Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Stormy Weather!

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Wow, what a storm! Well, make that what a pair of storms! Right now the Interstate is closed in both directions, trees are down, a house is burning, water is up to our knees.

It started yesterday afternoon with quite a heavy, sharp rain. These squalls move across the desert quickly, and so within a few minutes the rain stopped and this brilliant rainbow, one of the brightest I’ve ever seen, stretched across the northeastern sky.

Rainbow2010

Thing looks like it’s coming down right in the neighbor’s yard, doesn’t it? LOL! Before this appeared, though, quite a lot of lightning, thunder, and pounding rainfall terrorized Cassie the Corgi. Moi, I was cool until a bolt of lightning crackled down right outside the back door…HOLY mackerel! We were both diving under the bed.

I thought it had hit one of the palm trees, but if it did, I can’t see any damage. Last night the skies cleared, leaving a beautiful evening for a late doggy walk. And this morning dawned clear with a few fluffy little clouds. A few…that, well.. coalesced.

About noon the skies darkened and then let loose with one of the wildest hailstorms I’ve ever seen. Vast quantities of ice fell from the clouds. By the time it stopped, the place looked like it had snowed. Here’s a view out the side door.

Hail2

That green stuff is not grass. It’s leaves. The hail stripped about half the foliage off every tree in the neighborhood! Inez and Carlos’s huge tree has blanketed the street and their neighbors’ yards with leaves, and my yard is covered with an even, thick layer of shredded leaves from their and my trees—front and back.

Hail3

Everything was coated with ice. Naturally, first thing after dawn this morning I’d finished putting in the last of my vegetable garden. La Bethulia’s cucumber plant was reduced to a nubbin, and the two bell peppers she gave me were shredded. They might survive, but if they do it’ll be a surprise. The millimeter-high bok choy seedlings were thoroughly thrashed, as were the tiny chard sprouts that were just starting to peek out of the dirt.

A fair amount of water fell out of the sky, too. This puddle outside the back door is almost over the threshold, which is three inches higher than the patio floor, which itself is well above grade. Another quarter-inch of rain, and I would’ve had water in the house.

Rainwater

This storm was so extreme and so fierce, I thought it was going to break the skylights. In fact, in other parts of the city the hail did bust in car windshields, and as I write this, NPR just reported that 75-mile-an-hour winds were recorded. As the black thunderheads rolled in from the south, we could hear the same roaring sound that came out of the storm that smashed the Encanto district a couple of years ago: like a freight train barreling past. Only this was a great deal more violent than that storm, it least in our little corner of the Valley. I grabbed the dog and barricaded us into the middle bathroom, which has no exterior windows (except…ahem…a skylight…) and provides a sturdy cage of copper plumbing.

About the time the hail stopped, I had to get in my car and drive up to the campus for a meeting. What fun, driving in this stuff! Went up on the surface streets to avoid the likely chaos on the freeways. While I was going about 40 mph through thick traffic and heavy rain, some asshole thought it was hilarious to streak past me on the right so he could dive through a deep puddle at about 45 mph, fire-hosing my windshield and utterly blinding me.

This is the reason I don’t carry a gun in my car. Honestly. If I’d had a pistol, I’d have shot the sunovabitch. I certainly would have tried to shoot out his tires as I passed him while he stood in the left-turn lane (yes: after entertaining himself, he swerved across three lanes of traffic to park himself in the left-turn lane), and wouldn’t have regretted it much if a stray bullet had wandered into the driver’s compartment. No. You’re right. I have no restraint.

Where was I?

Yesh. Soon enough, the meeting adjourned and I headed back to the Funny Farm. By now more storm clouds were rumbling in. Threw some food on the stove before the power could go out, and just about the time the dog and I finished scarfing dinner, another violent hailstorm hit. We had hail at least an inch in diameter, some of it bigger. It sounded like rocks hitting the roof!

This struck right at 5:00 p.m.: perfect timing!

Power lines fell across the freeway, closing the Interstate 17 in both directions at mid-town. Underpasses flooded, and people stuck on the interstate found themselves in water up to their doors. The airport was shut down twice. Power poles went down, some of them through the roofs of utility customers’ homes.

Now it’s quiet. Quiet and finally, mercifully, gloriously cool. It’s down to 70 degrees on the back porch, the coolest temperature we’ve seen in three months.

And so, to walk the dog, and then to bed…

Gold Bugs, Burglars, and a Way to Pay off Your Credit Cards…

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This morning while we were out estate-saling, La Maya reported on a recent burglary in which the thieves made off with the neighbors’ jewelry, and only their jewelry. Other valuables, including an iPhone left sitting on a nightstand, Mac and PC laptops, and a large-screen TV were untouched. But a lifetime’s collection of jewelry was lifted, apparently for the gold.

A chat with the police revealed that gold is now selling for $1,300 an ounce. The vic, on advice from friends, paid a visit to a nearby pawn shop, claiming to be looking for a gift for a sister who desired rubies set in gold (exactly the description of a set the couple had picked up on a trip to Spain).

They were advised not to tell a pawn dealer that they were looking for stolen goods, because of course it’s wildly illegal to accept stolen property. And as we all know, no pawn dealer would ever do any such thing, eh? Word has it that if you say you’re looking for something that was taken, the pawnshop people will freeze you right out. Instead, claim you’re shopping for a purchase that resembles the stolen jewelry and hope they bring it forth.

Anyway, when she went into this nearby pawn shop, the dealer remarked that people are flocking to sell their gold. (Yeah! And presumably everyone else’s! :-))

Prices, he said, are high and unstable—just that morning the price of gold had risen $120. He pointed out that at the current prices, you could bring in an earring that’s lost its mate or an out-dated bauble and come away with a nice pocketful of cash.

Dealers weigh your jewelry and pay by the gram or by the troy ounce. Today a gram of gold was selling for $41.66. One gram equals .035 ounce.At the end of trading today, gold was selling for $41.66 a gram, or $1,295.83 an ounce. He said even a thin piece of gold of the sort that decorates an earring could be worth a couple hundred bucks.

La Maya said she’s going to dig out the orphaned earrings she’s tossed in the drawer in the forlorn hope of someday finding their lost mates, and she’s going to schlep them to the nearest pawn shop. I’ve got a couple of orphaned earrings myself, plus a pair of old 1970s hoop earrings, massively out of style (14k, as I recall) and a gold ring that no longer will slide over a knuckle.

At those prices, you could turn your discards into enough cash to pay off a credit-card balance or take yourself out to a very nice dinner or two or thee.

Think of that. Gives new meaning to “decluttering,” doesn’t it?

Images:
220kg gold brick, Chinkuashi Gold Museum, on loan from the Republic of China. Texcoco. Public domain.
Golden earring rendered using 3D software. Aldzine. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Books

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This morning a student sent over his latest paper, a response to an assignment in which I asked classmates to write a narrative describing their response to a tour of the campus library. This library, in addition to functioning as a busy learning center full of constant activity, houses a Southwestern art collection donated by an emeritus professor, and so there’s lots to see in there.

As he was charming me with his usual well-tuned authorial voice, he remarked in passing that although he had been attending the college off and on for the past three years, this was the first time he’d sent foot in the library.

Boink! Even dinosaurs have startle reflexes!

After an internal holy mackerel dialogue, I realized that even though the library is still the heart and brains of a college campus, there’s a reason my students seem to have set as their goal moving through two to four years of higher education without ever visiting a campus library: they can.

So much learning is available on-line, including full-text scholarly articles and books, that a good student quite reasonably can expect to get through most courses, writing creditable term papers and studying for challenging exams, without ever visiting a museum of books.

Frugalscholar, is that your hat in orbit overhead?

As I continued to read his essay and thought about his passing observation, I realized he was commenting, unconsciously, on something that has occurred to me, to at least one of my academic coconspirators, and probably to Frugalscholar: Why the heck are we keeping all these books in our houses?

Frugalscholar has shown the way to peddling scores of books online. Are we sitting on a small gold mine here, one whose financial proceeds would do us a lot more good than the decorator quality of a wallful of books?

Like many other academics, I have ceiling-to-floor bookcases in the living room and the family room, and of course the de rigueur six-foot shelf of reference works in the office (make that 18 feet). As a writer and then later as a younger editor, I used to have recourse to this library all the time. Even the most unlikely occupants of those shelves would occasionally be picked up, looked over, borrowed from. My library was an integral part of my work as a teacher, a thinker, and a writer. And I used one part of it or another every single day.

Recently, however, I’ve come to realize that I hardly ever open a book anymore. The only works I use at all are a few cookbooks…and half the time I get my recipes off the Internet—like everything else. When I write, when I grade papers, when I edit a client’s copy, when I check facts, I invariably use the Internet. The encyclopedias, the various dictionaries, the OED, the history and political science texts, the novels, the chronicles, the tomes of literary criticism and social history and science and mathematics: they just sit there gathering dust. Two walls filled with dust-catchers!

Truly, today I could get by with a computer and the following:

The Oxford Dictionary of French
La Petite Larousse
The Oxford Dictionary of Spanish
The Harper-Collins Dictionary of Italian
Collier’s Latin Dictionary
Cassel’s German Dictionary
The Compact OED
Random House Webster’s Dictionary
The Chicago Manual of Style
The MLA Style Manual
The APA Style Manual
The CSE Scientific Style and Format Manual
Roget’s Thesaurus
A couple of field guides to birds
A field guide to Southwestern flora
A few favorite cookbooks

And that’s it. None of these (except the recipe books, maybe) has an acceptable online equivalent. All the fiction? It could go. The classics are online at Project Gutenberg. Most of the contemporary fiction is eminently disposable stuff, occupying shelf space by default. The nonfiction tomes are largely out of date—maybe one in thirty is worth keeping.

Because Poisoned Pen Press keeps me supplied with light fiction (at the price, o’course, of having to edit the stuff), I hardly ever buy “airplane books” anymore—their detective novels supply all my bedtime and idle moment reading. Partly because I’m paid to read and don’t feel inclined to devote leisure time to reading and partly because I don’t have a helluva lot of leisure time, I almost never buy new books.

So…why is my house filled with books?

I asked La Maya the same question, and she responded with approximately my own sentiment: Books define our identity as academics. We keep them because they say something to others (and to ourselves) about us. Also, she remarked, a bookcase full of hefty tomes makes a nice decorator item.

Yes.

I wonder what on earth I would do with those big walls in the absence of running foot after vertical and horizontal running foot of books.

Fine art? The sum total of every book I could sell wouldn’t buy one Ed Mell painting. Maybe some Navajo rugs? They’d cut the echo, though not as well as all those books. I haven’t been up to the rez to price any of those lately, but one thing’s for sure: if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

So, what we have here is a lifetime of learning—or the metaphor thereof—reduced to interior decoration. The truth is, everything I once used books for has been transferred to a computer monitor.

For individuals, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Our students, at least the ambitious among them, can access as much information in an hour as once took us half a semester to dig out. I can check a fact in 30 seconds, a chore that once could have taken me anywhere from 15 minutes (if a source was at hand) to a day or more (if I had to traipse to a library or archive to track it down).

But what about our culture, our society? Now, there I’m not at all convinced that the demise of the book and the rise of the Library of the Internet are happy developments. For one thing, paranoia tells us that censorship of online resources is even easier than censorship of print material. But the big repercussions, the scary ones, are economic.

• Who will continue to produce “content” if all creative and scholarly work is available for free on the Web?
• How many jobs will be lost when a print book is a rarity?
• How many graphic artists, editors, circulation drones and managers, librarians, printers, paper manufacturers, ink makers, and booksellers will be stocking shelves at the Walmart?
• How much more power will monied interests have over the intellectual and scientific direction of our country?
• And when an entire generation has never known the pleasure of reading for the sheer joy of reading, what will that mean for the entire economy of the developed world?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But the fact that we have to ask them makes me itch.

Image: Interior of the British Library, with, behind smoked glass, the King’s Library. Andrew Dunn, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

Puttering around, catching up…

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Shameful neglect of the blogging project! The fast-bloating set of chores and goals and paid work has expanded to fill all hours of the day, and so I’ve let Funny slide a bit and, at least for the nonce, given up on the Half-Off Diet. Decided to let “Fear and Loathing” sit at the top of the site for a day, because it strikes me as one of the best things I’ve written in a long time and because quite a few people kindly left comments. Half-Off? Well…I’m afraid my dieting habits have tended to “Twice On” the last couple of weeks! {sigh}

The low-desert summer’s unholy heat is slowly fading. The past few mornings have been gorgeous. La Maya and I have crawled out of our air-conditioned boxes to restart our early-morning constitutionals, and it’s finally cool enough in the evenings to walk Cassie before 10:00 at night.

La Bethulia, an accomplished gardener, is planning her fall and winter crops, and of course I can’t let that go unchallenged. It’s been a busy couple of days, despite the crush of student papers, the ad-selling scheme, and various client projects.

Yesterday morning after a breakfast meeting followed by a drive to a client’s office but before it got too bracingly warm (the thermometer eventually rose to 108°), I dropped by Baker’s Nursery, my favorite purveyor of garden goods, to pick up a rat bait station. Of course I couldn’t resist a few packages of seeds and some plants…

Back at the ranch, I managed to pull out some old onions (or possibly garlic chives? don’t think so…think they’re overgrown LGOs) from a big pot. Used part of a bag of potting soil to transplant the ficus and its attendant decorative plantlets into that big pot, a Costco plastic number that looks convincingly like terra cotta.

Earlier this summer, the ficus blew over in a monsoon, breaking its real terra cotta pot. It was so rootbound that its dirt just clung to it in a clotted ball. M’hijito lifted it into another pot about the same size, and, pushed way in under the back patio cover, it managed to stay alive through the remaining horrific heat. Just now it’s shivering with joy to have more room and fresh soil.

The pot recovered from the struggling ficus, which itself is a pretty good-sized terra cotta pot, was refilled with the rest of the potting soil, along with another large pot and a smaller wall pot reclaimed from a wad of dead roots. Decided to use the pots only to hold herbs, and so now we have a new parsley plant, a new sage plant, and a vigorous young basil plant, ready to burst into growth. This is what happens, you  understand, when fall is spring: in Arizona plants thrust out joyous foliage in October.

The basil on the west side is two or three years old now, and it’s getting tired. Really, it’s an annual. But where the weather’s mild and the human is willing to haul the pot into the house during frosts, you can make it behave like a perennial by cutting it way back now and again. Like a rose, it responds to pruning with new (delicious!) growth. But there’s a limit: no matter what, basil doesn’t last forever.

I’m thinking when I get around to tossing that aged basil plant, its pot can hold some chives, summer savory, and maybe a new thyme or tarragon plant.

But for the nonce, I planted a few parsley seeds in the pot with the sage and basil. I love parsley, especially the flat-leafed Italian type. Baker’s was billing its parsley plants as flat-leafed, but the one I got looks curlier than flat. Besides, parsley bolts to seed at this time of year, and so that plant won’t last until it gets cool enough for parsley to live a long and productive life.

One of the things I’ve missed over the past straitened summer has been parsley. I’ve stayed out of grocery stores pretty  much—have grazed out of the freezer and off the shelves, and what I’ve bought has come from Costco, whose limited fresh produce offerings do not include parsley. So it will be nice to have the stuff growing out there again.

Into the pool to cool down around 11:30 a.m., by which time I was thoroughly fricasseed. This is the nicest time of year for pool swimming! The water has cooled down enough to be refreshing, and the sun has slipped behind the devil-pod tree, so a fair amount of the pool is shaded. It is absolutely lovely. It took a half-hour and a couple of dips to let the water soak the heat out. During that time I noticed the pump wasn’t pushing water through there very fast, and from there observed the pressure gauge was into the “clean me” range. Another day…

In the afternoon around reading stoont papers I cooked some of those golden Mayan beans, planning to make a soup. Out of onions (another item that hasn’t been on the shopping list all summer) but still managed to flavor up the beans with celery, carrots, garlic, rosemary and thyme from the garden, dried herbs, and a few aging tomatoes. Just as the beans had reached the desired stage of doneness, La Maya called and invited me over for an impromptu dinner.

Well, given a choice between bean soup and La Maya’s incredible cooking, it was off to her restaurant with me and Cassie! She fixed a fresh pesto sauce with a mountain of basil from their garden, served over pasta. Awesome!

So this morning the beans still resided in the fridge. And a great many chores remained to be done.

Before getting started, though, I decided to have a real, decent meal for breakfast: defrosted a piece of steak, wrapped some asparagus in tinfoil, and tossed both on the grill to cook. Served those up with one of the pears liberated a couple days ago from Costco, now ripened to glorious juiciness.

Having enjoyed that and a cup of pretty darned good coffee, moved the car so I could climb into the attic up the folding stairs in the garage. Sally’s Handyman had come by to secure the loose screens and close up any other suspicious openings, by way of keeping new rats out and locking any resident rats in. A few days ago I’d bought a pair of Tomcat rat traps, a lot safer to use than the Victor traps, which are just gigantic mouse traps. I’ve never been able to set a mouse trap without snapping my fingers in the damn thing. Snap your finger in a rat trap, and you’ll end up with a busted finger…or no finger at all.

The plan is to trap any rats still hiding in the attic, if any are up there at all (it’s now beginning to appear not, thank goodness!), and then to pizzen any visitors that climb up the paloverde overhanging the deck roof before they get a chance to try to break in. It will be easy for me to climb a ladder to the roof over the deck and plant a rat bait station up there. A rat station holds the rat poison inside a box with a rat-sized entry that’s too small for a cat and unattractive for birds, thereby minimizing the risk to the neighbor’s pets and one’s favorite singing bug-eaters.

This is a nuisance, but far less nuisance then getting rid of a covey of little roommates after they’ve already moved in. So today’s first project was to bait the traps with peanut butter and haul them into the attic. That went quietly and I did not whap any fingers in the things.

Onward:

• Hauled the untouched sticky rat traps (proven useless in the past, but they were all I had) down from the attic and out to the garbage.
• Backwashed and recharged the pool filter.
• Dragged the hose to water the plants.
• Cut back the dying thyme plant, which is mightily infested with hated bermudagrass.
• Preserved some of the surviving stems that bore still-living thyme leaves.
• Loosed the opening salvo against the hated bermudagrass.
• Cleaned up the resulting mess; hauled the dead shrubbery out to the garbage.
• Sprayed weeds growing in the alley along the back wall.
• Figured out how to bait the rat station, approximately.
• Walked the dog.
• Dropped in the pool to cool down, again.
• Made the bed.
• Cleaned up the kitchen.
• Started the laundry.
• Shoveled several piles of old student papers out of the closet in my office, filling the gigantic blue recycling barrel about halfway up to its top.
• Gagged the shredder on the wads of paper the school sent containing former students’ ID numbers, scores on placement tests, and grades on earlier efforts at remedial English, ESL English, English 101, and English 102.
• Decided that paperwork should be treated like clothing: if you haven’t looked at it in a year, throw it out!
• Shoveled the first 20 or 30 junk messages of the day out of the e-mail.
• Wrote this post.

And so to work… Back to reading student papers, a pastime that occupied time until about half-past midnight this morning.

🙂

Image: Cynodon dactylon (hated bermudagrass). Bidgee. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Fear and Loathing in America the Beautiful

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My father, a Texan born in 1909, used to say he was a bigot and proud of it. He used the N-word freely, and he had a pejorative for every race, ethnicity, and nationality on the planet.

He had a bizarre cosmology of race, a hierarchy in which Asians ranked highest as most evolved among the human family, followed by whites (in his time, Latinos were regarded as white, more or less: highly sexualized whites who liked bright colors, so my mother said), American Indians, Blacks, and, at the bottom of the ladder, hybrids of all sorts. The Arabs among whom we lived were scarcely better than monkeys, he believed, because they were the product of intermarriage between African slaves and light-skinned Semitic slave-owners, and so inherited the worst of both breeds.

Even as a child, I used to marvel at the strangeness of this construct, its basic metaphysical weirdness. It wasn’t until we came back to the United States and I was halfway through junior high school that the vicious wrongness of his thinking revealed itself to me.

In San Francisco, I attended an urban school that was about a third white and Asian, a third black, and a third Latino. At the start of the seventh or eighth grade, I don’t recall which, the school assigned an African American girl to share a P.E. locker with me. I was put out not because of who she was but because I had zero desire to share anything with anyone. But when my parents found out that the sharee was black, they charged down to the school and demanded that I be assigned a white lockermate. The principal, to his lasting credit, said “thank you very much” and ignored them.

Before long, the young girl stopped coming to school, so in effect I had our locker to myself. Two or three months later, she resurfaced, with a horrifying story. Her clothing had caught fire in a kitchen accident. In her terror, she ran through a glass sliding door before anyone could catch her. She had been in the hospital for weeks.

So it was brought home to me, forcefully, that this was not some sort of subhuman creature but another early-teen girl, just like me. A living, breathing, feeling, fragile human being.

Not until I was in my twenties did it cross my mind that my father’s fierce bigotry toward everyone not like him—a broad, inclusive bigotry that took in women and homosexuals as well as people of different races and nationalities—was rooted in fear. He feared the Other, and that fear, being unmanly in a time when men were men or else, manifested itself as hatred. He feared the Other more than he hated the Other. What I couldn’t figure out, didn’t understand for many, many years, was why? What was he so afraid of? What about a 13-year-old black girl is frightening?

A great deal of time passed.

Toward the end of his life, he admitted to something profoundly ironic: his grandmother was a Plains Indian. His mother, whom I never met, was half-Indian. His brother had made noises to this effect over the years, but my father vehemently denied it, said Ed was full of beans. This interesting revelation took on more poignancy when one day a young man rang his doorbell and said he’d noticed my father’s name on the front door. The visitor was working on the roof at the retirement home where my father and his current wife were living and, since the name was a little unusual, he worked up the nerve to introduce himself, because his last name was the same. He came from a whole tribe by that name. And he was a full-blooded Choctaw.

Well, helle’s belles. My father was outed. I have no idea what his father was or what he looked like (though my father was distinctly Indian in appearance, with high cheekbones and black hair that stayed dark until after he was 80). My grandfather ran off when my father was born and before long was found dead by the side of a road, an apparent suicide. But whatever the details, ultimately the truth was that he—my father—himself was the Other. What I do know is that the family was passing as white and that my father clung to that identity. He clung to it with some desperation.

But still I didn’t know why was he so afraid? Why was he possessed of such fear that it invaded his soul, curdled into hatred, and took up permanent residence in his heart and mind?

One’s children are slow on the uptake, no? It takes a long time to grasp a parent’s humanity. Sometimes it takes the odd intervention.

Yesterday I was editing a forthcoming book by novelist Donis Casey, Crying Blood, due out in February 2011 from Poisoned Pen Press, and very much enjoying it. The characters live in Texas during the 1910s, the time when my father was a boy. They arrived there from the same part of the Deep South that my father’s family came from, and they behave and sound much like my father’s family—though a bit more enlightened, given their author’s immersion in the culture of the twenty-first century. Casey has a real gift for character and voice: her people sound exactly like my father and uncle did.

Along about the end of the book, we learn that the protagonist, rancher Shaw Tucker, has a great deal of Indian in him, having come from a family “woven through with Choctaw and Cherokee ancestry from as early as anyone could remember.” His mother was the daughter of a full-blooded Cherokee woman.

But he was raised to be White. In fact, even though he was an enrolled tribal member, he was White enough in blood and looks and way of life that the U.S. Government never bothered him. No one had ever come to take his children away and put them in boarding school. No one had ever proscribed his movements or told him where he had to live, or how. Shaw Tucker was White and he viewed the world in the way of a White man.

Well, now. There’s something to be afraid of! Your children kidnapped and hauled off to boarding school, there to be assimilated into an alien culture. Your way of life extinguished and your people forcibly removed from their homelands. That would have been the experience of my father’s parents and grandparents.

Why did I never see this? It seems so obvious. He wasn’t afraid of all the people he’d taught himself to hate. He was afraid of what he wanted to be.

He wanted to be white, whiter than the whites who were his forefathers’ mortal enemies and exploiters. More precisely, he needed to be white, so that he could have a shot at decent jobs and the same kind of freedom the majority of Americans took as their born right. The contradiction must have twisted around and around inside him and finally come out as hate. Bizarrely metamorphosed hate.

§

The present discourse on immigration rings of my father’s language. I can hear his voice in every pejorative: “illegals,” “Mexicants,” “beaners,” and in every random news story that commenters turn into a racist tirade. The new N-word is “illegals,” and the new “greaser” is “Mexican.” It’s as dreary as it is disturbing.

So what are we, as Americans, afraid of? What terror inside the American soul writhes around and comes out as hatred? My Muslim students tell me of experiences when they personally have been the targets of hate and threats. Latinos and Indians, citizens of the United States of America, say they dread being stopped by the police, hassled, and made to show papers.

Whatever it is, we need to get over it. The current fear and loathing of the Other, to the point where citizens express distaste for small brown-skinned children, is dragging our polity and our people back to the 1950s, when it was OK to utter the N-word in polite company and grown men and women thought it made sense to raise hell when a white kid and a black kid were assigned to share a locker for 40 minutes a day.

We have met the Other, and he is us.

Image: Choctaw woman. Public domain.


Friday Torpor

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Well, only ten more days to go in this month’s discretionary budget cycle, and I’m well on target, for the first time in months. Now that I’m finally getting paid, now I’m staying on budget! Every single month this summer I’ve gone over budget, with too little money coming in to cover base expenses even if I could have made budget. One little calamity after another racked up one big bill after another.

It looks like I’m going to be paid about $545/pay period, about $83 a month more than I expected. If I transfer $249 a month from the summer stipend (prorated over 16 weeks), then I’ll end up with about $185 a month more than needed to cover basic expenses.

As the weather cools, the amount of play will be more than that, since the air-conditioning and water bills drop steeply during the winter months.

That, btw, is without a drawdown from the 403(b). I cut the drawdown to a dollar a month by way of preserving capital. The state requires retirees to take something out, to remain eligible for the payout for unused retirement pay, which, thanks to our leaders’ infinite wisdom, is irrationally paid out over three years. I rolled most of the money in that account over to my big IRA, where it could be invested more intelligently, but had to leave enough to cover this year, 2011, and the first two months of 2012. The last RASL payment is due in February 2012; the instant that  hits my checking account, whatever remains in the 403(b) goes straight to the IRA.

I’d left enough to cover a $500/month drawdown, since no one at GDU, the State of Arizona, or Fidelity seemed to know what was the minimum drawdown one could take and still qualify as “retired” for RASL purposes. Late last spring, some guy at Fidelity finally revealed that you could take out as little as a dollar a month. Not having enough to live on over the summer, I kept the $500 ($383 net) coming through the summer but arranged for it to drop to a net 77 cents a month starting this month.

The stock market has been so volatile—and the fact that we’re in an economic depression so obvious—that I wanted to avoid pulling out money from investments whose value probably is near their nadir. This strategy will keep $6,000/year in that account, instead of having it come to me to be frittered away on living expenses.

Nevertheless… I’m thinking that next summer I’ll draw a chunk out of that fund to make life a little less precarious.

If I do get a summer course—or if I can find some other job—then I’ll take out enough to net about $2,000. That would allow me to run the air-conditioning enough to keep the house tolerably comfortable. I am tired, tired, tired of breaking a sweat by working my fingers on a computer keyboard! It might even provide enough, combined with whatever I’ve managed to economize over the nine-month academic year, for me to take a little vacation someplace cooler. If I don’t get a course, then I’ll need net $3225 to cover my living expenses from the end of May to mid-September: that’s a $3,970 drawdown. In that case, I won’t be living comfortably or taking any trips, but at least I’ll be able to get by.

At any rate, in theory I should be able to do OK without having to take much out of savings, as long as I’m teaching. I can improve on that theory significantly if, come next May when I reach so-called “full” retirement age (don’t you love it? at 65 you can be “fully” unemployed and unemployable, but you can’t be “fully” retired!), if next May I take my entire emergency fund and pay back the amount of SS the feds have doled out so far. This would jack up my Social Security payout to the amount it would have been had I managed to hang onto my job to age 66, a better pittance than the one I’m getting now. The amount would the more than the 4 percent drawdown one can supposedly take from investments, and so I think this would be a smart move.

It leaves nothing to buy a new car, however. The Dog Chariot won’t run forever, and so I’ll have to figure out a way to afford a replacement set of wheels sometime in the near future. Oh well…later. I’ll think about that later.

For the nonce, I’m in a daze—another 4:00 a.m. wake-up call, lhudly sing goddamn. Along about 6:00, stumbled into the kitchen to fix breakfast for me and the hound and was jolted awake by a sharp chomp on a toe: more Ondts! I think they’re coming in under the back door this time, but am not sure because I can’t find them outside. They may be entering through the woodwork. Sprayed the little gals with some more home-made window cleaner, mopped the floor, and am now waiting for the tile to dry so the dog and I can get some food.

One reader asked what’s in the window cleaner. I no longer measure, but just toss the stuff together by eyeball. It’s about half a spray bottle of rubbing alcohol, to which is added about 1/8 to 1/4 cup ammonia and a like amount of vinegar. Fill to the top with tap water, and voilà! A very fine grease-cutter, glass-cleaner, and ant-killer.

Sooo much work to do today…must get moving.