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.
