July has been a scorcher, with 12 triple-digit days and one record high (104° on the 17th).
It was 103° yesterday. Not a record, but still, damn. Today, at 3 p.m., it’s 97°.
And I’m gonna try real hard not to bitch about it because I’m not one of the landscapers trying to make a silk purse out of the sow’s ear that is our back yard.
I didn’t even go out to sweat for fun yesterday.
But the landscapers were out there bright and early under Tōnatiuh’s broiler, with shovels and rakes and implements of destruction, excising scorched swaths of grass, excavating edging stones gone all wobbly like a meth-head’s dentition, and wheelbarrowing railroad ties off to … who knows? A railroad, maybe?
All the livelong day, too. As an expression of solidarity while motoring to the grocery for some grub that would not require cooking I refused to turn on the a/c in the Subaru.
I guess we can leave the skinny skis in the garage.
Well, it must be true, if both The New York Times and The Washington Post simultaneously catch up to the sad story about Rio Verde Foothills, where dreams go to die in the dust.
It’s an old story, with the new wrinkle being Scottsdale finally putting a cork in water sales to Rio Verde, saying it had to consider its own residents first and foremost. From the WaPo:
“The city cannot be responsible for the water needs of a separate community especially given its unlimited and unregulated growth,” the city manager’s office wrote in December.
The stories share a squeaky wheel — Cody Reim, who has a wife and four kids, works for the family’s sheet-metal business, and is looking at a water bill that could surpass the tab for his mortgage, when he’s not chatting up the national press. Again, from the WaPo:
“I thought, this is the United States of America, we do so much in humanitarian aid to other countries that don’t have water, they’re not going to let taxpaying citizens of this county go without water,” he said.
“You don’t think this could happen,” he added. “You have this belief that there’s going to be help.”
I have sympathy for the Reim family. Like them, we chose to live in a sandbox — the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert — and our water gets humped uphill to El Rancho Pendejo via a series of pumping stations. If we paid what this liquid gold is actually worth, or had to fetch it here by bike or burro, you can bet your ass we’d use a lot less of it.
Either that or we’d move to where the water is. Yet here we are.
Deciding to build your base camp in the desert is magical thinking going toe to toe with mathematics. As John Fleck observes in his ongoing Dead Pool Diaries, decent runoff this year will not change the fact that Colorado River water is overallocated and always has been.
“It’s just arithmetic!” he says.
If God wanted us here, He would’ve stored more agua fria under the rocks and cacti. But clearly He wasn’t expecting quite so much company.
“Hey, you come to the desert to get wisdom, 40 days and nights, tops. And then you go back where you came from. You silly sods never went back.”
“I bet they send me those shitty Marlboro Lights, too.”
So, crypto bro Sam Bankman-Fried, who is charged with perpetrating “a fraud of epic proportions” involving billions of actual dollars, strolls out of the federal slam and flutters home to Cali to live with mommy and daddy, who are on the hook for his $250 million personal recognizance bond.
My mommy and daddy would have said, “We’ll send cigarettes.”
The War on Christmas continues apace. And leading the charge: preachers?
From The New York Times:
This year, church leaders are grappling with what may seem like an odd dilemma: Christmas Day falls on a Sunday for the first time since 2016, and that’s a problem.
“Christmas morning and Sunday morning are sort of in tension with each other,” said Timothy Beal, a professor of religious studies at Case Western Reserve University. “Most people who are churchgoers think of Christmas morning not as a religious time but as a family time: stockings and brunches and staying in your pajamas until midday or later.”
In other words, Ho ho ho, Baby Jesus. Happy birthday and all, but come Sunday morning we’ll be in our jammies, worshiping that golden plastic calf from the Church of St. Costco. Feed it four D-cells and it moos “Away in a Manger.”
• • •
If you happen to find yourself with a little change left over after your holiday shopping’s all finished, please consider kicking a bit of the extra to Charlie Cunningham’s GoFundMe, which Jacquie Phelan uses to help underwrite his care following an awful crash in 2015. She would welcome your warm wishes and cold cash.
• • •
And finally, John Fleck comes away from a Sin City water convo more hopeful that the states can reach some class of a compromise over Colorado River water use — management based on inflows rather than reservoir levels — before the feds step in.
Now that would be a useful Christmas present. Not this year — but maybe next?
We never hear of Capital Day, not because Capital has no day, but because every day is Capital Day. The struggle in which we are now engaged will end only when every day is Labor Day. — Eugene V. Debs, Labor Day 1903
It’s still Capital Day. For now, anyway.
At The Guardian, Douglas Rushkoff recounts his chat with a secretive group of super-wealthy dudes “preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether.”
In short, they’ve grown tired of our sniveling about their shitting in our shared sandbox and wonder whether they might be able to dispense with us altogether.
Writes Rushkoff, a self-described humanist and Marxist media theorist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives:
Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.
One of the capitalists’ main concerns centered on how to control their security people after The Event — “their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.”
Yep, that could be risky. A SEAL might grow weary of barking for fish from the plump, well-manicured pinkies of a plutocrat. How to get away from it all when you need to take a few of “them” with you?
What happens when Labor Day finally comes around for real?
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