This is a foul mannered day. Mom & Dad are out a while, so I’m hanging with Happy, to watch in case the day takes a toll on her health.  

A fire – the Day Fire – is burning over near Castaic and Fillmore. 125 square miles devoured so far; it’s been burning for nearly two weeks, since Labor Day. Well, the winds shifted last night, and blew smoke and ash all over Carpinteria.  Its overcast too, and when the sun finds a thin place in the clouds to let a little light seep through, it filters through this acrid crap.   The light is mostly gray, with a tint of sickly orange brown. And just in the last few hours, we’ve been spared the scent of the burning brush. Reminiscent of a campfire, but not in a good way.

The only upside is that it’s not too hot to be indoors with all the windows closed against fallout. Behind these double-paned windows, it’s quiet. Happy is taking a nap.

I guess the summer has been murdered in old age, cremated and sprinkled on the land, unloved and unmourned. So it goes. I’m looking forward to autumn and winter, when the sky will be clear and crisp.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

— George Bernard Shaw

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous." 

– Robert Benchley

 
I’m so glad I don’t have that problem.

Robert Jensen:

“Five years later, one thing is clear: The antiwar voices were right. We saw what was coming, not because we were so smart but because it was so obvious.”

Here’s a great wiki post on How to Dissuade Yourself from becoming a Blogger.

If you have come to this blog without coercion, and especially if you are considering blogging, this information is vital. And it’s absolutely true.

Write on a regular basis in a text editor instead. If that doesn’t satisfy your urge, and you feel that you must post your blog online, then you might just be craving attention and validation–which you’ll never truly find in a blog. If you give up on your Wordpad journal after about three days, you’ll do the same with a blog that just takes up server space.

Of course there are two sides to every apple, mon frere. It’s true that blogging comes to spare pickins in terms of external validation, and that’s it generally amounts to honking your horn while passing through a tunnel. And it’s an excellent way of sowing the seeds of future embarrassment.

Perhaps the worst thing about blogging is the process. Write, then publish. That’s not the way quality is produced. The better process is: ideate, research, ponder, take a walk, make notes, pet the dog, start a draft, eat lunch, start over, write several more drafts, give up with something that looks mostly finished, think about shaving, share it with people, re-write it, and stare at it while thinking about publication.

On the other hand, it’s like what Douglas Adams said about Earth in Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy: “Mostly Harmless.” It’s a hobby. Flying in airplanes started out as a hobby of – inter alia – two bicycle-repairing brothers. And I think online publishing, once past this awkward adolescence, will grow into something valid. After all, the evening news and the daily paper are cranky, arthritic old men now. Something’s coming along to replace them; and it too is on its way to memory.

Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort—
along with human love,

dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds
flying among the scarlet flowers.

I was down at the coffeehouse, connected to their wi-fi, then I drove about two miles to my folks place, and it says I’m still connected.  My folks don’t have wi-fi, so I was just going to use Word. There could be a neighbor with it, but I’d have to connect to their signal, wouldn’t I? 

Garrison Keillor:

The Federal Aviation Administration has now acknowledged that the third of the four planes seized by the 19 men with box cutters had already hit the Pentagon before the FAA finally called there to say there was a problem. The FAA lied to the 9/11 commission about this, then took two years to ascertain the facts – a 51-minute gap in defense – and released the finding on the Friday before Labor Day, an excellent burial site for bad news.

So America is not the secure fortress we grew up imagining. Perhaps it never was. What protects us is what has protected us for 230 years: our magnificent isolation. After the disasters of the 20th century, Europe put nationalism aside and adopted civilization, but we have oceans on either side, so if the president turns out to be a shallow, jingoistic fool with a small, rigid agenda and little knowledge of the world, we expect to survive it somehow. Life goes on.

Oh, how I wish I’d written that. This is the kind of thing – and by the way the whole essay is great – that comes from sitting and thinking and writing with patience. One of the reasons my blog isn’t better – and my writing in general – is that I rush it. I’m rushing this now. More on that later, when I have time. Suffice it to say, I’m glad we have real writers of focus like Keillor … and Molly Ivins.