Hottest Day of the Year

That's what it felt like today.  It was officially 98 at the airport, but my car thermometer read 100 degrees when I left work at 4:30.  It may have been even hotter earlier than that.

I delayed my run until 7pm tonight.  It was still in the mid-90s at that point as I trudged around the track at the nearby middle school.  I started out in a tank top, but that soon came off.  I couldn't go much farther than the 3.75 miles I managed.  I walked home and took the coldest shower ever.  The previous record for that had been last Saturday.  Finally, the summer of my dreams has reached western New York.

It comes at a price though.  This has been fueled by the drought in the lower midwest.  The area is so dry, there is no moisture to cool the air flowing up from the southwest out of Mexico.  It's given rise to what meteorologists have been calling a "heat dome" that has slowly traveled across the country.  This must've been why temperatures were so much warmer in the 1930s as well.  I've seen so many heat records dating back to that decade, the time of the dust bowl.  We created a new heat record today.

What a far cry from summer of 2009.  I was positively bitter after that summer.  I felt cheated.  Two years later, I find humans and mother nature colluding to make up for it.  I'll be ready for winter this year, I know that much.

Debt and Default

We're, what, two weeks away from the government defaulting on its debt?  I thought we'd have an agreement by now, but Republicans still refuse to act like adults.  I've been reading and hearing reports that the main obstacles to common sense are the 87 freshman congressidiots who were elected last year.  Thanks, American electorate.  Your "protest vote" has officially threatened our economy and our country's stature in the world with complete disaster.  I'm still trying to work out the logic of that vote.  "Hmm...the economy's just beginning to recover thanks to President Obama's policies.  I think I'll put a stop to that by voting for the party that got us into the mess in the first place.  Yeah."

Here are the facts.  The debt ceiling has been raised when necessary by administrations of both parties.  If we want to keep what healthy economy we do have, then this has to be done before the deadline.  There is a better way to cut the deficit--raise taxes on the wealthy.  But Republicans refuse to do that because the wealthy are one of their prime benefactors.  You'll hear baloney about how we shouldn't raise taxes on "job creators".  Only 5% of the wealthy can actually be credited with creating any jobs though.  Most of the extra money they get, they keep and spend on themselves, not on you or me.  Plus, the Bush tax cuts have been around for quite a few years now.  During the Bush administration, this country had the lowest job creation period of any since World War II.  Sounds to me like the tax cuts were very ineffective.  I can remember getting my paltry $300 check when the first round of cuts went through in 2001.  I wanted to send it back to the government in exchange for some real economic improvements.  The 2003 cuts were even worse, as they focused mostly on the wealthy, who'd already enjoyed cuts two years previously.  Add to these the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (the second completely arbitrary and unnecessary) and the unfunded Medicare Part D law, all courtesy of Bush, and you have the seeds for our deficit today.  Bush left office with a 1.5 trillion dollar deficit!!  How come Republicans weren't whining then??  And I'm tired of hearing the words "failed stimulus."  Firstly, the stimulus had been reduced from its original amount.  So its power was diluted right from the outset...by Republicans.  Secondly, Bush sent out the first stimulus.  He acted because failure to act would've meant an even worse recession, or depression.  During the time the stimulus was in effect, the unemployment rate did go down.  Now it's stalled however, and I blame Obama.  That's right.  Because he's spent too much time trying to compromise with Republicans, who clearly wouldn't know the country's best interests if it clobbered them over the head.

If we keep electing tea partiers to office, my fears for the future of the country have just grown exponentially.  They appear to be the modern equivalent of the Know-Nothing Party, an organization from the mid-1800s that formed to resist immigration from Irish and German Catholics.  Like the tea partiers, they were fueled by irrational fear.  But the name in particular seems to be very applicable, since tea party politicians seem to know nothing about reality.  Their "solutions" fly in the face of facts and common sense.  It's as if they still think it's 1955 and we can roll back government to the size it was then.  That we can make the minorities hide again and be a lily white nation, wearing plaid dresses and overalls, and be blissfully ignorant of all the problems that the nation had.  It's a narcissist fantasy.

I'm relying on Democrats taking more of a stand in the months to come.  They have to, or we're doomed.  I last voted Republican in 1992, when the moderate wing of the party still existed.  It was just for one candidate, Amory Houghton I believe.  I would never vote for one now.  It's been hijacked by extreme elements, and resembles in many ways the fascist movements in Europe in the 30s, or the Bolsheviks in Russia.  It's like one person commented during the 2004 Presidential campaign, on the prospect of Bush winning again.  "If you're not scared, you're not paying attention."  Amen.

Obsession

Okay.  They need to get these back on Wegmans' shelves pronto!

It's been over a couple weeks now since I've seen them...and I miss them terribly.  How dare you, Nonni's!!  Get me hooked and then force me to go cold turkey.  I'll do anything for a hit...er, I mean a box.  C'mon!  They're still on your website, for fuck's sake!  I know the world hasn't run out of chocolate yet.  I see a ton of it in other products there.  Why not these??

Alright.  Coming down.  Centering.  They'll be back, it's just a matter of time. I can hold out.  It's just dessert, right?  Right.  A dessert that infuses my whole being with light and joy...that makes me see beauty in the ugliest places on earth...that makes me think I'm a good and successful human being, at least for the two minutes it takes me to wolf it down.  Yes, I crash into an abyssal depression.  Until the next hit.  I mean, box.

Solstice

Happy Solstice!

I decided to observe the longest day of the year by going for a hike tonight with the Meetup group.  There were close to 70 people for this one, and I got to talk to a couple of interesting women.  I hope to see them again at another hike soon.

The only way I made it out was by going in early to work today for a meeting.  I got out earlier than usual, squeezed in my usual run, wolfed down dinner, then headed out to Seneca Park.  I can honestly say I'm tired after a nearly 4 mile run and a 2 hour hike.  By the end, my legs were moaning at me to stop.  I flashed back to being a kid again and getting that feeling when you were spent and you just wanted to flop down right where you were.  Had to wait until I got home though.

I wait many long, cold months for this time, and watch the days lengthen with relish.  Now the cycle reverses and we lose daylight in tiny increments from now until December.  Still, there is glorious summer to look forward to.  All three months of it.  Let's see what I can do with this year's edition.

Energy Surpluses and Shortages

Just finished working out and completely unaware of where the energy is coming from this evening.  Usually on a hot, humid night like this, I feel spent...with little left in the tank.  Maybe it's all the soda I had.  Or the residual effects of the bagel slathered with butter I had this morning.  Wherever it came from, I won't complain.  I stopped at Wegmans on the way home from work to pick up some things, only to find all the traffic lights in the general area dark.  Wegmans was pretty dark as well, and all the frozen foods were off-limits, covered up in an effort to trap the cold for as long as possible.  I got what I could, but had to leave some things behind.

The spring has been mostly cold and wet again.  The heat has finally arrived in response to my earnest prayers.  We've had a couple days touch 90 already.  Yesterday I ran down Jackson Rd. in full view of a merciless sun, sweating mightily but plowing through nearly 4 miles at a steady pace.  If this were September I might be weary of it.  After a bitter winter and an awful spring though, my body is absorbing the heat like a sponge.  All the better to store up for the fall and winter to come.

I'm reading a short novel called Snow Country right now which is really brilliant.  It won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1968.  I picked it up at a used book sale at work.  It was a dollar, more than the 75 cent cover price.  Well worth it, however.  It's a small story about a man from Tokyo who visits Japan's snow country every year for a getaway.  Snow country is in the northwestern area of the country, where the Siberian winds cross the sea to slam against the mountains there and dump fantastic amounts of snow.  He develops a relationship with a young geisha at the inn where he stays.  The dialogue is pitch perfect, almost minimalist.  The author, Yasunari Kawabata, throws in delicate descriptions of the landscape and insect fauna to paint a rich picture of the place and the people.  It's only 142 pages, which is the only flaw I can find in the novel.  Calling it a flaw is not really accurate though.  The brevity of the story only increases the enjoyment of every carefully chosen word.  I'd read a blog in a Japanese English language website that mentioned this book, and I'd kept thinking about it for a couple weeks, right up until I ran across an old copy of it at the sale.  Guess I was meant to read it.  An incident like this always makes me wonder how much good stuff is out there that's now out of print and I've missed.  It's frustrating to contemplate.

As for my own writing recently, you're still looking at it.  Yeah, I know.

Apprendre le francais

For a long time, I've wanted to learn French.  I started doing just that a few weeks ago.  Teaching myself with the help of a book and Google Translate (to get pronunciation).  So far, I've cracked the surface.  I'm starting small and branching outward.  All the chapters in the book start out with a paragraph in French, mostly untranslated.  Some of the words and phrases are translated, but most aren't.  When I got to the second chapter's paragraph, I was a little shocked at how much I could read of it.  It's feeding my enthusiasm to keep going.  That's crucial, because before I read that paragraph, I was wondering what I'd gotten into.

I hope to be somewhat fluent in six months.  It'll be a challenge to maintain it.  I don't have a reason to speak French on any kind of regular basis.  But I can seek out French language news sites, read French books, watch more French movies.  These can help.  Once I can get to a certain level, I'll be able to move to the French Riviera and not worry about how to communicate.  Step 2 in this plan is, of course, winning the lottery.

The War of Southern Aggression

Today is the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War.

As a kid, moreso as a teenager, I had a very focused interest on World War II.  I remember that my grandparents had a set of World War II encyclopedias that dated back to the 50s.  I would grab them from the bookcase they were in and look at them obsessively.  I read nonfiction books on the war that I bought at the local drugstore.  Bantam paperbacks were my favorite.  Every month, they seemed to have a new book out by a veteran about their corner of the global conflict.  I devoured so many of them.

By contrast, the Civil War held very little interest.  When my mother and I lived in Delaware, my class took a field trip to Pea Patch Island, a small dot of land located in the middle of the Delaware River.  It was a Union fort during the war, and held Confederate prisoners.  It is marked in my memory as a cold, dark place.  The old prison cells were cast in impenetrable shadows, the walls covered with slime.  I couldn't imagine anyone staying in them.  There wasn't much to see there by the time I had arrived.  The highlight of my visit was a stop at the gift store, where I was able to purchase a couple ceramic figurines--a Union officer and soldier.  I wasn't at all interested in any Confederate troops.  After all, they were the bad guys, fighting to keep a race of people enslaved, and they were rightfully the losers.  Until presently, that was probably the peak of my interest in the war.  Apart from a children's book which told the story of the battle of Gettysburg, and contained the full text of Lincoln's address, I had nothing else regarding that period in history.

The identification with the moral stance of the North made sense to my childish outlook.  That never changed, however.  I still feel strongly about it.  It boggles my mind how a vast section of the country could've fought and shed so much blood over such an inherently evil institution as slavery.  PBS recently replayed Ken Burns' documentary about the war.  I watched much of it with renewed curiosity as the anniversary approached.  It's scary to think how many victories the South tallied up in the first few years.  As Lincoln struggled to find a general who could properly wield the Union armies, which in many battles outnumbered the Rebels, he despaired of ever gaining the upper hand.  The pivotal fight of the war, Gettysburg, was exactly what the North needed at the time.  Robert E. Lee's air of invincibility had been shattered, and the tide at last began to turn, though it wouldn't be the end of Confederate victories.  It wasn't clear that the North had the war sewn up until at least late 1864.



Sherman's March to the Sea



As Burns' epic account wound to a close, I couldn't help but feel immense righteousness and vindication in Sherman's march to the sea.  He left a trail of destruction unparalleled on this continent, while the hugely diminished Rebel armies bounced off his flanks like flies.  After reaching Savannah, he turned north towards South Carolina, where the fever of secession had been born.  His troops' wrath was multiplied there.  Speaking of his men, he said, “The whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak violence upon South Carolina. I almost tremble for her fate.”  Whenever I thought about what the South was fighting for, and the enthusiasm with which it set about fighting, thinking some God was on its side, I could feel the desire that those Union soldiers must've felt.  Ironically, southerners who like to make themselves feel better often refer to the conflict as the "War of Northern Aggression," when it was actually the South who fired the first shot.  Even today, many in the south try to re-characterize the war as a battle for states rights.  But this has always been a code phrase for racism.  Rational beings know the main reason this war was fought.

The South's intransigence was a heavy price for the nation to pay.  An incredible 620,000 casualties on both sides, not counting civilian deaths.  Reconstruction in the years after failed, and segregation and further murder and oppression of blacks would go on for another century.  On the other hand, it propelled the country toward industrialization at light speed.  America would no longer be an agrarian society.  It sowed the seeds for our dominance in the decades to come.  I also believe, at least until the Second World War, that it cured us of being a militaristic society.  We too easily forget history though.

Now that the sesquicentennial is here, and I'm alive to see it, I'm going to take a closer look at at this war.  I'm thinking of taking a trip down to Gettysburg and visiting the battlefield as well.  The divisive nature of that point in history seems to mirror the present circumstances we find ourselves in politically.  Having our first black president imbues the struggle with that much more meaning.