We live in a rather strange times, where hate dominates our national conservation, with a White Supremist running our country. One who is concerned about the plight of the Jews – at least the White and Conservative Jews – and White South Afrikaaner farmers. But not so concerned about the Muslims, the Hispanics and African Americans. The President who took away honoring Martin Luther King in National Parks in favor of Flag Day, which just also happens to be his own birthday.
Truth is discrimination and cracking down on people who are different then you is bad regardless of how you cut it. Muslims have every much a right to practice their faith, seek refugee status as do any Jew. The US should help those seeking persecution and not be driving out or promoting discrimination against minorities or those who are not in political favor. We should instead be encouraging diversity, sharing ideas and learning the best of every culture to integrate into our own culture.
No one group has a monopoly on good ideas or knows the best ways of doing things. We are a complicated, diverse society, and things that are acceptable and normal in one area might not not acceptable in others. That doesn’t mean their wrong in all areas, but instead we should encourage tolerance, and embrace the creativity and diversity. We shouldn’t look down at people who are different then ourselves.
Besides the fact that it’s nine degrees out and wind is whipping around, tonight is the Public Hearing on condemning part of Albany Pine Bush for the trash transfer station now that landfill is supposed to close in the next few years.
Truth is like so many Mondays, I felt sick before I got out of bed, 🛏️ but getting up, unthawing some frozen strawberries 🍓 and shredding some carrots for pancakes, and putting the bread, sweet potatoes 🥔 and acorn squash in the oven to bake 🍞, I’m feeling better now. Maybe it’s the coffee ☕ that is certain to keep me pissing and shitting all of the time. I kind of loathe sticking around downtown until 7 PM and going to city hall to bitch about the dump that I rarely use because I burn most of my shit. 🔥 But it’s important to fight to save the remaining Albany Pine Bush, 🦋 even if soon enough I’ll be leaving Albany never to look back. It’s just another public hearing, Lynne wrote me crib notes, and if I don’t want to get emotional or say what I really think about garbage hump of consumerism, 🐪 I can just have Chat GPT write me some notes. And it’s a chance to walk laps. 🚶
But somehow I was hoping for an excuse to say I’m sick, 🤒 and need to stay home but the coffee and strawberry pancakes 🥞 got me going and probably soon enough peeing and pooping, 💩 which the crap that doesn’t burn ends up on that garbage heap in landfill. Somehow composting toilets, out houses and humanure seems all the more attractive! But I also find the whole concept of permaculture to be so repulsive, 🍆 maybe because of who I associate it with, usually menonites and overly jacked up hippie types. 👦🏽 It will give me time to walk laps in Plaza where it’s warm, finish up Cathy Friends’ Hit By a Farm, an audiobook I’ve listening to about two lesbians who form a sheep farm in Western Minnesota and learn about the trials and tribulations of farm life between dead sheep and broken fucked up farm equipment. 🐑 It’s a good story, and sometimes I need a diversion from more serious material.
Wednesday Big Red 🛻 gets inspected and tires rotated, probably for the last time I tell myself, but it will be good. I want to get through this winter with Red. I need to pull off the hub caps and install the new windshield wiper but I doubt I’ll get a chance to do this before Wednesday morning, 🛠️ as there is a hearing about a development in the Pine Bush 🌲 on Tuesday to attend also. I will probably take that day off as I time use up before the end of the year and I want to read 📖 and if it’s mild enough do some riding. 🚲
That evening it was bumper-to-bumper traffic on the bridge as cars and trucks hurried home from work or a day of Christmas shopping.
Then, at about 5 p.m., the unthinkable happened.
Charlene Foster, who lived in Kanauga on the edge of the river, in sight of the bridge, told the Gallipolis Daily Tribune that she was preparing dinner in the kitchen of her home when her two sons suddenly screamed, “Mommy! Mommy! The bridge is in the water.” She looked toward the bridge, and “It was just like a snake slithering down into the water. It seemed to go down in slow-motion.”
Ann Davis, who worked in a beverage store near the bridge, was watching the heavy traffic cross the bridge when she heard a large boom. She told the Plain Dealer that it sounded like a sonic boom, and then “the bridge started to crumple and sink like a set of dominoes falling. Cars were being crushed like toys in the girders.”
It took just twenty seconds for the entire bridge to fall into the river.
I don’t remember much from seeing he Wonder Years but I’ve always kind of liked that Joe Cocker song and the power of nostalgia even though it was long before my time on this earth.
There will be a time when I look back with such nostalgia when I was in my early forties much like when I often look back to those days in my thirties and even my twenties. In some ways, I look back in complete horror about how things used to be, but also I do wish such a simpler world still existed. At same time, I dream of the better future, the homestead and land, the freedom away from cities and consumerism and the pollution.
It was a year of pure madness and paranoia of myself and others. A victim of the confusing times we live in, where maleaase and fear dominated all aspects of life as spent many hours reading and listening to Edward Abbey and Hunter S. Thompson as I smoked pot by many a campfire, and rode back and forth to that hideously ugly suburban state office building next to one of many former city garbage dumps. It was really stupid to fear my truck so much, to delay and cut back both my summer vacation and my autumn road trip just because I feared my truck would melt down and fall apart in wilderness.
Eighteen years came and went in my career and in my apartment. The strong economy, my frugal living and investing started to pay off on paper but I still don’t have that off-grid cabin, goats, hogs, or a burn barrel out back though I did spend a lot of time in wilderness and burned up a lot of debris, pallets and wood from the forest. Been since last winter when I recycled any plastic but I dumped most of my food scraps in my parents compost and I’ve been collecting cans all summer. I feared every creak and gone of my now rusty pickup, though it still seems hard to imagine a life after Big Red. I scaled my plans back because I lived in fear, that breakdown in wilderness or somewhere in West Virigina that never happened, though I did enjoy getting back to the North Country and the Adirondacks for the first time in years. Spending that weekend up in Plattsburgh sure was memorable.
Reading and E-books became a bigger and bigger part of my life as I learned to fully exploit the free resources the public library offers. Spent many an evening over at Five Rivers reading and thinking, laying back and watching as it got dark out. Those summer days come and gone much too quickly, replaced with long dark nights spent going to bed early and reading under the heated blanket, trying to stay warm in my diaploated apartment. While moisture issues have meant the paint has always pealed, after 18 years of no paint and minimal maintance, it’s really coming off in big flakes this year. Like usual, the most memorable places I went to where new to me, but I alway was too afraid to try too much change. Didn’t want to get too far out, break something on my big jacked pickup, which continued to serve me reliably all year.
So much of the year was dominated by extreme confusion in my mind, and general indirection. Maybe because there was no obvious answers and much emptiness in world. Maybe it was the lessons learned in 2024, the reinforcement of the fact that there was no easy answers and all the options were bad. With nothing better to do, I just push forwarded, with vague notions of the future, though even on that front I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought. Maybe it was best I deleted the Zillow app off my phone. There are a lot of options out there, but the ones I actually like are much too far away. And New York State sucks even if it pays the bills and let’s me save and invest to a better future. And all I got was more wokeness pushed upon me. You don’t like the status quo, or how everything is fucked up? Try going woke.
Up at 5 AM to boil down the coffee and shred the carrots for the pancakes. I’m already through a bag and half of cranberries since I bought the four 12-oz bags on Friday evening for 97 cents a piece. I do like cranberries, but I like bitter shit like that as I’m kind of bitter son of a bitch.
Continuing to read that book 📙 about butchering, 🗡️ smoked some weed last night and listened to more of the Fairport Convention along with Ian and Sylvia. Eventually I did ride my bike out to Five Rivers, thinking about it again today, but it’s pretty windy and cold out. At first when I woke up and it was still and cold, I was thinking how I wish I had done an overnight last night as I watch as next weekend fades to crap, but certainly I want to get out at least on Christmas Day 🎄 to the woods to have a fire and be away from all that Christmas crap. 🎁
Made a big pot of black beans yesterday 🍲 making sure to wash them and put extra salt on them to keep them from getting stinky or making me stinky from farting after eating too many. Fried them up with onions and corn for lunch. 🧅 I often prefer pinto beans as their somewhat cheaper and more flexible, but both are good and probably black beans are somewhat healthier. I froze the remaining pea soup I had from earlier in the week, to avoid it starting to get tangy in fridgerator. I have some acorn squash I want to cook when I’m baking bread 🍞 on Monday morning. I also might make up some brown rice and have rice and beans this week too. I don’t plan to go to the grocery store again until after I get my truck inspected 🔎 on Wednesday. I was going to work from home that day, but honestly, I have the time, and I think I’d rather just drop my truck off and ride and hang out most of the day I don’t know at various parks or seeing the country on my bike if it’s not cold and gray. 🌥️ If I was honest with myself, I’ll probably spend it home reading as it will be cold and nasty.
Ran into an old colleague at Five Rivers, 🐸 catching up on the happenings at the Capitol and soon it was getting dark, but honestly I didn’t expect to spend much time walking around there, I mostly went out there to get some exercise riding out there, 🚲 and past by Meads’ Cows 🐮 out there. Kind of a cold, dark gray day yesterday too. Wouldn’t have been real great in Rennselaerville for sure. Also started reading another book on working with custom builders, not that I’m sure that’s the route I want to go, but I just hate those grid-tied, plastic houses with weekly 96-gallkon trash service in the suburbs, not that I’m necessarily embracing a stinky smoldering load of plastic fires every other day. 🔥 Though, some thing stink when you burn them, so their best kept downwind just like your hog pens. 🐽 I’ve been mostly staying off Facebook, really trying to instead read more on Libby and Hoopla, 📰 along with keeping up better with the various magazines but not getting too much into the depth of swamp of the Love the Cops and Government Workers 👮 that the press really wants to you to be ever so scared of.
Heading out to visit the parents later today and empty out the compost bucket which is mostly full at this point. 🪣 Not of spoiled food but apple cores, carrot tops and banana peals and other similar things. I really try to avoid wasting food, 🥕 as unlike many people, I don’t have unlimited money as I don’t want one of those woke suburban houses with vinyl siding. It is amazing how rich and wasteful the poor people are. And I was bitching about my $95 electric and gas bill last month, but I’ve done a lot of cooking and hiding under the electric blanket, and probably taken too long of hot showers but I also keep my heat at 48 degrees except for that real cold day this winter. 🔌 Of course, I’m saying that, sitting next to my space heater which has been basically off except for this morning but I like being warm.
