single episode of Arrow. It's the action film nadir and up-swing into the third act. They never quite finish off the full bad-guy threat, but there's a bit of cathartic success.

There's also Stephen Amill, the young man playing Oliver Queen/the Vigilante (he's my brother Dan's age) who has scruffy facial hair and works out without a shirt all the time in the first two or three seasons. He also reluctantly takes many trips to bone-town, AKA: has many women coming for his genitals in a non-threatening manner.

For all the sexy time in the show's first few seasons, Oliver is rarely the instigator and is told things like: "So, hey, thanks for saving my life...and for the sex...I mean, I needed that." Or another time, while trying to get to a rendezvous for a jailbreak and away from the clutches of his female partner, he says, "Uh, I really have to go," he's told, "Don't worry, I'll be quick," and then later, as he's leaving, trying to make sure she's cool, she says, "Do I look like I need to cuddle?"

I asked Corrie, during one of the video conference calls with my brother and dad, if the Arrow show was good, since she'd been watching it. She answered, "Well, yeah, if you're a hetero lady."

It doesn't take too long for there to be at least two bare-chested dudes working out regularly, plenty of sexy time, and, frankly, a shit load of action. The first season is, like, a 20 hour action movie.

And it's good. Well, not bad at least. If you're knowledgeable of the comics, there's WAY more characters than I would have guessed by all the positive press I'd heard over the years.

Using Green Arrow as the basis for a television show that's this dark and risky makes sense: nobody cared about Green Arrow. If the show was a hit, Greg Berlanti could make his Flash show and his Supergirl show and the other projects that have become the so-called "Arrowverse."

Arrow skips the tween-drama that Smallville laced in the show.

But while this character makes for an interesting low-stakes risk, it's success highlights some the renaissance of comic book shows, and high-falutin' ones at that. 

And I'm not talking about Greatest American Hero from the '80s, or Flash and Lois and Clark from the '90s, or the animated Maxx and Spawn. One of the biggest comic book shows is one of the few that predate Arrow:

And while it may have finished up (I'm not sure, I've never seen any episodes...), the prestigious era for comic-book-properties-as-shows is fully upon us.

I mean, just take a look:

And those are shows that friends and family won't stop gushing over, and with which I am unfamiliar. Which is unfortunate. I mean, I read Preacher back in the day, and I like Darick Robertson, the artist of The Boys, and Joe Hill, the author of Locke and Key, and I like Gerard Way's work with the Doom Patrol, so at least I'm familiar with some of the creators.

Look at this next one, the morphing of Archie:

My wards love the show, a cross between, I've been told, 90210 and Twin Peaks.

HBO Max has been either funding or producing the first show on this list I actually watch:

And, oddly enough, like Arrow, they add a whole bunch of elements from the comic, a property I am also familiar with...like Danny the Street and the Beard Hunter. Not to mention Mr. Nobody and the Painting that Eats Cities.

Anything that contains something this weird, has to be cool:

AND THESE ARE THE PRESTIGIOS SHOWS.

Corrie's little sexy-guy show spawned an entire collection of shows. And it makes a very specific kind of sense.

On the Animatrix DVD is a documentary called "From Scrolls to the Screen," a cute little program about how the Japanese used the American innovation of sequential art and applied their own scrolling scroll stories to the form, creating what they call Manga. In it, there's an interview with Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn and one of the founding members of Image Comics. 

To paraphrase his sentiment, he says: People in America scorn you, like, "You're reading a comic?" while at the same time they love to go see action movies. Action movies are just comics.

In an era that seems starved for original movie ideas, or too risk-averse to fund independent movies, the small-screen still allows somewhat more freedom.

But here too, comic books still rule the day. It also makes sense: it's just action movies, it's mostly storyboarded already, and there are literally years of stories: Green Arrow first appeared in 1941(!!), oddly enough in the same comic where Aquaman made his first appearance (I couldn't make that up if I tried).

I haven't even mentioned any of the Power Man and Iron Fist/Daredevil/Jessica Jones Netflix shows or the Agents of Shield and Peggy Carter network shows, all Marvel properties.

And then there's the reason I like the show Arrow:

So...the Lakers Have Won

 I'm not a person that makes bucket lists. I've also been blessed to have the same lady put up with me for 20 years who is also kinda crazy with adventure ideas, to which I say YES. Autobus to Mayan ruins? Of course. Speed boat up the Mekong to see Angkor Wat? Why not? Fly with the three-year old over the North Pole to go to Italy? Well...duh.

Anyway, it was an earlier pair of trips---Spring Break '04 in Thailand and Summer '05 in Europe---that inspired me to try to accomplish something: I wanted to live in a city where the major sports team won that country's, or a major league at least, championship.

Like what if we moved to Guadalajara and Chivas would win La Liga's championship; or Milan and Juventas; or Barcelona; or Sao Paolo...I was mostly thinking soccer, since it's pretty global, but I would have settled on something like Tuscaloosa for college football. But I would never live in Alabama, so that was out. But we did live in Austin, and UT football is sacrosanct.

But then things got weird, as they do with us. The timeline I considered this goal to be accomplished was generally in terms of lifetimes, and yet it only only took a few years. And it was my team, in MY city, with arguably the greatest Super Bowl in history, when Eli beat the perfect Pats, in February of 2008.

It happened again in the next calendar year, again my team and MY city, but for baseball, with the Yankees beating Philly.

After moving to Long Beach, you learn how the Southland views possession of teams, and the sense blooms of how many teams here could count. USC college football; UCLA college basketball; Fullerton college baseball; two NFL teams, two MLB teams, two NBA teams, an NHL franchise...two MLS teams...

And if we look at the Four Major sports in America (Baseball, Basketball, Football, and Hockey), we first have to recognize we're talking about professional sports proper. I'd like to include soccer, and the WNBA, but we must grow their profile...

Anyway, I got the Giants in '08, the Yanks in '09, then the LA Kings won the Stanley Cup in '12 and '14. So basketball was all I needed at this point. And the Lakers delivered. 

See, we choose to live in huge metropolitan areas, and those attract premium talent and dollars. The LAFC were in the MLS cup last year (their finals). The Rams made the Super Bowl (albeit in the most boring game imaginable (still butthurt that the only game I made time to watch that year was still 3-0 deep in the 3rd quarter)). And the Dodgers have made two World Series' since we moved here, have won the division almost every year we've lived here, and have the generally considered "best team" currently in baseball. Even the Clippers had some shine for the championship, and the Angles have the best player in baseball.

I can't say this was really an "accomplishment", or like it was anything I did per se, but it's something.

The Sky Returns to Blue (Mostly)

 The western states were on fire the past few weeks, as if the year hadn't caused enough damage. (The year landed us a daughter, so that's pretty rad!)

Smoke filled the air from the west coast of America all the way to northern Europe. It was said that here, in Southern California, the weird orange glow with the morning sun and the daytime white sky was due to the Northern California fires pouring smoke into the upper atmosphere, while our own poor air quality and visible foggy-smoke was due to the local fires, only a few hundred miles away.

There's Long Beach from up on Signal Hill, showcasing both calamities. The high NorCal smoke finally just dissipated, or moved on, mainly due to new pressure fronts moving through.

And while the air has been bad, it hasn't been anywhere near the danger levels of locales north, like Oregon and northern California.

Driving home after picking up Cass during this time had some very eerie mirror views. Ahead was mostly clear, and by "mostly clear," I mean overcast with smoke.

And yet, it wasn't bad here at all, relatively speaking. Sure it smelled like campfire for a few days, with white skies for a few more, maybe a few weeks.

We even got some bitchn' sunsets:

So, this is exactly the kind of thing that we're going to need to prepare ourselves for with the changing climate. Fight it or not, call it a hoax or not, THIS SHIT IS NOT GOING TO ABATE BECAUSE YOU WANT IT TO.

It doesn't work like that.

We gained Camille. We lost John Lewis, Chadwick Boseman, RBG (aw c'mon!), 200k+ American's to the 'rona...

Whatever happens in November is going to trigger some [distasteful expletive], mark my words. The outcome doesn't matter, okay? We need to agree that this is the case and be clear eyed. No matter who wins, the fan will be COVERED.

At least our skies returned to blue for a bit in September...

Not Lying to Your Kids

 I find myself occasionally in strange situations with my kids, and my son specifically. I don't lie to him, or them, but my daughter is only seven months old, and the sound of my voice is more important than what I say.

With the recent social unrest about police brutality, not to mention all the goddamn pandemic ennui, we've been having serious talks in our house. Specifically about his role as a blond boy in our society and the dismantling of the patriarchy, it's been going well. Recognize what you get from the patriarchy, and the like, you know---real talk.

Anyway, we were on a drive the other week and he had a box of old CDs of mine in his lap, and he was looking through them. At one point he was holding two jewel-cases:

And:

I said something like, "Oh man! Those are great! The music is so iconic and culturally important, and both guys were named Jim, and both died tragically at the age of 27...too early..."

"They died?" he asked. Yup, I told him, starting to regret my relentless honesty. And of course it went a little sideways: "They died? How?"

"Well, they asphyxiated. That's like choking..."

"Did the police kill them by stepping on their neck like George Floyd?"

On the one hand, I was so proud of my little blond white-boy, because it's going to take millions of white-folks to be clear eyed about systemic racism and police brutality to make any change in this busted-ass system actually take effect.

On the other hand, I was mortified about now having to explain choking on vomit while asleep and dying, because, you know, knee-jerk relentless honesty.

The walk from the car into the appointment, waiting in the lobby, and in the examination room the conversation continued (he still had the jewel cases in hand, having brought them like treasure from the car), and eventually the doctor came in and asked what was up.

"Well, I'm explaining to Cass about asphyxiation on vomit and the deaths of seminal American artists. How are you doing?"

She said, "Aaahhhh, ohhhkaaay. Um...Let's take a look at those ears..."

Yes, let's. 

Also, Cass's favorite song currently is "Riders on the Storm," but "Hello, I  Love You" is coming on strong. "Play the 'Jump in your game, I love you' song, dad."

See? Not everything is about revolution. That may be the only way to keep him from becoming a real zealot.

How Vulnerable Are We To Systems Collapse?

Near the end of July I became intensely interested in the Bronze Age Collapse. After some deep rabbit-hole dives, a picture started to come into view. Civilizations I had heard about---the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Sumerians, the Egyptians, Babylonia---started to form in historical context. 

This was centuries before the Greeks, even more centuries before the Romans.

And nobody knew what happened.

Well, not definitively, anyway. Great civilizations grew, complex societies we would recognize today as fairly modern with art, leisure, literature, sewage, agriculture, complex trade systems, agriculture and warfare developed. And, within a decade, great metropolises were destroyed and permanently abandoned, left in ruins. Out of these near-east nation-states, only the Egyptians moved past the collapse, and even then it was a shell of its former glory.

If you melt copper and add arsenic, you can make a type of metal that's harder than copper, namely bronze. But working with arsenic is dangerous, and once it was discovered that using tin instead of arsenic made the bronze harder and safer to work with, a world changing metal could be produced in massive amounts.

Bronze was used for jewelry, weapons, and other more banal household items. Having it in abundance (like the Hittites did) meant you could trade it for grains and another precious metal, gold, that other kingdoms had (like the Egyptians). After a few generations a complex web of trade stretched around the eastern Mediterranean.

During this time both writing and mathematics developed out of the ways in which large civilizations needed to supply their populations with food. The cities involved were massive, some nearing a hundred thousand people deep. (Enter the MHs Calendar from earlier this month.)

The recorded history from the time of the collapse mentions, repeatedly in different sources from different places, marauding "sea-people" arriving and wreaking havoc, among other naturally occurring catastrophes. The identity of the sea-people is hotly debated, but with enough research and a well developed smell-test skill, an advanced view of the realities start to form.

Besides writing and math developing, the use of the wheel had become rather advanced, and with it the chariot as a weapon of war. Chariots are pretty badass, but they are complicated to use effectively. It takes years to train to be proficient. All you need now is a collective system where enslaved people do the agricultural and industrial labor (check), a series of climate-induced droughts, and the system is ready to crumble.

So...droughts lead to starvation and unrest, the hyper-trained soldier class that is no longer being paid---or fed---start to attack, causing more unrest and internal strife, which causes trade to dissolve, and the positive feedback loop can't stop. 

Survivors flee coastal metropolises for inland mountains more easily fortified, and literacy is lost. For centuries.

A dark age begins.

The letters from the collapsing times are tragic: kings send off pleas for help; responses are found in broken tablets, never to reach their final destination: "We can't help you, we also have no food and are, too, being savaged by the sea-people."

This concept---civilizations growing larger than they can manage crumbling under their sheer complexities due to a confluence of factors---is known as Systems Collapse. The systems that keep a community of civilizations going---agriculture, trade, and warfare---fail to be able to maintain their integrity, and the whole web fails.

In the aftermath, literacy plummets, as does life expectancy and art. Most recently it occurred after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which plunged Europe and the west into the so-called Dark Ages for nearly a thousand years, up until the Renaissance.

This got me thinking about right now, in the early 20th century (55th century MHs): We fully rely on one invisible thing for our continued existence---electricity---while a separate invisible thing---the novel coronavirus---has ground our world to a halt.

I guess not a halt exactly, since some places are beginning to reopen, but any return to "normalcy" is a fantasy, in the short term or, frankly, the long term. Whatever that "normalcy" was left us so vulnerable to being decimated by pandemic that why would we ever long for it? Nostalgia? I'd hoped that kind of thinking had been done in by the events of September 11th.

Early on during the pandemic I remember seeing a joking comment about our national response saying we were "failing our beginner's apocalypse."

This is funny because it's true. We're not really vulnerable in this moment, I'd posit, to a Systems Collapse event or series of events. I could be wrong, and the events surrounding the upcoming election in November could have some influence on that. But I'd guess that our Systems would mostly stay intact.

But what of those systems and their structures? This "beginner's apocalypse" has shown how threadbare our society is. The vast majority of working families were headed towards destitution after two missed paychecks. For a great many of those families, the federal relief package of $600 a week was more than they made before they were sent home to sit and hide and try and beat our invisible foe.

The healthcare system isn't prepared for a tsunami of cases (luckily many hospitals are able to function with only overworking their staffs, and not bursting at the seams); preventative care evaporated well before the virus hit, making the impact worse, and especially for people of color. States have been sent to fight amongst themselves for testing equipment.

An educational infrastructure that has been repeatedly defunded for generations has produced a populace that regularly questions the authority of medical experts and could be responsible for the continuing inability to contain this threat.

Armed white people storm state capitols demanding an end to safer-at-home protocols---and seem to have the support of the highest executive administration in the country. No harm befalls them.

Peaceful protesters around the nation amass to demonstrate after the murder--on camera--of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd (SAY HIS NAME). They---we---demonstrate for a reckoning with systemic racism. It does NOT seem like we have the support of the highest executive administration in the country. Hundreds are beaten and gassed.

The last two points are just here to illustrate how frayed our national identity gets when told go hide for a few months to beat an invisible foe.

The pandemic has shown how "essential" workers are the ones making the least money.

I'm not making the case that we're a failed state, because it has been made before recently, and been made well. 

I think the burden of proof is on the position that we aren't a failed state: that case is hard to make. ESPECIALLY WHEN THE INCUMBENT PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE OPENLY TALKS ABOUT HIS PLAN TO CRIPPLE THE EASIEST MEANS OF VOTING DURING A PANDEMIC.

Our country may be teetering WAY closer to an edge than we're really willing to admit, but that's not what Systems Collapse is about. We are a cog in a larger machine. Sure, if we were to fall into some kind of even-worse hellscape, the larger machine would be rather damaged, and in a sort of trouble, but even then, I don't think Systems Collapse is in the cards.

But...

Three threads in my head come into focus.

Thread One: I watched a show on an astronomer who aimed his big telescope at the sun and was actively sketching sunspots on paper that collected the light from the sun, for he knew it was too bright to stare at using his eyes. As he sketched, a bright flash popped a few times on his paper. Weird, he thought. Eighteen hours later every telegraph box around exploded, having been overrun by a solar burst.

That it was a mass telegraph box explosion betrays the era in which this astronomer worked. What if this unpredictable event happened tomorrow? How would our global society deal with explosions at power stations around the globe? Is it conceivable that this could act as a nudge towards Systems Collapse? 

Thread Two: It's been quite a few years that I've been of the belief that we're witnessing an Extinction Event. Especially after watching a great many dinosaur shows with my Boy, the view that Extinction Events quite often take a few million years to occur is prevalent. Maybe a few thousand years, what with the volcanic formation of the Deccan Plateau in India caused conditions that were mortally exasperated by the great asteroid crashing through at Chicxulub and ending the Permian (and the dinosaurs). The asteroid hit is romantic to an extant, but it happened in concert with other, natural phenomena.

When you hear how many animals are careening towards extinction, coupled with how many have already succumbed in the course of a few human lifetimes, it's hard to ignore that this is probably what an Extinction Event looks like to observers of the event. Which leads to...

Thread Three: While I've been of the opinion that we're witnessing an Extinction Event, I've also held the position that climate change is too far gone to positively (for humans) alter. A complete and radical change to our approach to life is what it will take to make the changes to slow the dumping of carbon into the atmosphere, and while it's my personal cynicism that believes the attempt is ultimately fruitless, it's certainly morally correct to do it.

And this is what people don't understand, or don't want to believe. If we get 4.5 degrees Celsius increase by 2100 (5582 MHs), as some conservative estimates put it, Systems Collapse is not only a possibility, it's a cute euphemism for "not quite headed towards extinction, but mostly fucked," which will be the reality. Is it "shred of humanity fighting for a piece of Patagonia or New Zealand" bad? Maybe.

The drastic estimates of 6 or 7 degree Celsius by that year would prove so catastrophic that discussing them is seen as alarmist. Like the Great Dying at the end of Cambrian Era bad. 

If all goes right, my kids could be alive in 2100.

This is why NOW it's important to try and learn from the past, to study it and try and make sense of it. To face it instead of still bickering about hoaxes and bad science.

Are we a solar flare storm away from Mad Max?

Are we another virus away from total breakdown?

Is the Old Normal even something we'd like to entertain?

No. Especially if it makes us complacent to real disasters that we could actually have some power over.

And, what exactly do we have power over?

Messed Up My Own List

 Wasn't thinking straight...

1. Thor: Ragnarok
2. Black Panther
3. Doctor Strange
4. Ant-Man and the Wasp
5. Captain Marvel

Doc Strange is the most psychedelic film ever made, and the first time Tilda Swinton sends the d-bag version of Strange through the multiverse is the most psychedelic sequence ever put to digital celluose.

Paul Rudd is just a special personality to try and squeeze into a super hero movie.

For #5, Captain Marvel , I chose maybe an unorthodox selection. I just like that the character is like Superman---nearly as powerful, but a chick, and angry. I find it cathartic.

The first two should need no explanation. (I haven't seen the newest Spider Man entrants.)(BUT, Sony's Into the Spiderverse" would rank very high on this list.)

When Rooting for the Badguys Was Fun

We can all see the ramifications when people don't take badguys seriously enough.

And I'm not here to talk about anti-heroes like Travis Bickle, Stringer Bell, or Tony Soprano.

Upon a viewing of Marvel's "Black Panther" film, I realized that for the first time in a while, the badguy, Michael B. Jordan's (AKA Wallace from the Pit) Killmonger not only had the morally righteous position, but also convinced the hero, Chadwick Boseman's King T'Challa, of the position. (Let's move past the fact that the love interest had been saying the same thing for the entire movie...that seems a fitting statement on gender relations.)

I always felt that Killmonger had been right: that Wakanda had been doing a disservice to the rest of the world by its isolationism. Maybe I agreed with his position that Wakanda should have been arming militant minorities in urban areas, but that's the demarcation between "winning the moral argument" and "going too far" in today's society. 

Well, in a pre-pandemic, pre-George Floyd society. 

And then I remember a long conversation I had with an old friend about the X-Men. I was, and still am, firmly on Team Magneto. The attempted genocide and all I was unaware of when I professed myself Team Magneto, but the point remains: Magneto's position that mutants will not be able to coexist with normals without some kind of conflict is the position that history would bare.

Charles Xavier's stance that peaceful coexistence between the two species, Homo sapiens and Homo superior, seems like it would be possible in a world that is an idealized version of our own, and NOT the one we actually live in.

To paraphrase Tupac's mom, Assata Shakur, an actual Black Panther: oppressed people do not gain rights by appealing to the good nature of their oppressors. Conflict in that system is bot necessary and inevitable.

I always felt that given the circumstances---if I had been a young mutant---I would have gravitated towards Magneto.

So...Team Magneto, Team Killmonger...

THEN I realized that both "Black Panther" and the first "X-Men" movie started with essentially scenes of their antagonist origins, their badguy origins. Black Panther opens with Killmonger's dad getting killed by his brother the King, in Oakland in the '90s (with Too $hort playing in the background). X-Men opens with child Erik Lensherr in Auschwitz, learning about his magnetic powers.

**

Talking about the Marvel movies for a second: It turns out that Captain America may be my favorite of the heroes. Corrie joked that both she and my brother Dan are Captain America, because of his moral rigidity, and that may be why I'm drawn to him.

Also, just to connect the topics: having just seen Age of Ultron for the first time and being introduced to the Twins: Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, I was proud of myself for knowing that they were from X-Men comics before Avengers comics (back when nobody gave a shit about the Avengers).

But I was shocked to learn that Magneto is their father.

Crossover maybe?

Also, just because, the Top Five Marvel Superhero Movies:

1. Thor: Ragnarok
2. Black Panther
3. Ant-Man and the Wasp
4. Iron Man
5. Avengers: Infinity War

Happy New Year! Happy 5502 MHs

A newly developed dating system helps put to put historical events into better context to each other. It's the first, as far as I can tell, fully unified year numbering system, and dates back to when the Sumerians, already nearly a thousand years old by the time, modified their bookkeeping system into a functioning language, the first such instance of human civilization doing so.

It was also at this time that arithmetic was developed. Both writing and math developed as a means to help keep track of the resources needed to keep cities of 80k+ alive and thriving.

Using this as the proverbial year 1 puts us in the year 5502 right now. Today actually marks 1/1/5502. This may help with calculating your birthday, as 8/1/2020 is a starting point, if you were born in a month before August, your birth year will be calculated differently than if after.

So, when math meets writing, and they're both being developed at the same time, it seems like a reasonable time to start the clock ticking on "recorded" history. The natural metaphor for math/writing would be a calendar, and being set that far back puts everything into a specific perspective.

This is where the name comes from: MHs stands for "Modern Homo sapiens."

Not modern as in anatomically modern, but modern as in "we're now recording abstract thought in two separate ways---through a writing system and through math."

Look at these interesting years in MHs notation:

• Year 1: Writing and math developed and harnessed
• Year 1382: the Epic of Gilgamesh is written in Akkadian
• 2302: the Bronze Age Collapse
• 2729: Founding of Rome
• 2919: Siddhartha born
• 3261: Unification of the Warring States in China; founding of Qin Dynasty
• 3438: Caesar assassinated
• 4643: Genghis Khan born
• 4697: Magna Karta signed
• 4935: Fall of Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire
• 5257: 4th of July, "1776"
• 5450: Humans land on Moon for first time
• 5490: Obama elected president

Is it me, or does it seem astounding how much we've been able to accomplish is what amounts to a geologic blip, 5500 years?

Birds and Water Pistols

Rounding out the last of the posts about the Cabin, I have a quick thing about birds. Well, members of the genus Cyanocitta.

As a kid we used to set peanuts up on the railing of the deck to lure the blue jays down. Once they got to a peanut, we, as children, would blast them with water pistols. As entertaining as this was for us, the jays never seemed to phased, as if this was just part of getting such easy free food.

They were/are smart and tough, vocal and generally unafraid of many things.

But they don't look like the blue jays from the baseball team's logo:

There's no white and the crest doesn't eff around.

Also, the book that has local flora and fauna kept referring to them as Steller Jays.

That's what I found on doing some research after returning home.

This is a blue jay:

And what we have at the Cabin are Steller jays. They're very closely related, as the only two species in the genus Cyanocitta. Cyanocitta is in the Corvid family of passerines, some of the smartest and most adaptable birds on Earth. Crows and ravens are likely the best known Corvids. Jays, crows, and magpies are the major subgroups of the family.

Here's a map of the range of the two Cyanocitta, with the Steller jay on the western half:

Then I thought, Aren't bluebirds a thing?

And they are:

That's a western bluebird, the one that lives in California. These are also passerines, just nor corvids, rather, they are thrushes (if that means anything to you).

Back to the beginning of the conversation/post: how cruel is it to blast black jays with water pistols after luring them out into the opening?

In general, and not that this is a justification but, birds are gangster AF.

So I feel a little less bad about it all.

RIP John Lewis, American Hero

Celebrate him. Put him on currency.

Remember him.

I missed my opportunity to have Cass meet him, but that was before I knew his hero status, which is a failure of AP US History class. Or curriculum.

Anyway: American Hero John Lewis as moved on.

Peace be with him.

Life Cycle of a Visitor

I've mentioned the photo corkboard in the past that lives on one of the Cabin's walls. This time, we set my mom up on the steps where my Nana, her grandmother, posed for a picture, and we put Camille in her arms. We took a Polaroid of the two of them and then put it up on the board, close to the picture of Nana.

My mom next to her grandmother, while holding her own granddaughter. This is kind of the point of this post.

My mom traveled to the Cabin as a kid, her first visit at age 8 or 9. 

Then she brought her kids, my brother and I, to the Cabin. We got to hang out alone (as a family) and then with her mom, our grandmother (who herself brought her own kids to the Cabin).

Now I bring my kids to the Cabin, to visit their grandmother, my mom.

My mom went from the kid, to the parent, to the grandparent.

I'm on Part Two of that cycle.

Corrie's family Farm, in northern Texas, has been in the family longer, but rarely is there a spot where the family can pose generation after generation to take pictures and compare over the decades.

More of my privilege showing...

Advanced Darkness

For discerning fans of Spongebob, the term Advanced Darkness resonates. Originating in the "Rock Bottom" episode, the line has wormed its way into regular conversation around these parts, and when referring to night at the Cabin, it really resonates.

Living in a city right now, with streetlights and shops surrounding our apartment building, REAL darkness is rare.

Never are light beams in short supply; never are the meager-est quanta of photons fully needed to get by.

Have you ever been in darkness so advanced that the only way to know if your eyes are open is your own body sense, since both open and shut look exactly the same?

It's something we take for granted, that there's a difference between having your eyes open or shut. City boy Cassius was, at some point one night, wailing away. I got upstairs as noticed that the desk-lamp we set up before we found all the nightlights seemed to be blasting him. He was fully turned around in bed and trying to bury his face where his feet should have been.

"Let me turn that light off," I said, and, despite his positioning, he sounded reluctant. Once I clicked it off, my own eyes hadn't adjusted and in the first seconds it was off, it was a definitely a can't-tell-open-or-shut-eyes situation.

For me and for Cass, as I learned because he let out a terrified bellow about turning the light back on. I realized then that that was probably the darkest he's ever viscerally experienced.

We retired the lamp once we found the nightlights, and one evening I helped him to the bathroom. Afterwards, once I noticed that it was a few minutes after four, I carried him outside to peep the stars.

HOLY COW! Mars never looked as red as that night. It would have been a spectacular night for a time-lapse pic that Corrie and I had been practicing. That kind of night never again materialized for us, but in the future we're planning on taking advantage of the fact that the Park is open 24 hours during the summer months.

Our Little Patch of Sky

The night sky is so spectacular in the area of Mill Creek, that my dad used to try and plan our trips during the new moon, so the sky was as awesome as possible. We used to head to the meadow at night and check out the stars.

Now the brook is gone and the meadow has reverted to wetlands, and while the certified Dark Sky zone is still on hit, the view from the deck is obstructed by trees. It's still pretty cool, but it is our Little Patch of Sky, and it's in this patch that I spotted the appearance of a new constellation that I have named.

I stared to take pictures of Our Little Patch of Sky at different times of day specifically for a purpose like this post.

Here we go:

8:34 am

1:18 pm

4:49 pm

6:11 pm

7:50 pm

9:06 pm

The first celestial object that makes up the constellation I discovered/interpreted anew is visible in the picture above, in the lower left section of the X. It was the first object we could see, and I'm pretty sure it's Venus. I'll post a mock up of the constellation when I can figure out how to print out a blank star-chart and draw it in.

I call it Vaggitarius.

By 10:30 pm the sky is nice, and by 3:30 am, Mars is a red light amongst a cityscape of lights.