When I came back home after getting stuck in California due to the bad weather in Kansas, my first thought was to get my car started. But that had to wait because the temperature here in Charm City was in the single digits and I caught (I think) a flu on the way back. So I was stuck inside until I got over that enough I could go outside and look the car over.
I’ll go into more detail about my adventures coming home eventually, but for now just know that the plan was to visit my brother and family in Oceano for a couple weeks during the holidays by train. I would enjoy a lovely trip out to the west coast in a sleeper car roomette with all my meals provided for and just a carry-on bag with everything I needed for the trip. I’d sent all the clothes and other things I would need while there to him by mail. The plan was to travel light, kick back, and enjoy the ride there and back.
I’ve done that trip by train over the holidays several times with no trouble and it almost worked this time too. Snow and ice getting to Chicago had slowed the trains down but never stopped them. But on the trip back my train was stopped in Albuquerque and had to go back to Los Angeles due to bad weather in Kansas. This eventually turned into an additional two weeks in California, which I didn’t mind very much at all except the weather in Baltimore was getting cold and snowy enough I started worrying about the house and the car. I have an app now that lets me fiddle with the home’s thermostat setting remotely and check the outside temperature. I had the water to the house turned off…SOP whenever I travel…so I was not worried about frozen pipes. But I started obsessing about the roof leaking. That’s happened several times since I’ve owned the house…it’s a flat roof…and I worry about it every time it snows. But the house was fine when I got back. Life was simpler when I was a renter.
My Mercedes-Benz is an ‘E’ class diesel sedan. You don’t want to be leaving a diesel sitting for long times in cold weather. I was pretty sure the local suppliers were pumping diesel with the usual anti-gel additives for cold weather before I left, but now I was also worried about the DEF tank heaters and the batteries. The batteries (a Mercedes ‘E’ class has two) would be running the DEF tank heaters the entire time and I was keeping my fingers crossed that they had enough juice to tide them over until I managed to get back. Since they’d just been replaced last year I should have been more confident than I was but I tend to over think these things. Also, I’d had to replace the DEF tank heaters at 120k (at a cost of nearly two grand!) and the car has almost 210k on it now. I was told then that the famous Daimler incremental improvement regime did not extend to the DEF tank heaters (it did apparently extend to the NOx detectors I’d had to replace at around 50k, but that put them into warranty territory).
When I was finally able to go outside and start the car up I was encouraged by the fact that the key-dongles opened the doors and flashed the lights without hesitation. I still had batteries. I inserted the key…my car was made before keyless go was standard…and clicked it over twice to the full power on position. I let it sit there for a few seconds while the car went through all the sounds of coming awake. My car doesn’t have glow plugs but, so I’m told, pre-heaters in the fuel injectors. I gave them time to come up to temperature. Then I turned the key to start.
I have Never heard my car groan so painfully at cold start, but it was just for an instant and then it turned and caught right away. I felt a wave of relief. The plan was to just let it sit and idle until the engine got up to temperature, then drive it around the neighborhood for a bit and see what the tire pressure monitor says. I sat for a while just listening to the car.
Apart from the factory and distributor I am its first and only owner. I grew up in a period where the rule of thumb was you bought the car new and drove it for about 50k, then traded it in for another car. Wash, rinse, repeat. You did that because as cars got older they were more trouble. But that was Detroit back before Japan started kicking their butts, and it was never what you did with a Mercedes-Benz. Unless you were an empty status symbol seeker you kept your Mercedes for life. Especially if it is a diesel. And besides, the home I grew up in was a do it yourself, waste not want not, replace only if you can’t repair household. I kept my first car, a 1973 Ford Pinto for 136k. What I learned from it was you hold onto a car you come to know its every little quirk and sound, and intuitively how it behaves on this or that road surface. You and the car are one.
So I sat there listening to my car after it had sat for weeks in snow and ice and single digit temperatures and I could tell it was feeling sluggish though it was idling smoothly. That muscular diesel sound has always been reassuring to me in cold weather. I could see it needed road salt cleaned off it even though it hadn’t been driven anywhere. I assumed that was from passing salt trucks on my street, and splashing road slush onto it from passing cars. The windshield had a dusting of road salt and I pressed the wiper stalk to clear it off. Nothing happened.
Oh boy… So I popped the hood and got out to take a look. Ice was bulging out of my washer fluid tank. I was appalled. I use a special Mercedes washer fluid concentrate which I mix to stay liquid at -10 degrees and it never got that cold here while I was away. I popped the trunk and got out the bottle of washer fluid mix I top off the reservoir with. It was fine, no ice, not even a hint of it. But the reservoir under the hood had frozen. Someone during one of my service or car wash visits had topped off the reservoir with their own washer fluid and it wasn’t rated down to the temperatures we’d had. I had to go back inside, mix up some more washer fluid, and get a chisel to clear the ice out of the reservoir while I kept topping the reservoir off with good washer fluid.
Eventually I got it cleared of ice but the washer motor still wouldn’t run. I figured either it was now damaged and had to be replaced, or a fuse had blown when I made the first attempt at running it. So I made an appointment with the mechanics I use to have it looked at. In the meantime the engine was at temperature now, so it was time to take the car for a wee shakedown drive.
I’m here to tell you that there is no rental car I will ever enjoy driving more than my car. It felt like coming home sitting in its driver seat and navigating my way through the neighborhood. The car responded to my touch of the wheel and my foot on the pedals like an old friend. I could feel the road under me like I hadn’t with the rental cars I’d had in California. It was wonderful. I think there and then I promised myself no more train rides this year. I’ll drive it to Walt Disney World later in March. Maybe again in June for Gay Days.
Surprisingly the tire pressure monitor was telling me that I still had the correct air pressure in all four tires, despite the single digit temperatures. I tried the washer squirter one more time. This time, the engine compartment at temperature, it worked perfectly. All it needed was to be warmed up and the last of the ice inside melted. So I cancelled the mechanics appointment. Then I drove up I-83 to the suburbs and filled the tank with fresh diesel.
Apparently it’s the only fish in that tank, which could be, and I sincerely hope is, because that kind of fish doesn’t take well to others. So I’m told by people who keep aquariums, you have to be careful about introducing others into the tank. But it had an audience that it clearly enjoyed as much as the public enjoyed visiting it. And then it lost its audience, and it stopped eating. Tell me that wasn’t depression. Just a fish you say?
In the night I heard him whining and yapping, and when I turned the lights on his feet were making running gestures and his body jerked and his eyes were wide open, but it was only a night bear. I awakened him and gave him some water. This time he went to sleep and didn’t stir all night. In the morning he was still tired. I wonder why we think the thoughts and emotions of animals are simple.
– John Steinbeck, “Travels With Charley”.
Deep within all of us is the beating heart of life on Earth.
[And Also…] This from Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner.bsky.social?) at Blue Sky…
Imagine spending your life being a second-generation NASA employee — she [Janet Petro] was running NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center before this week — and having it come to this.
A lot of people are making a lot of decisions already this week that should stay with them for life.
I started feeling a sore throat, and having a rasping cough the second day of my train ride back home, and hoped it was just the dryness of the heated air in the train. But no. By the time I got home I was ready to admit I’d caught a flu, despite having had the shot. Not the first time that’s happened to me. Back home I was weak as a kitten, barely able to climb the stairs to get myself into bed. At the age I am now, 71, these things hit me really hard.
Hemingway wrote a passage in one of this stories where a guy was asked how he went broke. The answer was “gradually, and then suddenly.” I’m here to tell you that’s how you get old too. Gradually, and then suddenly. Two therapists I have visited, one when I was feeling lonely and suicidal and the other much later after mom passed away, both told me that I “present young.” I’m pretty sure that wasn’t about my fashion choices, but something about me that, to the therapist, suggested my mindset. And it’s true that, unless I’m looking in a mirror, or more painfully at the skin on the back of my hands and arms, I still see myself as a young man. Catching a flu now, at this age, yanks me out of that mindset pretty forcefully. But not entirely.
I’m not afraid of dying…death isn’t a thing we ever know because by definition if you’re dead you stop knowing anything. So you won’t know you’re dead, or even that moment it happens. But seeing it coming can be unpleasant. It isn’t death I worry about, it’s decaying. I don’t want to go slowly. Especially now that I’m at that senior stage in life where the internal young man mindset gets scary revoked whenever I get sick.
Like now. I’m not even sure it was a flu I had that I’m just now getting over. It only acted like a two-thirds flu. Pretty sure it wasn’t COVID since my blood oxygen levels have been good throughout. Looking over the online information it might have been that Respiratory Syncytial Virus going around. The symptoms I had match except for the physical weakness I was experiencing. But that could just be a function of…well…my age.
Doesn’t look like I’m dying this time. Hopefully I hold onto that present young mindset right up to that last moment…when it comes.
This music video by Martha Stromberg always makes me want to go back, and I have only just returned from a holiday visit. I have walked the streets in this video many times. Notice how the homes there are all built differently. I love that. Everyone puts their mark on their homes in a place where there’s no master developer plan, just lots people could build on. You don’t really see it in this video but there is an impressive amount of agriculture going on around there, and in the towns south of it along the coast. There’s a strawberry field where when in season you can get the best strawberries you have ever had. The food everywhere in that “five cities” area is amazing. The best clam chowder you will ever taste is found in a little place on the Pismo main drag called Splash, which usually has a long line out the door.
I love it there…the plan originally was to retire back to Oceano. I was born in Pasadena and my dad’s side of the family is from Oceano and it has always called to me, ever since my first visit when I was 15. But alas, the cost of even basic housing there is way out of my retirement income reach and I can’t afford it. Home prices and rents there have exploded even more than they have here in central Maryland. I suppose because the climate is so perfect, and the nearby coastline is so beautiful. My brother often says he lives in a postcard. So I’m probably remaining here in my little Baltimore rowhouse forever. But at least I can visit. I visit often enough that the bartenders at Old Juan’s (you see their sign in this video) know me and what I’m likely to have.
I’m back home from a holiday visit to my brother and family that live in Oceano, and I have stories to tell. But they’ll have to wait until I’m recovered from the bug I caught on the train ride back.
In the meantime my brother there is suffering under winter conditions of 40s and 50s, and here in central Maryland they’re calling for 9 degrees tonight. Count your blessings brother mine.
There’s some claptrap from the usual sources about how this really isn’t the nazi salute but one the ancient Romans used, but that’s as you would expect, self serving bullshit…
“The Roman salute, also known as the Fascist salute, is a gesture in which the right arm is fully extended, facing forward, with palm down and fingers touching. In some versions, the arm is raised upward at an angle; in others, it is held out parallel to the ground. In contemporary times, the former is commonly considered a symbol of fascism that had been based on a custom popularly attributed to ancient Rome. However, no Roman text gives this description, and the Roman works of art that display salutational gestures bear little resemblance to the modern so-called “Roman” salute.” –Wikipedia (which you should contribute to if you regularly read the entries, and especially now as Musk has stated he wants to “defund” them for maintaining a respect for the facts.)
He knew what he was doing, what message it was meant to convey, and to whom. I’ve often said of myself that I’m a Cold War kid, but another part of growing up in the shadow of possible nuclear annihilation was being practically inundated with movies and documentaries about the Second World War and the horrific cost of defeating global fascism, when only Britain remained unconquered and imperial Japan was raging all across the Pacific, and it seemed like fascism would take it all. Everybody of my generation and our parents knows what that salute is. He knows what that salute is.
This is what we’re in for in the coming weeks and months.
Why Commercial Social Media Is Dying…Part The Upteenth…
This just came across my Blue Sky feed…
Back in 1973 Frank Zappa did a song called I’m The Slime, which was a hilariously brutal take on commercial TV, the essence of which was you, the viewer, are the product not the customer…
You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don’t need you
Don’t go for help, no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold
Television was, and is, a one way street. You sit in front of one as a passive receptor for whatever it, that is to say the networks or the local station operator, decides to feed you. For a while the personal computer and modems, and then the internet changed that relationship. We no longer had to be passive recipients of information about our world. We could speak for ourselves.
Well…we can’t be having that can we? A good rule of thumb is if you’re getting it free then you are the product and some corporate investors are the customer. Also, if your social media is owned by billionaires, then you really can’t trust anything much you read or hear on it, and especially after today, because if our billionaire overlords don’t like it they will make it disappear from your feed and worse, if they Do like it, if it does serve their purposes, then prepare to be inundated with it whether it’s factual or not.
That’s right folks, don’t touch that dial…
What we need to do going forward is log out, and stay away as much as possible, or only log back in to check for messages from family and friends, and to remind them that you have gone elsewhere.
I’m hanging out at the bar at Old Juan’s, a favorite place for good Mexican food and margaritas. It’s a short walk from my brother’s house and by now some of the bartenders there recognise me and know what I’m likely to order. As I’m savoring my margarita I happen to glance out the window by the bar and see a brand new Rolls Royce Phantom (but seriously…it’s a BMW masquerading as a Rolls Royce) pull into the parking lot with three older folks inside. This is something I’m not used to seeing in Oceano, which is a completely wonderful place to stay and to live, but what you’re more likely to see on four wheels there is somebody’s meticulously restored to better than factory new classic muscle car, not that empty status symbol for the rich and tasteless.
After a while I mention it to the bartender, who tells me that because of the massive fires in LA, a bunch of celebrities and wealthy Los Angelenos have come up the coast and are hanging out in San Luis Obispo.
I can see it. Regretfully. That part of California, to which Oceano, Pismo, Grover Beach, Arroyo Grande, and Sun Beach also belongs, and also Morro Bay, is a bit of coastline in paradise that I was hoping to retire back to someday, because it’s where my dad’s side of the family is from and I was born in California. But it’s been “discovered” and if you have to ask what it costs of buy a house there you should be looking at Bakersfield instead. Which I won’t. The term “valley people” has a different meaning where my brother lives.
So best I can do now is visit my brother and the family there every now and then.
As I leave for my walk back to my brother’s house, I see the old folk getting back into their “Rolls”, and I can’t help but think You could have bought a Bentley for that money… Oh well…
The full extent of the horror won’t be known probably for years. Embedded in it are these little stories of absolute desperation. Of course she did. Anyone who has ever loved a pet knows why.
Via Sue Echelmeyer over at That Other Place…
Actress Samantha Rose Baldwin was trying to get home in the Palisades fire to save her 10-year old cat. Traffic was at a standstill so she abandoned her car and ran for 15 minutes straight to get home.
She found her cat who was hiding, put her in a blanket, put her in a cat backpack and fled the house. At this point the route where she had left her car was on fire. So she ran for her life down to the ocean carrying her cat on her back and a roller bag.
She made it. She saved her cat.
From the photographer Ted Soqui: “Samantha Rose Baldwin escaped the Palisades Fire with only a roller bag full of belongings and wearing her pet cat in a backpack. She is standing with the sea to her back in the Gladstone’s Parking lot, and facing the acrid smoke from the fire. Shot this image with my Leica M6 film camera using Kodak Portra 400 film
This post from farmer Edward Westerfield shows us why we need to pay attention to what farmers tell us about the changing weather patterns (paragraph separations are mine).
Fire about one mile from my home in Baja in the last hour. My home on the beach will be fine but it makes me think about what more than a half century of farming has taught me.
Two weather events marked vegetable production in California like clockwork. One was that rains would start in the fall almost exactly on November 1 after a long summer of no rain – meaning time to make sure all tomatoes and other non rain-tolerant crops were out of the field and on their way to market. The other was the Santa Ana winds. Every fall they would come within a few days of September 21, the fall equinox. It defined our plantings in the Imperial Valley near the Mexican border where the salad and brassica crops feed the country every winter. I was trained to start planting the day the Santa Ana winds ended so that the soil temperatures would have dropped enough.
This year no rains have come to southern California or northern Baja in 8 months. ZERO! And the Santa Ana winds came this week – almost 4 months late, and fiercer than any on record. Some people with political agendas are trying desperately to point fingers but us farmers know the problem. The clock is broken.
Global Warming…or Climate Change if you like…is a real thing. Ask the weather forecasters whose models are all mucked up now. Ask the ski slope operators who need to use their snow machines more often now. Ask the farmers. Especially ask the farmers. Their clock is the ticking of the seasons. And the clock is broken.
A short time ago I read a story about the Spiderman actor Tom Holland discussing why he decided to quit alcohol and his three years of sobriety. What interested me about it was that after a discussion with his doctor about his liver scared him, Holland decided to quit drinking for a month to prove to himself he didn’t have a problem. It turned out to be so difficult that he extended his test to another month without drinking. Then it was three. Then, finally after a year without a drink, he was noticing how much better he felt, how much better he was dealing with his personal and professional relationships, his life and its stresses. He says now he’s never going back because he feels he’s having his best life.
Addiction can take many forms, but probably all of them are damaging to some degree. This week the loyal opposition (as opposed to the unloyal in power) have called for a week long boycott of Facebook and all of Meta’s social media properties, to protest Mark Zuckerberg’s not only kissing the Trump ring but belly flopping into the toxic masculinity pool along with Musk, Thiel, et al. The problem for me is I’m not sure I can. I’ve tried it before whenever Facebook has ticked me off about its content moderation policies; I’ve even removed a bunch of my artwork from it. But I’ve always come back to it fairly quickly. It isn’t just because I have a lot of friends on it.
I’ve told this story before, about how a question from a 14 year old kid in the Netherlands posted to a primitive FidoNet BBS echo board awakened me to the power of this technology to liberate gay and lesbian people forever from the identities pushed on us by heterosexual culture and its fear and loathing of homosexual people. We no longer had to see ourselves through heterosexual eyes. I consider “social media”, broadly defined as any computer communication technology that gives individual users a means to access a digital “commons” where they and others can gather and chat freely, as a vital part of gay liberation. Anyone who remembers being a gay kid in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s can plainly see that this technology has done miracles for our lives. It has done miracles for mine. And now I live and walk among a generation of gay people who do not remember a time before personal computers and modems, let alone smartphones and the internet.
But commercial social media is profoundly different from those first amature BBS systems, and then later after the internet became a thing, the first blogs. Prior to commercial social media, the users of various forums and commons were also either the owners, or the maintainers, or were purchasing the hosting of those forums and commons out of their own pockets. Now those commons are owned, if not entirely (thankfully!) by billion dollar corporations, or Elon Musk, whose interest in maintaining them could not be less about the welfare of the gay community, let alone this country, let alone humanity. And we are the products. The lives we live on commercial social media are sold to investors and advertisers. Our loves, our losses, our joys, our sorrows, our fondest hopes and dreams, our deepest fears…it’s all grist for the profit mill.
It was tolerable, barely, when what you could say you were getting out of the bargain was easy access to family and friends you didn’t have when all there was were blogs and AOL Instant Messenger. You needed a decent amount of expertise to use a computer and modem to connect to the greater outside world and a lot of people simply didn’t have, or want, that kind of involvement in computers. Commercial social media made it easy to connect. Also, and gradually, hard to go back to your favorite websites. Initially Facebook made it easy for bloggers to link their posts to Facebook. And when their users all flocked to Facebook it cut the blogs off. I admit the east of use Facebook gives me to knock out posts on my smartphone as opposed to writing this blog post on my personal computer, has left my little life blog suffering.
That ends today. I am joining the Facebook/Meta strike week not only as a show of solidarity against the impending billionaire fascism to come, and against Zuckerberg’s belly flop into toxic masculinity, but also as a test to see how big an addiction to Facebook problem I have. I see lots of people saying they understand the impulse to leave Facebook but they can’t because all their friends and family are there. But this is how it holds us hostage to its business model and it’s the number one reason you Must leave, or at least attenuate your use of it severely. Facebook wants you to believe if you leave it’s clutches you will lose all your friends and family contacts. But if they really love you that much, they’ll follow you elsewhere, even if they decide to stay on Facebook.
It’s easy to point a web browser to your favorite blog. It’s even easier to link a blog reader to it, and to others (I use Feedly these days). Once upon a time there were lots of blogs and websites where like minded people could gather and chat. There were blog rolls where you could see what the folks running the blog liked to read. There was a community of bloggers. I got invited to one such gathering in Philadelphia by Jim Capozzola, author of The Rittenhouse Review blog. There I met other well known bloggers like Fred Clark and Duncan Black (Eschaton) who flips your bogus bit far too quickly. It was a happy gathering and a feeling of comradery I miss deeply. And none of us were beholden to a corporate business model.
I dropped off Twitter completely and it wasn’t hard at all, given what Musk had done to it. I joined BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social) when a friend gave me one of their test period invitation codes. I never felt any pain of leaving Twitter because BlueSky was an even better alternative. I give leaving Facebook a week. If it is excessively difficult then a month. However long it takes for me to not feel compelled to visit. After that I’ll only be going back to check for messages and remind people who want to follow me to visit my blog.
Maybe I’ll end up seeing myself living my best life…
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