The Great Houses

I am, without question, not a fan of Donald J. Trump.  But he's going to be president. 

I am also a lifelong Beltway Insider.  Born here, raised here, pretty much the entirety of my life.  It's where I own a home, purchased back in the late 1990s for what felt...at the time...like an exorbitant amount of money.  Two hundred and forty nine thousand dollars, for a 1,300 square foot brick rambler in Annandale, and even with family help, it was a bit of stretch.  

We bought in because it was where my wife and I both planned on working, and because it was near family.  More broadly, it's our cultural expectation that buying in will give you equity in a home, which is better than just dumping money into rent.  When home prices go up over four...or eight...or twelve...years, selling off means you profit handily from the purchase.

Our rambler, for instance, is worth 200% more now than it was two decades ago.  The house my parents bought, and in which my mom still lives?  That's worth about 1,100% more than it was in 1975.

Again, I'm a Beltway Insider born and bred, which means I've seen what happens when administrations change.  Folks hoping to work with the new regime come bopping into DC, seeking housing to buy.  For most of the fifty five years I've lived here, that's been a good bet.  

Out there, I don't doubt there are Trumpy politicos thinking they'll get a piece of DC Real Estate.  In that knowledge, I'm reminded of my Lord and Savior's insistence that one love one's enemies, that one go the extra mile, that one offereth up one's cloak also and whatnot.

So to them, a warning about buying a house here:  Don't.

Knowing the sensitivities of Trumpy folk, let me note that even if you are the great Cornholio, I am not threatening you by saying this.  You'll be fine here.  Folks are generally neighborly in these parts, if a little prone to being overly work focused.  Some eye rolling and muttering may be encountered, but that's as far as it'll go.

No, the reason not to buy in to the housing market in the DC area is, if you voted for Trump, precisely because he may well do what he promised.  If the Department Of Government Efficiency has even a fraction of the impact Elon and Vivek insist it'll have, it'll tear an iceberg sized gash in the Titanic of the DC housing market.  

Many thousands of workers, gone.  Departments eliminated.  Agency budgets cut to the bone.  The broader economy here will be significantly impacted.  No matter what your opinion on governmental size may be, the impact of that would be gobsmackingly obvious: a sudden explosive decompression of the local economy.  I know what that looks like here.  Things got noticeably leaner here a bit during Al Gore's reinvention of government.  Then back in the subprime crisis of '06 and '07, home prices collapsed, leaving folks with mortgages they couldn't afford and houses that were worth half of what they paid for them.

In my own neighborhood, houses were just abandoned.  Meaning, the owners closed and locked the doors and disappeared.  The two little ramblers at the top of our street, both identical to our own?  They sat empty for years, the grass growing high, the only signs of life being the county violation stickers and foreclosure notices on the front doors.

Ever take a long walk through Flint, Michigan?  I have.  Following the closing of the Buick factory there in the nineties, entire neighborhoods were abandoned.  Home prices went to functionally nothing.  That's what it looks like when the primary industry of a region shutters or significantly retracts.

So, in the interests of being honest to even those who are my political enemies: don't buy a house here.  

You don't want to tie youself to this market right before your own choices destroy it.

Just a friendly warning.

I've also got something you might want to be aware of regarding continuing to live on this planet, but hey.  One thing at a time.

The Illusion of Self-Sufficiency

I will, on occasion, see folks pitching up suburban survival gardens.  We suburbanites are anxious creatures, dimly aware of how vulnerable we are if everything were to suddenly go south.  In response to this anxiety, I'll occasionally see some bright-eyed influencer who's packed their quarter-acre full of raised beds.  I'm hashtag self-sufficient, they'll hashtag say!  Hashtag blessed!

I'm under no such illusions, and am quite aware of how far I am from being able to provide for my needs from my property.  Self sufficient I ain't.

Well, I am in a few things.  My garden plots yield 100% of the garlic that I require on an annual basis.  29 heads of garlic came out of the ground this last May, and I expect they'll carry me comfortably through to May of 2025.

I also produce 100% of the basil we use for cooking, as I've got a four by four bed dedicated that sweet, delightful herb.  It fills the area near the carport with a delightful fragrance during summer and fall, and produces enough basil that this year I finally got around to drying and saving it.  Sixteen cups of basil dried down to fill a medium-sized spice jar, which is more than enough to overwinter.

I'm angling towards providing all of my own rosemary, having put in two plants this year.  I've got mint out the wazoo, because mint being mint, the issue isn't cultivating it, but keeping it from taking over the entire garden.

So I'm getting close to being herb-self-sufficient.  

But that's pretty much it.  My suburban quarter acre simply can't provide enough to sustain a one hundred and seventy five pound omnivore, let alone two of us.  

I mean, I could pretend it did, if I turned and cultivated every inch of arable soil in my light-filled front yard.  With fencing and several greenhouse enclosures, I could stave off the chipmunks and squirrels and deer that take a substantial portion of my yield.  That would increase production by a factor of ten.  

Which sound great, but as I only produce about 1% of my total caloric intake from my own garden plots, that'd still leave 80% remaining.

I could, I suppose, cut down every single tree in my back yard, converting that area into an urban farm.   But...where would I get the leaves for my compost pile?   Driving to Home Depot to pick up plastic bags full of soil kinda stretches the meaning of "self-sufficiency."  And where would the water come from?  I don't have a well, nor could a well be relied upon in a long dry season, particularly if my densely packed neighbors ever drank or washed or flushed their toilets.  

Rural folk may think they have it better, but the reality is a little different.  Yeah, you've got more land.  But how do you till that soil?  How do you plant and grow?  Americans agriculture is now completely machine-reliant, and those machines themselves rely on a vast and convoluted industrial network to provide the fuel that runs them.  How often do you need to refuel a combine?  How often do you refuel your truck?  That's the extent of your self-reliance right there.  Without those refineries and tanker trucks, that John Deere is just a lump of expensive metal.

The reality, for most American human beings, is that we're not even close to being able to meet our own physical needs if something...or someone...sabotaged the systems that sustain our existences.

Always a fun thought.

A Measure of the Temperature

My garden is almost entirely shut down for the year.  The beds are nearly all emptied, the final straggling tomatoes and beans and okra uprooted and shredded for compost.  A layer of leaf mulch covers the soil in the beds where I'd put in two new rosemary plants, and should keep their roots cozy over the cold season.  Two beds of garlic went in back at the beginning of October, and should be on track to yield their savory harvest come May.

 But I've still got an item of unfinished business that niggles at me.  My asparagus bed just won't quite stop growing.  

Asparagus, in the event you don't know, is a fernlike plant (closer to the lily, genetically speaking), one that grows around six feet in height.  The asparagus we eat are the first tender shoots that rise in the spring, which can be harvested for six or eight weeks before ya just let the plant grow.   Asparagus rootstock, once established and well tended, can provide nutrition for a generation.  In order to harvest it, you've got to cut down the ferns in late fall, as I have the last three years.  You put a nice blanket of leafmulch atop the bed, and tuck it away for a nice winter rest.

To do that, you have to wait until the tall, delicately formed plants end their annual growth cycle.  This year, they're just not stopping.  

About a third of the ferns have browned and died off, but the majority remain green and vital.  I'm sitting there, tapping my foot, looking at my watch, but they're in no hurry. 

All it takes is one good hard frost to shut them down, but...that frost hasn't come.  Not yet.  Historically speaking, first frost in the Midatlantic comes in mid to late October, but this year, it didn't.  Instead, we got a record-breaking stretch of drought, coupled with anomalously warm weather.  That happens more and more, because of course it does.  That frost is nearly a month late is...well, it's something notable.  Something real.

The longer the asparagi pump energy back into their roots, the stronger the plants will be, so I'm not going to rush them.  That unfinished task will just nudge about in the back of my mind, reminding me of something undone.  

And something a little...wrong.

Of Blue Skies and Deserts

I have been on social media since social media first crawled its way out of the primordial sludge of the internet.  I was there on MySpace.  Xanga.  Facebook.  Ello.  Twitter.  Mastodon.  And now, BlueSky.

Without question or exception, the best social media experience I ever had was Xanga.  I was on Xanga for years, and my arrival on BlueSky brings that medium to mind.  Xanga existed before microblogging became a thing, so posts and engagement there were more long-form.  Connection wasn't algorithmic, 'cause this was back in the day, kids.  You searched for and chose areas of interest yourself, and assembled your own networks.  There was no blocking, because, well, you couldn't.  So, sure, there were trolls, but they couldn't hide.  Troll someone, and they could see your profile, as could everyone in a group.  

There were no bots, because in 2004, bad actors hadn't figured out how to do that yet.  There was no tracking or gathering of data on users, because, again, that wasn't yet a thing.  There were no ads, because the internet was young and free and wild.  The content on a person's Xanga was mostly their own writing. 

It was, to be honest, a pleasure.  You really got to know people as people, and even the neoatheists and fundamentalists I jousted with became friends of a sort.  It's been nearly twenty years, and I am still in conversation with some of the souls I connected with there.

But Xanga died, because...well...there was no way for it to stay in operation.  There was no revenue, and no plan for revenue.  No ads.  No subscription.  No harvesting the activities of users to sell to advertisers. When Facebook rose and started sucking in the users, things began to go south.  Decreasing participation meant less venture capital, 'cause there wasn't any way to pretend it could be sustainable.  They tried a subscription model, but it failed.  They tried a reboot, but it failed.  It was a beautiful dream while it lasted, but it never found a path to long term viability.

As millions upon millions of users flee the propagandistic shores of X and the now-aggressively-censorious algorithms of Facebook, the challenge facing BlueSky is the same.  It's great.  I mean, a lovely place to connect.  Again, it reminds me of Xanga.

And not just in the good ways.  There is no publicly stated path to BlueSky viability.  Servers and moderators and infrastructure require an income stream, and scaling up from an experiment in federation to a sustainable platform will demand resources.  It's all buzzybuzzbuzz right now, but it'll need more than butterfly farts and biz-speak daydreams to keep it afloat.

A good social media platform is, I will note, worth paying for.  The subscription model is the single best way to ensure adequate revenue for that form of social exchange.  It guarantees platform stability, and is ultimately less predatory than the Meta model of viewing the data of your users as your product.  It also adds a transaction cost that limits botfarm incursions and gives a traceable trail to trolls and predators.

Alternately, it could lean into federation, becoming a more user-friendly version of the sprawling mess that is Mastodon.  

What's the plan?  Well, for now there isn't one, at least not one that's been shared.

I do hope it succeeds, but in the meantime, kids: don't get too attached.    

Failing to Fail

Being able to fail is a gift.

All of us do fail, now and again.  Some of our failures, like my experiments with new plants in my garden, are trivial.  There was that time I believed a few chattery Youtube gardeners and Reddit posters who swore up and down that you could plant "potato towers."  Just plant taters at the base of said tower, and they'll grow and grow and grow upwards as you add compost to an ever rising wire-frame.  Did it work?  Nope.  Potatoes don't do that.  Lesson learned.

Or the time I didn't move slowly and patiently through the process of installing a light fixture.  Or the time I rushed and didn't properly torque down the oil drain plug on my motorcycle.  Mild electrocution and/or struggling not to crash as you slide wildly on the highway are nice gentle reminders to take your danged time, son.

There've been worse failures.  My first church failed.  It was a long shot revitalization effort, but there were plenty of times I didn't speak up when I needed to speak up, or let my tendency to anxious paralysis prevent me from doing what was needed.  There was pain, there was reflection, there was correction.  Eventually, I realized there was no path, and spoke that truth.  When folks wouldn't hear it, I stepped aside.  It was rough.

If we do not fail, we do not learn.  But what if we cannot fail?  If pride and ego prevent us from ever seeing our own contribution to a misfire or a catastrophe?  Or if admitting failure is ideologically unacceptable, as it requires us to admit that the whole ethos of our chosen tribe is flawed.  Then we will fail, and fail, and fail again, until all is ruin and our lives are a bitter wreck.

And here lies a deep challenge for the next four years.  This isn't another list of what the Democrats did wrong, and here's how to fix it, and blah blah blah.  And sure, progressives can struggle sometimes with course correction, particularly when they've "progressed" into a new "truth" that doesn't actually reflect reality.  I'm naming a larger challenge. 

We're about to have a government that doesn't know how to learn from failure.  Donald Trump is congenitally incapable of admitting failure.  The MAGA ethos is similarly inclined.  Everything is someone else's fault.  Or failure never happened, it's really success, in the same way that January 6, 2021 was a beautiful day of love and peace, and the COVID years were the best ever, and nonstop nationwide riots and civil unrest during the inchoate brutalism of his first administration must have all been something we imagined in our pretty little heads.  

The information ecosystem Trumpism created to serve its Lord and Savior simply won't admit error.  It's a closed loop, sealed off from reality.  It is numb to negative input, which means that it is oblivious to damage it does to itself, right up until that damage becomes life threatening.  Like, say, someone who has lost all sensation and circulation in their feet, as my Dad did late in the process of his dying from CHF.  

This is pretty much exactly what happened in the old Soviet Union.  Back when I worked at the Aspen Institute, one of the studies my program funded looked at how environmental degradation helped hasten the collapse of the Eastern Bloc powers.  Under communist rule, untreated waste filled the rivers, and unfiltered emissions choked the air, and all of it was swept under the rug by The Approved Media.  No counterpoint was admitted, and disloyalty to the party line was actively suppressed.  There was no system for critical feedback, no way of course correcting.

Even when people started getting sick, their illnesses were ignored, and their complaints about the obvious cause were silenced.  But it kept worsening.  Family and friends of communist party leadership sickened, as the blight of unfettered and unaccountable industry spread.  It reached a point where everyone knew, because the rivers were dead and the hospitals were full, and all of a sudden, the apparatchiks refused to crack down on the activists.  Like silencing voices criticizing the misbegotten war in Afghanistan, or naming the causes of the actual fallout from Chernobyl, these failures to fail cost the Soviet Union its existence.

Because if you cannot admit failure, there's no way to learn from it, and you will fail existentially.

Putting Conservative Christians in Detention Camps

Looking at what we can anticipate from the upcoming administration, one action in particular stands prominent in my attention.  It's perhaps the most dissonant of the paradoxes facing this country as we move towards the next four-or-so years.

On the one hand, there's the fervent turnout of evangelical and conservative Christians, who voted en masse for Donald J. Trump.  

On the other hand, it's the stated intent of the forty-seventh president to...on day one...start rounding up conservative and evangelical Christians and forcibly taking them to camps.   

Generally speaking, this is not the way that most of the folks who voted for Trump would frame this commitment, but it's an entirely accurate way to describe what's planned.  

The plan is mass deportation, on an unprecedented scale, as tens of millions of undocumented migrants will be rounded up and returned to their countries of origin.  Given the logistics of such an endeavor, detention camps will be necessary.  If we're thinking only as selfish consumers, it might occur to us that this will cripple our ability to harvest crops, resulting in price increases and shortages.  But if we're thinking as Christians, there's that other consideration.

We know, with certainty, that most Latino immigrants profess to be followers of Jesus.  In the region of the world from which they hail, between 75% to 80% of the population are Christian.  They are Baptists and Pentecostals, independent evangelicals and traditional Catholics.  Those who risk their lives to reach our borders are no different, which is why so many reach out to Christian communities (or form their own churches) upon their arrival.  They are fleeing a combination of things: economic hardship, violence, and political oppression, particularly those trying to escape the oppressive leftist regime in Venezuela.

Again, American conservative and evangelical Christians voted, by a strong supermajority, for an administration that is planning...very first thing...on mobilizing the military to forcibly round other Christians up and ship them to detention camps, which is perhaps the least Christian response imaginable.  

Jackbooted soldiers herding Christians into trucks parses more like an Antichrist thing, or it was the last time I cringed my way through parts of one of those barely watchable Left Behind movies. 

Even more odd, to my eyes, at least, is that most of the immigrants America will be forcibly detaining aren't progressives, or leftists, or even liberal.  They're conservatives.

Latinos are many things, but most of those who come here are faith and family folk, the sort of people who are willing to risk their lives for the opportunity to work hard.  They are, as the protagonist of a novel of mine once noted, really just rednecks.  They like trucks and beer and dancing.  They like fireworks and cowboy hats and traditional family structures and Hey-zuus.  If America put the resources required to deport them into welcoming them in, they'd be Republicans for generations.

I know, I know, they're "illegal."  If you think that ultimately matters, you're welcome to lecture Jesus on immigration law and secure national borders when you stand before him on the day of judgement.  You might also try telling him about how they don't speak English, so they aren't really Christians, which I'm sure he'll appreciate.  Or how you believed Trump when when he belched out the slander-pander that they were all murderers and rapists.  I mean, it's not like showing hospitality to the stranger and mercy to the foreigner in one's land is ever mentioned in the Bible.  He'll understand that you put country and race before Christ, which he's totally cool with.  Ahem.

Que dios tenga piedad de tu alma.

The M Factor

Post election, there's a whole bunch of Monday morning quarterbacking going on amongst the chattering classes, trying to figure out why the recent election took the turn that it did.

For lefty-types, it's because the campaign was too moderate.  For moderates, it's because the campaign was too left-wing.  For MAGAs, it's because Trump is Jesus and can do no wrong and always wins no matter what because God!

Having tracked the polling, day by day, for most of the last six months, there seemed to be two inflection points of most significance.

The first came following Biden's disastrous debate, and with Harris entering the race.  That was, understandably, a game changer, as the whole game changed.  For a while afterwards, the metapolling had stabilized, with Harris consistently up around the three point margin necessary for a potential Democratic victory, both in the popular vote and in the electoral college.

But that stability shifted in the month prior to the election, and the trendlines shifted.  By the time we reached election day, metapolling showed Harris significantly underperforming Clinton's 2016 final polls, which...by my own gut metrics...meant a more substantial loss.

As best I can tell, one particular event rested at the inflection point where things began to notably shift: the entry of Elon Musk into the race.  

Note, I'm not saying: Elon Musk's endorsement.  He didn't just endorse someone in the race.  That endorsement dropped back in July, before the Republican convention.  During the last month of the campaign, Musk entered the race.

Musk pushed Trump hard, inserting himself into the campaign in a way that was unprecedented in my memory.

It's not just that Musk's X began to aggressively pitch pro-Trump content, and used algorithms to tamp down other voices.  It wasn't just Musk pouring millions into the campaign.  It's the weight and presence of Musk's entire sprawling business empire.  Progs and leftys like to snark at his business achievements, and I'd be the first to note that there's a major hype factor in everything he does, but...still.  

Musk isn't just a celebrity.  He is, very visibly, the richest man in the world, and wealth in our culture is a both a mark of success and a social proxy for power.  Musk says, as the richest man in the world: I'm with Trump.

And then, with that still in the public consciousness, in front of all our eyeballs comes SpaceX catching a booster in midair.  Kvetch and quibble all you want, but it was an undeniably impressive feat of engineering.  Into the subconscious of Americans, goggling in awe at the rocket's red glare, came the thought: he's with Trump.    

Then there's a robotics event, filled with droids and self-driving cars and robotfuturebuses.  As the hype machine interfaced with the inevitable hot-take resistance, into the subconscious of all Americans came the thought: he's with Trump.

Then you're driving, and you see a Tesla, and another Tesla, and another Tesla.  In my neighborhood, the most common car to arrive with a temporary tag lately: the Tesla Model Y.  There's one two houses down.  There's one four houses up.  Another one across the street from that.  That's not even counting the derpy but utterly distinctive Cybertruck, which catches the eye and reminds you, when you look at its absurd proportions:  he's with Trump.

Then, with his rockets and his robots and chatter about Musk's wealth all around us, every Harris ad pitched to me included a tuxedoed Elon laughing at a swanky party.  The goal was to make swing voters grumble at Trump, at his pandering to the billionaire class.  What I'd think, every time I saw one of those ads, was that Democrats were reminding the average American that the most public avatar of material success, wealth, and power?  he was with Trump.

I don't share our cultural assumptions about the merit of wealth, given how my Teacher challenged and rejected that very principle among his own people.  But I'm not everyone, and while I know that all that glitters is not gold, it's a very human mistake to make.

We do love our Mammon.

On Living in an Oligarchy

Two days after Donald J. Trump won the 2024 election, I was reminded of the limitations of social media.

Those reminders have been present throughout this election season.  In 2016 and in 2020, posts containing my reflections on the state of the election were places of extended conversation.  They were shared, and shared often.  

This year?  Crickets.  Part of me got to thinking, you know, perhaps it's just that I'm boring.  And, honestly, it also felt a little repetitious.  A little dull.  Why just say things over and over and over?  I stuck to pictures of my garden, and limited my posting to my blog and the twelve people who read it.

But it wasn't just that.  Meta has changed.  Facebook was once all about friends, about leveraging the human pleasure of interacting with familiar faces.  That was their whole business model.  I'd scroll, and it'd be people I knew from every phase of my life, intermingled with the occasional ad.  That was the point.  

Now, it's not about faces.  It's primarily content pages and advertising.  The shift has been slow, but it's a completely different landscape today.

In the Meta media ecosystem...Instagram, FaceBook, and Threads...we also know that political posts have this season been suppressed by redesigned algorithms.  For major influencers, with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, that following's baked in, but for normies like myself with just a few hundred souls tagging along, the potential for a post to go viral has been muted.  This is by design.

Among my friends and colleagues who skew progressive, there were increasing reports of community standard violations, for infractions that seemed picayune or absurd.  Posts about the climate crisis.  Posts critical of far right-wing foolishness, entirely legitimate as political discourse.  Posts about nothing political at all.  Posts that would once have been utterly par for the course.  All of it, suddenly taken down.

At the same time, in the weeks before the election, my FaceBook feed was suddenly dominated by posts from a single person pitching Trumpy talking points.  He wasn't someone I know, or am close to, or have ever meaningfully interacted with, just a fraternity brother who'd graduated a few years before I entered undergrad.  He was all Trump, all the time, and if you'd read my feed, you'd have thought he was my best friend in the whole wide world.  He was delighting in being a troll, in being provocative.

It was odd.

Then, yesterday, I was hit with my first Facebook community standard violation.  

Six months ago, I'd created a FaceBook page for a work of satire I self pubbed back in 2022.  TRUMP ANTICHRIST, it's called, because what else are you going to say about a politician who has most of the American church in his thrall, while at the same time being precisely and in every way the opposite of Jesus?  To make it clear that it was satire, the book is written in the voice of Satan himself, and it calls out both the decadence and falsehood of Trumpism and...at the same time...challenges Christians who allow hatred for Trump and his followers to consume their souls.  Love your enemies, as a command, isn't contingent on your enemies being the ones that are easy to love, eh?

I'd posted on that page for most of last year, dropping relevant writings from theologians and commentators.  And then yesterday, two days after the election, the page was suddenly suspended.  Why?  It was in violation of newly revised community standards, for "impersonating another person."  

So...you write a book that is clearly satire, and clearly mark your media as a page promoting a book written IN THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL HIMSELF...and you're "impersonating another person?"  What, people might think I'm actually Satan?  I mean, ok, fine, some might, but...what and the what?

I asked that the decision be reviewed, a process that required checking one of four prewritten replies, each of which was written to subtly suggest I might be in the wrong.  The response came seconds later.  Denied, all content removed, all by an "admin," which clearly it wasn't.  This was a machine at work.  The corporate algorithms had spoken.

Here, were I ignorant, I suppose I'd whinge about First Amendment rights.  Mah Rights!  Mah Rights!  

But I wasn't speaking in America.  I was on Facebook, and Facebook isn't America.  

Meta pages or groups or profiles reside in a corporate media ecosystem.  They're not our property, nor are they the public sphere.  We are in a space controlled and managed by a global conglomerate, run by and for profit, one whose interests are engagement and eyeballs for the purposes of selling our data and advertising to us.  That's the whole business model.  Freedom of speech isn't relevant.  If, like X, Meta wants to suppress political or religious discourse that they feel does not benefit them, they can.

Constitutional protections do not apply in oligarchic systems.  I have no right to a Facebook page, or a Facebook profile.  None of us do.  There are no freedoms when our every interaction is owned by corporations.

It's something we need to remember.

The Tail of the Night

The last couple of years, I've had trouble adapting to the time change.  Not Springing Forward, which one would think would be more difficult as we anguish over a lost hour.  But Falling Back, where you get that whole extra hour of sweet morning sleep.  I haven't been falling back well.

I'm not quite sure why this is.  Perhaps a middle age thing.  Or perhaps because I don't rely on an alarm to wake me most days.  I just get up when I get up, which...as the days shorten...tends to be right before the crack of dawn.

These last few mornings, I've been fully awake at 5 AM, which...not too long ago...was 6 AM.  This is well before the sun lights the morning sky.   I'll lie there for a bit, which typically involves morning prayers and reflections on the necessities of the coming day.  Then I'll slip out of bed as quietly as I can, endeavoring not to disturb my sleeping wife.  The dog will stir, eager for pets and breakfast and a morning walk.   

Once I've got the coffee on, that is.  After he's eaten, together we step out under a sky dark and speckled with stars, and into a neighborhood still unroused from sleep.  The birds aren't yet singing.  No cars whisk off to work or school.  All is quieter.  Not just the neighborhood, but the city itself, the omnipresent hum of gigatons of wheels on asphalt barely a tiptoe.  Foxes scamper about, occasionally stopping to glare at the silly human and his dog, so rudely intruding on their pre-dawn hunt.

It doesn't feel quite like morning, but like catching the tail of the night.

I rather like getting up early.

The Dull Grey of Morning

Yesterday for the first time in my adult life, I paid only passing attention to the election.  I'd already voted, weeks before, because early voting is a thing that we can just do now.  In part, that's because my wife works as an election officer, and votes early herself.

But there was no obsessive checking of final polling, or reading final prognostications, or doomscrolling.  

Instead, I read scripture in preparation for my sermon.  I did yard work.  I had a helpful call with a Presbytery staffer.  I took Mom shopping, and we went to lunch.

When evening came, again for the first time in my adult life, I didn't track the proceedings.  There was no evening spent with laptop open to granular county-level results, as talking heads chattered on the big screen. Instead, I read a novel.   

There didn't seem a point. It seemed clear, as the last few weeks had progressed, how the election was going.  One never knows, of course, but the metapolling trendlines seemed to be going a very certain way. 

I didn't want to endure that, to track along frantically scrabbling for handholds as the paths narrowed to nothing.  It was possible that I was wrong, but...improbable.  So at a little after 10 PM, having finished the book, I went to bed.  Rache was so worn with the stress and work of her day that she soon joined me.

When I woke, I took my time, and did what I always do.  There was no rush to a screen.  What had happened had happened.  

So I prayed.  Got out of bed.  Fed the dog.  Started the coffee.  Walked the dog.  These things must happen.  As our pup trotted down our driveway, the paper wasn't there yet, but that was no surprise.  It's often late when there are late-breaking headlines.

Above me, the sky was grey and featureless, a dull haze obscuring the deep blue of morning.  Perhaps just mist.  

Or perhaps the windblown smoke from wildfires now burning in Pennsylvania.

Merciless Nature

This last week, I began the process of finally putting my garden to bed for the winter.  As we enter November, the cold days have begun to slip in, here and there, although peculiar warmth has been sticking around more of late.  Still and all, the trend line has been cooler, and my summer garden is now gone.  

I'd tried okra this year for the first time, and pulled the last of the plants from the soil a few days ago.  That included seedsaving from the dried-out pods, which is one of the easiest and most satisfying things imaginable.  The pods even kinda sorta open up for you, each chamber splitting neatly, hinting at the seedstock within.  It just requires a little twist of a blade, and...pop!  Out tumble a dozen or so dun brown spheres, looking for all the world like misshapen ball-bearings.  Then you move on to the next chamber, and the next, until from a single pod you've received fifty or sixty potential future plants.  I dedicated three beds to my okra experiment this season, two four-by-eight and one four by four, and just one pod gives enough seed to do that three times over.  The ten pods I used for my seedstock gave me enough seed to turn the entirety of my property into an okra patch.  I'd have to cut down all of our trees, and level our house, so that's not going to happen.  Still, it's such an impossible potential abundance.

Life is like that, because life has to be like that.  If it wasn't, if it didn't produce wildly and wantonly, it would die, because nature is utterly without mercy.  Ten of my twenty okra plants never produced a single seed, as they were devoured by deer, every leaf consumed, the stalks left standing stark and denuded in the soil after two straight weeks of rain flushed my repellent spray from the leaves. Though okra is heat and drought tolerant, we also had another record setting hot-spell this summer, which stalled growth, and several more of my plants just never went to seed at all.

Elsewhere in my garden, other plants also struggled.  My bush beans, usually prolific, were stunted by the heat.  My butternut squash, devoured by chipmunks as soon as the first sprouts rose from the soil.  The squash, I replanted, and replanted, and replanted, but chipmunk hunger drives them around even the most carefully constructed barriers and netting.  I only saw a yield of three modest squash, about one-fifth of what had been normal.  My sunflowers, which have graced a corner of my garden for years?  All but a single seed-head were devoured by squirrels. Still, I have seed for next year, and am plotting and planning necessary adaptations.

The only way living things survive is to spam themselves into the world, producing and adapting and producing and adapting until finally something sticks.  

Before the modern era, we humans were like that, too.  

I was reminded of that recently, as I prepared a sermon on that little passage about Jesus blessing the children.  It's a sweet little passage...right up until you think about the why of it.  

Kids used to be, well, they weren't the gravitic center of adult life the way they are now.  They just didn't last long enough.  We had babies, and they died, and had babies, and they died.  You could be healthy, and well fed, the offspring of wealth and privilege, but still, children died.  Just ask Mary Todd Lincoln about that one, eh?  Or ask my ancestors, literate souls, who recorded the losses of their beloved children in their diaries with a stoic acquiescence.  Most human beings who came into the world didn't make it to ten years of age.  We tried everything we could, until we found modern medicine and penicillin and pasteurization.  

Absent functioning antibiotics, unspoiled food, and effective vaccines, life was consistently, relentlessly short. 

For the last few Sundays now, I've also been leading a group through a thought-provoking book about forgiveness, and about the central place of mercy and grace in Christian faith.  As we discussed the notable absence of forgiveness in Western pagan culture, the thought came to me: well, I mean, forgiveness isn't particularly natural, either.  Nature doesn't let us make errors.  Choose wrongly, and it "corrects" our mistakes by removing us from existence. 

We've forgotten this, clearly, as the voices of our ancestors are drowned out by the cacophany of our short-attention-span consumerism and the synthetic realities of social media influencer culture.  Nature still exists, and we've forgotten that nature, once provoked, gives no quarter.  It is utterly unforgiving, ruthlessly exterminating the weak, the unproductive, the foolish, and the forgetful.

Death is, after all, a natural remedy.

What We Have to Offer

 It was a familiar moment.

With our worship service finished, I'd stepped out of the doors of my sanctuary, where I greet each of the congregants as they depart.  It's a pleasant enough thing, one of those rituals of church life.

As I stepped over the threshold, I saw a man standing at the edge of our parking lot.  White, middle-aged, and a tiny bit worn, he'd clearly been waiting for the service to conclude.  The moment he saw me step from the church, he bustled forward eagerly, making a beeline for the dude in liturgical garb. 

He introduced himself, earnest, eager, and intimate, shaking my hand.  "Can you help me out today, pastor?" He leaned in close to ask if we could talk in private.  I agreed, and when the line of parishioners had concluded, I stepped aside to hear him out.  In this case, it was that he had cancer, that he'd lost his job, that he was three months behind on rent, but needed only one month right now so that he could stave off eviction.   

As it so happens, my little church (along with the other churches in our town) works with a local nonprofit that can handle emergency financial requests.  Housing assistance, utility assistance, emergency food, all the needs a person in crisis might have.  They pay the utility or landlord directly, and provide connection to other service providers for longer term support, including emergency medical and dental helps.

I said, "Sure! We work with this organization to help folks out, one that might be just what you need."  I started to describe it, and how it works.

I was halfway through my third sentence when all the expression left his face.  I mean, it was like flipping a switch.  The smile and the eager light in his eyes just went Click.  He grunted out something that I didn't quite catch, turned on his heel, and walked away briskly without another word.  Beelined back to the parking lot, back to his car, and drove away.

That was that.

I was offering to help him get exactly what he said he needed, but...well.  That wasn't what he wanted.

It got me to wondering, as I reflected on his abrupt departure, what it is that we Jesus folk have to offer those who arrive on our doorsteps seeking something.

There's no question that my visitor had real and material need.  Perhaps not the need he was articulating, but this was a soul who unquestionably wasn't doing well in life.  But was food...or housing...all he needed?  Is that the heart of his struggle, or does that go deeper, to something more essential in his nature?

Does he have a sense of purpose in his life?  A community in which he feels belonging?  A vision of how valuable he is as a person, leavened with the truth of what a mess we all are, and a path to move from one to the other?

That's kind of what we do, the heart of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

But again, that's probably not what he was looking for.