The time that is given us...

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. 

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

The graph above shows the average ocean temperature from roughly the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (about 66 million years before present) through the middle Eocene, roughly 45 mybp. 

 This geologic period is a contradictory and, to some degree, still confusing one. Global climate at the end of the preceding Mesozoic had been relatively warm and moist; think "dinosaur jungle", you get the idea. 

Then came Death From Above...

...and the world changed.

Among the changes (and, probably, a huge reason for them) were the second most recent of the immense "mass extinction" events that have swept the planet's biota clean, and a long-term change in the climate that made the planet drier and cooler. 

But before it started cooling the planet got considerably warmer. In general - notice the "hill" that starts around 57-59 mybp - this meant a fairly gradual increase in global average temperature that peaked some time near about 52-50 mybp, then from there the climate average began to decline to where we start to see the ginormous "continental glacier" formation around the end of the Pliocene/beginning of the Pleistocene about 1.8mybp. Hello, ice age!

But this climate trendline wasn't entirely gradual. 

The spikes on the ridgeback of the trendline that show up around 55.8mybp? There are known as "hyperthermals" and are described in the Wiki entry as:

"...geologically brief (<200,000 year) events characterized by rapid global warming, major changes in the environment, and massive carbon addition...and stand(s) out as a major change in the lithologic, biotic and geochemical composition of sediment in hundreds of records across Earth."

This, the "Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum", or PETM, is important to understand today because, as its Wiki entry says;  

"The PETM arguably represents our best past analogue by which to understand how global warming and the carbon cycle operate in a greenhouse world."

Which brings us to what I want to talk about.

 

I've railed in this blog about human foolishness, and, often, the foolishness of the particular humans who have been placed in charge here in the United States. A lot. If you're still here surely you know that.

War. Economics. Non-alcoholic beer. Sex, including procedures, physical form, and body hair.

If a person, or people, can fuck any or all of that of in ways that make life more fucked up for other people (who didn't do anything to help out, or even fought against the fucker-uppers) I've often had some pretty scathing comments about them, and the fucking-up they did.

This, though?  

This is, in my opinion, the single biggest, most grave, most dangerous, and most imperative test presented us humans during the Anthropocene; "anthropogenic climate change".

The fundamentals are simple and obvious.

Since the origins of human civilization; first agriculture, and then, increasingly, industrialization, We the People of Sumer, Rome, the US, &c, have been adding much the same chemicals to the global environment as nature did in the early-to-mid Eocene. Mostly carbon dioxide - the CO2 level shown graphically above - but with a side order of everything from methane, freon, nitrogen...you name it, we've made it. And let it go, into the ground, the water, the air.

It doesn't take a goddamn genius to figure out that if spontaneously-occurring high level releases of natural carbon dioxide could help produce the PETM spike in global temperature, then human-caused released of the same gas could, and most likely would, have the same effect.

The huge, horrific difference?

We - humanity in general - have absolutely no fucking idea what effect a similar rapid spike in average global temperature could, or will, do.

And yet...

The climatology isn't questionable. There's more CO2 in our atmosphere now that there has been in the Pleistocene. Ever. Because, well, duh; we're burning more of everything, starting with wood, then coal, the petroleum. The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions were televised in the form of the grossly changing picture of atmospheric carbon dioxide shown above. 

Okay, so. First, yes, there has been that much CO2 in the atmosphere in the geologic past. And. The effect of that CO2 has always been the same; a rise in average global temperature. The effects of those temperature spikes have been all over the place; some seems to have come and gone with little or no permanent impacts.

Others? Mass extinction. Biological diversity (both reduction and/or punctuated evolution). Oceanic current changes. 

What will the Anthropocene Thermal Maximum do? I haven't the slightest fucking idea.

Will it do...something? Lots of somethings, probably? Changes in local climate, changes in global stasis like sea levels? Changes in habitability (you think summers in Phoenix suck now..?) or agricultural production or disease or...keep going, I'm sure we can think of more.

 But, unless you're a complete moron or a Republican (but I repeat myself...) there's no way to deny or refute that:

1) Human civilization is producing and releasing CO2 at levels not seen before during the existence of homo sapiens, and

2) That's going to change our world. A lot. And,

3) We (that is, humanity in toto) have known #1 and #2 for at least the past forty to seventy years.

Meaning that we've had our opportunity to "do something" about that. Either...

Alter #1. 

Or prepare for #2.

Or some combination of both. 

And have "we"? Fuck all no, we haven't. 

Largely because, frankly, we as individuals and in a group as societies don't have any real sense of urgency about it. Because "altering #1" would mean substantial - and, largely, unpleasant - changes to our industrial societies, and "preparing for #2" would mean somewhat similar changes that those societies don't really understand, or have any deep concern about, as well as requiring a metric assload of money that we'd rather spend on fifth-generation fighter aircraft and outdoor grills or what have you.

Throw in the fundamental problem that, in most non-dictatorial political systems, voluntarily choosing those sorts of drastic present actions (and costs) to (possibly) avert or (probably at least) mitigate the worst of future problems is damn near impossible.

You're asking me to stop eating salmon and running the airconditioning and dump my Chevy Nova and start walking or cycling or riding a train or bus everywhere? Because it's possible - or even probable - that fifty years from now (after I'm long dead) that the Portland area will be a toxic malarial fever swamp uninhabitable in August?

How the hell do you convince me to vote for that?

(Dictatorial systems, on the other hand, just flat out won't do those things, simply because the dictator(s) have, by the very nature of the system, to plan for the short term. The premier or president-for-life or mullah or Donald Trump can't be sure that the regime will survive him (or is very sure it won't, or, because they're a vicious, ruthless, dictatorial bastard, doesn't care...) so why waste the opportunity to steal everything now to prepare for, or avert, some future disaster.

Christ, fucking Trump & Co. couldn't even foresee the predictable result of starting another goddamn war in Southwest Asia! Climate change? Even if they were canny enough to believe it they'd fuck up the response to it...)

Anyway, as we've shown, we human can't do anything that is going to change our power-drive towards PETM 2; Global Boogaloo.

 Or won't. Or have tried and failed. But, honestly?

We haven't tried very hard.

So, instead, we've failed the great test that was set before us. 

"It" - the most important deliberate choices we as a species were presented with in human memory - is, indeed happening in our time. And as a species, we have "decided to do"...

Effectively, nothing.

And, well...

 

Yep. Pretty much. 

What a fucking fuckstory. But that's how people are, innt? 

In some ways we haven't really evolved all that much, now, have we? 

Snow and Ice

So we’re on Day Four of the First Snowpocalypse of 2024, and anticipating Icepocalypse: The Sequel later today.

Did the marketing a day early (yesterday) to provision. Schools are closed, so all the students plus Miss Debra, school secretary, are free of the need to travel.

The wild card is power, tho. There are still a crap-ton of outages from the first round of weather, and ice has a nasty way of bringing powerlines down around here. So hoping for luck with that.

Meanwhile I'm working to stay busy. The weather has badly disrupted my kendo practice - the ceiling here is too low for a correct men-uchi, so I'm reduced to trying all sorts of gimmicks to workaround. Plus the little gym we belong to is down a steep hill from St. Johns and, while I'll bet we could zip down it'd be reeeeeal iffy trying to get back up so, no.

I'm writing a lot about Portland soccer - our women's professional team 1) just got sold to a California real estate developer and 2) just made it's 2024 college draft picks, so there's a lot to talk about.

And I'm reading a lot; first Wayne Lee's splendid The Cutting-off Way, a modern analysis of native warfare in Northeastern North America between first European contact and the emergence of the early United States.

Second, several sources for my planned Frontiers 1914 post later in the month (or February), beginning with Showalter, Robinson, and Robinson (2019) The German Failure In Belgium. I've also got Terence Zuber's 2007 The Battle of the Frontiers on order. The more I look into this whole "Frontiers" business the more I want to focus on the issue of reconnaissance and, particularly, cavalry, since it was the horse soldiers that the commanding officers of 1914 presumed would get them the intelligence they needed to carry out their operational planning.

(Yes, the fliers were busy, as well, but I don't get the sense that the maneuver commanders had enough familiarity with how the aircraft worked and how to use the information they could produce to really incorporate that into their planning...)

Anyway, that should keep me busy for a bit.

Meanwhile out in the larger country the 2024 election campaign has begun with the ridiculous Iowa caucuses on the Republican side.

In a shocking upset, Tubby swept the board. Yeah, I know. Pinch me.

There's no kidding ourselves; the Right is gonna return this fucker to us in November. If they can foist him back into power it's gonna suck for everyone not them, and, frankly, that's so obvious that if you're not them and you're not fulminating at the moment you get to vote against them, fight them, and destroy them, you're nuts.

We the People are going to get a very simple choice this year; choose the promise of the better angels of the American Experiment, or choose the original sins of the Founders, the long legacy of slavery and oligarchy.

I know where I stand. Where the rest of my nation will go? I can only remind them that...

Ceterum autem censeo the GOP esse delendam.

A hazy shade of winter

 

The summer has finally left, and the rains returned.

The winter is not far off.

I love the autumn, the somber, reflective mood fits me very well...although I sometimes miss the crisp dry chill of the Octobers of my Midwestern childhood. The Northwest lacks the fiery colors, as well; our deciduous trees are dominated by the bigleaf maple, Acer macrophyllum, which does turn a handsome golden-yellow but briefly; the leaves wither and brown up as quickly as they turn.

The days grow short, the shadows long, and another year draws to a close.

Thunder on the right hand

I was still only partially awake - as much as you can still be asleep with eleven-point-six pounds of cat on your sternum - when the light flashed beyond my closed eyes.

"That's lightning" I thought muzzily and, after a long, long pause, the low grumble of thunder confirmed it.

Between that moment and the giving in to the furry supervisor's demand that I get up and deal with the whole Lack of Food Crisis several more thunder rolls broke through the usual background morning sounds; birdsong, the tap of rain on the downspouts, the sussuration of tires in the street out front.

As a child of the East Coast and Midwest I miss those thunderstorms as only you can miss something that is too far away to be a nuisance and too distant in time to be a bad memory. 

The "thunderstorms" here in the Northwest lack conviction. They are more often like this morning's; a subdued series of distant rumbles punctuated with the occasional flash, usually fading after less than a half hour.

That's not a thunderstorm. Where's the crescendo, from far-off subsonic explosion through building flash-and-crash to the climax of blinding-strobe-and-wall-shuddering detonations overhead? And the decrescendo as the storm cell passes, the artillery of Heaven receding "...like troops to fall on other fields and streets"?

I still enjoyed the brief passage this morning, warm and dry and comforted with coffee in the cup as the minor-key thunder passed by.

The photo above is from the east deck during that morning, in one of those weird "the western sky is storming while the sun climbs bright out of the east" moments we seem to have more often than not in our springtime. 

"Sunshowers" they're called, and they're as close as we come to the towering storms of my Midwestern youth. Sad, really.

So. Blogging?

I'm working through another "battle" piece for May, this one the "Battle of Blair Mountain" from the coalfields of West Virginia. It's a real oddity, and I'm having a bit of a struggle finding extensive sources. We'll see how it works out.

As for the rest of life?

Well, we're working up to the biggest remodel we've ever done in the Little House, a completely new kitchen as well as a lot of bathroom upgrades. The whole thing is kind of on hold for the moment, however; the contractor seems to have over-estimated how much structural work they could do without additional foundation support. That wasn't in our initial - high, as it is - budget, so we need to look at that before we decide how to deal with the additional cost.

My Bride soldiers on in our neighborhood school, as Beloved Ms Debra the Secretary. Her friend and work-wife the Principal's Secretaryis retiring at the end of this year, though; she's a treasure, and will be sorely missed.

The Boy is in the local community college, doing what I have no idea. He seldom speaks, and never of his classwork.

The Girl is exploding all over; she's a star for her high school theatre tech staff, the Mistress of the Soundboard, she's going to a theatre getaway this summer, her ceramic art took third in the Potter's Guild show this year, and she finally passed her driving road test, so she's well on her way to freedom.

Me?

I'm knocking about, still working on and off, still writing about soccer and here about everything and anything. Still watching our national devolution into Weimar Germany with a sour distaste for the combination of stupidity and hubris that seems to be the 21st Century American Way. I'm glad, in a sense, to be close to the grave. Between climate and politics I don't want to see what this country will be in forty years.

Oh, well.

Paprika Plains is almost over and I'm off to the gym. If I find anything compelling to say I may be back in a bit. Or you might not see me again until Blair Mountain.

We'll see.

Hazy Shade of Winter

It was just less than a month ago that I posted pictures of the autumn drama at the Portland Japanese Garden.

Writing shit about new snow
For the rich
Is not art.
 ~ Robert Hass (supposedly a translation from 小林 一茶 (Kobayashi Issa)

As Kobayashi-san says; that shit's done with.

The weather has made a hard turn to winter. Mind you, it's winter in the Northwest, which means one of two things.

Typically it's an endless gray drizzle spiced with days of genuine hard rain. Low temperature 42, high temperature 44, rinse, repeat. That's the "west-wind winter".

Then every couple of weeks the polar high looms down over the intermediate space between the Cascades and the Rockies, over the high desert, and the east wind blows the clouds away and the cold in.

That's when you get mornings of freezing fog, and bright, chill afternoons that never let old bones warm, and my bones - those of which that aren't titanium aftermarket parts - feel very, very old on those sorts of days.

They're also not beloved of Portlanders, creatures of the Mediterranean that we are. So the Garden was quiet and I enjoyed the change from red and gold to spare black branches. 

Or bare red ones, as on the red-twig dogwood...

I should note that True Portland dies hard in the winter; this young woman attending the annual "Crafty Wonderland" fair refused to let the biting weather nip her toes back into closed shoes:

That's not actually an uncommon sight here (I'm pretty sure I've blogged about it somewhere but am too lazy to look...), the combination of a heavy sweater or jacket above some chilly pink toes below. 

Part of it may be hardiness, part of it may be unwillingness to surrender to the season. Part of it may be the simple ease of slipping into sandals rather than wrestling with heavy socks and shoes.

Whatever the reason, it's a thing, and a Portland thing, at that.

Speaking of Crafty Wonderland, several Portlanders took advantage of the seasonal surroundings to let some pretty serious Xmass-y freak flags fly.

One such was this gal; I couldn't get a great shot of her outfit but this gives you the idea - the entire front of her dress was an solid mass of Christmas-tree bling, like the gold-encrustation on Smaug's belly:

Plus glittery silver snowflakes in her hair. 

The effect was completely insane in a sort of holly-jolly way. The Nikes make it sort of Ugly-Christmas-sweater-casual. Fun look, but I sure couldn't pull it off. There's something to being cute and /or pretty that helps make "okay, that's freaky" into "awww...that's cute".

But the award for Most High-level Holiday Cosplay goes to the Elf Off The Shelf:

I don't want to show her face, so you miss the Santa-hat topping, but given the rest of the outfit you get the idea.

My favorite bit is from the hem to the floor; you got your saucy fishnets going for the whole "Santa Baby" frisky sex-under-the-Christmas-tree thing, but then you've got the massive engineer boots that add a touch of "...but-fucking-try-it-and-I'll-kick-your-fucking-ass" danger. 

Clearly this is someone who has the authority to get you on the Naughty List.

That's all for now.

This little post has been too much fun to load up with serious business, so I'll close with Christmas standard you know (It's the "Piano Guys" doing the Vince Guaraldi Peanuts tunes, and since Blogger is being a dick about letting me embed it, here's the link to copy and paste - https://youtu.be/tyPDQpel8bI and a finger to you, Blogger, for being dickish about this). 

But I will be back later in the weekend to discuss some of the nonsense that we're getting up to here in the Land of the East Wind Cold.

Back in a bit.

Away from home...

 ...after the holidays; it's either one damn thing or the other around here.

The damn thing is dirt-nanny work I'm doing for a friend of mine. He needs the help, but it sucks ass like all dirt nanny work. So I figure I earned my week off.

The not-damned thing is that we got some snow yesterday; not enough to be a real nuisance but enough to be pretty, so I just enjoyed the winter wonderland and put out seed for the wild things who weren't enjoying it nearly as much.

I've been enjoying all the soccer (and, yes, I know; Qatar is a hissing, and FIFA exists to make the IOC look like a bunch of saintly contemplatives. I'm not pretending to be a good person about this...) but I'm going to miss the insane energy of the Japan fans. 

Apparently the soccer world will, too; they've won some sort of weird fame for policing up the stands after their games.

So will the otter. Ah, well; live and learn, Taiyo the Otter. Soccer. It's a cruel game.

Speaking of cruel, the Girl just laid down the law: no more singing "Hong Kong Phooey" because it's racist.

Yeah, well, no shit; it was a Seventies cartoon about a dog, voiced by a Black guy, pretending to be a Hong Kong kung-fu star. 

And let's not eeeeven go into "Rosemary", the horny switchboard/9-1-1 operator who spent the entire show constantly trying to hook up with the randos that called the cops.

The layers of "this is some fucked-up-racial-and-sexist shit" go about basement deep.

But it's Seventies phooey racist style! Sorry, kiddo...Yah!

Anyway. I'll get right back on this blogging thing later this week; I've got a break coming up.

It's Fucking Hot

 Well...not now. But until this morning we had a week (and more) of 95+ temperatures thanks to those cunning Chinese climate-change hoaxters. 

 Being the hardy American pioneers were are...we all hid inside the air conditioned Little House

...even this goofball.

Christmas Day, 2021

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

~ T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi

There was a time when I would struggle out of sleep on Christmas morning, desperate for caffeine amid jittering children impatient for loot.

Today? Nah. Just me and Little Cat, coffee and tuna pate' and soccer re-runs in the silent morning house. Why the hell was Qatar playing in the CONCACAF Cup semifinal? Fucker was in Eurasia last I checked. Fucking FIFA cash-grab, I suspect.

Finally the crew staggered in and the presents were distributed and everyone got down to the hard business of Christmas Day - napping (parents), gaming (The Boy), and something artistic (The Girl). The cats begged for food, prowled randomly, or napped, although Drachma did have a moment with his new catnip toy:

.

He had to sleep it off under the tree...

Late in the afternoon my Bride concluded that we needed a brisk walk, so we headed out into the gray, rainy, high-thirties evening, down to the little woodlot waste ground along the fringes of St. Johns to walk off excess Christmas Spirit.

And proceeded to immediately come across a dump of cut-up commercial weed.

"Oh Christmas weed, oh Christmas weed, how lovely are your branches..!"

Frankly it was miserable; cold, wet, with a nasty east wind that was just enough to chill any part of you that wasn't covered.

The Girl and I turned back just past the treeline in the distance of the photo above. The Bride kept on going just long enough to show us what weenies we were being, and I'm totally okay with that. That was a rotten ramble.

But we got home to the warmth and the glow of the lights, and the promise of the quiet evening to come.

The Big Heat

2020 was kind of suck-ass here in Portland.

First antifa and BLM ran riot in the streets and burned the whole goddamn town down.

And then we had massive forest fires that burned the whole goddamn woods down.

And then we had goddamn MAGAts that came around trying to sweep the goddamn ashes into Idaho's goddamn trash bin.

Jesus wept!

And then - just this past weekend - we had a giant, creepy iron high-pressure dome or something come oozing in off the Pacific and hunker down over us for three days or so bringing the big heat.

As in, 115 degree heat.

Cliff Mass at his Weather Blog has some terrific posts discussing what happened and why. Here was his warning Sunday afternoon:

Tomorrow: The Day of Unimaginable Extremes

But tomorrow, it all goes horribly wrong.  The thermal trough moves northward and westward, pushing the strong easterly, downslope flow northward to over the central Cascades (see map for 11 AM Monday).  The sinking air will compress/warm as it sinks.

The burst of downslope, compressional heating will cause temperatures to warm beyond the experience of any living inhabitant of the region (see forecast temperatures at 5 PM Monday).  

Temperatures will rise above 112F on the eastside of Puget Sound and above 100F for everyone more than a few miles from the water.  Portland will be similarly warm.  And so will the lower elevations of the Columbia Basin. 

The first and most obvious question is; "is this due to a warming climate"?

And Mass' answer (and mine, since his data appears quite sound) is; sorta;

"...a number of people have asked about the role of global warming on this event.   

Is global warming contributing to this heatwave?  The answer is certainly yes.  

Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming.  The answer is yes as well. 

Our region has warmed by up to 1-2F during the past fifty years and that will enhance the heatwave. Increasing CO2 is probably the biggest contributor to the warming. 

But consider that the temperature anomalies (differences from normal) during this event will reach 30-35F. The proximate cause of this event is a huge/persistent ridge of high pressure, part of a highly anomalous amplification of the upper-level wave pattern. 

There is no evidence that such a wave pattern is anything other than natural variability (I have done research on this issue and published in the peer-reviewed literature on this exact topic). 

So without global warming, a location that was 104F would have been 102F. Still a severe heat wave, just slightly less intense."

I do wonder if the intensity of the tropical storm that helped create this immense high pressure ridge might have been heightened by the warming climate...but, I defer to the subject matter experts.

So how did we do here in the Fire Direction Center?

Pretty much just fine.

I hid inside all weekend, pretty much, other than taking my Bride and the Larvae to the airport Sunday morning for their pilgrimage to the Gramma Shrine.

It was pretty damn hot when I dropped them off at 11:00am...by Monday morning it was insane:

By Monday afternoon it had gone waaaayyyy past insane...

The Little House is one of the fortunate older ones here in the Portland region to have had central air installed. So I cranked that baby and kept it cranked all through until the heat broke Monday night.

Mind you, when the outside of the house is 112 degrees even the butch-est air conditioner struggles. On Monday afternoon the thermostat was set to 72 but the interior temperature was 83. That was the best the poor bastard could do; fight a delaying action against the heat.

It worked well enough.

With the family off tickling grandparental fancies just the cats shared the Big Heat with me.

Mostly they were smart enough to stay indoors to do their eat-and-sleep-repeat cat thing. But, being cats, they couldn't STAY indoors, so every hour or so they'd swagger out into the heat in a manner entirely inappropriate for an animal wearing a fur coat.

Once there, mind, they'd flop over and just lie there, like, maybe it was too hot to do anything, like, move. No shit, cats.  No wonder you aren't the top of the food chain, never mind the whole opposable-thumbs thing.

The residents that suffered the most were the vegetables.

My daughter has recently developed a huge taste for gardening. So the Little Yard is now verdant with plants of all kinds, mostly flowers. We have random sunflowers along edges and by fences, potted plants on benches and tables, raised beds full of goodies...they're all over the place, and the Girl is besotted with her flowers.

And it is flowers. The Bride and I are raising tomatoes and squash and peas. The Girl is raising dahlias and zinnias and passionflowers.

(The Boy is raising nothing but digital hell in the HALO universe, so he's not really in the frame...)

Well, most of the in-ground plants came through the big heat okay...

...a little wilted by Monday night when I went out to water again (I'd watered in the morning, as well) but still living. But the potted ones..?

...not so much. Three of the Girl's beloved dahlias look pretty fried. I'm still watering when I do the rest of the garden, but I'm not hopeful.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of the fire direction crew are unimpressed by the historical (and historically awful) event they just lived through, as the Senior Enlisted remarked when we woke up Tuesday and walked out into a cool morning;

Little Cat: My butt cold. Why my butt cold? Where hot?
Me: It's gone, the heat wave is over. We're back to normal-ish.
LC: My butt cold. No like!
M: Yeah, well, it is what it is. Have some cat food.
LC: No! Where hot? No like! You fix!
M: I can't fix the weather, doof. Look, there's some nice kibbles.
LC: Meh. You fix.
M:
LC:
M: Fuckit, Imma drink my coffee. You do whatever.
LC: ...the fuck? The goddamn service around this place has completely gone to hell. I'm going over here until I can speak to your manager.

K. Good luck with that.

Chaincicle

We're still thawing out from the icy depths of Icepocalypse 2016.

It's hard to decide which is sadder; the insane panic that hits this burg every time it snows, or the way that everybody in this burg seems to completely forget what they learned about what happens every time it snows. Until the next time.

Beavers in the mist

Winter in the Northwest is not all Dark Ages; sometimes we get a sunny day or three. Or week. Or two.

But the underlying reality is that winter in the Northwest is cold and damp. So that when those sunny days arrive and the air warms up the ground is still...well, cold and damp. So in the lowlands the fog forms thick and dank in the predawn darkness and lingers until the sunlight dispells it like the dawn the old tales of night-terror.

Nothing of moment to say, other than that this was a pretty morning; the high hills of Forest Park and the Coast Range further on fir-green and crisp whilst the rolling bottomlands of the Tualatin Valley hid under the cotton sheet of Night.

The winds of autumn

Last night the wind blew in.

Sometimes in the last of summer or the earliest months of autumn we get an odd sort of east wind. The winter winds that blow off the interior are frightful and frigid; they usually meet our Pacific rain in a head-on collision of ice and snow, plunging the Portland region into a Dantesque Hell of fearsome roads and fearful drivers.

These are not those winds.

Instead, the late-summer winds clear out the skies and crispen the air. Temperatures drop into the pleasant seventies, the nights are sleep-cool and the days brisk and autumnal. Moribund leaves, already drying and turning, pile in drifts along fences and at the base of walls. Crows scud overhead in playful bands trying tricks that only the strong winds allow them.

We don't enjoy the autumn wind every year, so it was with a deep, slow satisfaction that I roused in the night last night to hear the soughing of the trees above the roof and the faint singing of the street-wires that announced the arrival of our occasional visitor from the East.

This morning was everything that a wind-morning should be; crackling with cold, bright and vivid, the gustlets whisking the steam from my coffee cup as I stood in the long shadows anticipating the arrival of the day.

The wind through my heart
blows all my candles out.
In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy.
From the mantle smashes birds’ nests, teacups
full of stars as the wind winds round,
a mist of sorts that rises and bends and blows
or is blown through the rooms of my heart
that shatters the windows,
rakes the bedsheets as though someone
had just made love.

~ Deborah Digges

Snowpocalypse 2014

We have had the first real snowfall of the year. Yes, its pathetic compared to the avalanche of snow that has buried the Midwest and East coast. But, for Portland, this is a natural disaster;

The children are heartsick that Portland Public Schools has already called off classes for tomorrow.

You'll note, however, the Boy's costume includes nothing but shorts and knee socks. Pants? Yeah, right.

The Girl, child of the sunny south of China that she is, claims that she "is never cold".

Where-ever the recent snowfall rates on the overall scale of winter adventures, for Portland this is a Big One. We're effectively snowed in and reduced to eating lasagna and watching bad cartoons and the post-Soviet Olympics on the television.

Sunrise

In the winter the Northwest typically gives you two choices:

The default setting is rainy but moderately warm (somewhere between the low forties and the high forties). This makes for a lot of dark, short days between December and March.

My friend Lisa reminds me that this sort of thing often leads to the sort of creative despondency that produces great art.

I will take her word on that.

However, the B-side of this winter drizzle are the days when the east wind blows, and the sky clears, and the frost settles on the wet grass like sudden senescence.

That's when we get mornings like this one.

And for all the extra work; the careful descent down the icy stairs, the laborious de-icing of windows or (worse) breaking open of frozen doors, the high blue vault of sky during the daylight hours is always worth the labor.

The Rains Come...To Fuck You Up

Now and then I may complain about the rain during our Dark Ages, but our rains don't come like this:

That kind of rain doesn't just keep you indoors and give you the wintertime blues.

It kills you.

It destroys your crops and starves you to death. It gives you typhoid fever and dysentery and liver fluke. It rips your nipa house apart and scatters your life across the wreckage of your fields.

There are reasons to complain about living in the United States. Don't get me wrong. Those of us not in the two-yacht families get reamed pretty hard sometimes.

But not often like this.

Stormfront

We've been gettin' a little weather around here.

Nothing more than the usual winter storm. But, still; just another reminder that Winter is Coming.

The Rains Come To Stay

It's not that late, but I have to be on the road again in the morning, early, so it's late for me. The kiddos have both been packed off to bed and the front room is a mess from a day forced indoors by the autumn's cold and wet. I'm too tired to try and pick up the litter.

My legs ache with the steady ache I've learned to live with for the past year. My neck and shoulders ache with too little exercise and the hard graft of entertaining small children over a long weekend. The back of my skull aches with the unpleasant knowledge that in less than six hours I will have to rise and drive 200 miles north and then walk a mile through the wet woods to work.

And over all of that I am soaked in a sort of quiet despair. I look around at my country and my world and realize that what I'm seeing isn't really new and it isn't really terrible. It's the same old tiresome horseshit that human beings have been doing to themselves and each other since Cain ambushed Abel out in the cuna grass; lying and pretending not to lie, grabbing everything around them regardless of what the long-term destruction they are causing. Indulging in every hate and stupidity and lust and whatever other evil toxic fucktardry they can think up.

When I was researching the last Decisive Battle I spent some time with the Praetorian Guard. You can't learn about the Guards without encountering a man named Lucius Aelius Seianus, better known merely as Sejanus. He was, perhaps the "original" Praetorian; one of the Emperor Tiberias' cronies who took the piss-ant garrison troop that had hung about the Forum for centuries and made them into the chooser and slayer of Emperors.

Anyway, you can follow the link if you want to learn more about ol' Lucius. Suffice to say that he was probably an evil little man who was brought down by others probably just as vicious and ambitious as he was. He got the chop, too, for his pains.

But I'm not thinking about an ambitious soldier now, sitting in the window seat looking out on a drizzly night. I'm thinking about a young girl.

Her name was Junilla, and she was the daughter of Lucius Aelius. Her right name was probably something like Junilla Aelia, and I have no idea who she was or what she was, down to her age at the time of her father's sudden encounter with the public executioner in 31AD.

We know nothing about her; not her age, or her looks, not how she walked, or talked, or stood up, or sat down. Being Roman she was probably dark-avised, and being young - at least, young enough that she was not considered a woman but a girl by the ancient chroniclers - probably slender and gracile. Based on the description of her arrest she sounds like a very young woman or little girl. Tacitus says of her:

"...the little girl, who was so unconscious that she continually asked what was her offence, and whither she was being dragged, saying that she would do so no more, and a childish chastisement was enough for her correction."

But we have no idea whether she was a silly or serious girl. Whether she was cheerful or solemn, light-hearted or glum, friendly or standoffish. Did she like to read, was she an indoorsy sort of girl, or one who liked to play outside and exercise with her friends, a sort of 1st Century tomgirl?

Was she one of those young women who grow up early, approaching womanhood with trepidation, or a late-bloomer still a child when her father ran onto the rocks of Roman politics and his own greed for power.

And of her last moments we only know this, as written by Cassius Dio some two hundred years after she died:

"His children also were put to death by decree, the girl (whom he had betrothed to the son of Claudius) having been first outraged by the public executioner on the principle that it was unlawful for a virgin to be put to death in the prison."

First, let me say this: I find this tale of prison rape, which is recounted only in Tacitus and Cassius Dio, to be hard to believe. There is no record of any such "law" in the Roman legal codes, while the punishment for rape (stuprum, that is, forcible intercourse) of a freeborn citizen was death.

But then let me add that regardless of the letter of Roman law the story is effective as horror. It strikes home because of the act itself and the young age of the victim.

Perhaps thinking about the recent awful clamor about abortion and rape got me thinking about what a fucking awful horror rape is.

Perhaps most of all because it takes the moment we are most intimate and defenceless and turns it into a waking nightmare. It takes what should be the most tender act of lovingkindness we can perform and turns it into the ultimate moment of powerlessness, hate, and fear.

So though I don't really think that one of the jailers of the Tullianum went and raped a little girl before he murdered her, I think that the ancient storytellers thought that story was the most awful thing they could think of to add to the horror of the end of the tale of Sejanus and his fall.

And what saddens me even more is that they felt they needed something more awful than the cold fact of a young girl casually strangled for the crime of being born to an ambitious father. Something more shocking to tittilate their readers' jaded tastes.

Something more frightful than the bald fact of her child-body cast down the Gemonian Stairs in a tangle of dirty clothing, her still-unformed arms and legs asprawl in the gross indignity not just of death but of careless cruelty. Something more awful than the thought of the vengeful citizens of Rome stepping casually over this sad little corpse, of the cold winds of December skirling the ragged clothes around her stiff limbs and the pale sun unreflected in the flat stare of her sightless eyes.

I don't really understand why the long-ago death of a girl two thousand years old so saddens and depresses me. But it does, and outside my window the night rain seems to weep for every little girl so lost, and torn asunder, and thrown away down the brutal stairs to lie forlorn under the careless feet of the passersby.