We are continuing to settle in here in the D.C. area, and have eliminated the moving boxes from our living space. We are using the kitchen and cooking, even as the exploration of grocery stores in the area continues. Superlatives are being sought — the best bookstores, restaurants, cafes, parks and farmer’s markets — and I continue to learn the lay of the land, what roads connect, and where they lead.
I am extra-keen to explore the many off-street pedestrian and cycling trails in the area — but have not made time to do so since arriving a week ago. We did, however, manage to explore a trail or two along the Potomac River at Great Falls National Park yesterday.
Great Falls National Park, MD (September, 2022)
We were impressed to learn of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal & Footpath that parallels the Potomac River for 185 miles! Even though there are many miles of other trails to explore in this area, a continuous trail 185 miles in length just reeks of long-term potential.
I should also note that I found the Potomac to be very nice. It seems like a midpoint compromise between the stately St. John’s River flowing North from central Florida to the Atlantic and the granite-carving San Joaquin as it comes together from its forks and tribs in the King’s Canyon and Sequoia National Parks racing towards the San Francisco Bay. I am looking forward to seeing the Potomac’s full might one day; the river was well below its banks and a few channels were either dry or not flowing this late in the year. During the next spring melts, revisiting this area of the river is a must.
A week in, I have the new sourdough starter close to established and while it is too soon to bake with it, it is apparently NOT too soon to wonder what sort of character it will yield. Time will tell.
A new Winogradsky Column is probably in order too (speaking of bacteria); I wouldn’t mind bringing the endemic microbiome of the Mid-Atlantic into view as well. This is probably going to be on my to-do list very soon.
My previous Winogradsky Column, sourced at Sibley Volcanic Regional Park in Oakland, CA.
currently reading: Freedom by Sebastian Junger, The Federal Resume Guidebook (7th ed.) by Kathryn Troutman.
We have moved; the move is complete. We are in Maryland, in a lovely 3B/2BA apartment with a decreasing amount of cardboard boxes to unpack, and an increasingly livable/maneuverable set of rooms to negotiate. The acoustics are great here; there are many short hallways and changes of direction that restrict the travel of sound throughout the flat. The windows face south and west. We found a nice dog park w/ hiking trails just shy of two miles down the road (a much quicker jaunt than our usual trek to the Berkeley or Oakland Hills to exercise the dogs in the mornings). The climate is worth mentioning, however. Today’s lowest temperature in the D.C. Metro area yesterday was a full degree warmer than the highest temperature achieved in Oakland. This will take some adjustment.
While driving the (apparently) 3,102 miles from there to here, I was able to listen to a fair few podcasts; I believe these are the conversations from last week that will continue to stick with me:
Collaborations Pharmacueticals, Inc.(CPI) is a small start-up that uses A.I. to discover/design molecules that might be useful in treating rare and neglected diseases. In 2020, while attending a computer science conference in Switzerland, the conference organizers inquired what would happen if CPI used their platform to develop toxic compounds. As a thought experiment, the researchers at Collaborations Pharmaceutical ran “the shortest experiment” the CEO has ever conducted, and was alarmed to realize that within hours, their A.I. could design thousands of toxic compounds as deadly as VX Nerve Agent, or deadlier.
A sober reflection on the 1 year anniversary of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Alan Robock, a climatologist at Rutgers discusses his team’s findings after modeling the climate impacts of a nuclear exchange — even between ‘lesser’ nuclear powers like India and Pakistan. The takeaway: entire cities will burn, in ways cities have never burned before, and the soot from these dense urban areas will become trapped in the Stratosphere (much like catastrophic volcanic events) too high to be purged from the sky by rain. The result would be a nuclear winter on a global-scale decimating global food production and–according to their model–resulting in the starvation and death of roughly 2/3rd of the world’s population.
Russel Moore may not be my political kin, but he seems like an honest Christian, at least. I enjoyed this discussion.
I had never heard the name before, but the case is made that he is one to watch. Apart from his individual narrative, it is also interesting to consider the chess powerhouse that India has become in the decade + since Anand was World Champion and to wonder if they might soon become the dominant force in global chess in the way that the Russians were for much of the twentieth century.
This is our final week in Oakland. We are moving to the Washington D.C. area in an effort to be closer to things like humidity and hurricanes.*
Life is basically something involving a lot of cardboard boxes at this point — and the various efforts at coordinating their transport. The work is going well; we are 4 days away from the morning we head East, and we probably have > 60% of our ‘stuff’ stacked in boxes, ready for the Moving Truck. On Saturday afternoon (right as all the Auto shops in the Bay Area were closing and not re-opening until Monday) our catalytic converter was stolen (again). That was a particularly stressful episode as it has taken up to three weeks to have that repaired before, and our apartment lease ends this Saturday. C&G Auto Body up in Berkeley pulled off a same-day repair though, on Monday, and we are back in business today, running here and there.
Today is also my second day without a job in a fairly long time (my resignation was effective last Friday). I feel like I have had almost an impermeable level of job security for the last several years, and perhaps walking away from that is just something that will take a minute to get used to. It could just be the radical departure from the routine as well. Maybe some of both. It does feel odd.
ADULTS MAKING DECISIONS (Season One, episode one):
Last week there was an Adult who made decisions to attack the regional FBI Office in Cincinnati. With an AR-style weapon and a nail gun. My first thoughts were that it must take a hell of a lot of talk-radio and online outrage harvesting to convince someone to be a Yahoo-with-a-gun attacking a building filled with Quantico graduates(?!) who excel at dealing with Yahoos with guns. But that’s not really what I’m following.
The ongoing radicalization of a small contingent of partisans is of particular concern to me; this fellow won’t be the last person to attack U.S. institutions in response to {all} the various matters of {ongoing?} criminality surrounding the former President. I also doubt all attacks from these discontents will be at such a small scale.
Further, the extent to which so many GOP candidates, elected officials and affiliated commentators continue efforts to capitalize on the anti-institutional sentiment, promoting and providing the incindiary rhetoric that drives these attacks is also worth a thought. Come November, will a Republican Legislator who simply speaks basic, easily verifiable truth–things like, “well, there is a process to obtaining warrants and this process appears to have been conducted in good legal order” be considered a RINO by the 56% of Republicans who want Trump to be nominated in 2024? How many Death Threats would a statement like that produce? Can they weather that, personally or politically? If not, who replaces them and what does that look like? It’s concerning.
In lighter topics, I listened to the Wu-Tang Clan for the first time this weekend. There are so many bands and films and authors that I simply haven’t made time for despite their cultural cachet constantly reminding me that I should, but I had some time to just sit with Iron Flag from 2001 over the weekend. I honestly expected it to be over-rated (because 10 million Rush fans *can* be wrong) but no, I liked it very much. Production has obviously progressed in the two decades since this came out, but the album holds its own 21 years later. Top notch stuff.
Jack, the Rabbit in the Stanislaus River, Carson-Iceburg Wilderness (CA)
Also, I picked up a dog in the time between the last post and this one. My wife and I adopted Jack (formerly “Hummus”?) from Oakland Animal Services on April 14th. I was looking for a dog that would be great in the woods, primarily for fishing and backpacking and also 100% reliable in dog parks with zero dog aggression. He came to us almost completely shut down, an incredibly fearful 12 month old puppy that would ‘pancake’ or ‘turn to butter’ anytime people approached. We spent many hours at Lake Merritt and walking here in downtown Oakland getting him socialized to understand the world isn’t quite as dangerous for him as perhaps it used to be.
Within a weekend, I’d established that he had become reliably velcroed to me, so he and I went backpacking/fly fishing in the Trinity Alps Wilderness for 10 days in late April and (coached by Zoe?) and he learned those ropes — and how to approach incredibly high stream crossings (spring runoff was fairly intense!!!). His evolution in the woods was honestly unbelievable and too much to try to explain in full — I’d just say he simply came out of his shell and showed me who he was and there was a lot of talent I’d not guessed was there. He ended up displaying some incredible traits — like following me up the banks as I would wade upstream in depths and current too strong for a dog. This is more complicated than it sounds, as the mountains often create a maze of tributary ditches feeding the main creeks and all the banks are usually flush with dense willow thickets that confuse and complicate any idea of straight lines and direct access. Regardless, if I dropped into a creek at a small clearing, and started working the river too far upstream, around a bend or out of sight, Jack would turn around, run off, and then be sitting on the bank, waiting for me, 50 yards upstream at the next clearing that approached the water when I got there. Zoe, old hand that she is, would often just go back to the tent and nap in the sun.
We spent a few days on the back end of that trip at a cabin on the Trinity River, closer to Humboldt County, and worked the Trinity River (proper) for Steelhead. Jack would bark at others he encountered though, so we worked on eliminating that behavior, almost as much as we fished, during the next few outings. By June, he got it and rarely made a sound on the banks of the Stanislaus apart from the intense splash when he’d find a deep enough pool and a big rock to leap from.
He’s a good dog. And I can trust him not to get in trouble.
Last night, Vladimir Putin effectively declared War on Ukraine, and the Russian military is currently attacking Ukrainian cities across the second-largest country in Europe. All I can think of is the dirt.
Of all the commentary that is circling today, I wish there were more that focused on the tragedy of an entire generation of young Ukrainians–and Russians!–who, rather than training or doing part-time things with less existential weight, less capacity for moral depravity and less opportunity to create long-lasting psychological damage, are now engaged in War. Young men with so much in common, separated largely just due to the goddamned chance of the location of their very birth, are invariably destined for mortal combat. In the fight over the very dirt, they will kill each other by artillery, airstrike, shell, bullet, bayonet, or other means.
I am heartened to see brave Russian people taking to the streets to demand a reckoning for the attack of their neighbors. The courage that takes is impressive and I honestly wish I could tell each of those arrested in Russia how much it makes me respect the Russian people that they have the courage to do that. But as an ex-Infantryman, who himself sat and stood in a lot of (peacetime) dirt, contemplating the ask that could come at any moment, I am nothing but remorseful that there are kids now in Ukraine, as old as I was then, who are tasked facing this unnecessary War.
I tested positive for Covid-19 on Friday, January 21st, 2022. This came on the heels of a negative test result roughly 24 hours prior.
The level of spread that week was sky-high across the country, in my county and the greater Bay Area — and remains so today. I woke up Thursday morning with discomfort swallowing; not really a ‘sore throat’ by definition–one of the anecdotal characteristics I’d been reading about related to the Omicron variant–just discomfort. This, during a surge in the pandemic where record levels of transmission and confirmed cases are occurring on a daily basis across my County, the Bay Area, and the Nation at large–and in multiples greater than in any surge thus far.
I took a single “Quick-VUE”TM COVID test that Thursday, but the results came back with no sign of infection. Less than 30 seconds later I’d created and established a (the dumbest) narrative in which I had simply caught an odd cold somehow — while still avoiding the #1, top, most communicable thing in circulation (on the whole damned planet) today.
Motivated reasoning doing its finest work inside my head. Sufficient information abounded. I was revisiting it often. But the moment a data point arrived to convince me that all the other data should be discounted and that the outcome I wanted was most likely, I was able to just erase the idea of Covid from my mind for another 16 or 20 hours.
Even the test kit instructions themselves stated that two tests needed to be taken no less than 24 hours apart for it to be considered a diagnostic tool. The next day the second test’s results came back positive and testing since then confirmed those results as well.
so yeah…
My course of the diseasethus far (your mileage may vary!)
Thursday AM: discomfort swallowing
Thursday PM: increasing cold-like symptoms by 4pm escalating all night (sinus congestion, headache, significant body aches)
Friday AM: very little sleep; cold/flu-like symptoms still escalating.
Friday PM: peak symptoms begin to decline by mid afternoon
Saturday AM: symptoms begin to decline, but chest congestion begins (its kind of a mind-fuck, this…)
Satuday PM: body ache is completely gone, slightly productive coughs and still background noise headaches and tiredness. (I should note one can add lethargy to all of these days thus far)
Sunday AM: the cough and the lack of abundant energy remain, although I do want to ride my bicycle trainer (but don’t)
Sunday PM: did everyone see that Bills-Chiefs game? Amazing!!!
Monday AM: Staring at a test kit, devoid of any real symptom (I can sense faint, minor chest congestion if I really try to feel it)
Monday PM: I take a Binax-NOW test thinking it’s early, but just maybe I can nab my first negative test results.
It came back Positive. Oh well. I should also note here that I’ve had three doses of Moderna with a booster shot in mid-November.
220 distinct electoral races were decided for State legislative seats from New Jersey and Virginia
2 high-profile governor’s races were decided
23 distinct State legislative contests were also decided
2 special elections for the US House of Representatives were also decided
Mayoral and ballot initiative contests were also decided all across the country
Overall, Republican party candidates fared better than Democratic party candidates and looking through multiple news outlets and aggregators, I find no mentions of ‘election fraud’ or similar ‘Big Lie’ style claims from any individuals on either side of any contest.
This, to me, is the story of today: the overwhelming majority of Republicans seemingly accept the electoral results of hundreds of elections across the countrythis time.
Four Hours at the Capitol is a new documentary on the events of January 6th this year, when thousands of Americans converged on the Capitol Building seeking to overturn electoral results they were unahppy with after being encouraged to do so by the President. For anyone with access to HBO, I would encourage taking the time to watch it.
A lot of discussion around historically abberrant civic behavior (threats made at school board meetings, armed gatherings outside election offices, violent breaches of the nation’s Capitol, etc.) focuses on Left-Right divides, but an interesting article in The American Journal of Political Science suggests that a better continuum to use may be Establishment vs Anti-establishment.
According to the researchers, it is the anti-establishment trait that “is correlated with several antisocial psychological traits, the acceptance of political violence, and time spent on extremist social media platforms. It is also related to support for populist candidates, such as Trump and Sanders, and beliefs in misinformation and conspiracy theories.” This seems to make sense . Folks aren’t joining wanna-be militias/gun clubs and decking themselves out in tactical gear because they’re just so gung-ho in support of certain types of foreign policy, limited government and balanced budgets (tenets of what used to pass for Republicanism) — they’re doing these things because they have grievance against an entity or institution, if not against the entire establishment altogether.
Further, it is possible and likely that leaders from established parties are stoking and growing this anti-establishment fervor among their constituents. And while most voters would probably tell you that politicians do not decide which way they feel about an issue, most voters are wrong.
In any event, it is worth considering how politics used to be on the Republican side of the aisle:
George W. Bush debating tax/economic policy with Ronald Reagan, 1980.
John Hallmén is a macro photographer in Stockholm who, as best as I can tell, uses an old school bellows system and modern-day frame stacking technology to combine dozens or hundreds of individual shots together to create stunning images of really small things — mostly entymology-related. Links to his work are here and here,
‘Black Ant’ by John Hallmén
AN interesting thing to consider ahead of the coming week is that four years ago, a Republican House, Senate and White House enacted their first significant legislation of the Trump Era, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Through this legislation, somewhere between $1.8 and $2.2 Trillion would be added to the national debt over ten years, in order to permanently cut corporate tax rates by 18%, while temporarily reducing the tax rate for individuals and married couples by a couple of percentage points. The law did other things, like preventing estates from having to pay any taxes at all; whereas previously Estates in excess of roughly $5M were taxed, after the Act was passed, an Estate was allowed to pass the first $14M+ to its heirs, tax-free.
I think about this as the ‘Build Back Better’ (BBB) legislation is pending final drafts, and we await the final implementation on the Infrastructure Bill (BIB). Folks will complain about all the ways that either bill isn’t perfectly to their liking and folks have alredy been complaining about how ugly they find the process of legislating to be. But an experiment has been run here, and the GOP–when in power–first used its majority to run up the deficit so they could reduce taxes on corporations. Conversely, the Democratic Party has used its majority to finally deliver funding for Infrastructure Renewal and Programs to help actual people — and without running up the deficit to do it.
To me, that is the story.
Another interesting thing to think about is that there is apparently market demand for $700 wheels you can put on the bottom of your computer.
Dune was released last night. It was beautifully shot, and the soundtrack seemed interesting, but other than that, I found the movie unimpressive.
A fellow named Nick was fired this week from his job in Washington state coaching college football. State employees were mandated to be vaccinated in August, but as of late October, Nick still refused to be vaccinated. At the time of his firing, he was the highest paid state employee in the entire state of Washington.
And that, too me, is the story here.
States run all manner of organizations: Health Exchanges, Highway Patrols, Departments of Agriculture, Substance Abuse Treatment Facilities, all manner of entities that require talent, dedication and experience to operate well, but who gets the most money? The guy in charge of the sportsball team. I will think on this the next time someone mentions American values.
I wanted a Brindle. Something like a Plott hound, maybe a Staffie, even a Great Dane, but it had to be brindle. Iconic, not small, sturdy, rugged and loyal. I went to my county’s Animal Shelter, and eventually the local Humane Society and while walking the kennels there just off of Pottsburg Creek, in Jacksonville, FL, all the dogs began to go off — barking wildly at my presence, super excited and eager for something. Most kennels had a couple of dogs, and there were more than a couple of Brindle pups on site, but in one pen, was a big puppy, all black, all alone, about 5 months old with paws nearly as big as his head. Someone had scrawled a card on the kennel door with the name “ZEAK.”
He was the only dog not barking. I was intrigued. Impressed maybe. The thought of a quiet dog, one who never barked suddenly became a very interesting idea, but he didn’t look like the dog I wanted. I passed on him. Kept walking, kept checking out the other dogs looking for the proverbial one. I think I met a few dogs that day, but on a lark I asked if I could hang out with the quiet one, so a volunteer eventually brought the quiet dog out and from the moment he arrived — he ignored me, and followed her around the pen as she struggled in vain to get him to lose interest and pay attention to the prospective adopter. She kept apologizing, again and again, saying it’s because she’s the one who feeds him and that I shouldn’t take it personally. I didn’t — and in fact I thought it was the greatest mark of character that he wasn’t so fickle to just fawn over the new guy. Dance with the one who brought you, I thought.
I came back the next day after sleeping on it, and said I wanted him. But it turned out he was a flagged dog (puppy, technically), serious resource-guarding issues and minimal socialization with people. He was already 55lbs. and he was accustomed to using his teeth to get what he wanted. I had to meet with the behaviorist on site. She warned me against adopting him — probably based on my lack of experience with similar issues. She explained that the shelter was a no-kill facility (implying that he was the type that would be immediately put down as aggressive elsewhere) and that typically a dog like him would require a ton of work. She explained the work, I was stubborn, and ultimately she agreed to let me adopt him.
If the truth be told, that decision was technically a mistake. Zeke (as it is correctly spelled) eventually changed my views on the virtue and vice of ‘no-kill’ shelters but that is a whole other post. For the next few weeks he chewed through leashes while we were out walking, sometimes escaping and running wild doing zoomies and snapping at anyone who tried to catch him and hold him down. Once, he chewed through the leash at the Five Points intersection of my neighborhood during rush hour and ran out into the road going full on buck wild. Cars swerved to miss him, others swerved to block traffic, with a few drivers shifting to park and jumping out of their running cars to try and help the guy with two frayed halves of a bright red leash get this maniac big black dog back to safety. I have no memory of how I was able to actually get him the four blocks back to my place.
At other points, once I had switched to leashes that couldn’t be chewed through, he switched to using his teeth on me directly, once severely mauling my right arm (he was 65lbs at this point), mad at being restrained on a walk to Mr. Lee’s convenience store three blocks away. After bloodying up my arm, with cars flying by on Riverside Avenue, staring at the ongoing spectacle, he clamped on to my right hand to the point that I suddenly realized something I had never considered before: a dog can crush your bones. He had already punctured skin, and I was fairly certain he was about to break a few metacarpals if not all of them. I spent the next 24 hours tore up emotionally, certain that I’d failed, and certain that I’d have to give him up, that he couldn’t really be properly socialized.
Thankfully, the shelter refused to take him back.
Over the next four months or so, we got really serious. Everything became regimented. I read everything from Patricia McConnell and The Monks of New Skete and Karen Pryor to Alexandra Horowitz and Jon Katz and numerous other authors. I watched every episode of The Dog Whisper and DogTown, every documentary I could get a hold of on dog behavior and eventually purchased and read all three volumes of the Handbook of Applied Dog Behavior and Training. Within that time we were able to establish SO MANY cues (he was always great with language) but most importantly we switched from having him ask with his teeth, to asking with a sit. Once he learned that was more effective, everything became easier. But it was rough getting there.
He was not the perfect dog. As a puppy, he was great with other dogs, and kind of indifferent to people. But as he got older, that inverted. He became incredibly status oriented toward other dogs. If any dog stared at him in any way but subserviently, he would want to correct that on the spot. We often had to navigate across streets and around cars, using any obstacle available as folks walked their dogs either off leash, or on those ridiculously long retractable leashes, completely oblivious to what was heading their way. After my girlfriend at the time (wife now) and I adopted another dog, Zoe, I was scared to leave the two of them home alone for weeks, but they never got into it during those early days and eventually formed the pack that continued until about 11:30 this morning.
Zeke was not an overly-affectionate dog. But every morning he would wake up, and once on his feet, if you’d let him, he’d walk over to you and give you a lick. Just one. To let you know, you’re still cool. As he’s gotten older and as this day has slowly approached, I was more and more fond of that trait. I would always squat down and let him plant one on me and then he’d turn to go check out the water bowl or what the office was looking like, or if the dog bed in the living room might need his presence. If he heard his leash rattle, he’d amble over to the door and patiently wait to be clicked in and taken outside to handle his business. If he had to go outside, he’d come over, rest his chin on your leg and then look up at you to communicate the fact. He was a brilliant communicator. He knew nouns, he knew verbs, and he could put them together to understand the syntax. I’ve never encountered a dog better with language.
His favorite place in the world was probably our bed. As he got older and more frail, he was less able to get up there (or off there) but he would often place his chin on the top of the bed and just look at it. His favorite thing he ever ate was probably a lake-caught Trout in the Trinity Alps of Northern California. He once hiked 18 miles in a single day from Grizzly Meadows to the Hobo Gulch Trailhead in the Trinity-Shasta National Forest. He once got up on the dining room table while Sarah and I were away and then got stuck there because he felt the bench was too unstable to down-climb on. Sarah and I walked in to the apartment and there’s a 125lb dog on the dining room table whining because he doesn’t want to be there any more. At the risk of an arcane (Ghostbusters) reference, he had a face not unlike Zuul of Gozer but the weird motions of helium balloons frightened him to the point he would lock up and freeze and no force on earth could move him any closer. He loved dogs bigger than him. He loved donkeys. He was weird. He was as big as a recliner, but if there were just a few inches of space available on the couch he would insist that he could fit into it. He was a sentient, living being, but no more. He was my friend, I loved him, and I miss him.
griff.works 
