Cloudy Today

 It certainly won't be cold. Elevated fire danger so the winds might be high today. No rain likely. So it goes. What I am currently reading is a large hard cover collection of stories from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Excellent stuff. I like everything about BOOKS. I like the tactile quality, the heft, the smell of the pages. Take your "smart phones" and stick them where the sun don't shine. I have, in fact, many many more books in this house than most people will ever encounter in their lifetimes. Those I read and decide not to keep go to the Friends of the Library for resale and others to enjoy. Many I do keep and many of the books in my library are worth re-reading and some have been re-read many times over the years. Permanent in my collection are books by Bart Ehrman, and James Tabor, and Elaine Pagels, and books on math and physics and history and many other topics. And there's a lot of fiction worth re-reading. Philip K. Dick, for instance! Dickens. Victor Hugo. Flaubert. Balzac. James Joyce. And on and on. Books to savor and books to make one think. And other books to entertain and divert. Thank goodness for gifted writers. 

But you won't find any contemporary right-wing trash, that's for sure. Look in vain for the likes of Sarah Palin. None of that garbage. 

 

Getting Warmer

 Our mild January continues, and it feels good. 

My routines are well-established, and I plan to maintain the status quo, no matter what. 

Windy And Dusty Today

 We seem to be stuck in that pattern. It'll be warmer today than yesterday and much better by the weekend but the wind will be unrelenting. So it goes. Are people getting dumber? Does anyone think anymore? How many people still read books? Everywhere I go I see faces stuffed into those damned "smart" phones, no conversation to speak of, and a lot of places have treacly and creepy "praise music" seeping like some kind of neurotoxic fog out of their speaker systems. Background music for the lobotomized. It's all very depressing. I feel sometimes that I'm living among pod people, that the body-snatchers have won, although it might be more like an invasion of brain eaters and the brain eaters are gaining ground. Resistance is useless? The battle for rationality is lost? Seems like it. I have plenty of good reasons to avoid people!

Very Windy And Dusty Yesterday

 Today a cold front. It won't be as warm but the low this morning was still well above freezing. Day before yesterday I spent a lot of time outdoors. Guess what-- I hate winter. Doesn't everyone? The weird and extreme seem to be the norm in more things than the weather. Were people always this crazy? I think so, but social media allows craziness to reach a critical mass. One village idiot is able to communicate with similar village idiots all over the world, and that's what the internet has done for us. That's bad news for the future of humanity. But in the long run, homo sapiens would probably have been a dead end anyway. A failed experiment. Somewhere in the galaxy there are probably species who have actually managed to do all the things that humanity is incapable of doing. Or at least I'd like to think so. 

The universe is probably littered with failed civilizations, and I'm quite certain that we will be one of those failures. 

Even More Like Spring

 High winds and a lot of dust and dirt blowing around today. Typical of Lubbock. We are really having one of "those" months. But it beats any Arctic Bum Blast. No snow, no ice, no sub-zero wind chills. I'll take it. It sucks, but it's better than many alternatives. Of course, it is very, very, dry. The drought is unrelenting. In 2019 we had a lot of rain. But I don't think that has happened since then.