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% ...

Thanks to The Atlantic for this month's " Failed State of America " article by staff writer George Packer. Of course Packer writes what we've all felt, and particularly brings alive the peculiar institution of the executive branch as it's now displayed for the world to gawk at. There will never be enough time, nor ink, to outline the gutless self-interest of Kushner and Trump and the boys and girls who surround them. I can't add much--but I would like to offer a further point of emphasis to this very satisfying description of the United States of America, and how we got from our last dying gasp of decency (9/11) to our current post-mortem, made real by the ambulances rushing to the mass graves. Had Packer asked my editorial advice (he didn't need it and my comments wouldn't improve what he actually wrote!) I might have mentioned not just the executive branch, since we’re all poisoned from that source. I would have summarized the failed st...

Wells Fargo, the bank with all the office space and ugly logo, failed to develop a loan processing system in time to allow any of its small business customers to apply for the Payroll Protection Plan authorized by the Small Business Administration (SBA).  Now, like every other major bank, it's been sued for prioritizing PPP applications to favor the applications with the largest fees (or worse). Double whammy--they didn't get organized in time to participate, and they're still getting sued for doing it wrong. Sympathy for an archaic dinosaur aside, these failures will bankrupt many Wells Fargo customers and result in immediate layoffs that were avoided by customers of many small local banks and other processors. Here's what Wells Fargo has to say about their failure: “We at Wells Fargo screwed up and made things worse for you than they already were. No other financial institution screwed this up as badly as we did, and we grovel with apology.  Because we screwed ...

Kindness Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.  You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense ...

Death is nothing at all, I have only slipped into the next room I am I and you are you Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by my old familiar name, Speak to me in the easy way which you always used Put no difference in your tone, Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household world that it always was, Let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It it the same as it ever was, there is unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, Just around the corner. All is well.  ―  Henry Scott Holland