The Long Road Out

Here's three minutes worth of handwritten response to what we used to call a free-writing exercise. The assignment was part of a program apparently developed by an exec at Google who has subsequently been dismissed during their gender harassment problems. The assignment was to write for three minutes without stopping on the topic of:            When I'm at my best, I am... When I'm at my best, I am 19 feet tall and free to find comfort in the wide range of the world around me taking things in without a hint of friction or remorse or selfishness and sending the energy out to those close to me with quintupled force and good will, making THEM as tall or taller than I am, a tribe of giants spanning other giants, treading on the earth with gentle and caring steps to all corners, rooting out the ignorance or hostility to be found in those dark and frankly quite dank (it has to be moist) places that rob the good souls of dignity. Don't ...

Pre-comment four years later during COVID: getting sick from a kid on a plane may not seem like a big deal, but in fact, the three months it took me to knock out the basic pneumonia symptoms changed my life.  I've never gotten back to road racing, or triathlons.  I've continued to overreact to any bronchial condition so I'm still running up medical bills out of fear I'll be as sick as I was in 2017.  And, most importantly, I stopped looking at myself as a healthy person, even though I continue to be active. I owe this all to one incredibly selfish parent in seat 2C on that fateful JetBlue flight. Now, our entire society has the responsibility to not be an asshole like this pre-COVID pig. I flew from JFK to Reno, Nevada on JetBlue December 29th, 2016.   I was in seat 2A. Next to me, in seat 2B, was a four year old boy who appeared to be dying of consumption or emphysema--or perhaps syphillis.   He coughed every four seconds all the way across the country. ...

The electricity that has your lights on and your computer charging comes from natural gas, coal, nuclear--or alternative sources if you care (if you notify your utility company that you want to purchase only solar or wind power, they're required by law to buy your allotment from alternative sources). Some good news--t he U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that another 1%--an additional 35 billion kWh of electricity generation--came from solar roofs, otherwise known as "small-scale solar photovoltaic systems." Small stuff, but a start, compared to the  about 4.12 trillion kWh of electricity were generated at utility-scale electricity generation facilities in the United States. Here's where all the gigawatts in consumption-central (the USA) came from in 2019: U.S. utility-scale electricity generation by source, amount, and share of total in 2019 1 Energy source Billion kWh Share of total Total - all sources 4,118 Fossil fuels (total) 2,580 62.7% ...