Captain Future, Captain Past

 The irony hasn’t escaped me: under the ancient marquee of Captain Future’s Dreaming Up Daily, in recent years I have been writing primarily about the past. 

 In particular this was brought home to me by an email I received from Jay Matson, poet, entrepreneur and a student several years ahead of me at Knox College.  He signed it Captain Past.  It seemed a more accurate moniker for what I was writing, as well as for the subjects of his recent poems.

 Sometime around 2005 I adopted Captain Future as a screen name for my posts on Daily Kos and a few other similar sites, as well as in other contexts.  I also began this blog around then. The purpose I had in mind for it was to highlight positive ideas and information for a better future—hence, dreaming up daily.  Even when I got sucked into the morass of contemporary politics, the perspective was to see things as they affected the future.  But I did get sucked in, railing against Bush, the Iraq war, torture, etc., then advocacy for Obama, then immediately unmasking Homemade Hitler in 2016. 

 Those posts, heartfelt and certainly justified, are the fodder of history, and as writing are painfully ephemeral.  I did focus at appropriate times on major threats to the future, such as nuclear weapons and especially, primarily, the climate crisis. Occasionally I highlighted positive steps towards a better future, and certainly tried to articulate principles necessary for pursuing it. Some of these posts remain very relevant. 

 But I also continued to respond to the latest news, to people and events that quickly faded.  And I did that, helplessly and stubbornly, for more than15 years, from the time that blogging was all the rage through the time that “nobody blogs anymore.”

 At the same time, I was exploring aspects of the past, especially my own, in writing that mostly didn’t make it out of the computer.  When I retired and turned attention towards writing projects on past and future, I discovered that my most natural form, and the way I could actually write something whole, was the kind of blog post that I had developed, solely on my own, over those years.  That my blog readership dwindled over the years was somewhat depressing but in the end irrelevant.  Writing these posts here and elsewhere, or essays or whatever they might be called, was its own reward.

 So I did a version of my Soul of the Future project as a series of posts here, but also the History of My Reading and more recently the TV and Me series, which concerned the past.  These evocations of the past increasingly took over this blog, partly because I was feeling more and more alienated from the public present. 

 For especially in the past few years I began to see, to feel acutely, that the world around me has changed so thoroughly that I mostly don’t have a place in it.  Just about everything is significantly different.  I can’t imagine how I would be making a living in this present.  Then again, I can’t imagine how I even would have been able to go to college, or lived in the places I lived.  Which leads me further back, to not even imagining how I could have been born at all.

 Obviously, approaching my 77^th birthday, I have many more days behind than in front of me.  But in this more profound way, my life is almost entirely in the past. I’ve always felt somewhat alienated, as if I might be an alien.  Now it’s pretty clear: I am definitely from another planet, the one that used to be here.  (For one thing, it had more birds.)

 Eventually I may be relegated to a very narrow present moment existence.  But for now, I live powerfully in memory.  Why do we have memories?  They seem an extension of the first requirement of any creature: to know what is food and what is not.  Anyone familiar with dogs or cats will understand how the first function—and perhaps the first step-- of memory is remembering where and when you find food, a vital skill for survival.  So for me, in various ways, memory is related to sustenance.

 What about that future I am supposedly captain of? In many ways, I cannot even conceive of an actual future anymore.  AI in particular has me throwing up my hands.  But in one essential way, the future is all too clear.  Captain Future’s mission was to relentlessly persuade about the need and possibility of acting in the present to further a better future, and specifically to meet the challenge of the oncoming climate crisis.

 I have been writing about the climate crisis since 1990. For the years I wrote about it on this blog, it was the quintessential elephant in the room (forgive me for using one of the many mindnumbing clichés that no longer have much power.) But today the climate crisis is no longer the elephant in the room.  The climate crisis is the room. 

 The climate crisis is no longer avoidable: it is the present and will be the present for the imaginable future.  A few data-driven experts who previously sounded alarms have recently moved the zeitgeist towards believing that the clean energy initiatives especially embodied in the Inflation Reduction Act will mean the United States at least will significantly lessen predicted levels of CO2 emissions in the near future, thereby preventing the worst case level of global heating.  But even if that works out, it does not stop what is happening, and will happen for decades to come.  The climate crisis is not “solved,” (whatever that means.)

 Even if future heating remains below levels that UN climate scientists designate as catastrophic (and that itself seems unlikely), those levels are approximate and truly uncertain.  Add to this the real world fact that when effects have differed from those predicted by climate models, they most have proven worse in reality than in what amounts to educated guesses.    

 I repeat, the elephant has not left the room.  The elephant is the room.  The future world is a hotter world, with accelerating consequences.  Even this spring—April and May—there are or have been intense and long-lasting heat waves in southern Asia, Europe, North America, and always Africa.  There are massive forest fires already in western Canada and Siberia.  Torrential rains have flooded out towns in a region of Italy—the worst flooding in that country for a century.  A heat dome settled over the Pacific Northwest—when a similar event happened in a summer month, it was called a once in a thousand years event.  That was two years ago.  Most ominously, the upper levels of the oceans are consistently hotter than they’ve been since measurements began 40 years ago, leading to an array of devastating current and future consequences.  The UN predicts the oceans will continue to heat up until at least 2300 just based on the effects of global heating to the present.

 These events, this suffering and death, this destruction, is going to get worse, year after year. (For instance, the World Meteorological Organization has just predicted a 98% chance that the next five years will be the hottest five years on record.) The financial and social costs of coping with them are eventually going to override denial and demand shocked attention.  Eventually it may even happen that wars will be recognized for what most already are—climate wars. And the migrations that the wealthy countries are already unable to cope with in a civilized manner might even be recognized as directly or indirectly involving climate refugees. 

 The point isn’t that this is a doomsday scenario—the point is that it will eventually and inevitably be the context for everything in the future—including every individual decision on education and profession for the next generations, and eventually on where and how to live.

 To meet the challenge of the global climate crisis required a level of maturity in humanity and its societies that once seemed possible, since it would not have required anything more than heeding those who have foretold the possibilities and the consequences.  But it didn’t happen in enough time to prevent climate distortion, and now nobody really knows where things are going to end up.  Again, this is the context for the work, the hopes and fears, and the lives of those who will live in this future, as it quickly becomes the present.

Apart from the omnipresent threat of thermonuclear extinction in the mid-1960s, this country and the world in general seems less institutionally stable than it seemed when I started college.  Despite "progress" in some areas, there seems to be regression in many more. The global battles between self-righteous reactionaries in their various forms and the self-righteous revisionists in their various forms makes for a peculiarly unstable world, especially in social and political institutions that people otherwise would rely on in times of common crisis. 

 It’s possible to exaggerate how widespread this is in America, but the extremes are jolting.  Guns of unprecedented destructiveness are a bigger part of US life than at any other time in its history, or was ever even imagined.  The return of child labor makes the huge gulf between rich and borderline poor look like the early 19^th century London of Dickens novels. Margaret Atwood’s Gilead society from The Handmaid’s Tale seems more possible than ever, only we’ll be calling it Florida.  And so on. All this at at the precise time we can’t afford to go backwards, to make more trouble for ourselves. But that’s what we’re doing, and expending a lot of energy, resources, attention and social capital doing it, diverting it all from where it is truly needed.  This makes us dangerously vulnerable and fragile as a society, as a civilization.    

 The climate crisis, the onrushing extinctions of other lifeforms, the unsustainable distance between the obscenely rich and everyone else—these are the meaningful vectors now creating any future context I can imagine.   The addition of AI and other technological wonders only magnifies and exacerbates the chaos that also becomes the background if not the foreground of future life. 

So I don’t see much of a role for this Captain Future anymore, except following the lead of Captain Past. I doubt I’ll have much to say about contemporary politics anymore—it’s all the same drone, and out of my old hands.  What I may be able to offer is my particular perspective from these many years I've been around.  My own past now reaches back beyond the experiences of the vast majority.  Perhaps it’s an inevitable discovery of my time in life, or perhaps it’s an historical truth (or I suspect, something of both), but I feel more continuity with my parents and grandparents time than this present I find myself in, and certainly any future I can foresee. That’s certainly not what I expected in the 1960s.  In any case, this perspective is all I’ve got to contribute, aside from bearing witness.

 I may have observations on aspects of the present based on those perspectives, as well as more recollections (I hope to continue and even finish my History of My Reading series, which should go faster through the decades than it has so far.)  I may finally get around to writing about words, another long-planned project.

 I’ll still check the numbers of “readers,” though what’s officially counted may be mostly bots, and who knows who goes uncounted.  Readers may encourage me, but the absence of readers will no more than temporarily discourage me.  The words are what’s real, and somehow I can only abandon my pieces by publishing them. Though I still hope to explore other forms of publication (even as I suspect them of being just as dubious) I will likely continue publishing in this hapless form of the blog.  

 If I do it under this marquee, it’s because Captain Future is a product of the past.  When I started using it as a screen name I actually had no idea that there were Captain Future stories, since they’d been written and largely forgotten in the 1940s.  When I learned that the idea for Captain Future was the result of a visit to the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the World of Tomorrow, that had always fascinated me (and which my mother visited), the link between past and future was made.  In a sense, I am now such a link.

Not This Year

from Trinidad Head a few summers ago

Obviously a lot of events have been cancelled this year, and they continue to be.  But in this case the reason varies a little.

In recent years I've made a ritual hike up the Trinidad Head on my birthday.  The next one is next week, and I've been undecided about it.  We haven't been restricted here from driving and walking where we could safely distance from others.  That's even more true in recent weeks.

One of my favorite spots over the years, taken last June on a foggy birthday.

But the trail to the top of the Head is narrow for most of its length, with a few widely spaced turnouts, usually where there are benches facing the sea.  It would be impossible along most of it to pass someone going in the opposite direction with more than a foot or two between you, and sometimes less.

But with masks and the light risk of getting much virus passing someone for a moment in the open air, I was still considering it.  Even after my car battery died again.

Until Tuesday, when I read a story in the online Lost Coast Outpost, a report of a Zoomed meeting of county supervisors and the public health officer.  All the supervisors talked about questionable activities and noticing hostility about any covid crisis restrictions.  Then there was this:

Fifth District Supervisor Steve Madrone spoke urgently about an inundation of tourists in his district. “We’re being overrun in Trinidad, literally,” he said, “by hundreds and hundreds if not thousands” of people he described as “arrogant” and defiant, refusing to wear face coverings even when asked.

“So we’re gonna see a major outbreak out of Trinidad — that’s my prediction,” Madrone said. He asked the sheriff’s office to get involved. “Frankly, we need help in Trinidad right now. It is out of control, literally. … Please, give us some daily patrols that are highly visible.”

A couple of paragraphs down, the story read: "During the public comment period, several people expressed frustration, skepticism and outright defiance toward public health measures."

These included extreme and abusive comments towards public health officials, accusing them at one point of "borderline child abuse" because of restrictions on ball games.

It is true that Humboldt County has few covid cases (though there has been a small surge this week) but nobody seems to credit public health officials with contributing to the smallness of that number.  Nationally there is such disgraceful and violent behavior towards public health officials that dedicated and experienced leaders are quitting.

Apart from the self-defeating behavior that is more and more leading to a self-created epidemic, there is that arrogance of those who refuse to take precautions, endangering others as well as themselves and their families.  The fundamental respect for others that is signaled by wearing masks is disdained, and the social contract is visibly broken.

The social contract is more specifically broken with seniors.  The cant that seems to be more and more quoted is to the effect that people have a right to take the risk of getting infected, but that those who are especially vulnerable, especially old people, "should stay the hell home."  Presumably forever.

Even more than that, masks and common sense distancing have been demonically transformed into political/cultural statements.  If I wear a mask as I pass someone, do I want to invite hostility and arrogance on an isolated trail?  Believe me, there are times when the answer is yes.  But I'd rather not go there.  In any case, there might be more danger from attitude than infection.  Both are profoundly uncomfortable.

So I won't be going to Trinidad this birthday.  I won't even be driving up there anymore (assuming I get my car fixed) because I'm a bit leery of my own anti-social tendencies.  I'll be staying the hell home, which is not hell at all, as a matter of fact.

Meanwhile, the self-induced epidemic spreads, with record hospitalizations in seven states as well as surges of new infections in many others.  And infections (like climate crisis effects by the way) are a lagging indicator, meaning that the causes are in the past.  According to Johns Hopkins’s Erik Toner, “It’s basically the same reason for all these states: It was Memorial Day.” And we've had some three weeks of post-sequestration activities since then.  It's no wonder that Dr. Fauci said Tuesday that the next two weeks will be crucial in getting control of the epidemic.

But the federal government is not only ignoring the epidemic (reportedly considering withdrawing the state of emergency officially) but the Republican candidate who holds the title of President angrily denounces anyone who recognizes it.  There happens to still be a majority in the country who do recognize it, but those numbers are slipping.

And the rest of the world is noticing that it's out of control here, and the government seems to have stopped trying to do anything about it. Accordingly, as of Tuesday, the European Union was considering banning visitors from the US to protect their own citizens.  (Canada already does that, but quietly.) That's not exactly transitioning to greatness.  That's an historic humiliation.

But perhaps this is all because nobody is smart enough to understand the advanced thinking of the very stable genius in the White House.  Evidently, when he talks about the virus he is discussing it on the quantum level.  It's a demonstrated fact that indeed on the quantum level you might have to observe a particle in order for it to exist.  Therefore, if you don't want the virus to exist, you just don't look at it.

6,000

A non-horrific statistic (at least I think it is): I happened to notice that my Memorial Day/Poetry Monday post was #5,999 in this blog's history. So this is my 6,000th post on Dreaming Up Daily.

I accept that the post counter is accurate.  But I'm not sure what the daily page view count actually means, what with bots, spammers and photo links, but page views passed 500,000 total awhile ago.  A good many Twitter and Facebook and other social media accounts exceed that number in a week, some in a day or an hour.  But for a writer, it's a big number, especially if it represented actual readers.  Even cutting it in half, which is generous but more realistic, is pretty good.

Blogs are obsolete, not quite yet in the same retro cool category as other things I've held onto, like vinyl records, flip phones and even video cassettes.  Not yet Old School either. But Twitter is too short, Facebook too ugly and creepy, and only blogs give me the space and the flexibility to create a page, something like a magazine.  I like that. So I keep playing here, regardless of who does or doesn't shows up to watch.

The superseded blogs as well the always unfashionable ways I use this one have contributed to the decline of daily hits over the years, especially for the newest post.  I am heartened however that older posts still get hits, which I suspect means readers who were actively looking for something found an example of it here.  I still have other blogs where I post seldom if ever (I've been blogging since something like 2002, though this blog is not that old, sometimes maintaining five or so at a time) and they continue to pile up hits, some in the thousands.  There's something substantive--an issue, a play, a writer, a Star Trek episode, that somebody wants to know more about.  Maybe an old movie or a book they just heard of, or just remembered.  Or they're turning 60 or 70, and found one of my posts on that.  This is what I've called the Internet of Remembering, and I'm pleased to be part of that.

There's an element of service in this, and I do think about that.  I think about adding to knowledge, making my very particular contribution.  I take it seriously.

But my dirty little secret is that I have always been less interested in sounding off, attracting clicks or going viral than I have been in writing.  Sure, there's an element of showing off in all this.  And I like to do what I used to do professionally for awhile, which is make a kind of page out of words and images.

When you're showing off it helps to have an audience, and there is something essential about the pairing of writer and reader. But that's becoming secondary (as the length of these posts may suggest.)  Especially at this point in my life, it's mostly about the doing.

Even famous writers will say this.  T.S. Eliot did, at the end of Four Quartets.  Last night I read an interview with Malcolm Cowley in his old age, a literary critic and biographer who had a lot of influence in American literature from the 1930s through the 1950s especially. (And he's also a western Pennsylvania boy.)  "Writing becomes its own reward," Cowley said.  "What do you need from others--except a little money--if you have satisfied the stern critic in yourself?"

These days not even a little money enters into it, and the inner critic is maybe less stern in some ways.  I can't say I'm exactly saintly about it--I get discouraged at the silence at the other end.  So I am grateful for my regular readers.  I suspect I know most of them by their first names.  I probably know their birthdays, too.

But in the end it's a kind of serious play, the work of a lifetime and the work of a life.  So when I get over myself and get into myself, when the energy returns, I can inhabit my zone of illusion, inside my carapace of play. And I make more sentences, and assemble another post.  Some don't look so good the next day.  But I'm happy with a lot of them.  I may have a huge blind spot here, but I think many are as good as anything else one can find on the Internet on a given day.

Still, I doubt there's another 6,000 posts coming.  Though I suppose you never know.

Turning 72: I Dwell in Possibility

It was a pretty good 72nd year.  No one close to me died, or came down with a serious illness or injury, though I certainly know people my age with significant health challenges.  The exception is our beloved cat Pema--we're currently nursing her through a terminal illness, making this a sad and anxious time. But as for my health, I'm looking forward to my annual trek up Trinidad Head later today. Yesterday I set my home court record with 7 straight midrange baskets (I can't in good conscience call them "jumpers") and 9 out of 10, before I missed two in a row.

I'm pleased with writing I did this past year, including what amounts to drafts of two short books which I have cleverly hidden within my blogs on the Internet.  My recollections--first of books, but especially of my senior year of college fifty years ago-- went very well, by my own lights anyway.  The process was fascinating. Reclaiming context through factual research seemed to evoke and free memories, some of which came to me in the act of writing.

Lately I've had episodes of visual memories, which have been rare before now. I'm not good at visualization.  "Imagine yourself on a beautiful beach" etc. has never worked for me as a meditation or relaxation technique, for example, if it depends on seeing it.  But lately, visual memories have come almost unbidden, and once I've had them (usually on the edge of sleep but not always), they more or less remain accessible.

The past, both culturally and personally, remains my focus, my fireplace (which is what "focus" means.)  I'm interested in depth, reiteration, a more thorough exploration, rather than new places and experiences.  Fortunately I don't have to defend that choice.  "Don't Want To, Don't Need To, Can't Make Me, I'm Retired."

At the same time, I am exploring new ideas, though they tend to be more like going farther along a path I darted down for awhile before.  Some of these bear upon that other area of concern, the future.

The future has looked dark many times in my life, probably most times.  But there was always an idea or two that suggested the possibility of light coming into being. That is less so now.

The newest ideas I'm still learning about are actually 20 or 30 years old.  It was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for example, that the scientific ideas informing the Gaia hypothesis were percolating.  Its basis was formulated even earlier, in the late 1960s when I was in college (but it was so unorthodox that it never would have been mentioned in a science class.)  In studying the atmosphere of the planet Mars, James Lovelock discovered that the physics and chemistry of that planet predicted what it was like.  But the physics and chemistry of Earth does not describe its actual atmosphere.  There is another element determining and regulating Earth's atmosphere, and keep its temperature fairly constant despite changes in the heat coming from the sun.   That element is life.

The Earth is self-organizing and self-regulating through its specific lifeforms. Living systems, from the smallest bacteria to the entire surface and atmosphere, self-maintain.  That makes the Earth a single system, and by some definitions,  a kind of organism.

The implications were vast, and go beyond ecology--the study of the Earth as our home--to the study of the Earth as our body.  The idea of Gaia was an immediate magnet for various New Age enthusiasts but in the late 1980s, William Irwin Thompson and the Lindisfarne Association published a couple of collections of essays derived from conferences the Association had held since the early eighties. (Gaia: A Way of Knowing, and Gaia 2: Emergence).

The authors were serious people, including James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, the scientist who helped him develop the hypothesis, as well visionary cybernetic pioneer Gregory Bateson, visionary neurobiologist Franciso Varela, physicist Arthur Zajonc, botanist and popular writer Wes Jackson, economist and futurist Hazel Henderson and W.I Thompson himself, who promoted the idea that Gaia could be the guiding idea of cultural transformation in the 1990s.

As far as I can tell, there didn't turn out to be a guiding idea of cultural transformation in the 1990s, nor do I know of any guiding idea since.  At best, some segments of society sort of caught up to ecological ideas of the 1960s and 70s.  Others got sidetracked by computer technology to contemplate bogus ideas like "the singularity" or just got sucked into the social media vacuum.

But lately I have been reading Slanted Truths, a book of the mid-90s, a somewhat shaped collection of essays by Lynn Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan. (He is also the son of Carl Sagan, and has taken on his father's job of popularizing science, though he's much more his mother's son in the science he attempts to popularize.)

Their essays were mostly published separately in periodicals and are often repetitive (which is actually good, since the ideas are still new and the science unfamiliar) so it is an immersive experience.  (These writings are however more coherent than either of the authors speaking: Dorion does not have his father's skills and both are pretty unorganized in the events YouTube has preserved, though Margulis is nevertheless magnetic and occasionally mesmerizing.)

Margulis herself transformed life sciences by concentrating on microorganisms, and showing the crucial role they played in evolution.  She also showed that these are the organisms upon which Gaia's ability to self-regulate depend, more than any other.  Bacteria is the essential lifeform to maintain the life of planet Earth, including its atmosphere.

I am reading this in the context of a year in which it seems that the collapse of civilization within the next century, and perhaps the fall of the American Republic much sooner, seems more and more likely.  On a somewhat longer timeline, the fate of the human species is in question.  If the climate crisis and mass extinction are as bad as they seem they will be, homo sapiens may be facing enough reduction that extinction is possible.  In a previous climate crisis, homo sapiens were down to perhaps 2500 beings in one small location.  Coming back depends on how extensive the changes are, and for how long.  Nuclear weapons complicate this further.

Mass extinctions may wipe out all large mammals and perhaps too many keystone species we don't even know about.  But the ultimate threat to life seems to depend on what happens to the oceans, and whether we end up killing them.

Margulis and Sagan leave me with at least this hope for the future of life: that bacteria are likely to endure and adapt, and since from them in time came all of the species we know, they can just start again.  Raccoons or rats or even ants may be faster to develop but then, does the planet want to go through all this again?  I sometimes wonder whether a species that invented helicopter gunships even deserves to survive.  Maybe evolution will settle next time on a scenario like that in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Galapagos, in which descendants of humans are more like porpoises, who frolic in pools with fins, incapable of building anything.

For the near future, Gaia offers some possibility of offsetting the worst effects of global heating, in that we don't understand exactly how life regulates the atmosphere.  Perhaps that self-regulation can overcome excessive global heating, although it seems there is unlikely to be enough time to adapt.  But maybe.

Which suggest another source of hope: our ignorance.  We think we know a lot, but all we've learned are a few limited mechanisms and how to do some stuff, mostly through trial and error.  We've just done too much of it, on too large a scale. Because in part there are too many of us.

In fact we know almost nothing about our world and our universe.  Steven Wright used to joke: "I bought a packet of powdered water but I don't know what to add to it."  We don't really even know what water is.  We certainly can't make the stuff.

We've made up all these categories and theories that soon reach their limits, though we insist they are universal, they are "laws."  Science has at least acknowledged that Newtonian physics doesn't apply in all realms. (And that's because we know how to do some stuff using the math of quantum mechanics, but we have no idea why they work.)  It took recent scientists like Lynn Margulis to begin showing that Darwinian evolution in its traditional definition doesn't apply to everything alive, or even to the origin of species.

Margulis and other microbiologists also showed that many of the assumptions made about how life works in general was based only on larger lifeforms: animals and plants.  But many of those "rules" don't apply to microorganisms such as bacteria.  Either these rules operated in a limited field or they are generally mistaken.

We use definitions as tools and then get captured by our definitions.  The most interesting philosophical essay I read this year, by Galen Strawson, suggests that the conundrum of consciousness as a non-physical phenomenon may lie in a restricted definition of "physical."   The universes of the very small and the very large have shot down a lot of our middle-range assumptions and definitions.  With dark matter, dark energy and all the other more or less theoretical aspects of the universe, exactly what "physical" means is (or should be) in doubt.

So maybe there's something we'll learn that we can't now foresee, something that will make enough of a difference to avoid catastrophe.

For those younger than me who will live in the future, hope is a daily commitment to make things better.  Hope isn't what you feel, it's what you do.  For me, looking at a future that extends beyond imagination, I am buoyed by possibilities we can begin to imagine but can't quite imagine, way beyond anything fantasized in Silicon Valley.

So I greet the beginning of my 73rd year with a poem by Emily Dickinson.  She was a favorite of Lynn Margulis (though admittedly not of mine)--I saw a line of this one that was sort of quoted by Dorion Sagan.  The whole poem however is what I want to say:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

P.S. I've added a "birthdays" label to such posts in prior years.  But two of the more extensive are on another blog: Turning 60 and Turning 65.

Head Lines

In recent years it's become my tradition to hike the Trinidad Head on my birthday.  It's not the only time I do it, but it's become a ritual of that day.  It's the first time this year though, and the first time since President Obama declared the Trinidad Head a National Monument, along with other features on the Pacific coast.

Hasn't changed anything--the trail is still rocky and narrow, which is reassuring in a way. This year on 30 June it was cloudy but bright when I started, and I could see the fog coming in as I headed up.

By the time I reached my favorite bench, you couldn't see the ocean anymore.  I went on to the top just to make it official.  My windbreaker and glasses were wet by the time I got back down.

A Spanish ship sailed into Trinidad Bay in June 1775, named the place Trinidad because it was the feast of the Trinity, and sailed away.  The Yurok lived near here, and they were left in peace for another 75 years.  But once the 49ers came, it took only a decade or so before their way of life for thousands of years was destroyed forever.  Their descendants are nearby.

Me and the Future

I started this blog with the future as its intended main subject, or at least its orientation.  Because I was looking forward from the present, with the past as a resource (including my own past), my age didn't seem to matter.

In the past year or so, since I turned 70, I began to be uncomfortable with this approach.  The "Captain Future" moniker denoted a certain irony, a particular playfulness about an heroic mission, but that no longer seemed enough.

There are two basic problems.  First, for a number of reasons that include my age, I've become more of a stranger to important features of contemporary culture.  I don't follow the latest popular music, I've given up trying to be at least familiar with the latest films and television, and more recently even the latest books.  The names of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar winners as well as the celebrities about whom the supermarket tabloids have frenzied stories about, are mostly complete blanks to me.

This is part of a natural turn away from the rolling present, with what now appear to be wearying and meaningless repetitions.  Especially after the last election, I felt the same way about politics.  I wore myself out over Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes.  And it changed nothing but my blood pressure.  I knew pretty much what was coming with this regime, though I confess it's happened faster, more thoroughly and relentlessly than I might have expected.  I didn't want to be doing play by play on self-defeating politics--especially not on that level--anymore.

So even before the election I had planned to transition out of this site into something that dealt more directly with my concerns as I age, as well as a site that seemed more honest about my point of view as it is particular to my age.

I didn't do so, partly out of inertia (a characteristic of aging, of course), partly because as small potatoes as this site's 10,000 hits a month may be, it's not nothing.  But the decisive factor was the world of pain I would likely be inviting by labeling a site--and myself--by age, and especially by my generation.  I couldn't think of an identity that would cover what I wanted to do.   And I definitely didn't want to be limited by defending the appallingly vilified baby boom generation.

So I've stuck with this site, though I've gradually added posts that reflect my newer point of view, which is from being older.  I am interested in the past I experienced, and look to it for texture and meaning, even if it isn't the most serious stuff in the world.  But I've noted that in terms of "hits" (which suggest but do not guarantee readers) these posts did pretty well. "The Lone Ranger Rides Again" is right up there with "100 Days of Solipsism."

(On another of my blogs, the less visited but personal favorite called A Blue Voice, the all-time most popular posts are my autobiographical exploration of "Christmas 1951."  I've thought about abandoning this blog for that one, and who knows?  I may still do it. But it currently gets far fewer visitors.)

But the point about writing about the future is, I don't necessarily share enough of the same present with the cultural mainstream.  I don't have the same references, I certainly don't have the same experiences--especially since I don't have (and don't want) a smart phone, nor do I text and skype and so on.  I'm not on Facebook or any social media.  So my experience is from an outsider, a minority point of view.

Well, maybe it always was.  And maybe, even without announcing my age and generational membership in every post like one of those smarmy "full disclosure" statements after 18 paragraphs of praising your employer or your brother's new book, I will almost helplessly indicate my point of view by the very references and even the vocabulary I employ.

In any case I'm not going to keep up any pretenses. Part of that is the attitude that suddenly arrived with my retirement from the comical responsibilities I did have for the past decade or so.  It happens to be perfectly expressed by one of those maddeningly repeated slogans on t-shirts and mugs: "Don't want to/don't need to/can't make me/ I'm retired."     

But there's also another pretense I'm giving up, which is that I'm competing for readers (sorry, I meant clicks) and power on the Internet.  If I cared about that, I'd be flogging this stuff on Facebook and Twitter, as well as learning all the dubious tricks of attracting "traffic."  You know what? Don't want to/don't need to/can't make me/ I'm retired.

Now back to the future which is already in progress... I said there were two basic problems I was dealing with in writing about the future (I should really make this another thread but...you got it.)

The second is the H.G. Wells problem.  At the end of his life, in the midst of his final illnesses, Wells wrote his final book, called Mind at the End of Its Tether.  Seventy years later, in his 2016 end of the year rants on The Well,  science fiction writer and futurist Bruce Sterling chose it as a cautionary tale about old guys writing about the future.   

He called it a "tragically ludicrous last book" that's totally apocalyptic. "In this book, the great speculator is elderly, exhausted, politically disillusioned, fatally ill and also the Atomic Bomb has been detonated. So he's like: Welp! That's it! No More Future!"

"For him, yes, that's true," Sterling notes. "Personally, he's toast: no more HG
Wells."  He calls it "just human egotism and frustration talking. Like: things didn't go my way, and the threats seem dire and mounting, and, therefore, there can be no world."

That's unfair to Wells and his work, but there is that one undeniable point: at a certain age, the end of the world is certain and likely to be soon.  That is, the end of the world for you.  There is the possible bias on your judgment therefore, to at least emotionally conclude that the world is also fated to end soon for everybody else.

Well, Wells wasn't wrong exactly--some of the failures he described may well be implicated in civilization's apocalyptic ending in historical time.  For me, it would be comforting to be able to believe that it's only my age that makes me fear for the future.  But as time goes on it becomes clearer to me that the climate crisis alone--and certainly in conjunction with the Fifth Great Extinction that's on track to happen--is going to vastly change the course of the future, and by most peoples' standards, for the worse.

There's plenty of evidence that those changes have begun, and plenty of science to suggest that the disruptions are going to get worse.  I have my ideas about the nature of the future into the next century, and it's not all shiny and bright.  There are a lot of hardships ahead in coming decades.  But there are also lives to lead that in some ways may be better lives, at least in terms of purpose and meaning.

But I have to be sensible that my intuitions may be colored by the imminence of my own future ending.  The nice way of putting it poetically is as a candle that flickers for awhile and suddenly blows out.  But the image that returns to me is of a figure bobbing in the ocean, suddenly disappearing into the depths and instantly covered by the sea, with no indication that anything was ever there.

But just as being old may color the future darker, being young colors the future just as much, and probably more violently.  An attraction to images of doom for some, but also identifying with the heroic survivors.  Or an anxiety, even denial, and an angry demand for hope.  The future is a fraught subject for everyone.

Besides, being older can also color the future brighter, based on doomsdays already survived.  In any case, it seems important to declare the age bias.  I just don't quite know how to do it.  But for the moment, it won't be by consigning myself to a geezer ghetto on the Internet, or by becoming an online Baby Boomer punching bag.

My philosophy of the Internet is "If you build it (or write it) they will come, or not."  As I wrote on another and since abandoned site: "This is the Internet I believe in: access to a backlist forever, from anywhere, at any time. An Internet for individuals as well as the swarm of the moment."

Maybe I don't go viral, but who wants to be a disease? I'd like to have readers, even lots of readers, who (by the way) really aren't the same as "clicks."  But in the end I write because that's what I do, that's been my purpose.  The Internet publishes it, for any reader in the world to find.  Anytime.  Now....or in the future.

A Story for Our Time? Well, For Mine Anyway

I had this clock on the wall in my bathroom, blue background, black numerals.  I liked it a lot.  Then a few months ago it started slowing down.  I changed the battery.  Pretty soon it slowed down again.  New batteries didn't help, and eventually it was losing hours.

I got another clock for that space in the bathroom, at a local thrift shop.  It had a gray, pebbled pattern surrounding the face, which coincidentally matches the colors and approximately the pattern of the surface around the sink.  (This is the original stuff from the 50s.)

That's pretty nice, but I still liked that blue clock.  So I mounted it in here, above my computer and to the right.  I decided I would treat it as an old-fashioned wind-up clock that you had to reset every day.  But most of the time I forgot, so it had any old time.  When I wanted to know the actual time, I depended on the computer time down there in the right hand corner.

Then about a month ago, the computer clock stopped telling the actual time.  I reset it using the various Internet clocks, like nist.gov.  The first time it worked but the next time I turned the computer on, it was wrong again.  Then it refused to update--just an error message. At the moment, that clock is off by 5 hours and the calendar by 3 days.

I'm told this may have something to do with a battery that's just for the clock.  It's an old computer.  The operating system is so old that Microsoft won't support it anymore.

  But here's the thing.  The blue clock on the wall started keeping perfect time again.  It has for several weeks now.

The Internet of Nothing

I'm currently having Internet connection problems, due almost certainly to wiring coming into the house, which also affects the landline phone.  It's acting like a short circuit--a problem we've had before in this old house (built in the 1950s and added onto.  The previous/original owner liked to do his own wiring.)

Right now it seems we have reasonably reliable Internet only when the sun shines.  Which given that it's November on the North Coast, prone to rain and fog, isn't very reliable at all.  (How could this be?  Wet wiring, a dodgy connection, heat expands to solidify it, how the hell should I know.)

Anyway another object lesson in fragility, on the folly of assuming things, especially in ignorance, as if things will always be as they are, and the Internet works by magic.

So consequently posting here will likely be dodgy for awhile.

On the bright side, we got a lot of rain in October and a fair amount this month, so we are the one area in California that is now officially out of drought.

Hello, I Must Be Going

My decision to step away from contemporary political commentary is personal, so my way of mourning and saying goodbye to the US presidency--and perhaps, along the way, examining how if not why I felt about it as I did--is also personal.

In the past couple of years, I've said goodbye to a couple of areas of activity that involved writing of some sort.  Though they were jobs that given better alternatives I wouldn't have chosen, I put a lot of myself into them.  So my way of freeing myself from them was to go back over the work, retrospectively, with maybe some attempts to summarize if not evaluate.  And when I did that obsessively enough, I was done with it.  And I can move into the David Letterman phase, of wondering why I did it in the first place, and who was that person.

In terms of this blog, it's mostly about allocating remaining time and energies, as well as about competence and audience.  I feel less competent to understand this time and place merely by trying to keep up with the most available information sources.  Clearly this election showed that this approach is insufficient at best.  For one thing I was serious that only Carl Jung could understand what happened.  I'll be looking again particularly at the volume of his collected works called Civilization in Transition, in which he writes a lot about the 30s and 40s, the Nazis and Europe.

Generally though I need to observe and write not as some featureless cultural/political commentator but as I am at this age, with those limitations and those experiences of years that I feel called to examine more closely.  So that's what I plan to do, on an entirely new site starting in the new year.  That's actually been on my mind for at least the past year or two.

In terms of audience, there are at best a handful of people I know of who read this blog regularly, and I know most of their names. I'm grateful for their allegiance and compliments.  I hope they follow me to a new venue, and I hope others join them there.  There's the question of social media participation to help spread the word, but I haven't answered that for myself yet.  Facebook still seems more like an unsightly disease than an opportunity, but maybe I should revisit that.

My way of saying goodbye to the enterprise I've been engaged in here at Dreaming Up Daily, and before that at what's now called American Dash (where I started in 2002 ) will be to say goodbye to President Obama and the American presidency. Why I'm doing it that way will become apparent when I start it.

I won't deny that being sickened by politics now has played a role in turning away from it, as has decreasing faith in conventional efforts of any kind to forestall the coming darkness.  I wish those who do fight the good fight well, but I'm not one of them, and it seems pointless to report on them here, or on the humiliations and degradation to come.  I have no role except waning witness, and  I've witnessed to enough.  It's time to deepen some meaning, to explore the past and future in different ways.

For some years I maintained a number of blogs, experimenting with reaching audiences specific to particular areas.  I've essentially abandoned most of them.  Social media and phone aps have absorbed the old blog audience (so "nobody blogs anymore.")

And that's part of the general competence question.  I don't participate in the social media smartphone Uber (what a well chosen name!) culture, so there's too much now that I don't understand through direct experience.  And I have no desire to get that experience.  (I do note however that both David Remnick in his previously quoted essay and President Obama in a recent interview expressed great concern for social media influence on the information people get and believe, which Remnick cites as a factor in this election.)

It's also been awhile since I've more generally been considered a competent observer, outside the fantasy world of a self-published blog.  Partly that's due to the contraction of publishing outlets but a lot of it has been prejudices about age.  One of the prejudices being that if somebody isn't well-known and/or in a powerful position by the age of 50, they are no longer worth listening to.  On the other hand, at 70 I accept that there is some basis for this now. With limited new experience, perspective becomes more and more important, and it gets to be time to be out front about that.

What I did here during the campaign however was apply a little judgment to extracting what seemed the most interesting and most important news or comments originated by others on the web, as both a daily report and a kind of diary.  That turned out to be an almost transcendental mockery of itself, and certainly calls into question the entire effort.  But for those who wish to go back over it, it will still be here, along with everything else that lives down on the server farm, accessible to--but mostly ignored by--the entire Internet-enabled world.

Some of the concerns of these blogs I started have also faded, but others--like comments on books--can simply be incorporated in one new site.  I'll probably keep adding to the archive of my past work and links on line at kowincidence, because there is past work I am proud of, and I have a fan base (considerably smaller than it used to be, though) at Soul of Star Trek.

I also have in mind refining the original mission of Dreaming Up Daily, which was oriented towards the future.  That may result in another new site eventually.  But that's too much information--or speculation--already.

So I'll stay through the rest of the calendar year.  But I am telling you---I must be... going.

The Internet of Remembering

Trinidad Head June 30, 2016.  Unfiltered, here to stay.

Reposted from Thursday, so it might last the whole weekend!

In the New Yorker this week, Casey Johnston wrote  about various social media platforms that wipe away photos and text after a brief period, like 24 hours.  Now you see it, now you won't.  This is much prized, Johnston writes, especially by younger posters whose identity is formed in the moment, and may be obsolete and even embarrassing before long.  This "satisfies a craving for immediacy and ephemerality, one that has lately grown to encompass all of social media." Johnston calls this the Internet of Forgetting.

Well, I am not young and that is not my Internet.  Time and its contents helplessly obsess me.  I crave scope, so I can maybe make some sense of it. The past has a different reality now that I have more of it myself. Rediscovering elements of the past and reflecting on them, connecting and reconciling, all add something necessary to my present.  Besides, these discoveries as well as re-discoveries in both their original context and in mine now, also constitute much of my entertainment.

So fortunately for me, there is also an Internet of Remembering.  There are search functions to vast data, various Wikis and especially YouTube.  On YouTube I can access (as I have recently) radio broadcasts from the 1940s, particular baseball or basketball games from--well, I haven't even explored how far back.  Interviews from the 50s, movies from the 30s (ever heard of the Torchy Blane series?  Neither had I. It's pretty good. Besides which, it may have been an inspiration for Lois Lane.)

Reading about past events in historical context, I can find documents and publications of the time online.  I can even see the faces and hear the voices, from at least FDR on.  The real stuff, including photos, not a description, reaching a hand back in time.

 There are surprising snippets of performances by legendary actors, though unfortunately not so many whole plays.  Can't find in any library an obscure treatise on ethics and psychology by one of the greatest classic science fiction authors (and least known outside the s/f community), Olaf Stapledon?  Search online, and ye shall find the entire text.  And so on.

A recent instance of personal memory...I remember one Saturday morning when I was 8.  I was watching "Space Patrol"--an episode in which Buzz Corey and crew used their "time drive" to travel to 1956.  They mentioned that they were traveling from the 30th century, when "Space Patrol" takes place.

My mother caught some of this.  She asked me if I knew what century we were living in.  I don't think I did, exactly.  She said it was the 20th century, and the Space Patrol people were coming from the 30th.  She mentioned that she used to listen to Buck Rogers on the radio, and he had traveled to the 25th century. I probably remember this because I learned something about time.

I recall Saturday mornings when there was one outer space show after another--"Tom Corbett, Space Cadet," "Rocky Jones, Space Ranger," "Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers" and "Space Patrol."  I researched these shows on the Internet in 2010 and discovered enough to figure out that they were probably all on during only one year: 1954.

  I was writing fiction based on my childhood, and for reasons having to do with other events in the chapter, I selected a certain October Saturday to revisit these shows, and how my friends and I used them in play.  Then I found a "Space Patrol" episode guide that described the show scheduled on the Saturday I had selected. From the description it seemed very likely it was the very one I remember, when my mother and I had that conversation.  (I blogged about this at the time.)

Well, it's 2016 and many "Space Patrol" episodes are now on YouTube, though not always under their original titles.  Also YouTube can be difficult to search systematically.  But the other night, I happened upon and saw this episode--the one I last saw with my mother in our living room in 1954.

But the Internet of remembering has more functions than revisiting personal memories.  Here's another YouTube show I watched recently.  I've been reading Arthur Miller lately--this latest Miller jag started when I read a roundtable discussion of contemporary playwrights, and one of them quoted Miller.  I then found on the Internet the interview with Miller that contained that quote, and more along that line.  That started me reading some of his nonfiction and lesser known plays, and re-reading his autobiography. So on a whim I went back and searched YouTube for television interviews.

I immediately found an interview he did with Charlie Rose in 1992.  When the conversation veered to that now historical moment--the 1992 election campaign and the rise of Ross Perot, a purported billionaire businessman outsider--I got chills, especially when Miller said: "When a leadership arises in a country that believes it can lead by using the darkness in men, it's probably unstoppable at a certain point."  He'd grown up watching Hitler's rise in Germany.

Does anybody--even those who lived through it, as I did-- remember what it felt like with Ross Perot in 1992?  I didn't.  From 2016, Perot now looks like an early and milder version of Trump, thanks to this interview.  There's precedent, a continuum of sorts perhaps. And people were worried then.  (Miller thought America was too diverse to fall completely for a dictator of darkness, which of course may be our salvation now.)  And to add to all this co-incidence (which means things happening at the same time, like the past in the present), Miller once described the function of playwriting as "remembering."

About many things, it doesn't pay to forget.  The Internet of Remembering is important to our survival, as well as the lives of "the olds" as Johnston says that tech folks call anybody over 30.  So in my case I guess it's "the ancients."

Emerson for the Day

“I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.”
Thoreau

Happy birthday to Martha, Bruce, Grace Ann and all my other natal twins. (And I'm not committing to this being my favorite movie line of all time--that's the original poster's opinion.  But I guess it's close.)

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

A blogger called cfk does a Bookflurries: Bookchat thread over at Kos on Wednesdays. Part of the thread is discussing authors with names starting with a particular letter or letters. This past Wednesday it was R, and in suggesting a few authors that hadn't been included yet, I was reminded of poet Theodore Roethke. I wondered if anyone read him anymore. It turns out that cfk lives near where Roethke did, and took the above photo of his house.

Roethke was a 20th century American poet who died in 1963, though his last book was published in 1964. I recall sitting in my college library freshman year, reading some of the poems from that book in a poetry magazine. A couple of them impressed me, and one in particular grabbed me and moved me. Even if my poetry profs would scoff at it as sentimental.

And the first line of "Wish for a Young Wife" embarrassed me because it's so obviously sexual, and I was so very young and callow. But the rest of the poem spoke to me, mirrored my own feelings, and reading it again (its rhythms still alive in my memory), it still does. So here it is, and I dedicate it to all the loves of my life, including those lovely young women--known and unknown-- of college days, and a little beyond...

WISH FOR A YOUNG WIFE

My lizard, my lively writher,
May your limbs never wither,
May the eyes in your face
Survive the green ice
Of envy's mean gaze;
May you live out your life
Without hate, without grief,
And your hair ever blaze,
In the sun, in the sun,
When I am undone,
When I am no one.

---Theodore Roethke

The Daily Babble

I'm a computer stuck-in-the mud: I use PCs with Microsoft browser, email and word processor. But I'm getting pretty sick of it all. Basically because they keep changing it, and making "improvements" that almost always cost me more time and effort to do what I want to do.

I've got Vista on my desktop. It's not so bad, I've gotten used to it, and I've learned to control the Microsoft Updates. But HP--or somebody--snuck something by me, and now switching between windows is two to three times more time consuming, and I can't figure out even where to find the change it made.

The new version of Explorer was snuck in when I had this machine in the shop, and now cutting and pasting for this blog takes a couple of extra steps each time. My new laptop has the post-Vista operating system, version 7, which is supposed to be so much better, but for my purposes, is just more complicated and worse. Plus I can't work on it for more than a few minutes before some message pops up on the screen demanding that I update this or that, or some damn thing.

And what's with Windows Mail? When email started, the email couldn't be read by anything but the Microsoft program that created it, which made it impossible to store email and read it on another machine, without importing it into the same email program. And damn if however many years later, this hasn't been fixed. Windows Mail isn't read by anything else--it's incompatible with Word and associated programs. I realize most people trash their email immediately. But this is the only way we get mail these days. I have a trunk full of letters from pre-email days. It would be nice to be able to keep letters I receive electronically without copying them into word processing and/or printing them individually. Is that really too much to ask?

I've managed to hold onto my 1998 version of Word, which is the only thing that instantly boots up when I access it. I'm staying away from new versions of Word and Office like the plague they seem to be. Though I don't know how much longer the Lords of the Internet will let me.

And these PCs, apparently loaded with capabilities which remain completely hidden. No explanations, no logical paths, no manual (of course)--print or online. Just a lot of ways to waste tremendous amounts of time and energy, often with no result, because they make a gazillion variations on their machines, and apparently can't keep track of how to do stuff on each one of them.

So that's that. As for these blogs, again I realize how much time I spend on them with little excuse in terms of numbers of readers. I like doing these little essays or feature stories, almost like a real magazine or something, but I don't seem to be doing much else with my non-jobs time. So instead of running away from the traditional blogging concept, I'm experimenting with moving closer to it. It might even be starting to look like tweeting. Don't know how long that will last, but if things seem to be changing around here, don't be too surprised.

We're Back!

We're back on line--let's hope it lasts (for both of us.) I got my computer back--it was the power supply, though there were some anxious moments when it was diagnosed as the motherboard--but it doesn't seem quite right yet, so we'll see. I'm not giving it up again, though, until my new laptop arrives.

As for Barack, his speech at George Mason U. (above) continued the campaign enthusiasm--and response. Yeah, and wasn't it like just last week that his presidency was over, and everybody had their analysis for why he was failing? Now with votes accumulating in the House--even Dennis the K.--it seems like he's peaking at the right time. Marc Ambinder at length:

"As Democrats move ever closer to the magic number of 216, it's unsurprising that the language used to describe the debate has lifted itself out of the depths of mere politics and vaulted into the realm of virtue. Courage is the most essential value. Who is the Antigone -- who built the "dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear," as Martin Luther King put it. For whom has this fight been easy? For whom has it been hard?

Whatever you believe about health care reform, it's hard to escape the conclusion that for one party, opposing reform was expedient, and for another, supporting it required the summoning of an uncommon degree of bravery and a resistance to every base political instinct. (There are plenty of Democrats who held out because they wanted something else and knew they could get it. They're not very courageous. It's easy to spot the difference.)

Why has Barack Obama risked his presidency for this crusade? Why has he spent more time on this domestic issue than any other president has spent on any other issue in recent memory? Why has he done so despite the manifest public unpopular of the case? The answer opponents will give is some variant of Obama's conviction that he must impose his solution on America no matter the cost, even to him; that his actions are part of a larger crusade; that he cannot legitimize government as an active force for good without government taking over the health care system. (Chicago politics, socialism, Saul Alinsky.) But this argument doesn't track with an argument that opponents have been desperate to make: that health care is not popular now and won't be popular in time to reward Democrats.

And it fortifies, indirectly, the argument that Obama is uniquely courageous: his stubborness in the face of public opinion, in the face of advisers who begged him to move on, in the face of a revolt from his base, is based upon his own conviction that what he's doing is the right thing to do, primarily, and upon electoral politics secondarily."

Sure, it's still a long way from "Health is not for sale." And it's of course insane that these baby steps should be so outrageously resisted. But it's not nothing. In fact, it's another miracle, like November 2008 and January 20, 2009. Yes, we can. And with any luck, by Monday it'll be yes, we did.

Aliens have invaded my computer, my car and front tooth--what's next? See post below.

The Daily Babble

It's been awhile since I've done one of these. Not to distract you from the really important news, like the attempts to exploit the addled rantings of an ex-congressman, or the Chief Justice's hissy fit. But I'm afraid I'm drawing attention to myself, something that of course the Internet doesn't usually permit.

I just wanted to warn you--both of you--that I might be "off the air" for awhile. My laptop more or less died a few months ago, and I've been slow to replace it. Now this computer, my main almost brand new desktop, has developed a problem, I think. I had trouble getting it to turn on yesterday (no 60s jokes, please, not here in Humboldt), and today it refused. I tried everything I could think of--plugging into a different power strip, disconnecting and reconnecting the power cord, and usually different rhythms in pressing the power button--one long holding it down, a bunch of short jabs, etc. but nothing happened.

I called the computer doctors who said it sounded like the power whatcacallit, only $50 bucks to replace plus the $80 an hour to replace it. And maybe 3 or 4 working days at best before I got it back. They said I might be able to recover some files while I'm there, so I can go on making a living.

Only trouble was I couldn't get it there right away, because my car won't start. Not an unknown problem for the last six months, but the mechanics can't tell what's wrong, and I'm contemplating a different approach (different mechanic, mainly.) So the old Volvo sits out there motionless.

I was about to head over to campus to find Margaret and see when she could give me and my computer a ride. I turned off the light, and as I passed it, I hit the computer power button one more time. It went on. So ever since, I've been backing up, doing the work I need to do for the rest of the week and into next, and sending it out. I had to cancel an appointment, and miss my discount day at the groc. But as long as the thing is on, so must I be.

My slowness in dealing with the car, as well as a few other things I should be taking care of, is partly due to a visit to the dentist. Where he told me that the work on one solitary tooth will cost me more than a new (quite used) car and laptop computer combined. It will cost more than I made writing my theatre column for the local weekly--for all last year. The work of 24 columns will disappear in two hours.

I got a second opinion--or rather, the same opinion from a second dentist, yesterday. So it will have to be done, and for the next year, I'll be working for the dentist. That's the one job. The other is the part-time "communications specialist" work for two university departments, both of which are currently on the list for "program elimination," as HSU has to cut another million plus from it's incredible shrinking budget. So money in is becoming a non-renewable resource. Can't say the same for money out.

Compared to the future I've been dealing with for planet Earth and human civilization, it's all pretty trivial. But it's my trivial. My little so-called life. And here on my little so-called blog, I can rant about it--at least until the computer goes off.

Well, be seeing you. Sometime.

Snow Flyer

Lots of snow in lots of places this winter--this photo is from Washington, D.C. Before global heating changed the predictable winters of western PA, snow was the default condition from late November through much of March. In my 1950s childhood, a white Christmas was such a fixed event that the subject of my first play--in third grade--was the amazing Christmas when it didn't snow (or at least, not until the last minute.) So it was that riding down the hills on my Flexible Flyer was a regular adventure, and Frosty the Snowman was a myth made from the world around me.

Where I live now it never snows, and I miss it--especially the silence, the muffling white of it. In the promo for his winter album, Sting mentions the beauty and mystery the blanket of snow brought to the industrial town where he grew up, and though my town was something like that but more picturesque--the snow did have a transformative effect. I loved walking in the town during and just after a snowfall, also in the city of Pittsburgh. (I did arrange my life so I could survive without driving in the snow.) Even in New York, where snow quickly became blackened slush, walking in the snow was exhilarating. In fact, when I realized my brief residence in Manhattan would be coming to an end, I walked from midtown above 50th down to 13th Street in the swirling snow--my last Manhattan memory.