Blogging: Old School but who cares.

While in the back of my mind this was apparent many months (years?) ago, I didn't acknowledge it until recently.  Blogging is rather passé.  Sure, if you google something like "is blogging dead?" you will find articles saying "NO!" but that is because businesses still occasionally have blog pages that no one wants to dismiss as redundant. But let's be real. Most successful blog pages have been around for 20 years and no one who starts one now is going to make anything of it.  So, that's that.

However, my tiny little blog page never aspired to be anything but ramblings from my mind, an occasional cool photo, sometimes a book recommendation and general whining prose. So that's not going to stop.  Here we go.

There is absolutely nothing to discuss at this moment that bears any weight because EVERYTHING right now is enormously weighty and fraught with angst and anger and fear. Therefore, resorting to talking about junky stuff is the only way to even vaguely consider putting words down on paper.  If I was a real writer, someone like Ann Patchett or a journalist like Sam Anderson, writing about anything would result in a great book or an intriguing column in the NYT. That is so not me. My words are caught up in the mundane, the boring, the everyday drippings of a small, enclosed life. But since I don't care who reads this, those drippings will continue to serve as the basis for random thoughtless musings. 

Somewhere in my strolling through the internet, I have absorbed book recommendations and have added them to my library list of books to read. Many times those books are boring or pedantic or of no interest, something I don't discover until actually getting them out of the library and attempting to read them. For example: historical fiction: how many more books do we need of a plucky young woman in war-torn Europe who ends up saving thousands of  refugees from the gas chamber while carrying on a painful romance with a soldier who will eventually be killed on the battlefield just as  the plucky woman realizes she is pregnant with his child and sneaks aboard a transatlantic ship and arrives in American in 1944 to become a world-renown seamstress for an incredibly famous fashion designer?  Too much, too many words and it's giving "historical fiction" a bad name, like, perhaps, "hysterical friction." 

But I digress. Many times those random recommendations lead me to a book I would have never found on my own. I just finished reading a small novel written in 1965 called "Stoner" by John Williams about a very sad, lonely man named William Stoner.  An oddly compelling story, very well written if somewhat of a downer.  And now I am half-way through another small book written in 1960 called "So Long, See You Tomorrow" by William Maxwell who wrote more than a dozen books, none of which I have ever heard of.  It's another story about a lonesome man, living in the early 20th century, trying to align his past with his current life. Very good, introspective and thoughtful.

All this is to say that sometimes a book report is the only thing worth writing about.  Sometimes reading is the only thing that gets one through the day, especially in these times that are overwhelmingly frightening and awful.  A good book, a good glass of wine or whiskey, a cozy reading spot. 

Read on, my friends. 

Birds, still captivating

 Two years ago I wrote a blog here about the birds in my backyard, how fun they are to watch, how they all have a different style of scratching for birdseed and how much I like spying on them from my kitchen window. Two years later I am still tossing seed out.  Because it is winter and there isn't a lot of field activity happening, the birds are incredibly grateful for any birdseed that gets thrown their way. (Of course, this is simply my anthropomorphizing them; they probably don't even know what gratitude is, being creatures of very small brains and no human emotions. But still...)

There is a small vole who shares the space with the birds, although they swoop in when seed is present and the vole actually lives there, not a swooper. But he creeps out of his (or her) hole in the ground and very quickly grabs a seed or a grain and darts back into his underground condo and no doubt hides it away in its vole pantry. The vole is a delight to watch and it makes me happy that my bags of birdseed are keeping it well-fed.

The time I spend watching the fauna outside my kitchen window is like my own private National Geographic show. The local feed store has a program when you have purchased ten bags of birdseed, you get one for free. Talking to the owner of that store, I mentioned something like "...maybe feeding the birds keeps them from hunting for food on their own, maybe it's not the right thing to do for them."  His reply was perfect: "We should do things that make us happy and if they make other creatures happy at the same time, everyone wins."  So I continue to enjoy the show and I will scatter birdseed until spring brings more plants and bugs and seeds and everyone wins.

Buy some seed. Scatter it.  See what happens.  We are living in a time when happiness is becoming difficult to find. Watch the birds, be happy with that one, small thing. 

Empty

 Nothing seems important enough to write about because everything that is currently happening is too important, too weighty, too catastrophic, too disappointing, too depressing and so, so frightening. How our country and our world got to this tragic moment is incomprehensible. I can read books and watch movies and have dinner with friends but none of those activities are of any importance when I compare them to real life. And by "real life" I mean what is happening minute by minute in the power structure of America.  I am deeply worried about the future. We all should be.

Over and out for now. 

Here We Go

 So far, not even a week in,  2025 doesn't feel any different than 2024 except more ominous. We have a very large monster waiting behind the stage curtain, eagerly anticipating its own power. That's reason enough to approach this year with caution and wariness and fear. Combined with other unresolved evils (wars, famine, poverty) there aren't a lot of positive incentives poking us forward. So we need to create our own.

Resolutions usually fail because (in my opinion) they are too grand or they imply character defects (i.e. need to lose weight, read more books, cook better food, be nicer) that are not going to change just because you tell yourself it's time for that change to happen.  Instead of a resolution, perhaps we need to embrace uncertainty and hesitation. Instead of insisting on getting more exercise, for example, one could simply say "maybe I will go outside now and then and look at the birds." Nothing major there, just a hesitant idea of looking around the yard. Or instead of planning on eating less processed food, one could say "maybe I will start reading the list of ingredients before I buy anything."  Not even deciding NOT to buy the product, just adding an action (reading the ingredients) to the process of shopping.

Maybe I am just blowing smoke here. But sometimes life is difficult, every day, day in and day out, and making a resolution and then failing at it will only make life more difficult. And send you down another spiral, another bout of depression waiting at the end of that tailspin. No one needs that, of course.  What we need is to be lifted up out of that tailspin. We need hope and a tiny bit of happy and some calm waters ahead.

So my resolution this year is the same as always: absolutely no resolutions. Just an idea or two to change the routine a tiny bit, to get out of the rut, to not let the swamp of current events (and the dungeon of events to come) kill us. More smelling the flowers, more stopping for a coffee, more daydreaming.  That's the ticket!

It's been a while......

 So much has happened since I was last on the scene. Halloween, for example, a holiday that I have always hated and thus will ignore, simple to do when you live on a hill and there are no sidewalks and therefore no small, hideous creatures knocking on your door.        

And then, shortly after that potentially frightening evening we had another one:  the election. Not just frightening but mind boggling and maybe apocalyptical. I don't want to talk about that, we will all be participants in its unfolding and unspeakable repercussions. 

That evil evening was quickly followed by what I love: an atmospheric river.  It's not just that I love the rain, but that description always makes me smile.  An Atmospheric River: it sounds like something out of a "Raiders of the Lost Ark"  movie, when clouds and wind and rain and mud and trees and stones all come together in a monstrosity of a downpour, torrential, of course, flooding the local lands with all of the above and yet never getting to the really dire realm of ..... TORNADO!  No huge funnel cloud developed and stones did not fly in the air (neither did cows or trucks) but it was quite dramatic anyway.  Especially for us Californians.

So we had that. And then a freeze in the early morning, and now chilly nights and lovely sunny days with beautiful skies.  (see below.) 

And then Thanksgiving. Turkey Galore!  (Better than Pussy Galore, and if you know James Bond, you know what I mean.)  And now, upcoming Xmas holidays.  Oh gosh, yes.

This leaves out all the other personal stuff, of course. Doctors appointments, pain killers, X-rays.  Apart from that, trying to walk a small dog in four days of downpours, baking at the hotel, sleeping with the cats, fixing the car, and on and on. 

So it hasn't been dull.  Boring, yes.  But not dull.  Read a couple of good books, watched some really good streaming stuff, ate some nice food, and before my back fucked me up, took some nice walks and saw some lovely fall trees. 

More to come.  Thank you for reading.

A cobblestone sky. 

A cozy sleeping dog.

And color!

Sock Weather!!!

Finally, after so many months of hot, sticky, oppressive heat, we are now entering Sock Weather! Not that one needs socks during the day (it is still around 75-80 degrees during daylight hours) but once the sun sets and the air cools down considerably, socks are necessary.  Just small cotton socks, no need for the heavy duty warm wool socks yet, but socks of any sort are a harbinger of cool days to come. Imagine my happiness at digging around the bottom of my undies drawer to fish out a pair of neglected socks!  It was joyful!

The Joy of Pre-dawn Baking

 What is it about getting up and going to work before the sun comes up?  (Actually getting up and starting a road trip before the sun comes up is even better, but we will discuss that at a later date.) Since my current job (very part-time) is baking breakfast treats for a small hotel and since the weather has  been unbearably hot this summer, the only time it makes sense to bake is before 10:00 a.m.  Luckily the small hotel doesn't mind if I get into the kitchen in the pre-dawn hours.

There is something very stealthy and secretive about being awake and alone in those pre dawn hours. It feels like there is no accountability to anyone then, as if the day is still  up for grabs, as if you could commit a small crime and no one would ever know because no one in the world is awake except for you.  The air is heavier at 4:55 a.m. than it is even ten minutes later, quieter and not just full of possibilities but full of a false reality that belongs only to you. Being in the kitchen, measuring out flour and sugar, beating eggs, greasing pans, getting muffins in the oven  before the sky lightens is a promise that the day can be yours, all yours.

No one interrupts with chatter, no one needs anything from you. The sky slowly lightens and once the darkness has trickled away it is clear the day is now to be shared.  Someone else is awake, you no long need to stand sentry to the day. 

Plus, it's nice to work 5 or 6 hours and get to go home before noon.  And if I had to be a baker every day, getting  up at 4:45 every morning, it would get tiresome quickly.  But once a week, I'll take it.