“[T]he things we mean to do rarely match the things we actually accomplish.”
Winter, Evan. The Fires of Vengeance: 2 (The Burning) (p. 440). Orbit. Kindle Edition.
I am not so sure that those things I may have actually accomplished were so much greater than I meant to do. I actually never had much ambition to do anything. When I was a wee nubbin, I was often asked by the big people that tainted my existence what I wanted to be when I grew up. I would always answer, “A bum, a tramp.” They would inevitably respond with a “Heh, Heh” like they were suffering a bout of constipation, formed their lips into a straight line that I assumed was a smile of some sort, and walk off.
In fact, I rarely recall doing something I really wanted to do. Usually, I generally would find myself with no option, or someone would ask me to do something and as a result I would find myself entangled in something I knew little about. In those cases, I would try to do my best — a very low standard of accomplishment for sure. As a result, usually whatever I accomplished generally exceeded my expectations.
This may explain why I have not mentioned the effects of the recent “River of Storms” here in the Enchanted Forest in Sacramento where I live.
For weeks now, it has been raining and windy while the local news readers on TV prattle on about this magnificently destructive event. I, during this time, refused to go outdoors if there was the slightest chance the I would become uncomfortably damp from the drizzle or cold from the wind. So, I would only go out when the weather was relatively dry and windless. I would on those days either go food shopping or visit Hayden for Lunch. On none of those excursion did I take any special notice of any particular evidence of the storm damaged landscape shown on the news.
I left walking the dog on those more rainy and windy evenings to Naida. When she returned she would tell me stories about the flooding along the banks of the American river and the tree fall caused by the storms. I dismissed her stories as being generated by someone not used to real storms. New York City and the surrounding are where I grew up is one of the 3 or 4 stormiest cities in the United States. Even during the most average of its years there it has three to four times more annual rainfall than the Sacramento area. The 7 or so inches that could fall in a storm in California storm over a day or more would fall in three or four hours in New York.
As for flooding, the geology of the place was well suited to adsorb the water from the most severe storms. I lived perhaps 5 miles or less from the Hudson River and there were at least two major streams and many minor ones to carry away excess water even when the ground was saturated.
My town and the others often had been developed before the coming of the developers and their need to maximize their profit by covering as much or their land with salable product. The people building their homes at that time wanted little to nothing to do with potentially flooded land or the costs of the dikes or embankments and generally put their homes beyond the flood plain. Over the years these areas have become parks or natural areas along motorways. Often the smaller streams were encased in pipes large enough to handle most storm induced floodwater events. As a result, I treated the recent hysteria as a product of regional standards of natural disaster severity and ignored it.
Today, Monday June 9, 2023, Naida suggested we go for a walk with Booboo the dog along the American River that flows only about thee or so blocks from our house. I looked out the window and saw it wasn’t raining and the trees were not hysterically swaying from the buffeting of the wind. It must be a hiatus between the various storms I thought — so I agreed.
As soon as we stepped out of the door, I could see branches of thees lying on the path to the street. A house two or three doors down from ours I could see had a fallen tree lying across its crushed roof.
Tree fall blocked the path to the top levee of levee next to the house so we took a path further on. We walked up that path to the top or the levee and on to the flat lands that extend until they reacher the twenty foot or so bluffs that led down to the river. As we walked toward the river, we could see that the water had overtopped the bluffs and covered most of the path we used to walk on. The river looked at least twice the width that we were used to seeing, Many trees that used to grow on the bluff had fallen. Across the river we could see that the water was lapping at the base of the Levee. On our side, a rise in the river of of a foot or two would have it lapping at the levee here on out side. (Isn’t there a song named “Lapping at the River?)
Naida pointed out sink holes that had begun appearing on the flat lands and fresh landslides that appeared at the edge of the water. One landslide we discovered had begun to undermine the temporary road built to allow access to the crews and equipment to the billion dollar levee repair project.
We returned home then went out for dinner at Zoccolo’s a Mexican Restaurant we like after which we did some food shopping and returned home to nestle in and await the next storm expected to arrive later tonight.
It is now Wednesday. I do not recall going outside the last few days but I do recall spending most of my day in bed one of those days. Today, I am more animated. I have an appointment with a new dentist. I find that a welcome break from grey days and terminal ennui.
It was an interesting trip to the dentist. Her name is Smita Khandwala. She is from India, I believe, and has a heavy accent. I told her that all I want was for my remaining teeth to last for 5 years so that I can enjoy chewing my food until I die or trundle off to the old folks home. After a lot of X-ray’s and rooting around in my mouth, she said that she could probably give me only three years at best.
That night, Naida woke me up to tell me that she could not rid her mind of a song rattling around in her mind as she slept. She then sang it to me. Unfortunately, I was not wearing my hearing aids and could not make out the words or the tune. After that, we went back to sleep until the morning.
It was sunny that day and in the morning Naida accompanied by Booboo the Barking Dog took a walk around the neighborhood to examine the state of the clean-up from the storms. She did not get far. Two houses down from our house she came upon an Asian-American woman. She discovered that the woman and her 94 year old father had been living there for the past 25 years. In all the time Naida and I have been living here we had never seen either one. They talked awhile about the house across the path that had the tree crush its roof during the storms. After this she walked to the river and back and reported the river had receded a bit leaving behind layers of soft sand.
While Naida and Booboo were on their walk, I began reading a book by Benjamin Lqabatut entitled “When We Cease To Understand the World” that was given to us as a Christmas present by Peter and Barrie. It has been described as “…a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present.” I have only gotten through a few pages and find it intriguing. At one point, when discussing Fritz Haber the Jewish inventor of the poison gas used by the Germans so effectively during WWI only to find himself hounded from Germany15 years later by the Nazi’s. (Hitler himself present at perhaps the first use of Haber’s discovery, Ypres, was so horrified by its effects he banned its use by German forces in WWII. Another of Haber’s discoveries was the mechanism to extract Nitrogen from the air just when the natural sources of nitrogen for fertilizers (guano, corpses, etc. were becoming exhausted)
“The Haber–Bosch process is the most important chemical discovery of the twentieth century. By doubling the amount of disposable nitrogen, it provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years. Today, nearly fifty per cent of the nitrogen atoms in our bodies are artificially created, and more than half the world population depends on foodstuffs fertilized thanks to Haber’s invention.”Labatut, Benjamín. When We Cease to Understand the World (p. 28). New York Review Books.
Labatut points out that even Haber believed there is a dark downside to his discovery, in addition to the uncontrolled population growth it generated that threatened, humanity’s future.
“Among the few possessions Fritz Haber had with him when he died was a letter written to his wife. In it, he confessed that he felt an unbearable guilt; not for the part he had played, directly or indirectly, in the death of untold human beings, but because his method of extracting nitrogen from the air had so altered the natural equilibrium of the planet that he feared the world’s future belonged not to mankind but to plants, as all that was needed was a drop in population to pre-modern levels for just a few decades to allow them to grow without limit, taking advantage of the excess nutrients humanity had bestowed upon them to spread out across the earth and cover it completely, suffocating all forms of life beneath a terrible verdure.Labatut, Benjamín. When We Cease to Understand the World (p. 34). New York Review Books.
I wonder if the coming collapse of human fertility rates will justify Haber’s fears, or will it have the opposite effect — providing the vegetative sustenance for humanity by replacing the caloric loss of animal food sources. I foresee someone writing a book about this in the near future either to justify vegetarianism or to confirm unbridled capitalism’s superiority because its invisible hand always produces a happy ending no matter how violent the rape.
On Friday, it rained hard enough that I had to cancel my lunch with Hayden. I slept for most of the day. Saturday I watched the Niner’s victory over the hated Seahawks in the first playoff game. Later I began reading the Biblical Books of Enoch. I had always wondered why, although they were part of the Hebrew canon even into to the third of fourth centuries AD, they were excluded in most Christian versions of the Bible. After reading about half of the first book, I began to understand why. It seemed like old Enoch was describing a universe that seemed closer to that of the other religions in the region than to that of the Hebrews.
Monday. It was clear and relatively warm outside. Since it was not raining, I drove into the Golden Hills for lunch with Hayden. Over meatball sandwiches at Subway’s, we discussed the Illuminati and the goings on at the Bohemian Grove. After I got home, I felt exhausted and took a nap. That evening after I woke up, we watched Antiques Road Show. There was a Walter Johnson signed baseball that was valued at $60,000. This is how we spend much of our time during our declining years. I’ve had worse times in my life.
Sometimes the least auspicious of days turn out to be, if not particularly glorious, than frustratingly interesting. On Wednesday, I woke up as usual, fairly late in the morning and ate breakfast in the early hours of the afternoon. My plans for the day included attending a meeting of Campus Commons home owners troubled by a proposed new development in the midst of the Enchanted Forest and later a visit from my sister Maryann who had driven from Mendocino to attend a meeting of the Economic Development Directors of California’s rural counties.
By about 3:30PM, I had dressed and set off to the meeting of concerned resident to see what the bru-ha-ha was all about. I myself was a bit upset by the proposal to tear down what I had thought one of the best designed commercial buildings in California and replace it with a residential development. The building was in the so-called “California Style” first popularized in the initial development at Sea Ranch by my friend Bill Turnbull.
About 50 people showed up. I approached a woman who was setting up an easel and appeared to be someone in charge. I asked her if she had a rendering of the proposed project. She said we were not here to talk about the project. “What were we her to talk about” I inquired somewhat taken aback. “We’re here to learn how organize ourselves for the meeting with the city councilman and the planning staff at the meeting two weeks from now” she responded. Being somewhat confused by her response, I decided to ask no more questions and I took my seat..
She began the meeting by announcing she was a meeting consultant and that we were here not to discuss the the project but to decide how we were going to prepare for the meeting in two weeks. I could not help but jump up and ask, “How are you going to get people prepared for a meeting about a project if they do not know what the project is about and its status?” Then all hell broke loose and people started shouting.
Now, I have been involved with meeting dynamics consultants of every philosophical and technical approach known to humankind and even a few that seemed derived from the animal kingdom — from the Harvard designed Synectics, to mom and pop operation and have found them fascinating in concept, fun in participation and useless in practice. Anyway, after a bit, she announced that if anyone wanted to find out more about the project they could meet with someone who knows outside. So I and a fairly large group trooped outside and gathered on the deck by the pool. We met with a woman who didn’t know much about what was going on about the project but was very firm and eloquent about her opposition to iot. She mentioned that at the developers presentation one of the developers, a member of a prestigious Sacramento real estate development family read to the group “if you feel my development is bad you should see what my cousin it planning to do on a parcel a few blocks away.” There was also a local real estate dealer there, a very old woman. Some of the people accused he of being a spy. She denied it claiming she was too old to be one. I noticed she was carrying some renderings and asked to see them. She showed them to me. When I saw the rendering I exclaimed, “That’s awful. That’s really awful. That’s really really awful.”
The existing commercial building sits on a berm about 20 feet high, it is set back well over 40 feet from the street. The area in front is well landscaped including several very large imposing trees. The development proposes to remove the commercial building, grade the berm down to to street level, remove all the trees and every ounce of vegetation and place thereon two solid ranks of attached, completely uninteresting three story homes with the first within three feet of the street and the project covering just about the entire site. Campus Commons that surrounds this proposal has a density of about two units per acre but the homes and placed it clusters of three up to about ten units to allow the trees, vegetation and screening that allows the arboreal, horticultural and environmental model development it been for about the past 50 years Now some argument could be made that this project was socially acceptable because it was city infill that would provide higher density lower costs dwellings that would alleviate the current housing crisis in the area. It could be that, except for the fact that the developer plans to market each unit at one million dollars or more more than twice the average going price for the other homes in the area.
After that, I returned to the meeting inside which now was being conducted by an elderly gentleman (perhaps younger than me) in a walker who had taken over the meeting and was explaining the issues involved with the development and writing them of a sheet of paper. After a while he stopped and asked, “Mr land use attorney do you have anything to add?” Well at first I did not know he was talking to me because my hearing aids are not particularly effective at meetings. Eventually someone next to me got me to understand it was. I answered, “ I wouldn’t know. I could not hear a word you said, nor is my eyesight strong enough to see what you wrote.” However,” I continued, “if you email your list to me I will look it over and if I see anything I will let you know.” This was met with a lot of laughter after which I slipped out and returned home.
About a half hour after I returned home my sister Maryann arrived. We went out to have dinner at Ettore a bakery/restaurant Naida and I enjoyed. The food was good and we had a fine time. After returning home Naida was not feeling well and went to bed. Maryann and I decided to set up the television that my grandchildren Anthony and Aaron got us for Christmas to replace the older smaller one we have been using.So, we took the new one out of its wrapper and box. Read the directions. Screwed and fitted what needed to be screwed and fitted. Plugged in this and that into where and wherever until finally I turned it on and it worked. That was when I made a shocking discovery. This was a smart TV. Unlike the TVs I was used to where you are automatically contacted with network television and have to contract with streaming channels, these smart TVs come streaming channels ready and one has to do a number of complicated things to hook up to the network channels. I asked my sister if she knew what to do. She said, “I don’t watch network television. Anyway, I live on the Mendocino Coast we don’t really don’t get network television. So, I don’t know what to do.”
We spent the next hour trying and failing. I then sent Mary up to bed because she had to depart early the next morning to get to her meeting. I spent a couple of hours more. I had no success but learned I probably needed to get a special antenna. So, acknowledging defeat, I went up to bed.
At about 1:30AM I woke up from one of those terrible nightmares that I had not had for several months. No not about Smart TVs. It was more like a violent version of my fantasy novels. I won’t tell the story here but in it I was involved in a cross country battle with hoards of white creatures. It was frightening and exhausting, so I woke myself up. Although, I knew I could fall asleep again, I was too exhausted to continue the fighting, so I got up and went down stairs to read for a while. I had little interest it returning to The Books of Enoch I had been reading because frankly it resembled my dream, all flying through the air, battles with demons and the like so while searched through my library for an alternative I came across a book with the simple title of “Debt: The First 5,000 Years .” I had gotten it because I had wanted to have a better understanding of debt since I had always believed debt predated money and the modern merchants of debt were not really a part of whatever we think capitalism is although it may be a controlling if not actually the controlling influence on it,
The first chapter of the book was entitled “On the experience of moral confusion.” It was followed by:
debt• noun 1 a sum of money owed. 2 the state of owing money. 3 a feeling of gratitude for a favour or service. Oxford English DictionaryIf you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, debt • noun 1 a sum of money owed. 2 the state of owing money. 3 a feeling of gratitude for a favour or service. —Oxford English Dictionary If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars,
This made me a little dubious about my choice of reading matter. As I got further into the book, however, I could not help to notice the facility and thoughtfulness of the authors writing. A few pages in I ran across the following passage
For almost two years, I had lived in the highlands of Madagascar. Shortly before I arrived, there had been an outbreak of malaria. It was a particularly virulent outbreak because malaria had been wiped out in highland Madagascar many years before, so that, after a couple of generations, most people had lost their immunity. The problem was, it took money to maintain the mosquito eradication program, since there had to be periodic tests to make sure mosquitoes weren’t starting to breed again and spraying campaigns if it was discovered that they were. Not a lot of money. But owing to IMF-imposed austerity programs, the government had to cut the monitoring program. Ten thousand people died. I met young mothers grieving for lost children. One might think it would be hard to make a case that the loss of ten thousand human lives is really justified in order to ensure that Citibank wouldn’t have to cut its losses on one irresponsible loan that wasn’t particularly important to its balance sheet anyway.
This reminded me of the writing of David Graeber the co-author of the magnificent anthropological masterpiece The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. So I stopped reading and returned to the front of the book and sure enough it was. Unfortunately, in 2020, he died on a visit to Venice. He was only 59 years old.
I returned to the body of the book where he begins to overturn the the traditional assumptions of economists that existed since Adam Smith created their profession which later practitioners attempted to claim it to be a science.
Lewis Henry Morgan’s descriptions of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, among others, were widely published—and they made clear that the main economic institution among the Iroquois nations were longhouses where most goods were stockpiled and then allocated by women’s councils, and no one ever traded arrowheads for slabs of meat.Graeber, David. Debt (p. 47). Melville House.
With this and other examples as far back as Mesopotamia and earlier, we learned there was never a barter economy that morphed into a money based economy as the economists opined.
So at that, I closed the book promising myself to read further into it during the next few days, went back upstairs and returned to bed. I did not dream that I could remember and woke up late in the morning as usual. In thinking about the previous evening and night, I felt I had experienced one of those days, neither good nor bad but interesting none the less.
I restored our old TV to its pace of honor. Naida went out to the banks and Social Security offices nearby to replace the documents that she had lost when her wallet was stolen a week or so ago. I did nothing much except walk the dog as the day slithered from slightly sunny to grey and dropped silently into night. We watched The Conversation on the restored TV, I wrote this and we then trundled off to bed.
Papa Joe's Tales, Fables and Parables 