And If They Like The Weather So Much, They Can Go To Hell

 

Dateline: Friday, June 25

I've complained about heat before. It's what I do. The only reason people think of me as even-tempered is that it's not usually that hot. That's been changing fast. Scientists are reluctant to pin any one weather event on global warming because they're trained to be careful in their conclusions, but we all know the truth. We're looking at an existential bollixing. And we are both the bollixers and the bollixees.

Today I am filling bird baths and looking out at my bird friends Studley and DooDah and Dickens and Peanut Dave the scrub jay with anticipatory dread on their behalf, and envy that they are, for the moment, oblivious. There's a forecast out for this weekend for a heat wave so unprecedented that the actual precedents are cowering under the porch and peeing themselves. This never was funny, and it's not now.

This Monday, in gentle Portland, Oregon, a modest and temperate jewel of a city on a major river within sight of actual glaciers, it is currently predicted to reach 118 degrees. And it will dip all the way down to 82 at night. Up till now you could count our nighttime temperatures above 70--for all time--on one hand. So unless the nearest glacier slides right off the mountain and into our bedroom, we're screwed.

As regular readers know, I do not have, or believe in, air conditioning, and intend to survive using my prehistoric caveman skills, refined in the sodden swamps of northern Virginia. I do not intend to fire up a box that sucks up more coal power. That's how we got here.

But I'm beside myself, which is really bad, because both of me are too warm.

It's only in the nineties today, but I peek out of my closed curtains and think about asteroids. Isn't it a blessing that no one saw that monster of extinction coming, 66 million years ago? Just chomp chomp chomp like any other day, and then suddenly a blinding light and powdered dinosaurs everywhere.

But here and now, we know it's coming, we know we caused it, we know what to do about it, and we spend our days talking about trannies in the bathroom and the freedom to infect each other. We've known for over a hundred years. We were warned urgently forty years ago. Al Gore pleaded with us twenty years ago and the Libertarian/Republican conspiracy of doom responded by instructing Americans to mock him. They were not about to let anyone interfere with the lucrative rape of the planet.

Every one of them should have to answer, really answer, one simple question: What's your plan, Skippy? They do not have a plan. For anything. Anything except keeping power and money. They are criminals in the first degree and should be treated as such. Mitch McConnell and every one of the sons-of-mitches, the whole soulless lot of them, should be removed from society before they do any more harm, and punished appropriately. I'd suggest they be roasted at the stake, if there was some way to make that take a few years.

United We Can't Stand

We're living in contentious times. Concerted efforts have been made to divide us in any way possible, for all sorts of purposes. Libertarian billionaires have funded Astroturf movements like the Tea Party to keep us squabbling with each other instead of banding together with pitchforks. Russian oligarchs have flooded us with disinformation to discourage voters or split votes in order to build their own power. Newscasters fan the flames because there's money in it for them. And, of course, sometimes a single man might wedge us apart simply because he likes to call people doody-pantses and get crowds roaring, because it gives him a little woodie again. Ah, nostalgia! There's all kinds of reasons to make us One Nation, Divisible.

So we must look for ways to bridge the gaps between us, and celebrate those areas where we still have common ground.

For instance, nobody much likes vegans.

We just don't. We don't really mind a lot of the other diets. They're so easy to make fun of. They eat only grapefruit. Or algae pellets. Or bacon. There's always a justification.  This diet aligns with the stomach contents of a perfectly sound frozen person who died of old age 10,000 years ago. That diet makes your urine crystals line up with the magnetic field. The other diet stimulates your metabolism in the morning, your chakras at noon, and your balls at night.

We think vegetarians are silly but sort of cute. But vegans? Man. They're just too extreme. They think they're better than we are. And if there's anything we can't stand, it's other people thinking they're better than we are, even if they are. Some people hate it so much, they even throw in with Donald Trump, who is a pus-filled waste of carbon.

Vegans choose their food and clothing and other things on principle. And principles are annoying as hell, in other people. Principles don't just sit on the sidelines. They accuse. We want to mock vegans. We want to poke them with a fork and speculate on how well-marbled they are.

Vegans will not partake of animals or animal products or consider animals a commodity in any way. Some vegans particularly revile factory-farming because of its unspeakable cruelty. Others emphasize the dire consequences to the planet of the whole system of animal agriculture. In the face of these strong, unassailable points, it is incumbent upon the rest of us to catch vegans stepping on bugs and accuse them of rank hypocrisy.

Because they're clearly out of control. For instance, good vegans avoid standard vaccines because chicken eggs are used to incubate their viruses. Lots and lots and lots of chicken eggs. There are ways to make vaccines that use cells from insects instead, which, technically, are animals. This is what the wise vegan would opt for, as opposed to forgoing vaccines, because it is not a perfect world and an insect is assumed to be a few notches less suffery than a chicken.

Not photo-edited. Dave didn't hold the camera steady.

You can make fun of this view if you want, but I won't join you. The vast majority of vegans are people who do not shy away from ethical dilemmas and who educate themselves about the fallout of their actions and conduct themselves accordingly. This is the mark of a grownup. Mocking vegans as scolds who don't want anybody to have any fun is totally toddler territory. That said, I had a flu shot, and so I believe a chicken has contributed to my well-being this year, and is liable to contribute to my plate this week.

I eat less meat all the time. You could call me a Flexitarian. Or just plain chicken. But I'm a work in progress.

I did hear that Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump aide and conservative bile factory, thundered "They want to take away your hamburgers! This is what Stalin dreamed about but never achieved!" Well, I swan. Ol' Sebass, there, might finally make a vegan out of me. Here's a tip. As soon as you hear people yelling about taking away your hamburgers, or your pickup trucks, or your guns, or your light bulbs, or your toilet, know this: that person really wants to take away your health care, your pension, your wages, and your Social Security. Screw them and pass the yams.

Januwary

So, January is in the books. We had 62 days of rain last month, 14 of them banked earlier and another 17 on credit, and people were starting to squeak about it. Not me. Seems to me this is right in line with a proper January. But we have a whole lot of new people moving into this town and a bunch of them must have thought they could drag some of their old weather in with them. They feel grumpy and misled. I'm not sure why. We do have a reputation for greenery. Even some of us are a little green--the sedentary types only on the north side. We who have been here a long time feel a little smug about it all. Like the newcomers don't have a right to complain.

Which doesn't mean the old-timers don't complain. It's just that our complaints have more legitimacy, coming on the heels of decades of legacy whining. Just you wait, the old-timers say. Get another thirty or forty soggy years under your belts and then you can start bitching. We're the old farts with a mortgage and medical bills asking the sniveling children what they think they have to complain about.

Yesterday I got caught on the sidewalk behind two people walking side by side with umbrellas. It was weird. Umbrellas are wide and pointy and a threat to the social compact. And the mark of the newcomer. There's no point in it. The anticipation of being drenched just gets all drawn-out. Jump in the lake and get it over with. Slap on some rain gear and get on with your life. If you have an umbrella and one other item, you've got nothing left to hold your beer with.

Thing about the newcomers, though, they might be right about having drug some of their old weather with them. It's not dry, but holy moly it's warm. Seems like every day in January was solidly in the fifties instead of twenty or thirty degrees lower where it belonged. And that simply can't be right. Nobody needs an abundance of degrees all the time. It's wasteful. You need a little chill to set up properly. That's what winter's for.

You need it to put snap in your soul. You need it to kill off the nasty bugs of your disposition, the lazy, entitled notion that the world is here to serve you. You need it to kill off the earworm larvae that will pester you in the summertime. (When the weather's fine, when you got women you got women on your mind. Chh chh-chh uh.)

There are people in this world whose chief goal is to live in a hammock and feel comfortable in their underwear all year long. Is there anything wrong with that? With shunning adversity? Or with spending half the year pining for the other half?

I think there is. I don't trust it. And I couldn't give you a single reason why, except that it comes from somewhere bone-deep, ancestral, a message from my fore-Vikings. I need to chew on butter. I need to tuck my fat yellow braids in my belt as I brace against the wind and look around for someone to cleave asunder with my broad-axe. I am not murderous, but I am ready.

And we need to be ready. There is adversity. Knock the frost off your pitchforks, people: those toasty fucks in Mar-A-Lago won't even see us coming.

New Dawn Coming

This is how it was.

It started just before dawn with a peep here and a warble there and before you knew it, a fabric of bird song was unfurling, birds in the hundreds, saluting the new day, claiming their ground, making a joyful noise. If you were familiar and so inclined, you could tease out the individual threads, or you could just allow the whole brocade to weave itself and wrap around you.

There are places that still host such a wonder, and maybe it's every bit as splendid as it once was, but who's to say? Who remembers? I heard it in West Virginia, a wealth of warblers in their spring migration, returning to the same trees and the same woods in the same mountains they were born. It's an extravagance of life, except where the mountains were decapitated for coal and their dismembered bodies dumped in the streams.

But most of us do not wake to the dawn chorus anymore. Maybe we snarl awake to one crow we find annoying. Most likely there are three or four birds in our yard and we can't tell one from the other, or aren't moved to. Three or four ignorable birds seem like the normal amount. We were born yesterday. We have no idea what is missing, so we don't miss it.

That's what happens. Whatever condition you find yourself in, you get used to it quickly. One day you're utterly amazed that you can take a stack of books on vacation on a device the size of a playing card. The next day you find yourself picking up an old paper book and spreading your fingers on the page to enlarge the font.

So it turns out to be really easy to persuade people that global warming isn't a big deal, or that we have nothing to do with it, or even that it isn't really happening. Doesn't matter that it was predicted over a hundred years ago, or that everything scientists have warned us about is already happening, or that the only thing they missed is the torrid pace of it. All it takes is a bunch of money; a disinformation campaign and propaganda outlets created and funded to spread it; and an underlying resentment to exploit, a suspicion that over-educated scientists are scolds who think they're better than we are. And that bumbling fop Al Gore, annoying as a morning crow, is just in it for the money.

Because it's simply not possible. There's no way humans could have an effect on something as huge as the climate. That's ridiculous. The climate changes. It always has. It can't be us.

But it's not only true, it's obvious, if you take just a step back and pack a few facts in your pocket. The composition of the atmosphere has changed a number of times for a number of reasons. Ultimately it comes down to where the carbon is. At one time plants grew so large that they pulled carbon from the air and loaded it up with oxygen. Firestorms released the carbon again. Plants were submerged in warm, rising waters and the carbon was buried in the ground in the form of oil and coal. Quarantined. For 300 million years. If we come along and pull sixty million years'-worth of safely buried carbon and burn it up again in a matter of a hundred years or so, it's back in the air. Fast.

So what people who scoff fail to appreciate is what a special time we are living in. Being able to keep large uninsulated houses the same temperature all year is nice, but it's not normal. Being able to motor a hundred miles for a day trip is nice, but it's not normal. We're on a heck of a ride, but it's costing us. It's more than we can afford.

Our weather isn't normal either. Almost everyone can see that now. Greenland is melting. The Arctic is on fire. More and more, people are coming around to the idea that we really have started something we need to fix. Some day. And now that the writing is on the wall, and we're told we have maybe a decade to kick our fossil fuel addiction--to leave it in the ground--it's more important than ever that we learn why. Facts we got. It's wisdom we need.

Because it's going to be damned hard. And, as always, it's going to be even harder on the poor. Our task is nearly impossible, but the alternative is not survivable. We all need to understand how urgent our situation is, or we will be conned once again by the first rapacious gasbag who tells us that the liberal elites want us to pay a buck more for gasoline. Or take away our "freedom" to use plastic straws. Or foist "socialism" on us, whatever vague horror we imagine that to be.

We're in a stupid amount of trouble.

These liars are not on our side. They're not even on their own side. We are sunk if we believe life began with us, that our unfathomable, unprecedented power is our birthright, if we believe our diminished world, our endless striving for material accumulation, and our dissatisfaction with it--that all of that is normal. What birds? We never had birds here.

Save The Billionaires!

Hey friend. Again with the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez meme? That's getting to be a habit with you. I know I asked once, and you said you just don't like her. I'd rather have more to go on than that, but okay, fine, you don't like her. I think maybe the only things you think you know about her are on these little propaganda hit pieces you keep posting, brought to you by the same folks who said Obama is a foreign-born Muslim terrorist. I don't know if you bought that too, but if you did, I'd say you're ripe for the picking.

This meme at least has a bit of substance to it, and isn't just trying to make AOC out to be a daffy uneducated bimbo. She's about as far from that as you can get, but evidently all you have to do is mock someone like that and people will gleefully spread it far and wide as though it were true. Just like you did! But this one cites a complaint about her involvement with a political action committee. The Federal Election Commission is looking into it, and I'd wait to see what they find out, myself--but hey, you go ahead on, and post the meme.

It's rich though. Really rich. The PAC she's involved with deliberately courts small donors. It's harder to come up with the millions it apparently takes to run a campaign when you're doing it that way, instead of tapping the billionaires, but it's the principle of the thing, and a fine principle it is for a working democracy, in my opinion. And the people ultimately responsible for ginning up the propaganda you lap up aren't bothering with the small donors.

They're probably starting with DonorsTrust,  through which they can make unlimited philanthropical (wink-wink) donations anonymously. And those untraceable billions, a.k.a. Dark Money, go to little grassroots (wink-wink) organizations like Americans For Job Security and All Votes Matter and Right To Work and other blatantly political outfits, many of which the original donors designed themselves. It's by far the biggest slush fund the world has ever seen, and look what it has accomplished! The defeat of universal health care in favor of the for-profit insurance industry, the rollback of taxes on the super-wealthy, and--most impressive of all--they were able to turn the tide on any effort to curb global warming, by paying off a few scientists, submitting a new script to their propaganda arms, planting irate citizen-actors in town halls, conducting focus groups to learn what particular line of bullshit would appeal to Mr. and Mrs. America, and good old-fashioned threats to pull funding from legislators--that sort of thing. Thus they were able to secure enormous private fortunes for another twenty years or so while threatening the future of every man, woman, child, fetus, and wombat on the planet. Bless their stony hearts, they may well have killed us all.

So. This is the group infiltrating your social media feed. This is the group working so hard to bring down this young freshman Ocasio-Cortez. And it's easy to see why the billionaire boys' club doesn't like her. They hate everything she stands for: Democratic Socialism, through which they might be relieved of the grossest excesses of their wealth in order to make life substantially better and more secure for people like you and me. And support for unions and a livable wage, both of which cut into their profits but which produce the actual job-providers. (You didn't buy that bit about the billionaires being the job providers, did you? Oh honey. It's normal people with enough security to live modestly with dignity, and pay each other to paint their houses or their nails. We keep each other afloat. And unions used to make sure we could, even those of us who weren't in one.) And, most urgent of all, she stands for getting us the hell off of fossil fuels and into the economy of the future before we have no future at all. Fast. Too fast, too extreme? As someone recently said, we're not in charge of the deadline: physics is. Ocasio-Cortez knows how imperative this work is, and how disruptive, and is working to make sure the poor and the shrunken middle class don't bear the brunt of it. She is not extreme. She is absolutely right.

So that's who's behind all this nastiness and mockery you like to spread around. I know exactly why the billionaires want to destroy this young woman. What I don't get is why you want to carry their water.

The State Of Our Union Is Wrong

Like everybody else, except Native Americans who might otherwise like to vote, the State of the Union has an address. Which means you can get a pretty good fix on it. With a good enough address, you can find out if the fellow in charge is able to correctly identify actual problems and then not really do anything about them; or, conversely, he has no idea what's at stake, attacks fictitious problems, and doesn't really do anything about those either. The first gives you that tiny pop in your sails for a few minutes, and the second makes you want to go straight to bed with Cheez-its, a bottle of hooch, and a catheter.

This one was a doozy. Both teams were in uniform: white on the side of Faint Hope, blue suits and red ties on the side of the Co-Conspirators. The co-conspirators got the most exercise. If you were able to thread them properly and hook them up to a machine, you could have stitched a nice long seam. Up, down. Up, down. Up, down. With the white team, you'd end up with the same basket of unfinished mending you started with. That's what makes them relatable.

All those ovations took a toll on the co-conspirators, though. Next year they're hoping to power their pants with coal, if they can't farm out the standing applause to ragged children in Bangladesh for a nickel.

Ovations there must be, however, in order to keep the Dear Leader from sagging like an inflatable tube-man at a used car lot. He was thus encouraged to tout all his accomplishments, most of them, amazingly enough, having been achieved like never before. This is the kind of thing you say if your history book starts the moment you get your breakfast cheeseburger and concludes with The Sean Hannity Show. Highlights included the smooth segue from defending sacred fetal life to having the biggest, baddest-ass military ever, like the world has never, ever seen.

It was a little disappointing, though, from a reality standpoint. Our commander-in-chief, as well as the rest of us, is standing under a monster Death Star and his plan is to shade his eyes, send the Death Star supplementary fuel and supplies, and send in the Marines to deal with a little hatch of imaginary terrorist mice on the southern border. It does make one wonder if he and the co-conspirator team even know where the true threat lies, but not to worry--it turns out they do.

It's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Ordinarily someone this fresh to Congress would not be the subject of so many mocking memes and hysterical right-wing attacks, so you have to give the suckers credit for knowing who's about to eat their lunch. Even just since the State of the Union address, where she sat resplendent in white with all her congress-sisters, she has been attacked for being too wide-eyed and wild AND being too sullen. She needs to find that middle ground.

Specifically, the middle ground wherein she pushes inconsequential legislation, protects the interests of billionaires, comes out strong against childhood diseases and the plague, and paves in a few wetlands on weekends.

While being blonde.

Xeric-Sum Game

You can tell the fellow gardeners. They don't admire the garden generally. They're specific.

Hi! You've got some great structure going on here.

Thanks! You should've seen it in May. Leaves and everything.

What's that thing over there?

There? You mean the dead stuff?

No. The deadish stuff.

The tall deadish stuff just behind the dead stuff?

No, I mean the scrubby deadish stuff just between the tall deadish stuff and the stuff that isn't dead yet.

Oh yeah! That stuff's great. I mean, the nearly dead stuff is a real champ too. I think it might still have a taproot that's hit a pocket of gardener's tears and it's really hanging on.

You know, I had something a little like it, but I watered it in April, and again in late June, and damned if it wasn't squawking for more as soon as August rolled around. Total princess. I don't need that kind of pressure.

Right? I really like the ones like the Bleeding Hearts that bloom in the spring and then die back completely. You can go all the way to the next spring thinking they're still alive. Hey, do you know about this one? It's my new crush. It looks dead right out of the nursery! A real time-saver.

I got one last year! They're cool. Just going to let you know, though, that when it really does die, there's nothing more pathetic-looking on the planet.

Oh rats. I had high hopes.

That's a nice big healthy green thing over there. Pokeweed?

Yup. I'm going to have to hit it with Roundup, I think.

The little maples are nice.

Thanks! They don't need much water at all. In fact the more you water them, the faster the verticillium wilt spreads. I've lost about a third of the limbs on this one and I'm pretty sure the coral-bark is next. It's seeding like crazy. They tend to do that when they know their number is up.

Yeah. Good for the birds, though. You should see them on my dead cascara! I've never had so many woodpeckers.

Aw! I wish I had a big dead tree. None of my dead trees ever got big enough to interest the woodpeckers. Oh, by the way, I totally recommend this little guy here. Sumbitch rises from the ashes every year like clockwork. I'm getting it to where it doesn't lose its leaves until early July, and then it goes out flaming. It'd be gorgeous against the blue salvias if I could get it to hold out that long.

You can't go wrong with the salvias. I'm all over them. My sister in California has one the size of a Volkswagen just blooming its fool head off. Dry, dry, dry! Sucker dies outright if you even sprinkle it. I'm not kidding. Shrivels up like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Ha. That's nothing. I had a hosta plumb blow up the other day. There was a puff of smoke and slug snarge rained down for hours.

That's nothing! I had one native snowberry next to a bed of verbenas and it up and murdered the whole family.

We lean on the wall for a few moments, absently crinkling leaves into powder.

"Don't forget to vote," we said in unison.

It's Time To Light A Fire

We just smashed the record for days above ninety in Portland, and we're not even through August. The historical average is eleven 90+ days each year, unless you're counting just since 2000, which would make it an average of 15,  or since 2014, which pops it up to 22 days, including the previous 2015 record of 29. Can you plot that trajectory, boys and girls? We are not happy. But there's good news. It might not get quite as hot as predicted today because the wildfire smoke is blocking some of the sunlight. Awesome!

Today the sky looks like sun-bleached construction paper, the shade no kid wants to use. Our smoke is mostly coming from Canada and Washington at the moment but it could turn and drift up from southern Oregon and California, where we're keeping our spare fires. California is basically cooked. But there's good news. A lot of the fuel that had built up over the years has been torched so the odds are good that a massive fire won't hit those particular spots again for a while. Awesome!

Wildfires, of course, are another anticipated result of the global warming that has been going on for, primarily, the last fifty years, caused by all the carbon we've porked into the atmosphere, and fire itself puts even more carbon in the air, as does the decaying vegetation left in fire's aftermath; not to mention that the loss of the forests themselves takes away a perfectly good carbon sink that might have helped mitigate the whole clustercaca, so that's a nasty greenhouse feedback loop for us right there. But there's good news. Fire isn't nearly as much of a carbon emissions source as our fossil fuel use. Awesome!

Yes, it's mostly our fossil fuel dependence that has transferred enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to slick the rails to apocalypse. Methane is an even worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but good news! We can totally blame that on termites. Termites and landfills and intensive livestock farming (like when you pack hamburger-on-the-hoof so tight as to rub it bald), and the production and transportation of other fossil fuels, but don't forget the termites, which are not only gassy but 100% natural. Also, a planetary bolus of methane is predicted to belch out of the Arctic any year now, because it's in the permafrost and the permafrost is getting less perma all the time, because of the global warming we created, but good news! We won't have personally put that methane in the air, or gotten any personal use out of it. That's just a collateral-damage kind of thing, like dead civilians in an otherwise profitable war.

Awesome.

Yes, it's true, people have kind of messed everything up, and even though many smart people have been aware of it for a long time and even know what to do about it, we haven't done a single thing, because that would threaten perfectly good money, but good news! The human population is due for a nice culling any time now, what with all the buried legacy viruses that are expected to resurface because of global warming, not to mention the widespread droughts and famine, and loss of water, and war over dwindling resources.

In the face of the clear imperative to move away from fossil fuels as fast as possible, the acting president proposed the exact opposite policy, in statements spiked with random gratuitous insults and racist dog-whistling, delivered in the style of the stupidest kid in second grade--all in all, the most impacted shitwad of sheer brainlessness the world has ever seen, but good news! This probably isn't the apex of imbecility after all!

Because there's always tomorrow.

Ready, Set, Hunker!

North Dakota, 1939

Populations affected by the recent polar vortex bomb cyclone have been advised to unhunker carefully, as scientists and other liberals are warning of worse to come. As noted elsewhere, the latest arctic blast was particularly widespread, with sleet grenades reported as far south as Texas, and experts caution the public to remain wary of exploding residual land mines loaded with frozen ass shards.

Another big blow is forecast, but nobody is expected to enjoy it. This year's Nor'easters are predicted to be more than usually violent and may degenerate into widespread rioting and looting. It is recommended that those who must venture outdoors obtain a Sou'wester fitted with a retractable awning and a portable laser weapon system. This may offer limited protection against the anticipated storm of frozen-off testicles, some up to three inches in diameter, which are anticipated to pile up in drifts up to two feet in unsheltered areas; after their initial deposition, these are not expected to be a hazard to the public until the first thaw.

In the West, expect atmospheric rivers to surpass flood stage, although insurance industry estimates of damage to structures, initially predicted to be high, should ease after mudslides of biblical proportions obliterate all evidence of previous habitation.

Elsewhere, expect generalized pestilence and intermittent outbursts of contagion as legacy zombie viruses newly released from melting permafrost begin to migrate down a low pressure trough. Poxy pockets with periods of pus are possible, and storm systems previously ferrying a cargo of locusts from sub-Saharan Africa are now likely to pick up massive mutated futuristic death crickets as well. Shingles is another possibility, although it will be restricted to just one hemisphere at a time.

Not all is lost: there is some hope that snow accumulations in Florida will raise the elevation sufficient to withstand rising sea levels, at least until next summer. Nothing, however, is expected to dislodge the persistent system of climate-change denial which invariably forms an obstinate gyre anywhere money meets greed.

Extreme drought in some areas has become so entrenched, however, that estimates of its duration are now being revised several months back in time, to achieve proper direness. Officials of the Pirates' Mutual Benefit Association recommend that the remaining molecules of water be captured in small plastic bottles and distributed to those in need at a 10,000% markup. This should supply continued funding to maintain misinformation sites well into the future, although even now the truth has  been unable to withstand the stubborn high pressure area parked over the Petroleum Institute.

Climate scientists peevishly remind us that recent extreme cold weather events do not mean the climate is not warming, but that climate warming should result in localized weather phenomena that will be ever crappier. If you had crappy weather before, you are now looking at a shit blizzard. Doots of doom are headed your way.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, where we have been accustomed to quite moderate weather conditions, we have been warned that the climate should become even more moderate, eventually reaching maximal averageness. In some localized areas such as Portland, a typical resident might be able to get by wearing the same stinky hoodie every day of the year, and don't think he won't.

Dispatches From The Crust

I recently mentioned that I have moments of doubt while writing. Not many, and not often, but more often than I used to. Some of the stuff I've learned hasn't stayed learnt.  I wrote a sentence the other day with about fourteen more clauses in it than anyone really needs, and by the time I got to the end of it I was just shoveling in pronouns with no confidence that they were the right ones. In those cases, I get a machete and whack at my sentence until I get control of it again. But it would be nice to be certain. It's humbling to feel at sea in my native language.

It's not just language, though. Thanks to the social media, I'm much more likely to weigh in on other issues. I'll stick my opinions out there like I'm planting flags on conquered territory--fervently, righteously. There are so many people who need correcting, and I'm just the one to do it. It's easy to let fly without lining up your shot first.

There are times I'm sure I'm right but can't say exactly why, and there are times I'm not sure I'm right at all. Humility can be a good thing. It's a big wide world out there, and I haven't learned everything about it yet, and unlike some people I won't name but didn't vote for, I know how complicated it actually is.

So I came across a thread about all the natural disasters that are happening all over the world, and someone said climate change was exacerbating the earthquakes, and as much as I like to sound the alarm about global warming, I don't like to attribute things to it promiscuously. There's enough misinformation out there already, and I didn't want to see someone set up a straw man that some Denier could knock down. Far be it from me to suggest we're not screwed, I typed, or words to that effect, but that's not how earthquakes work.

Because, you know, I'm all science-y like that.

Tectonic events are shaped by things that are beneath us, not to put on airs. Heat within the earth, friction and pressure, that sort of thing. This guy contending that we're getting earthquakes now because the crust is heating up? I suspected him of also having the inside skinny on The Rapture. So I just made my comment and flang it out there.

And there it dangled, nice and slow, so I could get a look at it. And doubt crept in. Was there something I hadn't read about? Some new discoveries? Did I go off half-cocked? And what does half-cocked mean, anyway? How much else don't I know?

Lots, as it turns out! Yes indeedy, score another one for humility--global warming is affecting earthquakes. It's not going to create one that isn't all cooked up and ready to go, but it can trigger them in a number of ways. A fault ready to slip can go off if the weight of the atmosphere eases up on it because of a good low-pressure typhoon. Rainfall can result in landslides massive enough to release strain on a fault. Ice sheets maintain a load on the crust, but when they melt, the crust levitates. The surface of Iceland is rising fast as glaciers disappear, and it's expected this release of tension will pull in more magma below. Et cetera, et cetera.

I lie in bed and think about it. Do I believe it? Our cat Tater weighs a thousand pounds when she lies on my feet. I'm trapped. There will be no rolling over until she gets up. And when she finally does, limbs are gonna fly.

I believe it.

When Juices Run Clear

Maybe you heard about our heat wave here in Portland. We were in for a good three days of temperatures in the mid-hundreds, followed by a cooling-off into the merely obnoxious nineties. The forecasters had this horror in their sights over a week ago and the local news was all over it, breathlessly spewing out strategies and warnings. The first and most important bit of advice was to begin panicking early so as to save time later. After that came earnest tips such as "try to stay cool" and "stay out of the heat" and "check on the elderly," many of whom were otherwise expected to sit and rotate quietly until they were evenly browned. In spite of this, no one has yet checked up on me, but one of the benefits of being elderly is that I grew up without air conditioning and I have skills.

The first day, it got up to 106, although on account of the breeze it only felt like 102, assuming you are in a quickie mart at the time, draped over the popsicle chest. Our house has so far remained in the eighties. We have our routines of opening up the place at night and exhausting the air with window fans, and shutting everything up and pulling the drapes in the morning. Tater, as a member in good standing of this household, has her routine too. First she goes to the hottest part of the house and sits in the sun, plugging herself in like a rechargeable battery. When she has accumulated the maximum survivable amount of thermal units, she wanders methodically through every other room in the house in order to radiate heatness into it, and ultimately beaches herself on the kitchen counter, where she puddles out to platter size and slowly turns into paste.

It takes a few days of this in a row to really get this place up to pork-roast temperature, but I remain on the alert for the smell of cracklin's, at which point I will find the nearest popsicle chest and make a nuisance of myself until I'm booted out. Then I guess I'll go to the basement. The basement is always the coolest part of the house. Science has shown this is because of the cooling effect of the spiders, all of whom are massively cool.

So, not so bad. At least, not as bad as the hottest day I ever experienced. It was July 1976, and it was 115 degrees in Salt Lake City. We were passing through on a bicycle trip. Fortunately, we were going downhill at the time, so it could have been worse--and it was, the next day, when it plummeted to 110 degrees and we decided to cross the Bonneville Salt Flats with a pint of water each, because our mothers were not there to stop us. Science has shown that the Salt Flats were formed over many years as dull-witted bicyclists passed through in a state in which they were no longer capable of perspiration, and had begun to flake out into a salty powder instead. This layer plinks off and settles to the ground, eventually forming a thick, flat surface. This does take a long time but there isn't a scientist in the world who will tell you that the salt flats were built in a day, and there's no shortage of dull-witted cyclists. Because of the complete lack of lumps in the landscape, scientists further surmise that deceased bicyclists turn entirely into salt and blow away.

Anyway, good news. After suggesting we might get as high as 113 degrees, the forecasters have revised the temperatures downward somewhat because British Columbia is on fire and a fortuitous wind has blown smoke in from the north. In similarly good news, I plan to stay warm this winter by slaying a cow and climbing inside its carcass.

We remain doughty and stout of heart. Thanks to all of you for your concern; we are especially grateful for the kind words of sympathy coming out of the Phoenix area ("Grow up, bitches").

Bedfellows

I don't know, guys, I don't know.

The good and beautiful people of my good and beautiful city are walking around like survivors in a blast zone. Strangers embrace. The detonation has happened and now the concussion and devastation will ripple on for a long time. I find I'm not interested in food. That's never good.

We can all see each other now. The really, really bad people are lit up like flares. They're celebrating in their white robes and waving their Confederate flags and terrorizing their fellow citizens in the street. Their unwitting partners--almost half the country--are not really bad people, probably. They're just full of shit.

I don't mean that in the normal disparaging way. I mean that a systematic propaganda apparatus has been cranking away for decades now, and its architects have concocted a poisonous stew of lies and distractions, and seasoned it with honey, and people have tipped their heads back and allowed the funnel to be placed in their mouths, and all that shit got pumped in. A party devoted only to increasing the wealth of the wealthy was rebranded as the champion of the middle class. A good, smart, hard-working woman was recast as a devil. Sound science became fantasy. Demonstrable falsehoods were propagated with glee. But folks on the left as well as the right sucked on that funnel and accepted the particular load of shit that was curated just for them. Truth is the first victim, but there are so many more. When you've been pumped full of shit, you actually begin to believe certain of your compatriots threaten you, when clearly those people have much more to fear from you.

Muslim citizens do not like to be mischaracterized as terrorists, nor Hispanics as criminals, and so too, Trump voters are outraged to be called racists and xenophobes. That's not who they are! That stuff is peripheral. They had other concerns. And you know what? They're probably telling the truth.

But the ability to filter out and discard as irrelevant the flagrant racism metastasizing all around them, and the demagogue at its epicenter, the Igniter-In-Chief, does not speak well of their capacity for empathy. To them I say: these are the people you have cast your lot with. To discount them is to reveal yourselves to be comfortably cocooned and unwilling to take a step outside your own experience and imagine someone else's: your neighbor now afraid to wear her head-scarf to the grocery store. The gay man now second-guessing his usual route home in the dark. The Latina betrayed by her own facial features and subject to derision and terror. The black man assumed to be a gangster, and subject to execution. This is what's happening in America today. We marginalize and dehumanize people who frighten us. Every single time we generalize about people, we're wrong. We're wrong, and we're lazy, and we're also less safe, if that is the point of the exercise. We are all far, far less safe now.



So what do we do? Deliberately, we do not have all the options embraced by some of our political foes: most of us are not armed. That's not the way we roll. One thing we do is band together for peace. We keep our eyes and ears open, and when any of us is under attack, we stand with that person. Literally. Physically. We stand together and we give each other strength. And we reject violence.

And we mobilize. There is so much to defend: our civil rights, our health care, our environment, our standing in the world. Everything we've ever cared about is under attack. Everything that actually does make America great is to be dismantled. It has not escaped us that international terrorists will take this opportunity to goad our new president, an insecure, easily-bruised, childish bully, into the all-out holy war they have yearned for. They've got their man, now. As bad as that is, we don't need an external enemy if we're rotting from within.

And with all that, there are even worse things.  We are many years too late to undo the damage we've already done to our planet. But we must keep things from getting worse. We have to at least try. We are out of time to waste. And we can't do it by pulling out the rest of the fossil fuel and burning it up. We have an international climate change agreement signed now--baby steps, far from adequate--but even at that, our new president wants to rip it up and drill, baby, drill. He wants to shovel ever more coal into the boiler of a runaway train. He is a simple, uninformed man: he thinks he's creating jobs. He wants to give us full employment--as grave diggers. When we're done we can all jump in.

We can't let him. We need to stand, march, and holler. We need to fill the streets with our good and beautiful selves and hold each other up. Someone talked about building a wall. We need to be that wall.

Not A Berry Good Year

Last year.

Mary Ann and I were eager to get up to the mountain for our annual huckleberry harvest. Piecrusts get lonely. We were fully two weeks early according to historical records, but we had a premonition. Things haven't been right. Winter started on cue last November and then it petered out. The sun swaggered in with its arms folded over its chest and shoved winter aside, glowering. Then the sun had to repeat a grade, and came back even bigger and meaner. Things started to flower and set fruit in February out of sheer submissiveness, while later the birds, sticking to their old calendar, came back from their tropical vacations and wondered where the food had gone.

Last summer we had the most stupendous huckleberry season ever. When we thumbed berries into our buckets it sounded like the drum corps in a marching band. This year it sounded like the triangle player in a mouse orchestra: ting!

...ting!

There was a berry here, and a berry there. Many of them were shriveled and disheartened. At best, they aspired to being maybe a pie in a mayonnaise jar lid. Three hours in, we could still see the bottom of our buckets. We'd have done almost as well looking for mangoes.

It's not a good sign when you reach for your phone in the middle of your favorite huckleberry patch just to Google recipes for salal berries. There were salal berries about, but I'd never heard of anyone eating them. The internet solemnly reported that salal berries were indeed edible, and that the native Salish tribes edded them. I briefly visualized a diet for the new century featuring salal berries pounded into animal fat, tied up with entrails, and seasoned in a hide pouch. A lot like a Larabar, I figure. The internet also volunteered that the berries were useful as an appetite suppressant.

Turd pie in phlegm sauce is also, I would say, an appetite suppressant.

Our huckleberry patch is in a little hidden hollow below the main highway on the mountain. Despite the inevitable shard of plastic or a beer can flashing in the sun, it's still a beautiful miniature. A small stream runs nearby, burbling companionably. The light is dappled and green as it sifts through the trees. Individual bushes wobble as a chipmunk races us to the last berries. A wren hops along the ground, poking for snacks in the log rot. There's not much that moves slower than a huckleberry picker in a bad year, and the wren walks right up to us, unconcerned. There are plenty of bugs in the disintegrating woods, and she'll be here through the winter. People are dangerous, as a group, but apparently she doesn't stereotype.

Above us, road equipment barks and bellows, and trucks blat by with their jake brakes on. Even higher, the mountain hunkers behind a smoke shroud from one of this year's six billion forest fires. It's wearing dusty shreds of its remaining glaciers like an old woman clutching rags to her chest for dignity.

Down in our green bowl, Mary Ann and I are little figurines in a shoebox diorama. Huckleberry Pickers Of The Pacific Northwest: "The ancients gathered foodstuffs according to the seasons."

We're nearly motionless, crouched on a beautiful stage, with a smoke curtain behind us, and a wounded sky behind that. We're a future museum exhibit. A tableau of what we'll lose next.

Pudding, Steak, and Cake

I've decided to devote mornings to priming the rental house. It's been close to a hundred degrees for forty-five days this month alone, and it may not pay to put off painting until it cools down, because it's possible it will remain this temperature until approximately 100,000 years after the death of Sen. Mitch McConnell (Rep--Kingdom of Coal). But it's been horribly warm in the mornings too, and that is how I discovered the precise temperature at which primer turns into pudding and slides off the house.

It's always something, with pudding. You put in all the ingredients and then you stir and stir and stir over low heat and nothing ever seems to be happening and you re-check the recipe and sure enough it does say "over low heat" but you start to lose confidence and you crank up the burner a little and start casting a longing eye toward the drawer with the cornstarch in it, and then all of a sudden, BAM, pudding. In fact, pudding that can stand up and march out of the pan. So it's all very temperature-dependent. And the primer on the rental house turned into pudding at precisely 10:38am, and when I checked the temperature graph for the day I found out that it was, at that moment, a bazillion degrees. So mark that down.

If I'd waited until afternoon, I could have stuck my paintbrush in the can and pulled out a can-shaped block of primer on a stick. It's fucking hot, is what I'm saying. Dave, as usual, went for a long walk and when he came back he was brown all the way through and his juices ran clear. I spent some time outside also, and by mid-afternoon I'd started to pull away from the sides of the pan and spring back lightly when pressed in the middle. I was a little flat, but that's because I don't have any eggs anymore. I should be presentable with a nice topping of the little crisp, crumbly bits that used to be my garden. So we're totally ready for company, if they should happen to be cannibals.

I've had some experience with this nonsense. I grew up in what would have been the shadow of Washington, D.C., if it had any shadows in the summertime. We coped. We opened up the house at night and exhausted the air out with a fan and then sealed it up tight in the morning and drew the shades, and usually we could get all the way to early afternoon before having to lie down on the linoleum in front of the little round black oscillating fan, breathing shallowly, waiting to die, and dreaming that some day someone would invent air conditioning.

And someone did, and we all love it. Even though it is helping make everything hotter, we all love it.

Whither The Weather

This should all be white. Not just Dave.

Well, it's winter. The hiking possibilities on Mt. Hood aren't the same as in summer. But we decided we might be able to pop up to Mirror Lake and Tom Dick and Harry Mountain. The trail is so short and scenic, and thus crowded, that we rarely take it in the summer. But in March, especially since we're in winter shape (a shape defined by large, soft, comfortable clothes), it sounded nice.

Last time Dave went up to Mirror Lake in the winter, there was an incident. I won't go into any details of the incident, except to note that snowshoes were involved, and someone had to take a dump. Actually, everybody who knows about the incident thinks it's wildly funny and they've thought so since it happened. Dave has thought it was funny for a much shorter length of time.

The point is if you do go to Mirror Lake in the wintertime, there will be snow. Lots of it. There will always be snow.

Not last week, though. It looked like there hadn't been any snow all winter. Dave and I waltzed up to Mirror Lake and continued on up another 965 feet to Tom Dick and Harry Mountain, overlooking the lake, in our sneakers. On some maps it's just Tom Dick Mountain; you can't always count on Harry. Dave and I have had either the flu or pneumonia (depending on which of us you're worried about) and our lungs still aren't quite up to their previous bounciness, and a six mile out-and-back seemed like a good enough start to the mountain hiking season. Which usually starts much later.

The view from Timberline

The next day we felt up to a longer hike and thought: let's go up the Paradise Park trail and see how far we get before we're bogged down in snow. That trail starts near the bottom of the mountain, where we should expect to be in at least two or three feet of snow right now, and ends at the Timberline Trail, the one that goes around Mt. Hood at an average elevation of about 6000 feet. We got all the way there. We climbed about 3000 feet and encountered only a couple snowflake accumulations that looked more like doilies than snow banks. Oh boy! We get to hike the alpine areas all year! Oh shit.

This is not what we want to do. We're fine with slogging around in the low elevations in the wintertime while our beautiful neighborhood mountain packs on its winter coat, as it is meant to do. Just a few years ago someone discovered some ice caves on Mt. Hood: turquoise cathedrals beneath the glaciers.  There was a lot of melting observed at the time, and whispers about the demise of the glaciers, and their ice caves, in our lifetime.

I'm not sure they're still there.

Here's the thing: everything we love about living here has to do with water. We are inundated with

green. Moss defines us. Ferns slouch from our city trees. Those of us who are up to climbing 5000 feet in the summer will be able to find a snow bank even in August that we can twirl our beer in if we're so inclined, and some of us are. Water. It's a miracle substance. The damn stuff falls from the sky. We know how lucky we are.

Were. We have had some water this winter, but we've also had sunny days on end, approaching 70 degrees, since the middle of February. It's been pleasant in a way that feels false and dangerous. We're supposed to be stacking up snow on our mountain to trickle on us later. The little rainfall we've had has been too warm to crystallize and has barely blessed the slopes. Now, standing at the timberline elevation of Mt. Hood in our damn sneakers and gazing up, we see a volcano bereft, its crown of snow a mere beret, trailing sparse tendrils. It looks like a comb-over.

Don't know where it all is. Where does our weather go on vacation? A bunch of it is in New England, apparently, where they don't have a volcano to stack it up on, and when it melts it's going to do nobody any good. In fact, it will be spectacularly bad. Didn't California used to have a little water? Didn't Texas used to store some fossil water underground? Didn't the sled dogs in Alaska used to run on snow? Didn't the mighty Colorado River used to go all the way to the  ocean instead of petering out into a pile of spit?

Can't Harry at least stay put?

The Stupendamoon!

The moon was huge the other night. It was so big I almost got my period.  Supermoon, they called it, but that doesn't mean much. That's just more word inflation, which seems to be required in a world where, omigod, we're all brilliant and everything we do is uh-mazing. The moon is always worth looking at and doesn't really need a public relations department. I had the same thought I usually do when I see a nice full moon: wouldn't it be cool if we had a bunch of them?

I mean, wouldn't it be swell to be on Jupiter? Except for the chilly part. Sixty-seven moons winging around that thing, all taking different amounts of time to make the trip, some going this way and some going the other way. There would probably be people around who could rig up tables of exactly how they were going to be arrayed on any given night, but your average person is unlikely to be able to keep track of it without the cheat sheet. Which shouldn't detract from the sheer joy of it all.

Just my luck I'd be stuck on the bus next to someone who goes on and on about the relative positions of Ganymede and Io and the consequences for my fortunes. She'd reel off a dozen moons in retrograde that will soon collaborate on an auspicious moment for changing jobs or starting a relationship, and explain my own personality to me based on the confluence of Europa and Callisto at the moment my egg split off from the motherpod. And on Jupiter it could be a long, long bus trip. I swear, Jupiter is wasted on the Jupitroids.

Anyway, what we just saw here was the Harvest Moon. It's called that because it's a full moon that occurs during "harvest time," which is an old-timey expression from back in the days we didn't have mangoes and kiwi fruit available in the store all year, thanks to all that oil. Same exact moon in February would be called the Shoot Me, It's Still Raining Moon. If we could see it.

Harvest Time

Mangoes be damned, it does signal a change of seasons. We still have changes of seasons--most of us--because our planet is tilted in relation to the sun, and depending on where we are in our revolution, the sunlight is scoring either a direct hit or angling in. The difference between lolling on a raft in your underwear and having to wear everything you own just to cross the parking lot comes down to how much atmosphere that sun needs to slice through. And the atmosphere isn't very thick. It's just a wafer of batting wrapped around the planet. But that thin batting is why we have wind and weather and, for that matter, liquid water at the surface at all. We owe our very existence to that batting, but we've gotten mighty slapdash with it. We just keep dumping crap in it.

That's what happens when people keep their perspectives narrow. Heck, we think the sky is blue, when really it's black almost everywhere, as soon as you get a few miles from here. We even fancy God on a nice fluffy cloud in the blue sky and imagine it's heaven, although that would mean God is practically parking His Fanny on the earth itself. Hope he likes it toasty.

Peeves

Almost all my peeves are someone else's peeves.

I first noticed it when someone down the street had a daily visitor who drove up and honked the horn for him instead of using the doorbell. It was rude, but I could ignore it. Not my neighbor, though. She got a little purpler each time, and eventually whenever I heard the car horn I could feel her fury right through the vinyl siding. I knew it was only a matter of time before she hauled out on the front porch with a pistol. She was plenty capable of taking that car horn out without nicking the dashboard. I began to seize up whenever the horn went off. I had developed Acquired Car Horn Syndrome.

This business of taking on other people's peeves started early. My father was a first-class curmudgeon and all sorts of things irked him. No improper use of English went uncorrected in our house. He was too polite (and anti-social) to correct other adults but we kids were fair game. And he went off several times a day on wayward custodians of the language. It could be anything. "The forecast IS rain, the forecast is not CALLING FOR rain," Dad would bellow at the weatherman, every single night, as we kids mouthed it silently behind his back. The fact that my father could not save the English language all by himself never prevented him from hollering at the television. He was certainly in charge of us, at least. All four of his children were punted out of the nest with a death-grip on proper English and a lifelong tendency to cringe, on his behalf, when "people who should know better" messed up.

He never got anywhere with the campaign to save "comprise." It means the opposite of "compose" but they are used interchangeably most of the time, and he simply could not stand it. But his fury was general: Nixon, the destruction of the environment, and people using "iris" as a plural all elicited the same reaction.

Dad has been dead for over thirty years, but I still hunch up wincing when our weatherman talks about his "futurecast,"as though that were somehow more prescient than a forecast. I'm the sort that thinks that dead is dead, but Dad's crotchets have eternal life.

George

Now people are more peevish than ever. Any glance at the internet will reveal how many things drive people absolutely crazy, and how proud they are to admit it. Apostrophe abuse, visible panty lines, clerks that call you "honey," people making duck lips in their selfies, long voice mail messages, people who write "wallah." If any of these send you around the bend, you might consider the possibility that you're wound too tight. You might, as my Dave likes to say, want to let out a loop. Because here's the thing: if hearing someone say "hone in on" drives you nuts, it's probably a pretty short drive.

As a public service here at Murrmurrs, Inc., we will now list all the things that you really ought to be upset about. The rest don't matter.

1) Global warming.
2) Mass extinctions.
3) "Comprise." It means "be composed of," not "compose." Get it right, or face the Wrath Of George.