Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

Edgar Allan Poe

Details to follow…

This poor thing…

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.

I suppose it’ll be the same old lavender scare in due time…

[Update…] Here it comes…

Pretty sure another updated version of Executive Order 10540 is in the works now…

[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.

Petro is a Trump “acting” NASA admin. 

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.

I woke up to this just now…

Well the new central heat is getting a workout. My monthly utility budget too, but probably on next month’s bill. 

[Update…] hour and a half after I woke up and it’s Still nine degrees.

[Update the second…] Two hours and it’s Still nine degrees. This is something I’ve never seen before.

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.

When they tell you who they are, believe them…

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.

[Update…] This is so sad…

All sides…all sides…all sides…

From my Blue Sky feed…

Remember, it was our commercial news media that sanewashed this man and his followers.

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…

#IHangOutAtTheBarForLocalGossip
#ItsNOTaRolls!

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…

I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it. -Mark Twain

People like to say the conflict is between good and evil. The real conflict is between truth and lies. -Don Miguel Ruiz

A friend on Facebook posted the notice that she’d died, and my first reaction was, Oh…her… There have been so many others since, but all of those are standing on her shoulders. The damage she did wasn’t merely to cancel that Dade County anti discrimination ordinance, or even to spawn dozens more local fights against The Homosexual. What her campaign did was decisively show republicans that they could us as a way to drive their voters to the polls.

She made herself the face of that campaign. They called it Save Our Children. The dark heart of it was a smear attack, utilizing the trope of homosexuals as child molestors. But we were also sexual predators, psychopaths and disease spreaders. During one appearance Jerry Falwell stood with her in front of the assembled crowd and said “so-called gay folks will kill you as soon as look at you.” That was how they intended to win an election to repeal the anti discrimination ordinance.

By 1977 gay people in south Florida had made progress. Police raids of gay bars were ended, The ’72 Democratic Convention, held in Miami featured openly gay San Francisco political activist Jim Foster who gave a speech on gay rights. We were seen in the local papers more as an oppressed minority than a threat. Still, it was thought the vote would be nail bitingly close. It wasn’t.

The day of the vote, from the apartment mom and I shared in the Washington DC suburbs, I watched all the news broadcasts late into the night for anything about the results in Florida. There were other elections going on that night all across the country, but there was nothing in any of the election reports about the Dade County repeal. We were a people not fit to speak of during family hours. Finally I fired up my shortwave radio and found a BBC broadcast that gave me the news. Her hate campaign won 4 to 1 against us.

For the republicans it was an epiphany.  Now they had another tool besides racism to reliably drive their voters to the polls. In some ways it was even more effective than race baiting, which also used the image of the black man as a sexual predator. Decades later that Save Our Children message would work for them during the fight over California Proposition 8. It still works for them. 

The day after the vote, as I walked to the store for some snacks and a soda, I counted off 4 people to 1 as I passed them by on the street, still trying to grasp the magnitude of it. All those people I would never know just to look at them, who would vote me and everyone like me out of existence the moment they had a chance. I would have to go on knowing.

And now she’s gone, but the evil she set into motion lives on. What is the profit in winning the world but losing your soul? She won her victory and it destroyed her. The obituaries when they mention her life before the rampage give it little more than a passing notice. She died known more for the hate campaign she waged than for anything else she ever did with her life. That is what hate does. It does not share power within a person. The pop singer became the hate monger, because that was all that hate would allow her to be.

She eventually withdrew from the public spotlight. The singing career was over, which she probably missed. She could have turned it all around with an eventual apology and declaration that gay and lesbian citizens are our neighbors, and that we are all equal in the eyes of her god. She had the entire rest of her life to make amends. But she never apologised for what she did, never moderated her views when asked, and when she died I am certain she regretted nothing about that campaign.