Just a little more than usual
I’d like to learn how to make bread. I’ve watched my wife do it many times, but have never tried it myself. It’s an art, of sorts, and a commitment.
Falafal would be on the To Do list. Sometimes I think it would be nice to have a general familiarity with the Mediterranean diet and various spice palates, be able to whip up a tasty meal at a moment’s notice, but I’ve never felt inclined to invest the time.
I think I could live on stews and soups.
Dogs, though cats are less labor intensive and lead a more autonomous existence. As I was once reminded, they’ve been domesticated for about half as long as dogs, and it shows sometimes. And, at least in this neck of the woods, we don’t have to worry about feral dogs.
Writing, listening to music, watching a good TV show or movie, reading, sometimes working outside. Quite a while ago, I once sat at the piano for three hours and remember marveling over having been there playing away for all that time.
It seems almost an inevitability that heads will roll. The hand-wringing and wrangling behind the scenes will reveal the latest in a long line of hires to part ways with Donald Trump. Pam Bondi may be safe, Kash says he’s not going anywhere, but Dan Bongino may be shown the door, or maybe he’ll let himself out.
All this because of the Epstein fallout. MAGA faithful are beside themselves because there was no client list reveal—a list that apparently sat on Bondi’s desk, and which the hardcore diehards apparently figured would be chockful of slimy Dems who, they’ve been told, were part of a network of child molesters and sex traffickers.
Intuition and drawn conclusions tell us something different now. Wagons may be circling to protect precious Donald, Teflon Man, who everyone knows often enough hung out with Epstein, who shows up in numerous pics and videos. It’s all causing major consternation among the far right talking heads who thought they had a smoking gun. They still might, but it may be pointing at their not-so-fearless leader.
What a useless bunch. Instead of governing and doing the peoples’ work, all we get is more drama and this sensational drivel that passes for news. Nothing will happen to Donald. Someone else will take the fall, as usual. This is why you have handpicked lackies in positions of power—so they can “disappear” the damning evidence, or at least try to.
Where’s Deep Throat when you need him?
Water in our basement is bothering me. Water doesn’t belong in basements. We had over 4 inches of rain in about 3 hours yesterday, and the saturated ground revealed some shortcomings in our foundation’s capacity for repelling water. In the larger scheme of things, it’s a mere flesh wound compared with what’s been happening in other places around the country and world, but it’s still a pain to deal with.
And of course the ongoing follies and painful reality of the current presidential administration is an ongoing dark cloud. Washington hasn’t seen such crass ineptitude and evil intent since, well, the first go ’round five-plus years ago.
The sun will rise and set.
Humans will continue to be brilliant and short-sighted in varying measures for the foreseeable future.
In the absence of love, we suffer.
Time is a construct.
Clean drinking water is a necessity.
There’s no need for all the food prep shows.
The universe is huge.
We don’t all share the same musical tastes.
More isn’t necessarily better.
The earth will survive our gluttony and mismanagement, but we won’t.
To follow up on yesterday’s entry, the difficulty in Texas is that its leadership often appears to subscribe to the Donald Trump School of Denial and Doubling Down. So, the likelihood that people will learn anything from the July 4 tragedy is dependent on Governor Abbott and his staff being open to a certain criticism and introspection and review—not in order to find a scapegoat but rather to learn something that might help in the inevitable next time.
Even if the Guadalupe event was a rare, perfect storm of conditions, accelerated climate change is here, even and especially in Texas. The once-in-a-lifetime events will be coming more frequently than once in a lifetime. Turning a blind eye and siding with the fossil fuel industry isn’t going to help.
Yes.
Security, and adventure on my terms. I don’t need to be scaling a sheer cliff or swimming with Great Whites in order to have a good day. I’m definitely not an adrenaline junkie, never have been. I feel plenty alive most days just tending to yard work, playing with the grandkids, or taking a walk with my wife. I consider the 26 years I spent as a pastor the adventure years, since I lived most every day so far out of my comfort zone.
Kind of boring, I guess.
The scale of devastating loss and damage from the Texas flooding on July 4 is inevitably causing questions to arise—about monitoring, about preparedness and advanced warning or the lack thereof, about the wisdom of carrying on with programming at a summer camp that lies in a flood plain when there was at least some rudimentary knowledge of bad weather and dangerous conditions approaching.
Do we just chalk it up to the pioneering, devil-may-care spirit of Texans who think they walk on water, or the hands-off management style and flaky views of the governor and lieutenant governor, and the general mindset of a state that can’t be told anything because you don’t mess with Texas?
Maybe it was all just a confluence of perfect conditions that led to a disaster that couldn’t be foreseen or imagined. But I doubt that’s going to sit very well with families who have lost loved ones and most every material possession they had.
One might expect people to want better answers than that it was the unfortunate and unpredictable arrival of a one-thousand-year event, and there was nothing anyone could do about that. That’s probably not gonna suffice in this situation.
Assuming this would be a meal hosted by my wife and I, I would invite our siblings and spouses, kids and spouses and grandchildren, a few college friends, Paul McCartney, Bobby Orr, Billy Joel, Pete Buttigieg, Desi Lydic, Rachel Maddow, Paul Simon, Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Greta Thunberg, David Brooks, Jonathan Capehart, Amna Nawaz, Geoff Bennet, and the cast from The Big Bang Theory. It’d be a catered buffet at a local community center.
3 Cents' 