Solstice 2024
Left Coast, WA


Dear Ones,

“Inconceivable!”

    Here we are, at the intersection of Fuck Around Street and Find Out Boulevard.  A collective spasm of anger, alienation, and fear has left us high and soaking wet on an unknown rocky shore.  I have not looked at the news since November 6, and have sworn off reading posts from pundits.  There was a long line of Libs waiting patiently at Deception Pass Bridge for their turn to jump off, but that has quieted down.  There should be some fat, sweet crabs there this spring, though… So I guess the calculation was, ‘He may be a rapist felon con-man un-American antidemocratic insurrectionist traitor, liar and cheater with a fake spray-on tan and bad hair, but at least he’s not a black woman.’

“You mock my pain!  Never do it again!”
“Life is pain, and anyone who says differently is selling something.”

    One can only hunker down and do the best one can.  I have bought lots of Chinese stuff in the past few months, just to beat the tariffs.  Time will tell.  But the notion that gas and egg prices will drop magically, and market will roar on from its current roaring is, well, pure unadulterated sales BS.  Life is pain.  The rest of the year receded to nothingness after November.  Wars grind on in the Middle East, and in Ukraine. It is so sad to realize Ukraine will be given up to Putin, all because of egg prices here.  Nothing to laugh at there.  Just a drear year all the way around.  A worser one is inconceivable.

“You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

    Our story here is at least a break from the humdrum routine we are used to.  In mid-September, our garage caught fire, and was totally torched.  Kathleen heard Rocco, our little Jack Russell terrier, making a ruckus, and opened the back door, expecting to find me returning home.  Instead, she was greeted by a huge fire and rolling smoke..  She scooped up the dog and ran out the front door.  Fire and ambulance arrived promptly, but smoke had invaded the entire house, coating everything with thick acrid black plastic soot, which permeated everything permeable.  The apparent cause appears to have been a lithium battery charger, charging a car jump-starter pack. These things turn in to mini-neutron stars when they go up, so don’t leave things charging endlessly is the upshot.  Charge them and unplug them.  Anyway, everything in the garage and all our furniture not made of glass or metal was destroyed, along with many other items of sentimental and real value.  All electronics, anything made of plastic, and many items of clothing were all condemned.  The house is ok structurally, but the interior will have to be gutted completely.  All drywall, ceilings, windows, carpet and flooring, duct work, furnace and AC, electrical panel and wiring, and most of the plumbing (all PEX plastic) will have to be replaced.  We are looking at 10-12 months from NOW to be back in the house.  That first night, we could only find a drive up tourist hotel, (BYOS—Bring Your Own Shotgun— as I call them). Rowdies partying past 0200 kept us up. The next day, we moved onto our boat, which, fortunately, had not sold this past spring and summer.  We have spent three months at a time on there boat a couple of times in the past few years, but it is a different experience when the scenery is BC and Alaska, and it changes every day.  Boats are, after all, wet.  In the winter months they are cold and wet.   We do have diesel heat, but it is either a furnace, or a walk-in fridge.  Not much middle ground.  In the mornings, pulling my clothes off the hook and putting them on felt like stealing clothes from a corpse.  The usual autumn storms kept us rocking and rolling, and the otters had a poop party on our dock nightly, driving the dog and us crazy.  They love to poop on soft, comfy piles of dock lines, and they poop a lot.  I am over the cuteness of otters.
    On the advice of a dear friend, Leslie, we hired a private insurance adjuster, to help us through the adversarial and mysterious process around recovering our losses.  I am passing along this same word of advice:  if something like this should ever befall you, do the same.  Our insurance company referred us to a firm which finds housing for insureds, but these jokers sent us the world’s worst contract, waiving any and all of our rights in the event of any disagreement.  I said “NOPE.” They were just a costly middleman  in any case, and no help regardless. Disirregardless, even. That decision right there more than paid for my legal education. I proposed that the insurance company give me the middle figure of their budgeted support money as an upfront sum, in exchange for waiver of responsibility for any further upkeep.  To my amazement, and with some prodding from our private adjuster, they said yes, and I was able to put that toward a down payment on a small house, just down the hill from us. So it turns out I am a stable real estate genius.  Hoo noo?? We moved off the boat November 22, and have been keeping busy fixing things up and moving in.  We bought a bunch of furniture from an estate sale of a dead doctor, all at garage sale prices, and things are taking shape.  The house is quirky, but with nice spaces, high vaulted ceilings, and beautiful light and color.  There is a huge garage with a workshop, complete with a plumbed-in urinal, just the ticket for the man of the house with an aging prostate. I have morphed into Norm Abram of ‘This Old House’ fixing cabinet doors, patching drywall, adding towel racks and changing locks and shower heads, etc. etc. etc.  I also regret to report that I have come more and more to resemble Wilford Brimley, though I don’t yet have “Diabeetus”.  The long term plan is not 100% clear, but I expect to move back into “Old Smokey” after a year.  We could sell the big house and downsize to here, but I will miss that view.  So perhaps we will rent this out for a few years, and then decide how we are doing as far as mobility and money.

    Kathleen is doing well despite the trauma of the fire, and then the election, but she sublimates her anxieties with long walks with the dog, in Anacortes’ incomparable system of public parks and trails.  She has begun, slowly, to resume her knitting, a sign of real progress.  The kids are well, and again, for brevity I will leave it at that.

    As for me, retirement suits me fine.  I have space, and tools for wood butchery and a MIG welding machine (Thanks, China!). We are, after all, alive and intact, on dry land, in a 2nd house that we will still own after this nightmare ends.  Thus will I have made fertilizer out of the great turd that fell upon us, and that is good.  The old house will be gooder than new, after all is done.  I am recovering pretty well from the hip replacement I had in March, and still achey and creaky, but out of constant daily pain.  Two Tylenol twice daily pretty much cover it.  So I cannot complain. I just miss my work friends.

“He’s dead.”
“Ooh, look who knows so much.  It turns out he is only mostly dead.  Mostly dead is still partly alive.  When they’re all dead there is only one thing you can do—go through their pockets and look for loose change.”

    Well the litany of the dead this year is unusually long, mostly because the people who became notable when I was young and still cared are now getting old.  I know nothing about current celebs, nor do I care to.  So I couldn’t pick Taylor Swift out of a lineup, and don’t follow who dates whose ex and all that.  This is a biased list at best, but oh, well.  My former New Haven neighbor Senator Joe Lieberman has died, as has Sheila Jackson Lee.  Robert McNeil (McNeil-Lehrer Report) and Bob Edwards (NPR) have signed off.  Phil Donahue has had his last guest, and Ethel Kennedy  last of the Camelot generation, is gone. Oodles of actors have exited stage left, including James Earl Jones, Donald Sutherland, Gena Rowlands, Lou Gossett, Jr., Shelly Duvall, Anouk Aimee, Carl Weathers, Dabney Coleman, Terri Garr, David Soul, Maggie Smith, Bob Newhart, Mitzi Gaynor (South Pacific), Michael Gambon (Dumbledore II), and Glynis Johns (of Mary Poppins).  The tribe of musicians has fared equally poorly, losing Quincey Jones, Kris Kristofferson, Toby Keith, Sergio Mendes, Melanie, Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, and Kinky Friedman, (and the Texas Jewboys).  The unclassifiables include Bill Anders (Apollo 8), Alexander Navalny, killed by Putin, Richard Simmons, Peter Higgs (of the Higgs Boson), airplane designer and aviator Dick Rutan, author Alice Munro, and Norman Lear (All in the Family et al.).  Sporting Lifers lost Pete Rose, no longer subject to a lifelong ban from baseball, Jerry West (the NBA logo guy), Lou Whittaker (Everest West Ridge climber), and Chi-Chi Rodriguez. Baseballers Rickey Henderson, Willie Mays, Luis Tiant, Orlando Cepeda, and Fernando Valenzuela have all taken or delivered that last called strike.  Gone, but not forgiven are Lt. William Calley (of the My Lai Massacre) Ivan Boesky (Wall Street Fraudster), Lou Dobbs, and Orenthal James Simpson.

“We are men of action.  Lies do not become us.”

    And so, faithful readers, I will close this 32nd annual recap with the best wishes for each of you, and all of us collectively, for peace in your lives, and everywhere, for steady improvement over this next year, toward the best version of us, for motivation and determination, even when the circumstances seem to deflate us completely.  I mark the return of the light every year, and try to puzzle out my place in the cycle we inhabit so briefly.  I haven’t figured it out yet, but I will keep you posted.

“Bye-Bye, Boys!  Have fun stormin’ the Castle!”
“Do you think it will work?”
“It’ll take a miracle!”
    

    I can only conclude with: “As you wish!”

Cheers, best, and all that.


BC


P.S.  If you haven’t seen  “The Princess Bride”, you are on notice.  See it.

P.P.S.  Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after first exhausting all other options.  (Churchill)