One thing I learned from my fundamentalist upbringing, which has served me well: I have never expected or needed the world around me to live by my values.
One thing I learned from my fundamentalist upbringing, which has served me well: I have never expected or needed the world around me to live by my values.
Erik Davis has a worthwhile piece on the supposed trend of a Silicon Valley Christianity. He calls it Christian transhumanism. When I read things like this, I feel that same discombobulation I felt when I first learned of The Church of the Papal Mainframe in Doctor Who.
So how’s climate change going for y’all?
On Wednesday, April 2nd, a big storm rolled through the area. Thankfully, we were spared the worst of it. Many, many people–including folks in the area–were not so lucky.
We went to the basement when the tornado warning was issued for our area at around 11pm. While we were down there, we found a few leaks. One was in the wall:
And, bizarrely, one was flowing like a water feature up from the floor:
We were able to put a bucket under the wall leak but there were also some prolific leaks in the back of the basement. A neighbor said his rain gauge measured 4.5" inches of rain over the course of that night, so there was a great deal of water flowing into our basement.
Near the end of the tornado warning, our power went out–which means the sump pump stopped running. Once the warning ended, I started bailing out the sump pit and continued doing so until 2am, when the rain substantially stopped. I wouldn’t even want to guess how many gallons of water I took upstairs to the kitchen drain. (All drains in the basement just empty back into the sump pit!) The power came back on about ten minutes after I stopped bailing.
Rachel then spent the next couple of hours sweeping the remaining water into the sump pit and using the shop vac on our water feature in the floor until it finally stopped flowing. The good news is that neither the furnace nor the water heater suffered any damage.
The next day, Rachel and I felt like we had hangovers. But we bought a generator, which will help us make sure we can run the sump pump (and anything else) the next time the power goes out. We looked at battery backup systems for the sump pump but the generator will serve that need for the time being. We also have a plan for patching the leaks once we manage to get two dry days in a row.
We’re increasingly thinking in terms of preparation, in case weather unpredictability increases due to climate change. We’ve never had a generator before, because it seemed mostly unnecessary. Now it feels judicious to make the investment. We’ll see.
In the course of a tariff discussion with friends in a group text, I threw out this statement of political priorities and, on reflection, I do think it captures most of what I care about at the moment:
In any case, my preferred outcome is not on the table: managed degrowth of the economy; discrediting and banishing the American dream of increasing consumerism and reliance on personal debt; and breaking up Big Tech and fundamentally slowing and limiting technological advancement.
If you need a cause, if you need a purpose, if you need a crusade that will do the most to produce the world you want, it is this: Class war. The same damn class war! Taking wealth away from the rich and giving that wealth to the less rich. Our democracy, such as it is, will never, ever be stabilized until that happens. Do not allow yourself to be hypnotized by the myriad results of the rich having too much money. Keep your mind instead on the problem itself. The rich are too rich.
We’re all okay this morning. Thanks for the expressions of concern. No significant damage but it was a crazy night. I’ll tell the story when I get some time today.
Power is out. I get to use my hurricane lamp! Also, we have plenty of candles around, being pagans. 😂
Tornado warning, so we’re all in the creepy basement for the next twenty minutes or so. I hope everyone stays safe tonight!
It’s very windy here at Green Man’s Grotto. Our resident pond frog is taking in the air before the storms rush in tonight.
Jesse Welles, “Trees” 🎵
We have some severe weather headed our way so we’ve been watching Max Velocity live on YouTube. His coverage is so much better than traditional media. It’s strange, watching this shift to new media. And sometimes it really is an improvement.
I used Kent Rollins’ recipe for homemade tortillas and quesadillas. I’m sure a Mexican grandma would look on my tortillas with pity, but it turned out pretty good. 😄 (That emoji is for you, John.)
Sand cherry and jane magnolia blooms
Rachel just reminded me that I had a Tabasco sauce tie collection in the early nineties. I loved loud ties in my teenage years. She thought I was cute. 😄
People — many of them friends I’ve known to be otherwise reasonable — have become so polluted by feeding on algorithmic despair that they’ve lost any sense of what is real.
In such a state, you lose your mind, which is to really say you lose your body. You feed on and then feed into the despair, spread it, becoming vectors for imaginal viruses which plague your unconscious bodily dreaming.
We imagine the world as unsafe, and then we dream the world as unsafe, and then feel in our bodies that the world is unsafe. And this is an inverted order of things, the opposite of how our bodies come to knowledge.
This is why time outdoors–in the sun, in the woods, doing something or simply being–is often an antidote to anxiety. It is taking your view of the world from reality around you, not adopting the timeline’s point of view as your touchpoint for reality.
Post from two years ago: The Tao makes no effort at all, yet there is nothing it doesn’t do
This morning, my 78 year-old mom called to tell me she has the flu so I’ve been talking to the pharmacy and the doctor all morning to figure out what we need to do. And then I got pulled over on the way into work and given a warning for speeding. So the last three hours have been a hell of a day
Come and get it! I used Kent Rollins’ recipe. So easy.
We were trying to remember Pete’s method for pork chops on the grill. Eventually I found the video. Bonus: his reminiscence of working with his grandfather, which puts a touch of melancholy in me.
Solstice ashes have been spread on the garden. Equinox fire is burning.
Business idea: hardware store with a spot in the corner for pie and coffee. Black coffee only. We’ll stock little creamers and sugar packets for the weak willed. Smoking preferred.
I didn’t get to have my Agent Cooper coffee and cherry pie at the diner I stopped at the other day. (They were out of cherry pie.) But Rachel took pity on me.
Are we sure there’s a “masculinity crisis”? Or maybe the problem is that we’re looking to pop culture or internet influencers to understand what it means to be a good man? It doesn’t need to be hard. No need for a set of rules. What qualities do you admire in the good men you know? Be and do that.
Our town had a successful tornado siren test last week. Then, days later, we had a tornado warning as a ferocious storm came through and the siren didn’t go off. Then it went off randomly at just after midnight today, on a clear and lovely night. So all is going well here.
Finished watching “Twin Peaks: The Return” (aka, season three). I almost stopped watching it early on. This is clearly Lynch at his most experimental–and that’s not why I watch TV. When I watch TV or movies, I’m just looking for entertainment; I do intellectual activity elsewhere. (I say this only as a description of my own habits. Yours will obviously be different.)
I stuck with it, though, and I did feel much more engaged by the end. There are certain images that will certainly stick with me. But I seriously doubt that I will put in the work to comb through the series and interpret it.
In short, it’s worth watching if you’re invested in Twin Peaks. There is plenty of material there if you want to work on your own interpretation. But I will warn you that Lynch is uninterested in fan service; in fact, he seems to be opposed to it. You’ll get one or two satisfying story resolutions but you will end the series with a whole lot of questions.