When I read that the owners of Camp Mystic tried to get certain structures removed from the Guadalupe River floodplain, it rang a bell that finally broke through: The news that, in 2017, a catastrophic flood in Houston was made worse because, wait for it, developers had built entire subdivisions inside a reservoir, but hadn’t told homeowners about it.

Because when they sold the houses, the level of the reservoir was low. Just as, when it’s not flash-flooding, the Guadalupe River is a pleasant stream you want to be close to, not up on a bluff looking down at it. Or as it was before Hurricane Harvey:

The vast basins are dry most of the time, dotted with wooded parks and sports fields, and are contained on their eastern boundaries by large, earthen dams. During rainstorms, floodwater accumulates behind those dams in areas known as “flood pools” and backs up to the west; how far it goes depends on how big the rainstorm is and where it hits.

That system worked well when the reservoirs were surrounded by prairie and rice fields. But in recent decades, development has encroached from all sides. Today, about 14,000 homes are located inside them. During Harvey, when more floodwater accumulated behind the dams than ever before, 5,138 of those homes flooded.

Some local government officials, like Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack, say they’ve warned residents for years during town halls and other public events about the risks of living in or around the reservoirs.

“It is very difficult to make people believe the unbelievable,” Radack said. “No one ever believed the reservoirs would fill.”

This is human nature. No one believed the reservoirs would fill, until they did. No one believed the river would carry away everything in its path, until it did. Living in a flooding city, as I did for 20 years, it’s easy to see this paradox. That river? That brown, stinky ditch? Coming this high? No way. And then it snows and snows, and then it rains and rains, and then the snow melts and combines with the rain, and the next thing you know you’re wearing rubber boots and throwing sandbags.

And that’s the best-case scenario. That’s a slow flood. We all saw the worst-case scenario July 4.

Fort Wayne has taken away a lot of the human factor by turning its floodplain into parkland. But honestly, I haven’t been keeping up. Have they had a major flood recently?

OK, then. A hot weekend. It’s been punishingly hot for a month now. During my Saturday boxing class, I was near a thermometer — it was attached to some fan. It was 83 when we started, and through the 45-minute class I watched it climb, degree by degree, until it topped out at 88. Thought I was going to die. Today was sailing — far more pleasant, but still hot.

How is it where you are?

It doesn’t qualify as a profound insight to notice that every child — hell, every person — alive today will have their photo taken a million times before they check out. Maybe more than that, if you throw in security cameras, which I’m not. I’m talking about how, as cameras have become omnipresent, we’re all more comfortable with having our picture taken.

If you grew up in the era where your parents might expose a single roll of film in six months, it’s a little unnerving. Yes, it’s great to have a bunch of pictures of your family. Yes, it’s also weird to point a camera at a child, and have them immediately step into a pose and flash a big insincere smile, the way mom and dad taught them. Where are the sullen teens of yore? Whatever.

Anyway, that’s all leading up to this: One of the things I did this weekend was go through some family pictures and artifacts my sister’s been keeping. I brought home my birth certificate, my high-school diploma, and a few snapshots.

My dad and his dad, whom I never met, c. 1943. My dad was meticulous in his appearance, and had his uniform tailored to his specifications. Looking at my grandfather, I can see it ran in the family.

I don’t know when that was taken, but St. Louis was a hot city. Imagine wearing a three-piece suit in that humidity.

Me and my brother, and me and my sister. This would be our house in Kansas City, most likely:

I had a bad problem with blinking when flashbulbs went off.

My very earliest memories were in that house; I think I must have been about…4? Maybe? After K.C., it was on to Columbus, where we settled and stayed.

Now these photos have been scanned and digitized, but I’ll keep the originals, where they’ll live in my family until Kate takes them, or throws them away, or they burn up in a fire.

I should toss my high-school diploma, though. Finishing high school is so bare-minimum, I wonder why anyone hangs on to theirs. But it seems wrong, somehow. Mine still has the sheet of onionskin paper that covers the precious diploma itself. It’s a thing of value! It cost the state of Ohio something to educate me. Better find a box to stash it in.

Also, this: I applied for a job a few years ago, not really wanting it, but curious what it might involve, and I was rejected for, get this, failing to attach a college transcript to my application, which was submitted online, of course. I think my college transcript must be in a moldy box in the basement of the registrar’s office, but never mind that, because it makes a pretty good segue to the bloggage, which today is a little dated. I’ve been throwing links into a blank doc for a few days now, so let’s lead with the evisceration of Indiana University, victim of a MAGA governor seeking to polish his national profile by gutting a fine institution. All in the name of “efficiency” and the needs of the job market, of course, which tracks with the right-wing insistence that college need be nothing more than a trade school for middle managers. (At least for your kids. The elite layer of the GOP will continue to send their offspring to the Ivies.) This Chicago Tribune editorial strikes the right note of are-you-kidding-me indignation, more so than any Indiana newspaper I’ve seen. But then, lots of IU journalism grads find jobs in Chicago, so no surprise there.

Here’s an amusing obit for a 105-year-old woman, a real GP OG, as I like to think of these dowagers:

Louise Booth, 105, passed away peacefully Thursday, July 3, 2025, at her home facing Lakeshore between Beacon Hill and Kerby in Grosse Pointe Farms. She was still of sound mind.

That’s a Booth of Booth Newspapers, back when owning newspapers was like owning a gold mine. They sold to Newhouse years and years ago, but they must have invested the pile wisely. Later paragraphs give the exact address of the house, in case any funeral burglars were confused. And while the obit isn’t amusing in the fashionable current trend of basically calling someone a lovable jerk — she seemed like a nice lady — I find any obit for someone who lasts that long into the postseason uplifting to read. Especially as she was still of sound mind.

The Sean Combs verdict happened so long ago it already feels like ancient history, but Monica Hesse at the WP has done a couple of good columns about it, which you can look up. This one, about so-called Alligator Alcatraz, is very good, too:

The point is that serious matters — the most serious matters, the matters of constitutionality, due process, citizenship and who gets to be an American — are, in this administration, being increasingly presented as cheap entertainment. You see it in the U.S. Border Patrol playing the power ballad “Closing Time” over footage of a scared looking young man being placed in handcuffs and shepherded onto a plane. You see it in the White House posting a video of detained migrants being processed for deportation, set to a hit from Bananarama.

Is it funny? Is it awful? Is it trolling or real life? The point is that we are not supposed to know. Alligator Alcatraz is a dehumanizing place, but when it is treated as spectacle, it’s not just the prisoners there who lose their humanity. We all do. The effect is to tell Americans not to take any of this too seriously. Families are being ripped apart, but it’s all for the lulz. We are dancing on the edges of constitutionality, but it’s making great television. We have become tonally incoherent, incapable of even determining tone. If Guantánamo Bay opened today, there would be a themed restaurant out back with happy hour specials taglined “Git mo’ at Gitmo.”

…I used to wonder about Roman gladiator battles. What kind of society would pack up a picnic lunch and go watch other humans, the enslaved or prisoners of war, forced to battle each other to the death? Another part of the gladiator legend is that these men were forced to fight large beasts, large carnivorous predators. But there was no physical evidence for that until just a few months ago in April, when archaeologists analyzed giant bite marks on the unearthed skeleton of a 1,800-year-old gladiator. Then it was confirmed: lions. In what society would this be a pleasant way to spend an afternoon?

Finally, a really interesting Atlantic story (gift link, as is the WP link above) about so-called customer-service sludge. Having recently spent 90 minutes on hold with the IRS without getting anyone on the line, I can identify. It’s maddening.

Here’s something weird about where I went to school. In junior high, there was always a talent show, and there were always two acts, one of boys and one of girls, who would dress up like the Temptations (the boys), or the Supremes (the girls), and their act would be lip-syncing and dancing to one of their hits. What’s more, it was always the most popular members of the class who did so, and no, there were no runner-up groups. It’s like it was chosen by some in-group election. The best-looking athletes were the Temptations, and the prettiest pretty girls were the Supremes. The boys wore the matching fly suits, and the girls the sequined gowns. It was always the ninth graders, too — no underclassmen allowed. It was like you were already popular, then the cream of the popular crowd was skimmed to do these acts, and it went on year after year.

Did I mention the class was 100 percent white? It was.

So you had these two acts, which were sandwiched between the kids who could sing, dance or play an instrument, or do something else. They got the most applause, mainly because it was very popular kids and very popular music and the talent show mostly didn’t traffic in pop music. So you’d dutifully watch someone do a dramatic monologue, or play the violin, and then there they were: The White Temptations, lip-syncing to “I Can’t Get Next to You.” The song came to the climax, and the kid doing the lead vocal snatched the dead mic off the stand and does his little freestyle boogie to girl you’re blowing my mind ’cause I can’t get next to you and the crowd of junior-high kids went wild.

The White Supremes would do their thing a few acts later. The only thing I’ve ever seen to compare to it is the scene in “Mean Girls” when the plastics do “Jingle Bell Rock,” which suggests this is one of those things that happen at certain schools.

I thought about this at my 50-year high school reunion this weekend. I can’t recall who any of the Temptations or Supremes were, but I remember the weirdness of it. The class was still 100 percent white at graduation, although there was one black kid in the previous year’s class, the son of…I believe…an OSU professor. Some goobers from one of the unincorporated townships burned a cross on their lawn. The community outrage was pretty pitched, if only because this grave insult was perpetrated by people who didn’t even live there.

Now, of course, Upper Arlington is quite diverse, with people of color everywhere. One notable resident? Vivek Ramaswamy. I considered going to the July 4 parade, on the chance he might be in it (he’s running for governor) and I could yell something rude, but the entire weekend was very, very hot, and well, the hell with that idea.

The reunion was fun. The food was fine, the crowd was dense, the space air-conditioned, but just barely enough. I saw a lot of people I haven’t seen for a while. I saw my old weed man, who has changed so much it’s still hard to believe. He’s now neighbors with Jorma Kaukonen. I saw a friend I used to smoke weed with, and he told me about being in the Navy, and smoking weed there, and watching planes land on the carrier deck. (“So is this why they keep sliding off the edge?” I asked.) I saw lots and lots of people, and bought a round of drinks for a stranger behind me in the bar line, because most of my enormous high-school class are strangers.

I’m still processing, and it’s still insanely hot They say this was the last reunion. So I’ll have more later. I leave you with this: Me in eighth grade, never to be a White Supreme. Dig my subversive peace-sign button:

While we’re on the subject of MAGA, MAHA and Whole Foods, I want to make a couple points:

Jakash is right in the comments from earlier: The 365 house brand at Whole Foods is really very good, and when I do go there, I tend to stock up on that stuff. It is not a store with no part to play in the marketplace other than to suck money out of your pocket.

Here’s the other thing, and I’m asking this with a pure heart. In the discussion over so-called seed oils, the argument against them — which is the argument against a lot of things MAHA finds fault with — is that they cause, or lead to, or aggravate “inflammation.” But what, exactly, is being inflamed? That part is never precisely explained, and if it is, it’s with sort of a hand-waving oh-you-know, indicating a place where inflammation is hard to quantify. I mean, if you get an infected cut, that’s easy to see. But inflammation affecting “gut health,” a big one in the MAHA canon, is not. I can pretty much eat everything and not suffer for it, which is, I know, enormous good luck. (I sometimes wish my stomach were more sensitive, and would maybe reject salt, grease and sugar, instead of gleefully adding it to my thighs, in case we need it in the coming winter.) Anyway, gut problems, absent inflammation, can mean anything from nausea to gross stuff further down the line.

So what do I need to know about inflammation? How can I tell if anything on the inside is inflamed?

In other news at this hour, I made a small decorating change yesterday, picking up a secondhand table that I used to replace the one on my side of the bed. It’s one of those newfangled ones with an integrated power strip, so I can accommodate chargers and my illuminated clock and lamps and all the stuff we want plugged in at our bedside, which wasn’t the case when the house was wired, 80 years ago.

The one I was replacing was a square, lidded basket from Ikea, and I hadn’t opened it in a while. Apparently I’d been using it to store books, similar to the piles on top. Two I hadn’t read:

FWIW, I didn’t need the Northrup book when I hit the Big M, because it was by and large a seamless transition. Again: Lucky me. Later, Northrup would go insane during Covid. And I’m not sure how Ron Jeremy found his way into the house. I’m sure it was a freebie from somewhere, but I never cracked it. You know what? I’m gonna read it, or at least read in it. If anything can distract me from the current crisis, it’s the Hedgehog.

But I also found some good books that I’d just tucked in there for one reason or another. One of my quirks is, I use ephemera for bookmarks. It feels good to open a novel I’d enjoyed years later and find a receipt from a restaurant where I read it over lunch. I opened an old Martin Cruz Smith hardcover and found? The mixing solution for the hair color I got on my last appointment in Fort Wayne; my stylist told me to give these hieroglyphics to my new stylist and she could figure it out. I looked at it for a moment, and? Reader, I threw it away. This constitutes personal growth, for me.

Finally, check out this weirdness, which I found via Roy. As ghastly as the content is, the comments would seem to indicate dozens of credulous Christians believe it is real. (Wait. It just occurred to me that the comments are fake, too.) I told someone the other day that I understand that perhaps someday, artificial intelligence will spot a tumor on a scan of mine, something that was missed by the exhausted and overworked radiologist, and that we may have to suffer through some misery to get there. Remember when your computer would freeze and you’d lose all your work, and now we have autosave? Yeah, like that. But just consider, at a time when the Trump administration is doubling down on fossil fuels, these AI party tricks consume insane amounts of energy, and data centers are being built all over to suck it up. When a rolling blackout hits your neighborhood in a heat wave, just consider: It was for this.

And with that? HAVE A NICE DAY, SUCKERS. I’m going to my high-school reunion at week’s end, and will likely be too jammed up to write anything more. Happy Independence Day. Maybe we can enjoy independence for a while longer.

I was in Whole Foods over the weekend, picking up a few things. The founder of WF was a big libertarian, right? One of those guys who believed we could “heal ourselves” by choosing the correct organic foods, and anyone who didn’t — whether because of cost or attachment to Doritos — well, it sucks to be you. And that’s how I came to associate the chain with the MAHA movement, which believes much the same thing.

Then I stumbled into the supplements aisle, and hoo-boy, do these people swallow a lot of this crap. Food is all you need to heal you, along with ten thousand sketchily vetted, surprisingly expensive capsules that almost all come with zero evidence of their efficacy other than a vaguely worded article on some website, as well as the all-important recommendation by either an Instagram influencer or your personal trainer, or both.

The older I get, the less of this stuff I’m even tempted to take. For me it’s vitamin D because I live in a sunless pit six months of the year, vitamin B taken at the same time to remind me I remembered the D (because B turns your pee neon-yellow for a few hours), and that’s it. The truest words I’ve heard in some time came on Chapo Traphouse, when one of the guys said, “Sooner or later, every con man will try to sell you supplements.”

Of course, also, many of these supplements are sold via Amazon, a company I am trying my best to boycott, or at least deal with as little as possible. (I just ordered two books direct from the publisher, in case you doubt my commitment.) I am just one small, angry, bitchy person, but as I cannot launch a torpedo at the Bezos yacht on its next trip to carry the new Mrs. Bezos to her next adventure, perhaps collecting another environmental award, I can at least withdraw my business.

And yes, I know Amazon owns Whole Foods now. I only shop there once in a great while.

I imagine we all saw at least one or two pictures from the tackiest wedding of the century (so far). The guest-arrival photos were a nightmare of mermaid hair and squashed boobs. The bride, on her third marriage and the mother of three children, wore virginal white. The witnesses seem to have been chosen from a list of the randomly famous. Are they actually friends with this far-flung group? The Kardashians? The Kushners? Tom Brady? Oprah? Do you get the feeling Mr. or Mrs. Bezos have any friends they’ve known longer than a decade? A childhood or college friend they’ve kept on the Christmas-card list? I don’t get that feeling. If so, they might have married in a similarly lavish ceremony at this or that Bezos house, and not have to take over a European city for a week to get the right backdrop for the photos.

Tacky-tacky-tacky.

It’s hot again here, and I want to read the new Laura Lippman book. So here, have some amusing bloggage…

The Department of the Interior’s efforts to revise unfavorable stories about American history at National Park Service sites appears to be backfiring — instead of reporting incidents of “negative” history as directed by new signs, visitors have used the signs’ QR codes to submit hundreds of comments in support of the park service.

In a 65-page leaked document provided to SFGATE by the National Parks Conservation Association, the hundreds of comments that have poured in through June 16 show overwhelming support for better funding for national parks and increased protection of public lands.

“This felonious Administration is the very definition of un-American. The parks belong to us, the people. … Respectfully, GO **** YOURSELVES” reads one comment that has been reported through multiple parks and is directed to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

“Rangers, have a lovely day. You are appreciated,” the commenter added at the end.

“This park is perfect. Please tell Trump to go **** himself,” reads a similar comment posted through Keweenaw National Historical Park in Michigan.

…and have a pic of me and Dustin meeting Laura Lippman herself last week, at a book-signing in Toledo:

Does she look nervous or tired? We were at the very end of the line. Great dress, LL.

Rising sun on garlic scapes in a decaying America. Happy Saturday.

If you live to my east, be advised the heat wave is faltering. This one, anyway. The temperature’s in the low 80s, the sun is behind clouds, it’s raining a bit and I can give the A/C a break. By Friday we’ll be kissing 90 degrees again, but any break is nice. Yesterday a brief, fast-moving storm moved through and took out our power. I had to wrestle the generator out of the garage, get it started, string cords, all the stuff we end up doing at least once or twice a summer so we don’t lose the contents of our refrigerator. I was almost literally pouring sweat and couldn’t even lie under a fan to cool off. The humidity was brutal. How the hell do you people in the south stand it? I would purely die.

The good news: The juice came back on after four hours. Did the whole generator thing in reverse. Settled in for some TV and it winked out again, for three minutes. It’s like DTE was playing a little joke. Bastards.

We all awoke to learn the news from New York City. I don’t want to read too much into it, because optimism is useless at a time like this. And this is only a primary; more will be revealed. But I will allow myself at least some glee that sex pest Andrew Cuomo will have more time to spend with his family. Is that good enough?

I don’t know what to say about much of anything at the moment, other than: Fresh thread for discussion. Have at it.

There are two kinds of sellers at Eastern Market, most Saturdays: Growers and wholesalers. The first group grows their own produce, the second buys in bulk at the produce terminal, packages it separately and sells at a pretty good, better-than-grocery-store price. There’s no deception here, unless a customer is dumb enough to believe Michigan has a citrus crop.

Sometimes I stop at a particular wholesaler early, because he sells limes three for a dollar and we’re into lime cocktail season. This week I had to wait while the seller, clearly exasperated, searched his phone for CashApp, so a buyer could pay him $12. And call me boomer as much as you like, but this is ridiculous.

The guy I buy eggs from says this happens all the time and increases every year, because young people are abandoning cash. What’s more, older people like me seem to think it’s perfectly fine to pay for $7 worth of eggs with a $100 bill. Which is also ridiculous, unless you’re at a meat counter buying prime rib. I was reading a Facebook group for residents of my city, and there was an indignant business owner complaining that the city hadn’t enabled a parking app for its meters, and “no one carries change anymore, especially young people.” That may well be true; the manager of the waterpark I worked at two years ago noted it was taking longer every year to close out the registers in the snack bar, because younger people were simply bedeviled by quarters and dimes, and strained to count them.

I use an app to park in Detroit, because the kiosks that take cash are often inoperable, enforcement is robust, tickets are expensive and I’m nearly always staying at least an hour, which makes the transaction fee negligible. Plus, the cost to park is, for a major city, miniscule — a dollar an hour.

But in Grosse Pointe? To pop in and out of the dry cleaner? I keep an Altoids tin in my dashboard cubbyhole, filled with change. I put in a dime, get 12 minutes and leave with six still available for the next lucky parker. If I use the app, they’ll tack on a 40-cent transaction fee. The hell with that.

Add this to the list of Shit I Thought I’d Never See: That cash would become a problem.

So! The heat wave has arrived where I am. Two hours until noon, and it’s already 86. Yesterday it started cool enough that I could wear long pants, and by 1 p.m. it was oppressive. The next three days will be worse. But this is the climate we have chosen, so.

There is good bloggage, too:

Thanks to Nancy Friedman for posting, in the last thread, this Jon Carroll column, “13 Things You Should Know About My Mother,” published on M-Day 2005. (If you get a register-to-read pop-up, just reload a time or two.) Things I learned:

1 She was adopted into a wealthy family in Grosse Pointe, Mich. Her father was a politician.

2 She left Grosse Pointe to go to Vassar. When she graduated, she was supposed to return home and marry one of 200 eligible rich boys. Instead, she went to Hartford, Conn., and got a secretarial job in an insurance company.

…4 She met my father, who was poor, Irish and Roman Catholic. She married him. She was disinherited.

She never saw her father again. Well, that is a very Old Grosse Pointe thing to do to a daughter, if I do say so. Also:

8 When I was 8, she was waiting for a bus when an ash from a cigarette dropped on her pretty summer frock, and the frock erupted in flames. A passing motorist took her to the hospital. The scars on her legs took 25 years to heal.

This is the second woman I’ve heard of, suffering such a mishap. (The writer Eve Babitz was the other.) Jon’s mother’s would have happened in the 1950s, but Babitz’ was in 1997, when I like to think consumer-protection laws had largely shielded American skirt-wearers from clothing that could burst into flames. (I imagine the Trump administration is working hard to roll back these regulations, don’t you?) Maybe Babitz, famous hippie eccentric, was wearing a thrifted or imported-from-a-country-where-they-don’t-believe-in-that skirt. Whatever, a good summation on a mother’s life.

From national treasure Eli Saslow, a deep read on the spring 2025 measles outbreak in Texas. Saslow is able to get into anyone’s confidence, and portrays these…what’s the word? antivax idiots, yes. These antivax idiots come across sympathetically, but my heart was left as cold as stone. Here’s the local chiropractor, who does a lot of non-chiropractic health care in West Texas:

Most of what he remembered about measles came from an old “Brady Bunch” episode, where the children celebrated staying home from school and played board games. “If you have to get sick, sure can’t beat the measles,” one of the children said. …“I feel like I’ve been lied to,” Kiley told his wife as his fever rose to 104 degrees.

“Lied to” by a sitcom, check. More:

For more than a decade, Kiley and Carrollyn had debated whether to vaccinate their children. Each time, they decided against it. … In recent years, as many as 15 percent of families in West Texas school districts had applied for “conscientious exemptions” from the M.M.R. vaccine. What Carrollyn feared more than measles was the remote possibility that her children might experience an adverse reaction to the shots. Two of her younger siblings had been vaccinated and had then suffered from high fevers that led to febrile seizures — scary convulsions that lasted several minutes but didn’t cause permanent damage.

“My children won’t see this disease in their lifetimes,” she always concluded. “The vaccine would probably be fine, but why take an unnecessary risk?”

The takeaway from the story is, lots and lots and lots of people not only got measles, but not the Brady Bunch board-games variety. This was a severe outbreak, with high fevers, intestinal distress and more. All four of the chiropractor’s children had to be hospitalized. Bobby Kennedy should be horsewhipped.

Finally, if you have an HBO account, I highly recommend “Surviving Ohio State,” a documentary (a film, not a series, thank God) on the sexually abusive sports doctor there, Richard Strauss. It’s a familiar story, similar to the same narrative with Dr. Robert Anderson at U-M — rumors for years, student athletes complaining of fondling during exams, an actual penetrated-while-drugged rape, etc. — but no one did anything, not one thing, about it. No, wait, there was one coach who tried to get OSU to take action. A woman, of course, coach to both the men’s and women’s fencing teams. One of the villains of the piece is none other than U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. It’s good.

The Iraq Iran bombing I don’t have the capacity to discuss right now. But you all feel free.

OK, then. On to confront the heat and figure out a plan for the day. I’ll probably work, because why the hell not.

Let’s pretend you-know-who doesn’t exist today. Let’s set the Wayback Machine for the early days of this blog, back when I had a writer-crush on Jon Carroll.

The San Francisco Chronicle columnist wrote five days a week, and his average was…well, it was astounding. I always read him, and I was rarely bored or disappointed. If you write five days a week, you will file a lot of columns about nothing in particular, and yet, even these were pretty great. He wrote about his cats a lot. He wrote about the persimmon tree in his yard. He wrote about getting caught skinny-dipping on a backwoods trail. He wrote about his daughter, a performer with Cirque du Soleil. And even among these always entertaining pieces, he wrote a fair number of straight-up bangers. I remember, in the early days of this blog, linking to many-many of them. They were such a pleasure to read. He was on my mind recently because a friend is dealing with the decline of a parent, and the piece he wrote about his own mother’s death was such a masterpiece, I wanted to reread it, maybe pass it along. (You can’t do that anymore without signing up for yet another email, which I simply can’t do, these days, especially for something I’m sending to someone else. Here’s yet another call for some sort of mid-grade newspaper collective gift-link arrangement, similar to the NYT’s or WP’s.)

Time marches in only one direction. Carroll left the paper in 2015 and had a blog for a while. Blogs are a pain in the ass, and after a while it tapered off, as 99 percent of blogs tend to do. (nancynall.com — still blogging after all these goddamn years!)

Anyway, it made me google ol’ Jon, and I found this interview with him, published just this week. He’s 81 now, and not writing, but still alive and kicking. Part of the reason he’s not writing is:

What is difficult about being your age?

I’m going blind. Around 2019 I was diagnosed with macular degeneration, which means that I am slowly and painlessly losing my sight. I had already stopped writing professionally when I got the diagnosis, and I’d also stopped publishing the blog, Jon Carroll Prose, that I had launched in December 2015. Now I can’t drive, and I can barely read. I get shots in my eyes every 10 weeks that slow the degeneration, but they won’t reverse the process.

On the positive side, Apple has wonderful accessibility options. I have a tablet that has very big type and I can sort of read it. I use voice-to-text technology for texting (it doesn’t work for email, alas), and I occasionally depend on the kindness of friends such as Nancy Friedman, who has helped me with this interview.

I can see my garden. I can see colors. I’ve always loved observing birds, and now, well, one of the things about birding that people don’t talk about is the sound. If you stand in the middle of the Sacramento Wildlife Refuge and cup your ears you hear a constantly changing cacophony.

What else is difficult? I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes about 30 years ago, and about 10 years ago I developed diabetic neuropathy, which means that my feet hurt all the time.

But he’s still Jon:

I refuse to vegetate, to lose interest in things, to let my curiosity atrophy. It’s a danger that we all face. It’s not an unreal temptation. How do you fight it? You talk. You think. You speculate. My granddaughter, who is 23, comes over here to hang out, not because we asked her to help but because she enjoys it. We play cribbage and talk about horses.

Here’s a thing a lot of old people are privately thinking: I’m really glad I’m not going to be around to see what 2050 will look like. I fear for my grandchildren. Our politics is controlled by billionaire boys who are enthusiastically letting the planet go to shit. I’m afraid the results of this little experiment in fascism will be sad. My granddaughter’s generation is the first that will do less well than their parents.

Bless him. And bless NN.C reader Nancy Friedman.

Newspapers — good ones — always had room for a writer or two like Jon. That was one of things I loved about them, the way you could just stumble across a column like his. Alan used to work with a guy named Ralph, a copy editor. At his retirement, a colleague talked about how Ralph also once wrote a weekly column called Mr. Cheap. It was all about entertainment to be had for free or not-much. One day Mr. Cheap went out to eat in Melvindale, a working-class suburb here, and witnessed a woman changing her baby’s diaper on the restaurant table. He ended up writing a hilarious dunking on ol’ Melvindale, just an over-the-top roast of the place. And Melvindale? Went insane over it. On the public-access cable channel, a crawl ran over all the programming for days, giving viewers the number to call to cancel their subscriptions. Was anyone in The Detroit News management worried about this? They were not. It was all funny. There were hundreds of thousands of subscribers then. There were many pages in the paper. They had to be filled somehow.

OK, then. The weekend is looming. The forecast: 90 degrees on Saturday, 96 on Sunday. And 98 on Monday. Kill me now.

Just as the chilly spring we’re already calling Maycember fades out, the summer heat arrives. The current forecast is for upper 80s/low90s through the weekend and into next week. Joy! Sweat! Smelly bras!

Now that the obligatory Midwestern small talk about the weather is out of the way, let’s get to the news, eh? Looks like we’re going to war with Iran, too. It won’t be a bad war, like Iraq. No, it’ll be a Grenada-type war, where we roar in with a bunch of air power, drop bombs pew-pew-pew, then roar out and land with erections already at half-mast. Also, some ICE agents arrested a mayoral candidate in New York City, for trying to escort a migrant the agents were trying to arrest. And then :::touches earpiece::: we learn that Kristi Noem was taken, by ambulance, to a DC hospital. Just moments ago, as I write this?

“Some lip filler got dislodged and traveled to her brain,” I said.

“Stephen Miller threw a telephone book at her,” Alan said.

And this is where we are in the United States of America, c. 2025. I give up.

It just occurred to me there are no telephone books anymore. So what did Stephen throw at Kristi? A remaindered hardcover of “The Art of the Deal,” perhaps. Or a Remington bronze. You never know.

So I was reading about how the shooter in Minneapolis — excuse me, alleged shooter — found details about his intended victims via data brokers. These are the businesses that, when you idly Google a person you made out with at a high school party, offers their Facebook or LinkedIn page, but adds they can give you phone numbers, home addresses, criminal records, etc., for a fee. Much of this information is public, to be sure, but has in the past required a little more skill to find than just opening an online account. There have been efforts to rein these companies in, but alas — they haven’t gone anywhere. And once again, I marvel at how our miraculous technology has come to enslave us, because we prioritize the needs of business over people.

My sister went to Europe in the ’90s, when cell phones were becoming ubiquitous everywhere. She watched, on trains, as Europeans blah-blah’d through tunnels without a care. Another friend talked about being on a ferry somewhere in Greece, so far from land you couldn’t see it in any direction, and talking to her mother in the States as though they were standing next to one another. At the same time, Verizon was basing their entire ad campaign on shitty coverage — remember “Can you hear me now?” Why? Because in these MARXIST, COMMUNIST HELLHOLES, government set the cell standards and sometimes picked the companies that could provide the service. Here, we let the Invisible Hand do that, and consequently, I spent half an hour on the phone with AT&T trying to get a data charge reversed, because Kate had downloaded an album at her friend’s house, and her friend lived on the edge of a weird cell here that, miles from Canada, always switched to Rogers, the Canadian company.

Now, of course, no one dares answer a call from any unfamiliar number.

I’ve gone off on a tangent, haven’t I? Here’s a picture of the lake this morning, for the first week of outdoor swimming. One of my favorite dawns — when you have to look for the line between the water and the sky:

What will tomorrow bring? Something crazy, for sure.