Day 3870

It's been exactly one year since I received the press proofs of my first article for SpaceFlight Magazine. A second article was published about six months later and a third is still scheduled for publication in September. It was a good beginning, but I thought my budding career as a space journalist be a lot further along by now. I certainly thought I'd be down at Kennedy Space Center tomorrow morning for the launch of the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission. Oh, well. It wasn't meant to be. Little did I know back then that the world was about to change. I keep trying to get media accreditation again, but it might be a while. In a post-covid world, newcomers go to the back of the line.

I shouldn't complain though. My problems are small compared with what other people are going through. I was going to get a haircut later in the week, but my stylist got laid off at the salon. Another covid casualty. I know someone locally who got infected now. He's OK, but it makes me realize that the disease is all around us. Most of my friends are healthy and continue to lead normal lives. A few seem to have flipped out and are way too angry for their own good.

Sometimes when my day is uneventful it is tempting to go on an angry rant myself. It would certainly be an easy way to fill up space. The problem is that I'm not really angry. I'm still very detached. I think this is the secret to social distancing. I look at the world like it is an episode of Black Mirror or the Twilight Zone. It is not my world though. I try to navigate the pandemic and the social unrest like everything is covered in a sticky glue that you can't let touch you. You have to plan your moves very carefully.

I have a few farmer and rancher friends that I envy. I keep thinking that their farms are so remote that they are completely unaffected by all this turmoil. This probably isn't true though. Farmers and ranchers might not have to worry about riots in the city or getting killed by a random cough at a grocery store, but some of them are probably having big problems selling their cattle or their crops. The whole supply chain is screwed up now. We are in the middle of a global mess that affects all of us.

You'd think we could all rally together to find a solution. That's what my parents did during World War II. It's not happening though. I have never seen so much anger and division. Much of the rancor takes place on Facebook. I look at what some of my friends say online and think "Do I even know you." I think there are going to be articles in prestigious medical journals for years to come about how social media causes mental illness.

The solution for some of us has always been dogs. It's hard to be angry when you've got a good dog. Dawn continues to be a joy. She certainly came into our lives at exactly the right time.

Tink is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3842

You don't have to convince me that July has arrived. It definitely feels like July. We got started on our morning walk before sunrise again and were lucky to have a breeze and overcast skies for most of the way. Dawn knows all the routes we travel so well now that we let her choose how long to walk. If it's cool outside and she has lots of energy, she'll usually pick a longer route. On hot days like today, she'll pick a shorter route home that shaves at least a mile off our travels. I continue to be amazed at what a smart Dawn is. She's kind of street smart too. I get the feeling that she's seen and survived a lot in her former life.

I paid my early July bills online this morning, but still had to go to the post office to mail a letter to my sister. Since there was no line at the counter today, I finally bought a roll of stamps. This roll ought to last me for several years. Periodic letters to my Luddite sister are the only reason I need stamps anymore.

It was a slow day so I did what I usually do on slow days: look at cars on the Internet. It's weird that I'm so interested in cars since I don't even like to drive, but that's the way it is. Ever since I spent that week at the Astronomers Lodge, I've decided that my desire to buy a 4x4 Sprinter Van was just a passing fancy. It is much more comfortable to stay in a hotel while you are traveling. Now I'm interested in the new Ford Bronco that is going to be introduced in a week or so. I owned a Bronco once and it was a fairly rugged trouble free car. There's plenty to choose from though. A British company called INEOS is introducing a car called the Grenadier that is a dead ringer for the old Land Rover Defenders I loved so much. This tough looking Defender clone features permanent all wheel drive and a BMW engine. It's going to be available for the US market too. Something to think about. I might even consider getting a Tesla Cybertruck. It's hard to bet against Elon Musk. Once they get around to putting a few Superchargers in Fort Davis, a Cybertruck is going to start looking pretty good.

While I was eating breakfast this morning I watched with some amusement as police began to dismantle the Seattle CHOP zone on TV. Very interesting that it wasn't the violence and murders in the occupied zone that caused the Seattle mayor to change her mind. It was when the angry mob started marching toward her own house. The people of Beverly Hills have banned protests in their ritzy neighborhood too. What a bunch of hypocrites. It's all fun and games for these armchair warriors until the mob threatens to burn down their homes.

There is a very famous quote from George Orwell in his book 1984. You probably read it in school: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” The interesting thing to me is that the left thinks this ominous message refers to Donald Trump, while the right is convinced Orwell is talking about today's cancel culture. This is the world we live in. We are able to look at the exact same thing and see something different.

I hate all this conflict. I think the United States has become too divided to govern effectively. I wish we could just agree to let the red states secede and form their own woke country. California, Oregon, and Washington State would make a nice little country. Maybe they could take an empty state like Nevada too so all the Californians who have moved to Texas could return to their roots. This will never happen of course, because Americans are too argumentative to do anything practical.

Before someone writes the next tell-all political book, we need to remember that over 100,000 Americans worked on the Manhattan Project for several years during World War II and not a single one of them betrayed the secret of the atomic bomb. That's unity. Before we continue finding Nazis under every tree, we need to remember that Wernher von Braun, the beloved scientist who took us to the moon was an actual real Nazi. Before we tear down any more statues and cancel everything, we need to remember that it was the Jewish people who insisted that Auschwitz remain standing after World War II, so that history would never forget. I think we started erasing history long before the statues started tumbling. It's convenient for a superficial world that communicates using Emojis to just remember what we like. We need to own both the good and the bad and erase nothing. It's who we are. Civilization requires both.

Bentley is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3833

And now there are two. Murphy found his forever home this week and has left the building. The only dogs left at the moment are Hank and Charlie. These two happy clowns have adjusted very well to kennel life. The staff loves them and it often feels like we are visiting them at home. Hopefully, each of these boys will find a real home soon. They certainly deserve it. Until that day comes, we'll continue to visit. Janet and I like to think we are helping to socialize the dogs, but I think Hank and Charlie know we are just having fun.

We woke to more rain this morning. It was raining pretty hard, so we changed our plans a bit. Janet went to the gym and I went ahead and made my morning smoothie. Two hours later, the rain had moved to the East and the skies began to clear. The good thing about these early morning storms is that they bring cooler weather with them. By the time we got Dawn in her harness and ready to walk, it was quite pleasant outside.

Monday's are all about the dogs now. By the time we've finished taking Dawn on a long walk and visiting Hank and Charlie at the kennel, the day is pretty much done. That's OK. I'm convinced that spending time with dogs is a lot better way to spend your day than worrying about which businesses in Dallas are virus free zones or watching the country self-destruct in television.

It still seems weird to me that Texas is reopening in a big way at exactly the same time as new virus infections are at an all time high. Maybe this was inevitable. The whole problem with lockdowns in the first place was that they were never designed to eliminate the virus. At best, all they could do was postpone the problem by kicking the can down the road a bit. Now that everyone has gotten tired of being quarantined and seeing their jobs and future go down the tubes, we are starting to notice that the virus is still here. Oops. It never left. I'm continuing to keep myself out of circulation, but I think we'll all become infected at some point. I just hope my immune system kicks in when the time comes.

It's actually pretty easy to avoid people when you are retired. I have no meetings to attend and no desire to engage in long conversations with anyone. Online shopping and banking actually works pretty well. I think I'm actually more worried about social unrest than the virus. Exposure to the virus can be controlled. I'm not so sure about an angry mob.

When I see people toppling statues indiscriminately and attempting to set up their own tiny countries inside the boundaries of large cities, I don't see anything resembling social change. This chaos reminds me of March 2001 when the Taliban destroyed the world's largest standing Budda statues in Afghanistan. The world thought that was terrible. Where is the outrage now? If you think all this violence and destruction is still about George Floyd you are being naive. This is more like Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. Like the Cultural Revolution, it is a blatant attempt by anarchists  to completely erase history. The sad thing is that when you erase history, you are much more likely to repeat it.

I'll probably have a pretty good day tomorrow if I can just avoid turning on the TV. It's getting ugly out there.

Kirby is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3828

The doctor wasn't pleased with my progress this morning. "I froze the hell out of those things last time and the roots are still there," he told me. It was a little unsettling to learn that keratosis blemishes had roots. I've watched enough science fiction movies to know that having something growing inside you with roots is not a good thing. "We're going to have to scrape these," the doctor told his nurse. I had visions of sandpaper and asked the doctor if it would hurt. "You won't feel a thing," he told me.

The doctor was correct. The anesthetic they injected in my face was pretty effective. I closed my eyes because I didn't want to see what the doctor was actually doing. After a while I began to smell something burning. "Is that me," I asked? I couldn't feel anything, but there was a definite smell of burning flesh. "This is how we remove these growths now," the doctor told me. "It is very effective. "Will this bleed a lot," I asked the doctor? "I doubt if it will bleed at all," He told me. "There is already a scab." The nurse placed a small bandage under my eye and the doctor said he'd see me again in four months. I was good to go in less than fifteen minutes.

This wasn't what I expected at all. The entire procedure was much less traumatic than a trip to the dentist. I'm glad I don't have to go back for another four months. A trip to the doctor in today's post-pandemic world is still a little unsettling. There are rules about how many people can ride in the elevator and lots of social distancing circles on the floors. So many people are wearing masks that you just know that some of them have got to be sick. I definitely wouldn't want to work in a hospital environment right now. You can tell these guys know that they are at ground zero. I always have to fill out a questionnaire saying that I haven't traveled anywhere in the last fourteen days and haven't come into contact with anyone who has been exposed to the virus. How would they even know if I was telling the truth?

The rest of my day was uneventful. We're still walking extremely early, but you can tell that the temperature keeps rising. Summer is here. There was a breeze this morning, but Dawn seemed a little tired. We'll probably try a shorter route tomorrow morning. Dawn loves these walks in the woods and enjoys smelling things, but we don't want to push her too hard. She's getting older and isn't as obsessed with exercise as Janet and I seem to be.

If I were writing a dystopian novel, it would be hard to top what is happening right now in real life. People around the world are tired of being quarantined and are becoming restless. The virus is still here though and keeps reappearing like a forest fire that can't be extinguished. Social unrest is growing everywhere and there is already a shortage of Xanax. Everyone is upset about something. Truckers say they are going to stop delivering to cities with protests. People want to go back to the beach. Supply chains are crumbling as workers fall sick in critical industries. Police and emergency workers are under attack at the same time there are massive riots and arson in many cities. Kim Jong-un is blowing up buildings along the South Korean border and a weird little country just appeared right in the middle of Seattle. Basically, it's a total shit show everywhere you look.

This isn't going to end well. We need to get a grip on things in a hurry. It's easy to break something. It's a lot harder to put it back together.

Riley is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3824

When I was leaving the grocery store this morning I noticed that the guy ahead of me had a package of Clorox Wipes in his buggy. How could I have missed these? I've been looking for them for months. I went back into the store and asked an employee where I could find the elusive Clorox Wipes display. "We're sold out," he told me. "You must have seen the guy who bought the last ones today." I asked when the store was getting more and was told that they were receiving a pallet of wipes several times a week. This was encouraging news. I've been convinced that when Clorox Wipes were on the shelves again the pandemic would be over.

I'm going to buy a ton of Clorox Wipes the next time I see them again. I'll buy a bunch of N-95 masks if I happen to see those too. It hard to believe now that these masks used to be a common item in the paint section at Home Depot. Even though I continue to see crowds in the park and traffic is back to pre-pandemic levels, I don't think anything is over. The virus will ebb and flow for the next year or so. People will forget about it for a while and then they will panic all over again. Civil unrest probably won't disappear until after November 3rd. Call me cynical, but I think both political parties have reasons to keep stirring the pot right up until election day.

I think the only way to restore a sense of normalcy quickly would be if there was a way to completely eliminate the media for 30 days. I"m talking about all the media, including Facebook and Twitter. The media loves a crisis. They always have. A crisis is good for ratings. Wars. Hurricanes. Civil unrest. It's their bread and butter. Have you ever noticed how quickly war correspondents rise through the ranks at news organizations? Cover a good war for a while and sooner or later you are hosting the evening news.

At any rate, without the media constantly stirring the pot to increase their ratings, we might actually be forced to talk to our neighbors to find out what is going on. Without looking at the world through the distorted lens of social media, we might actually go outside and notice that our immediate surroundings aren't so bad after all. I know a few people who are little terrors on social media that are actually fairly nice when you can sit down and have coffee with them. We need a lot more real conversations and a lot fewer emojis.

Our society has made has made it far too easy to act without thinking. The ignorance I'm seeing these days is breathtaking. When you form your opinions by looking at memes, you wind up vandalizing a statue of Matthias Baldwin without even realizing he was a leading abolitionist. When you keep saying you've got to "follow the science" without having a clue what scientists actually do, you wind up wearing a mask when you are driving alone in your own car. When you try to start the next revolution by turning a few city blocks in Seattle into a low rent copy of Burning Man, you probably just leave advocates for real social change shaking their heads in despair.

I've said it before and I'll probably say it again. Everything we have experienced in the last six months has been made worse by social media. We live in a world where everyone is glued to their phone and nobody talks to their neighbors. The traditional media isn't helping things either. They keep pouring gasoline on the flames in a mostly failing effort to stay relevant. Lord help us in the days ahead. We have become a nation of idiots.

Marcie is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3814

I used to like social media. Back in the dark ages when blogs were popular I was even considered an influencer. Sites like Klout gave me free stuff and I had a huge following on Google+. I never took it seriously though. The blog was just a lazy man's way of maintaining the daily journal I used to write by hand in little leather bound books that I would buy every January at a local stationary store. It never occurred to me that other people would want to read this stuff. It still baffles me why some of you are here.

For many years the Internet seemed harmless and innocent. There were no passwords or hackers. Nobody was trying to steal your identity. Occasionally you would strike up a conversation with someone who was even nerdier than you were. Then Facebook appeared.

Somehow everything has changed. From my perspective, social media has become a corrosive, destructive force. I'm not sure we should be connected. It has become far too easy to see what is trending and just drink the cool-aid. I remember people saying how wonderful it was that the Internet gave people a voice during the Arab Spring. Then look what happened. Country after country in the Middle East descended into chaos. Now the chickens have come home to roost. My own country is descending into chaos as well.

I'm not completely sure why all this is happening, but I have a feeling that it has something to do with the false sense of belonging that social media can give you. Social media and tribalism go hand in hand. It's easy to find like-minded individuals on the Internet. The platforms are set up that way. Why do you think Facebook invented the whole concept of 'friends" and "likes"? They make more money by aggregating you into groups with similar interests.

The whole friend thing has gotten out of hand though. I never wanted to know this much about you guys. I've worked with people for over twenty years and never knew much about their political beliefs or personal opinions. It was better that way. When you had to look someone you knew in the eye before you spoke, you learned to measure your words carefully. Friendships were built slowly over many years. The Internet made it far too easy to wear your heart on your sleeve with no consequences. People use their words like flamethrowers now.

I can't recall that I've ever unfriended anyone. I've usually been content to live and let live. So why do I suddenly feel the desire to unfriend people now? Probably because folks I've known for years appear to have lost their minds. How can you go from "stay inside or you'll kill grandma" to "join me on the streets or you're part of the problem" almost overnight? Some of the most strident social distance advocates are now arm-in-arm spreading the virus everywhere because something new has captured their attention. You can't really have it both ways. I wish everyone would just quit virtue signaling. It's not a good look. Nobody is as virtuous in real life as they like to appear on the Internet anyway.

Freckles is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 3813

Of course there are riots. Every zombie apocalypse end of the world movie I've ever seen has riots. The combination of a global plague, an economic disaster, and extreme social unrest all happening at the same time does make you wonder. Is this going to end up like The Stand? Maybe these are the end times. Hey, I'm not waiting for the Rapture or anything, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised to see that giant spaceship from District Nine hovering over the city in July.

I don't think my bank is ever going to reopen. I went to the drive thru today to make a deposit and ended up at a window that wasn't working. I had to circle around and try a different window. I still can't bring myself to use the bank's phone app to photograph checks and make deposits electronically. I'm very suspicious of my phone. I basically only use it to take photographs and check the weather.

My desktop computer is much more secure, but I'm even suspicious of that. I was paying a phone bill electronically today and noticed a suspicious phone number on my profile. I called the company to find out if I'd been hacked or my account had been compromised, but while I was sitting on hold waiting to talk to somebody, it occurred to be that the weird phone number might actually belong to my iPad. Yep. It was my own phone number I was worried about. I hung up before I embarrassed myself talking to a service representative.

We've been getting up really early to walk Dawn before the weather gets too hot. I'm always surprised at how many cyclists are out this early. There must be a lot of people who routinely exercise before they go to work. The park is pretty busy during the first hour of our walk and then the trails thin out again. By the time we returned home around 8:30 AM, the park was practically empty. Early morning exercise must signal that Dallas is returning to work. The roads certainly look that way. Morning rush hour in our part of town is just as bad as it ever was.

Janet's gym is open again, but mine is not. My gym hasn't even announced a date for reopening yet. I wonder who decides these things? I guess it's just as well that my gym hasn't reopened. I'm not sure I'm ready to go back to a gym anyway. Maybe the long walks are better anyway. Five miles in the morning and another three miles in the afternoon is probably all the exercise I need.

It takes a lot of patience not to bother the editors at Sky and Telescope and SpaceFlight Magazine and  continually ask when my articles are going to appear. I need to just start writing new articles, but my interests are limited. I used to think that writing the blog kept me in practice for more serious writing, but I'm not so sure anymore. I'm just treading water here.

Abby is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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