REPORT on JUNE FIRST
Now begins a short, very hot, summer series of trials of people we once thought of as responsible, civil, and thoughtful. We probably can’t strip them of their illusions but the question is whether we can recognize our own fantasies.
For the last twenty years I’ve been blogging in an attempt to catch myself fleeing around the corner with my success and pride clutched under my arm. I’ve yanked open closet doors in pursuit of the truth, revealing a genome full of glitches, dreams full of moth holes, and pretensions that dissolved — or should have — dating back to the age of Agriculture, the clanking oppression of the Industrial Revolution, and the flickering glow of the self-righteous Enlightenment. It can’t all be discarded because we may be looking at a planetary survival collapse and the scraps of the past may be what save the remnant.
I don’t know how long “blogging” will last. Indeed, how long this computer or my pickup or this house or me myself will last. A blink. Last summer’s endless rain produced wild growth of upstart “trees” — I rather liked their shade and screening — but this spring they are all dead of the cold. And so it goes. The grass is tall again and this time I’ve ordered a weed eater that is battery-operated like a flashlight. No real evidence that it works, but battery-operated cars pass my house every morning on their way to work. A few nights ago a hobby-sized drone passed to the east just above the treetops, soundless but flashing green and red lights like a proper Piper Cub.
My neighbors to the north always wanted to buy this house but never made enough money. At least they had a mostly empty lot to their north, but now it is a wall built for a meat-cutting plant that will specialize in wild meat because a man wants to make Valier a headquarters for skilled snipers which he insists is about hunting deer though his targets will be almost too far away to carry back to the pickup so they can be brought to the meat cutter.
To the east when I came was open “prairie” as the neighbors called it, but that’s all built up now. As soon as Loretta built a very nice garage she had always wanted, her son-in-law made it the seed of a Texas-style ranch of broken machinery. (She left to live with a widower.) Much of what I wanted is gone now, but I had it, I did it. To quote “Mrs. McThing” (I was a high school star in the play), I didn’t just say I was gonna do it, I did it. Live quietly and write, that is.
I’m in debt in a way I swore I never would be again because a vicious hail storm punched holes in my roof, my garbage can, and the canopy of my pickup. The re-roofer discovered the vents of my gas furnace and water heater were corroded and unusable. Research revealed that gas is far more dangerous in old buildings that anyone is realizing. So an electric water heater and a wall furnace that vents outside. The gas meter itself was also leaking and had to be replaced. Now my energy bill has doubled.
The more I give away books, the more I can’t resist buying. They are not novels but my doorway into the new science and thought that hasn’t got a name yet. They had already used “modern,” “post-modern” and no one knew what “post-post-modern” meant anyway. I call it an explosion of knowledge, still unassimilated and treated by many as mere sci-fi foolery. Their 19th century religion persists unchanged because it never was real or realistic and because they don’t want to know — anything. Just health tips, you know, like brushing your teeth. I try to shower more often.
Pandemic. We knew. We didn’t want to know. We addressed it more quickly and efficiently than anyone expected, but left hundreds of thousands dead or damaged. The Black Death of Europe wiped out so many farmers that the climate changed and the Red Death of Smallpox in America did the same thing. Will our climate change now? It already is.
I hadn’t bought new clothes for two decades but I couldn’t get to the laundromat during the pandemic and resorted to buying a few new things. Now I don’t recognize my own clothes. I like to wear the ones I remember.
Maybe this era should be called “Reform from Stem to Stern.” Montana is now run by criminals. The US Supreme Court is so rotten that even the wives are crooked. Repubs cling to their madman. But I hear rumbling and shifting and new coalitions forming.
I’m supposed to write a thousand words a day, every day, which is a rule I made up and imposed on myself. There’s no reason I can’t break it. I just passed 800 words and I think I’d rather go read a book. I’ll think some more tomorrow.
