Zen and the Art of Snow Removal

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In New England choosing a snow removal method is kind of like choosing a religion.  There’s the mainstream snowblower sect.  Then there are those plow guys both the ones that mount it to their family truck and the ones who buy those ATV looking vehicles that zip around after major snowstorms cleaning off people’s driveways.  They’re probably pagans or something.  Then there are the hardliners who own a tractor to which they can attach plows, blowers, even trailers in which the snow can be collected.  These guys are ready for the apocalypse.  And finally, there are the fundamentalists; the shovel guys.  To them moving the snow is the punishment we all deserve.

A week ago, I was walking in the haunted forests and swamps of Dunwich and observing the first little buds and leaves opening up on all the thorn bushes, briars and poison ivy vines.  But now there’s eight inches of snow out there again!

And so, I spent Tuesday and today on snow removal.  I skipped Wednesday because, dammit I’m an American.  My weapons were the snowblower, the snow shovel and the ice scraping shovel (technically it’s a roofing shovel used to scrape the shingles off a roof, but it’s really good for smashing and scraping ice off a driveway).  And I got all of the top driveway done and the lower driveway so-so.

And that’s just in time for tonight’s predicted one to four inches of new snow.  Now what kind of prediction is 1-4 inches?  When the maximum is 400% of the minimum it shouldn’t be called a prediction.  Clueless guess is probably closer to the truth.  But the last five hours of snow removal has brought me back to the zen-like state that eventually sets in near the end of a New England winter.  And this is even true during extremely mild winters as we’ve had the last three or four years.  Because an inch of ice can cause more grief and work than two feet of dry snow.  In the zen state you abandon the idea of gritting your teeth and pushing through until spring.  It’s too long.  There are still seven weeks until snow is unlikely.  So, you must embrace the crappy weather and become one with it.

And so there I was, lavishing loving attention on asphalt that needed the snow coaxed off of it with a light, almost delicate touch to the shovel at just the perfect angle to get it to peel off the pavement.  I experienced ineffable contentment as I worked down the driveway six inches at a time.  I had become a snow clearing zombie.  And I loved Big Brother.

As you can tell I’m suffering from the last stages of cabin fever and I’m contemplating warning Camera Girl to abandon the Compound until spring when hopefully I’ll regain my sanity.  She knows my weaknesses and it’s just too reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Jack Torrance in the movie version of “The Shining.”  If I do go berserk, I won’t use the weapons that Jack Torrance took up (a fire axe in the movie and a roque mallet in the book).  I will instead embrace my most formidable weapon, bad puns.  The poor woman.

Anyway, I’m enjoying the posting of my novel fragment.  It’s cathartic to put it out in the real world and get feedback.  I’ve been trying to figure out a strategy to get it in the public eye.  I’m thinking about putting it on a crowd-funding site to see how much visibility that would give it.  If anyone knows which sites are best for our side of the political spectrum, please chime in.

Valentine’s Day 2024

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As you can tell from the photo above I consider myself and Camera Girl odd ducks.  But Valentine’s Day is a universal call to action.  Today of all days every red blooded American man has to prove to his girl that his undying love is worth slightly more than the cost of a box of chocolates, some flowers and a decent meal.  Play Don.

He Isn’t the Plucky Hero, the Alliance Isn’t Some Evil Empire

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Joss Whedon is a Leftist.  Despite his recent fall from grace on account of saying and doing mean things to actors on set, he believes in the cause.  All of his cinematic and television creations to some extent, are shaped by progressive concepts.  So, it always seemed a very strange thing that he created Firefly.  Based, he said, on a book about the battle of Gettysburg he imagined a universe where the elites defeated the freedom loving proles in an interplanetary civil war and these defeated forces maintained an outlaw existence at the edge of a distant new solar system among pirates and barbarians.

In the cinematic finale of this universe, the elites in the “Alliance” send out an agent to eliminate the renegades that have some dangerous secrets about the government’s experiments with controlling the behavior of the ordinary people.

During one encounter the agent recites the title of this essay.

He is portrayed as a true believer.  He is making a better world, a world free of sin.  And he’ll do this, no matter how many people he has to kill to get there.  The agent is polite, intellectual, cultured and completely ruthless.  Because he thoroughly believes in what he is doing.  In this portrayal I think Whedon was being completely honest in how he evaluated the Left and the Right.  The Left is polite, intellectual, cultured and completely ruthless.  The Right is crude, naïve, boorish and principled.  And for some reason Whedon sympathized with the Right, at least somewhat.  Possibly he recognizes the inherent lack of intellectual freedom that the Left always creates.  As a creative type himself, maybe he could see how restrictive life under this regime would be.

Well, all of the above is just a long digression because the line from the movie seems to encapsulate our reality.  Our rebellion isn’t like Star Wars.  It’s more like Firefly.  We don’t have any plucky heroes who will save the day by blowing up the Death Star.  We’re outnumbered, outgunned, outmatched in money and buried by the media and Corporate America.  The elites have a firm hand on the levers of power and we are just outlaws living on the margins trying to avoid being rounded up and chloroformed like some troublesome stray cats.

And if we look back through history all free societies seem eventually to collapse into oligarchies like ours.  But I haven’t been able to figure out what is the “smart” way to think and act in this environment.  If I had a strong enough stomach I probably should suck up to the elites and try to find a spot among their toadies.  But I’ve always had trouble convincing them I believed in their bilge.  Something about my sense of humor always gets me in trouble.

But what is the right answer?  Is there a way to live in such a society and still have any self-respect?  It doesn’t appear to be the case.  And what about children?  What do you tell them?  Look at the mess we have with Gen Y and Gen Z.  They’re living in a fantasy world and life will completely pass them by without leaving a trace.

So, there’s my thought.  The elites don’t appear to be vulnerable to anything we can do.  And waiting for their decadence to finish them off might take centuries.  I guess eventually Caesar or Theodoric will appear on the scene and we’ll get a different group of oligarchs and different bread and circuses.

But is it impossible to get a Brutus instead of a Caesar?  And not the Brutus who slew Caesar, not Marcus Junius Brutus, but rather his ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus, the one who overthrow the last Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus and ushered in the Roman Republic.  Is it impossible that a member of the elites would side with freedom over power?  I think the answer is that it is impossible.  And the reason is that no one man, no matter how smart and strong can rearrange an empire once it’s built up.  All that can be done is bend its path slightly for a few years.

So I’ll finish by saying that there are plucky heroes and it is the evil empire and that in their prime, evil empires outlast plucky heroes every time.  It’s in their nature.  Better to look to the fringes of empire for where the successor to that empire will appear.