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Climate insomnia & amnesia

The heat wave here in DC, nothing like the heat dome effects of the Southwest and Northwest, has actually broken. So I did not have a hot, sleepless night. Merely a sleepless one.

Still, our early and exceptional heat wave coupled with news about the western heat waves and correspondence with a friend in my childhood home turf about a heat wave in Upstate New York brought my insomniac attention to the issue of overnight temperatures.

I did a search for some news on it, and found something adjacent to where my friend was that corroborated his experience: the heat waves beyond the heat dome have been hot at night too. Which can be dangerous.

As I looked down my search results, I was jolted further awake by seeing repeated reporting on this going back over the decade:

It is overwhelming, how much time we have wasted.

Near miss

The Mid-Atlantic region and DC were always known for stormy summers, and even catching the tail of hurricanes now and again. But yesterday, and last night especially, was intense. The Tornado Warning alerts caught us off guard. I had to check to see if was meant for us. I found I lived inside territory covered by those red boxes and ultimately under that storm track.

A couple years ago, I’d have gone outside (and probably would’ve been fine) but this time I grabbed my kiddo out of bed and we sat in the basement for 15 minutes, waiting for the danger zone to move past us.

Postscript, 3 July — National Weather Service Confirms Two Rare Tornadoes In D.C. and Arlington.

Counting blessings, being counted

I filled out a random Census survey on behalf of my family about my child’s health over the past year. I am once again reminded as to how immensely lucky my family is, and saddened by all the challenges out there (the vast majority that I, so far, could respond “no” to). Still, certain questions made it clear that we were deeply affected this year, and maybe the kiddo’s parents are worse for wear. Burnout is on the Census Bureau’s radar, after many other more imminent challenges for so many.

More importantly: the frailty of the safety net and the widespread and deep impact of economic injustice made me feel more vulnerable than maybe I am, but I know I am vulnerable if my fellow citizens are.

Senator Mike Gravel passed away.

I had lunch with him in 2007 at McCormick & Schmick’s on K Street. I heard out his bizzaro communications strategy for his quixotic presidential run (and I was in the mix as a veteran of such a campaign), and took a pass.

I liked the guy.

The pandemic is “ending,” on a slew of bittersweet notes for me.

(And of course, it isn’t really over yet for so many around the world, including small children here.)

After a long year, I'm seeing the cracks

“I’m breaking a little," (or words very close to that) was a sentiment shared with me recently.

Me too.

…And not just us. (Not to say that this other person’s experience is about anxiety, but both what I infer or imagine about theirs and what Dan Cederholm shared resonates with me.)

Lab leak hypothesizing

I’m a college dropout. Not a scientist. Let alone a biologist or epidemiologist or whatever other ologist I would like to include in a fantasy panel to help me reconcile my interpretations of the news with what their expertise, regardless of their preferences, might inform.

I’ve been aware of the credible strains of the “Lab Leak Hypothesis” from near the beginning, which now have fairly widespread recognition. (And all the words mean something, right? Hypothesis == something to be proved or disproved.)

What I feel like is missing is a middle ground in what otherwise seems like a dichotomy. Either its from the wild or it was “created” (modified/magnified) in a lab and got out. It seems like the middle ground is, for a lab that might be collecting samples to then study (and perhaps modify, say through alleged “gain of function” explorations, etc.), that a yet to be modified strain of something collected might leak, if a leak is a possibility.

And then it would have no markers of its own that would necessarily indicate human intervention. Right?

The folks who dismissed a lab leak given their belief in the ostensibly far lower odds (but now widely recognized as yet to be actually precluded odds), always, I think, seemed to really speak to their judgement in natural origins of the SARS-CoV-2. But that wouldn’t preclude the scenario above.

I am not even sure this is an original critique. I might have picked this up somewhere and my brain is spitting it out because it hasn’t seen it incorporated clearly into the new reporting that legitimizes the broader theory as still being a possibility.

A crime against humanity

Given my apparent “sensitivity.” I am working on consuming more “positive” media (and boxing in my media consumption), but I can’t live disconnected from the world. Yesterday’s heading was “criminal negligence,” but this is a Crime Against Humanity: How Families, Separated At The Border By Trump Policies, Are Coping. Listen to it.

I don’t trust the “quote sites” to neccessarily attribute a quote well, but while I am taking care of myself, I also recognize the value of this observation, attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti:

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
On this lunch break, I'm heading over to the kiddo's daycare to spend some time with him. He's a lucky kid and I am luckier than I feel.

Criminal negligence

I can’t filter it out, and it still cuts. Every story about the horrible things the systems we make hurt children.

Every dehumanizing experience with authority that children are directly subjected to, and every exhausted, desperate parent because they’re underpaid, dehumanized, sick, tormented… every one of those things is a crime.

Pretty much that and the climate crisis should be things we reconcile ahead of just about anything else.

I am writing again

I got some hours in front of a couple of different text editors this weekend.

Two pages about what were maybe the local epicenters of trauma shared between my parents and I. It is not what I expected to come out, but it did. I rushed off the first draft of these spare pages to a good friend. Tears came out too. A couple of guttural cries even.

Yesterday I banged out some useless Swift code to solve notional tutorial problems. But hey, my brain was working on its own and the code compiled as I dusted off some programming fundamentals.

If only I could sink into my weeks building on these things at my own direction.

Anytime there’s news of a child dying, and most especially by the hands of their own parent or caregiver, my heart breaks for days.

While I haven’t used it much, no regrets to my micro.blog renewing. Happy to see Ulysses will let me post directly from the app to here, and wondering if WWDC is going to inspire me and my cough copious cough amounts of spare time.

It's getting better?

The Internet is getting better (yes, parts of it, or the people and businesses behind it continue to be rubbish) with all this… enjoying catching-up with what Kottke.org and LaughingSquid.com (some old school aggregation and curation) have corralled over the past week. Digging Brian May’s Instagram posts. There are many little reasons to hope. For now I’m focusing on individual creativity and sharing.

(Without devolving into a power politics analysis, we gotta do more than hope. Gotta keep naming the whole thing and realizing we have barely maybe begun to fight for the thing that could bring everything else that gives reason to hope down. But we gotta give ourselves breaks too. And create. I’m so stuck… I’ve forgotten how.)

Thunder From the Mountains

Really digging this Orson Welles radio play about Benito Juarez and the Mexican resistance to French imperialism being aired tonight on an NPR affiliate. I’m sure it’s a flawed telling of the history, but I dig Welles and its a more in depth telling of what Cinco de Mayo is an observation of than most mentions in broadcast media now.