Why Do We Live Here?

 It was a question I posed in my last entry. I had asked it to myself as we arrived back in the heat of the Valley after descending from the Rim, completing our return from Colorado.

The way I asked the question to myself suggestion the answer would be a void one. It could be answered only by fate and inertia. This is where we wound up.

But I was glad to be back in Arizona, even in its barrenness that is so different than the landscapes that nourish my soul. It is not always about having one's soul nourished by the land. There is more to life than that.

The reason I was glad to be back was that Arizona has felt, over the last year and half, and continues to feel, like it is one of the few free places left in the world. Others states, such as Florida, have gained more notoriety for bucking the repressive mandates of the shutdown, but Arizona has felt as close to normal as anywhere probably has felt in the United States, and by extension probably through the western world. 

This morning we went to breakfast with Ginger's folks in downtown Scottsdale at our usual egg place. I didn't even think to bring a mask. Nor when we went to Costco did it occur to me that I would need one. Live feels normal, except for the folks who still wear masks. I will not wear one. Among other things, the scientific evidence I have seen suggests that they are dangerous to one's health. It is foolish to wear one, I think. 

I am thankful that I have that choice. I am thankful that things feel normal for now. In neighboring New Mexico the female governor has imposed the severest of restrictions for the next few months. I mention that she is female because I think there is something in the lack of masculinity in our culture that leading to this overwhelming of fear, stemming from the nature feminine desire to seek protection. 

I thought of us while participating in a Zoom call this past week, for the company for which I just began remote work. The female head of marketing was interviewing a new board member, who is a woman in her sixties. They were swapping female empowerment stories as three hundred employees watched, including me. 

At one point the marketing head asked the board member for her heroes. The board member cited the female president of New Zealand, specifically because she recently shut down her entire country because of a single death supposedly ascribed to the disease that we are supposed to fear. They couldn't say enough good things about her.

I later joked that it was all I could do not to put a "barfing emoji" into the Zoom chat scroll. But it was only my second day. I don't mind getting fired over something like that, but I figured I'd wait at least a week.

The company is headquartered in Ohio. I will probably never meet any co-workers in person. It would not be the first job for which that was true. I have been joking that I am waiting for them impose a vaccine mandate for all workers, even remote ones. I'd love to be fired over that.

So yes I'm glad to be in Arizona. Not the male governor here would be any better, if we let him. He'd gladly sell us all out in a moment, to get a pat on the back from the Establishment and from the media. But he knows we'd ride him out of town on a rail, tarred and feathered, if he tried to do that. We already know he helped in the election steal.  No way will we wear a mask for him.

Of course the bigger issue is how we somehow allowed governors to turn into dictators, to be able to "mandate" such things at all. Somehow the idea that we are a free people is receding into the rear view mirror. But such type of freedom is a masculine virtue, that cannot exist with strong masculinity in our culture, which is protective. Most of our male politicians are corrupt these days, so no one feels protected, even when they admire the raw strength of the "strong man."

Meanwhile people come into this state and find it refreshing. One of Ginger's new patients is a young woman who just moved here from California, and remarked how much more relaxed it is here in Arizona. Ginger was surprised because the young woman is a vegan who strikes her as a natural leftie.

"Tell her to make sure vote for Democrats here so it can turn into the nightmare place she left," I told Ginger.

By the way, Ginger has a good track record of convincing vegans to give up the horrible lifestyle choice they have made. Even when we lived in Portland, she was able to deprogram a few of them.

The Poignant Edge of the Rim

 Going south from Flagstaff on the Interstate, one has about thirty miles where one is still up on the Mogollon Rim, pronounced roughly (MOE-gee-yon) by locals, with a strange elongation of the first syllable, as if it is almost MOE-OE-gee-yon). It is ok to simply call it the Rim. 

Along the road one sees pine trees broken only by small roads into tiny communities. These communities are being developed quickly. Land is precious here. So much is off limits because it is national forest. Flagstaff is filling up quickly. 

I know exactly the milepost on the Interstate where the Rim reaches its edge. At milepost 313 ones comes around a bend and sees a vista ahead, as if one is on the edge of a cliff. The pines suddenly slacken and give way to drier trees. It will be the last pines one sees along the Interstate going south.

One quickly descends over the next twenty miles several thousand feet, coming down and down, past truck emergency ramps and warning signs to check ones breaks. It is not coming down off the mountain passes in Colorado. It is most gentle, less mountainlike. But is longer. It keeps going on and on. At the bottom one reaches the Verde River. By then one is unmistakably in the desert. The air temperature is at least twenty degrees warmer. One can feel it in the car in summer. One feels the heat.

It only gets hotter from there south. We have not even descended all the way, into the Valley of the Sun. We have not reached the low desert where the saguaros grow, and wild burros stray onto the highway. We have not reached the land of triple digit temperatures all summer long.

Reaching home, we can only sigh, "Why do we live here?"

The Last Breath of Mountain Air

 After a couple hours crossing the Navajo Reservation, one gets to the main U.S. Highway that links Flagstaff up to Page and the Grand Canyon. Turning south onto the highway, one is still on the reservation, but it is not the same. One no longer feels isolated from civilization. One feels connected to it, part of the the civilized highway system that laces the country. The feeling of being in a special place is no longer there.

Yet even as we drive south, I look forward to one great moment of sensory joy before we reach Flagstaff. Coming up past the San Francisco peaks to the west, one ascends again briefly into pine forests that descend from the flank of these, the highest mountains in the state. At one point, one reaches a turnooff to a national forest service road which ascends up towards the peaks. It is here the the road reaches its highest point along the stretch north of Flagstaff. On previous trips, when traveling alone, I have pulled aside onto the national forest service road, going a couple hundred hards into the pines to pull off and walk around to breathe the sweet cool air there. From there it is all downhill, literally, as one descends swiftly into Flagstaff where one reaches civilization in all its glory, that comes with the Interstate highway system.

This year I didn't make Ginger pull over onto the national forest service road. I simply rolled down the window and put my hand out to feel the air at the summit of the road. One takes what one can get.

The Purification of the Navajo Reservation

 The consolation of leaving the high country of the Rockies and crossing the Four Corners is that ahead of us lies the long drive across the Navajo Reservation. There are few ore enjoyable stretches of highway in the country for reviving ones soul.

There is little to see along the way except for a very arid wasteland and some sporadic interesting rock formations. It is the lack of things to see that feels purifying. 

After five years of doing this, several times a year, I know the names of the towns along the way. Kayenta, which is about halfway along the route, feels like a metropolis with its fast food restaurants. Last year during the shutdown it was impossible to find a restroom open to the public even there. We saw families with the children wandering into the dry scrub along the way. This year it was slightly more opened, but still very restricted. Masks were mandatory, even as there are optional in the rest of the state. As I said, my intuition is that things will never return to normal here. People wanted an excuse for change, nowhere more than here.

After Kayenta lies another hour of glorious barren landscapes, punctuated by isolated ranches and little hamlets away from the road.

Driving this highway, one inevitably wishes to arrive at the end, as one does all voyages. One counts down the miles on the signs. But at the same time I wish it would keep going. On the reservation, everything seems far away. Lately I like things being far away.

Four Corners Conspiracy Theory

 Each year as come down off the high passes of Colorado and approach the Four Corners, I grow saddened that I am leaving behind the alpine meadows, pine forests, and the cool air that I love much, and reminds me so much of home. 

Even the Four Corners themselves seem to verify the transition from one state to another in an uncanny way. As one approaches the famous point, one descends rapidly into the valley of the San Juan River, which by a weird coincidence seems to flow almost exactly through the Four Corners, missing it only by a few hundred yards.

One comes up the other side and one finds oneself in New Mexico for a few miles, and along this small stretch of the road is the entrance to the Four Corners, the monument for sits on a small plateau above the river.

Last year the gate to the monument (which is just a big plaza with a four-cornered emblem on the ground, flanked by a stalls selling Navajo fry bread and beads) was locked with a tribal police officer stationed in front, making sure no one tried to access the point. It seemed both typical of the reservation---where everything was shut down in the most extreme way, all the while in the most ridiculous way, as the Four Corners are very much out in the open air. Very few things about this whole shutdown have been rational. The Navajo went into extreme isolation. That's their right. They have been slow to reopen. i think in some ways they never will. They will use this episode as a permanent change. The signs along the road urging people to avoid large gatherings will linger for many years, I think . If you know anything about the reservations, and the way of life that people lead there, you will know what I mean. 

Ginger and I have a conspiracy theory about the Four Corners, one that I invented. I noticed that it seemed too perfect that the Four Corners happened to land on this convenient plateau above the river. Too perfect, I think. I have this theory that the actual location is actually on the flank of a steep cliff nearby, or in the river bottom by the San Juan. There is no way the geographical location could have determined when the borders were determined by law. They had to be surveyed later. What if the surveyors conveniently decided that the Four Corners would be on the plateau, instead of in a less convenient location that woujld less amenable to commemoration? What if?

Spy Drama at the Four Corners

 During the evening we spent in the Retro Inn in Cortez, I decided to launch into my next Agatha Christie novel. As I mentioned, I had anticipated that I would read only the Hercule Poirot books for now, and even then only a sampling of them. But as usual my completionist tendencies were taking over. I had already decided to read the early Poirot short stories. Now I decided that I would also read the Christie novels featuring her other famous detectives.

I decided to loop back and read her second overall novel, The Secret Adversary, where she introduces her fictional detective couple, Tommy and Tuppence, the spunky young folks who bill themselves as the Young Adventurers. 

After a little research determining the correct Kindle volume, I purchased a copy for a small amount, although more than a tuppence. My computer devices already knew the wifi password from the Retro Inn from the last four times we had stayed there. There is something comforting in the fact that one's favorite motel has the same wifi password as before, and that it is stored in one's device.

The Secret Adversary was a fun read. I read a goof portion of it in the motel room that night, and sipped it while riding shotgun the next day and Ginger drove us across the Navajo Reservation, as I could get no other reception there, and the book was already downloaded on my phone.

Unlike the Poirot stories, the Tommy and Tuppence stories are, as I learned, not so much murder whodunnits, but more in the lines of amateur spy adventurers. The story was fun, although I easily knew who the secret villain was. It was rather obvious, but it was still fun to discover the solution. This is stark contrast to the murder mysteries, where Christie famously loved to make it difficult to determine the killer, to the point of making the murderer "the least likely person." In this case, the villain was the most likely person, and really only one of two possible choices.

One thing that came through was the Christie theme of her being a romance writer in disguise. In this case, the two young folks, who were childhood friends, team up at the beginning of the story, and by the end they are married. So it is another case where Christie uses a tense crime story to bring two lovers together into a conjugal relationship. In Christie's world, for love to flourish, the world has to be surmounted.

Cortez: The Resistance, One Year Later

 It was still light when we got into the outskirts of Cortez, our destination for the evening, and easily found our motel, the Retro Inn, where we have stayed multiple times. It is a nicely run, well managed and remodeled classic motel on the eastern edge of town amidst other chain hotels. We tried other places but have come back to the reliable Retro Inn. A statue of Elvis sitting on a bench greets one as one drives up to park in the classic covered drive through by the office. 

The rooms all have numbers from the post war decades of the Twentieth Century, and each room has decor that reflects the pop culture of that year. Somehow we always wind up in the mid 1950s. This year we found ourselves in room 1955, which was decorated with posters of James Dean, whose famous movies were released that year, during his short career.

Cortez is the last stop on the edge of Colorado in the four corners. Unlike Durango or Mancos, there is little tie dye here. It is cowboys and, curiously, Indians, as it is the nearest town to the Ute Reservaton that occupies the southwestern most corner of Colorado at the Four Corners. Last year we were shocked, in a refreshing way, to find people disobeying the mask mandate, dining outside at the burger drive-in with faces uncovered. It was beautiful to see it at the time. I called Cortez "the Resistance capital of Colorado." Cortez came me hope that people were still sane. Now the revolt has spread far and wide.

This year things were a lot looser. The Retro Inn seemed almost back to normal. Last year there was no breakfast. This year they had most of it back, and one was not required to drop one's key into a vat of decontamination liquid upon checking out. We could even sit and eat together in the little dining room, where the tables are covered with a collage of images from Route 66.

It's a pleasant town and we always happy to be there. We have gotten a chance to see much of it, as we often go through going both ways to and from Arizona and Colorado.

The next morning, saying good-bye to the Retro Inn, James Dean, and Elvis again, we made our way through town and made our customary yearly stop at the the little airstream trailer that serves coffee by the highway junction at the edge of downtown, which bills itself as the "second best coffee" in the southwest. Like the Colorado Cherry Company, it is a place which feels comfortable as part of yearly journey.

Unfortunately visiting there at the western edge of Cortez, before we head out on to the highway towards the Four Corners, means we are on the edge of Colorado, and we have passed yet another gateway on the return journey home.

You would think that the Four Corners are simply lines on a map, but weirdly the land shifts drastically just beyond Cortez. One leaves the farming region on the high plateau near the San Juan, and the river valleys, and enters a bleak and dusty landscape populated by stray meager horses from the Utes, but almost nothing else. In those last few miles of Colorado, one feels as if one is leaving civilization altogether and entering a great wasteland. There is something purifying about it. Were it not for the fact that it means we are leaving Colorado behind, I would always feel uplifted by it.

Mancos: Where Tie-Dye meets Cowboy at the Front Lines of the Culture War

 Coming down from Wolf Creek Pass we came into the glorious green glacial value of the upper San Juan, with lush fields along the river where cattle graze. After a half hour one comes into Pagosa Springs, known affectionately by locals as "Pagosa." It is home to a famous hot springs. We stayed there a couple years ago.

It's a nice town, and it seems to get more popular with each passing year. The strip of restaurants as one comes into town from the east seemed far busier than we had remembered from our previous stay a couple years back. Traffic was correspondingly more backed up.

Having no reason to stop, we went straight through town and made our way past the golf courses and resorts on the west side of town, and an hour later we were approaching Durango. We made a detour there to check out a new subdivision on the outskirts of town. We have put Durango on our list of possible relocations for us next year. Unfortunately the real estate market, both for buying and renting, is extremely tight. Neither of us particularly liked the subdivision, including the apartment complex there, which is one of the only decent places with availability. It reminded me too much of what I dislike about our neighborhood here in Scottsdale. I wouldn't like living there.

Our next destination was much more inviting. For dinner, Ginger had wanted to stop in the little town of Mancos, which is between Durango and Cortez, which was our destination for the night. Mancos is located as one finally comes out of the mountains and the national forest, into an arid agricultural valley near Mesa Verde. 

I had passed it many times, thinking it consisted only of the businesses along the highway, but it turns out there is an actual little town if one detours off the highway. Ginger navigated the streets to the cidery she had located on line, where one can buy locally made cider as dine from the food trucks.

It was a very lively scene. It felt like the whole town was there, drinking and eating on the wonderful balcony along the river.  The town seemed to be in the middle balance between an old ranching and farming town, and also a new-wave "tie-dye town." 

It's funny that in the past, I would have felt more at home with the "tie-dye" people than the old ranchers, but now it is the reverse. Part of is that while we went inside to order our cider (which lets one peek at the cider facilities in their warehouse), we stood behind a woman with turquoise hair whose face was bound up in a mask while she gave her order.  I have nothing against someone who wants to wear a mask, but in this setting, with no one else wearing one, and the fact that we were barely indoors at all (since the walls of the building were opened up to the outside), it felt more like a political statement. I can only assume that she is the kind of person who not only wants to wear to wear a mask, but she wants me to wear one. Moreover she probably wants me to be forced to wear one, if she could arrange it.

It's this last thing---that we should all be forced to do it---that has really spoiled me to the tie dye people. So much political drama playing out, even in the little hamlet of Mancos, as we try to order our cider and eat our slices of pizza in the beautiful August evening of Southwestern Colorado. 

I hate this kind of drama. I hate the estrangement with people I feel from this. I hate that they won't leave me alone but want me to obey their rules. How did tie dye come to be about forcing people to follow thei rules?

Thankfully the cider was magnificent. We drank ours while sitting next to an elderly couple that looked like they had arrived in a mud spattered pick up truck. Next to them was a vending machine that sold locally made art.

I could live in Mancos, perhaps. So long as the balance between the cowboys and the tie-dyes stays where it is .

Colorado Between the Passes

After two glorious, relaxing nights at the Surf Hotel in Buena Vista, we reluctantly checked out of room and took to the road again, going south in the sunny August sun of the Colorado mountains on US 24. We stopped for lunch in Salida, which Ginger had wanted to see as well. She found out it drier and not as much to her liking a Buena Vista. But the downtown was lively. At my suggestion we ducked into a used book store where we both spent over twenty bucks. They didn't have any Christie novels, but I found some useful historical books for another project of mine. Ginger bought biographies of Sandra Day O'Connor and the actress Melissa Gilbert, which she began reading that evening.

From there we climbed up over Poncha Pass and came down into the north end of the massive San Luis Valley, which opens wide like the pastures of heaven, with the Sangre de Cristo Range to the east. There are few more peaceful places in the world than the San Luis Valley. 

As usual we skirted the west side of the valley, coming into Del Rio, where one crosses the Rio Grande as it comes out of the mountains. Then we turned to follow the river into the narrowing valley to the west until we come to South Fork, where we made the obligatory stop for gas before climbing the road over Wolf Creek Pass.

It is always poignant to go over Wolf Creek Pass, as the last high mountain pass that we surmount on our way home. Colorado to me is all about the passes. So long as one is "between passes" is means that one must climb to above 10,000 feet to get home. Being in the high country is all about that kind of isolation from the world.  Colorado is perhaps the only place in the country where one can be embedded in the mountains that way. Even in a place like Oregon, one goes to up to high pass and then comes down the other side. There is no "between the passes" where one is in the midst of multiple ranges.

At the top of Wolf Creek Pass, I like to open the window and breathe the air at that summit because I know it will a year perhaps before I am at the altitude again. It is all down hill from there, literally. It is a poignant moment, as I said. 

Christie Does Conan Doyle

During the respite above the rushing waters of the Arkansas River in our hotel room at the Surf Hotel in Buena Vista, I had a chance to read Poirot Investigates, which is an early collection of short stories featuring Hercule Poirot that Christie wrote after the first two Poirot novels. I had been planning on skipping it, but a sense of completionism took hold of me about my project, so I purchased it on Kindle for ninety-nine cents and read it on iPhone, mostly while sitting on the balcony of the hotel. It felt so wonderfully continental.

There were fourteen stories in the volume. Christie did not write many such short stories, and one can see why. The novel is her strong suit as far as genres. The short stories seemed more like sketches, case studies for a larger projects. They seemed an attempt by Christie to duplicate as closely as possible the short story format of Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes stories, where he excels. In all of the Christie short stories, the narrator is Captain Hastings and the format is uncannily like Conan Doyle. In fact there is almost a hint of ripping off Conan Doyle in some of the plot elements. One of the stories is remarkably close to A Scandal in Bohemia. Nevertheless the stories were enjoyable to read and I'm glad I took the time to make them part of my project.

Truly a Buena Vista

This year, on the way back from Estes Park to Arizona we stopped for two nights in the town of Buena Vista, which is in the Colorado mountains in the upper Arkansas River basin, downstream from Leadville. 

Ginger booked two nights at the Surf Hotel, which is right along the river, smack in the middle of a brilliant New Urbanist mixed-used project called South Main Street that was built within the last five years, along a previously empty tract of land along the river. We had discovered it last year on the way back, along the same route. Ginger had wanted to see Buena Vista for a few moments. I had always thought of it as a sleepy little town, but it seemed to have grown up, especially with the boom in summer time recreation on the river. Fortunately the lack of a nearby ski resort keeps it from being over developed from the winter traffic. 

We had been stunned by South Main Street, which is on the far end of town from the highway. We found it back accident. We noticed the brilliant hotel that is along the river and Ginger thankfully got us two nights there. 

It was a wonderful splurge. Our room was on the second floor with a patio access out to the balcony where the river roared below. We watched people surf on the paddle boards, trying to stay upright. In the mountains we sauntered across the wonderful little grassy square, where concerts are held, to get coffee in the coffee shop on the other side. In the evenings we dined in the hotel restaurant, just below our room.

We could have stayed there at the hotel for weeks. It was so peaceful. I has catapulted Buena Vista (Spanish for "Good view") into being perhaps my second favorite town in Colorado, after Estes Park.

The Best Tasting Thing in the World

 We embarked on our journey home to Arizona exactly a week ago, and as always, we made our first stop at the Colorado Cherry Company, which is in the mountains along the highway between Estes Park and Boulder.  Ginger could tell you how many times we have stopped there.

We always get the chicken pot pie, which comes in a dish with red checked paper. We eat in the dining room and look out the big windows to the trees and the highway nearby. Then we go into the neighboring room where we pick out a selection of bottles of cherry juice which we will carry back home with us, both for ourselves and for people we know. 

It is all part of the wonderful traditions that one must make, if one is to go to Estes Park, and return there. These are the things that make life wonderful, and make one feel connected to the joyous things of the past.

A few days after we got back home, Ginger attended a bridal shower for the girl who works for her, helping her with her medical practice. As part of her gifts, she brought a bottle of the cherry juice we brought home with us. 

She said it very much puzzled the other women at the shower. What is it for? Cooking? No, you just drink it. Is it alcoholic? No. But why?

Because it's awesome, that's why. In fact cherry juice, at least the kind we purchase on the road from Estes Park to Boulder on our way home, is the best tasting thing in the world.

Estes Park of Memory

 We checked out of the YMCA camp after ten days---our longest visit there. I had scheduled such a long visit in March partly because I did not know when my sisters would be there, and we were not on sufficient speaking terms to arrange our normal arrangements which we used to make together. As it had happened I had guessed correctly for the first seven days, which was the first full week of August. I managed to have a brief visit with my middle sister her twin daughters, who are now in high school. I don't know when I'll see them again. It may be many years from now.

That first week of August, as we learned, is the last big week at the camp. After the second Sunday (the 8th), we still had three more days at our cabin, but the camp was almost deserted. So many of the kids had to return to school. It felt like it had the previous summer during the shutdown. In a way, it was much more pleasant, but I actually liked the activity of the people there. Ginger suggested that next summer we book for the second week of August. I agreed, but I said I might want to have a day or two to overlap the busy time. I feel cheered by the people and the families enjoying ourselves. Besides it might give one day or two possibility to see my nieces, whom I love. I doubt I will have much to say to my sisters by then. It is a sad time that way.  But life goes on. 

The last time we were all there together as a family was 2015. I remember on the last day there, seeing my father standing in the main lodge, by the window, looking up at the menu at the little cafe that is along the side of the big hall. I felt the aching feeling of the moment. He didn't notice me. I just felt the love for him. It is burned into my mind because it perhaps the last vibrant memory of my father that I have before he went into his final decline, starting only about a month later, and by the time I saw him again, flying from Portland to Colorado, he was very sick and within a few months he was gone.

Now it is just me by myself. I probably will not see my sisters there anymore. I will not strain things by attempting to see them. I will let them do their own thing. Perhaps I will never see them again either. It is not as if I have much chance to be in that area, without an explicit invitation to see them, which will not happen any time soon. 

But we will come back, at least for one for year to the camp, because my membership runs for another year, and also because I love it so much there.

There is something about Estes Park, I told Ginger, that invokes a connection to the past in one's life, of the times one has been there, and the shared memories. It is a special place that way. That is especially true of the YMCA Camp.

The Ashes of Estes Park

 During our visit to Randy and Heather at their cabin in Glen Haven, when Randy was leading us into the mountainside for a walk before dinner to increase our appetites, I mentioned the fires that devastated the area the previous October.

"They came really close," he said. "We can see the burned area if we go to the top of this ridge," he said, mentioning further up the mountainside.

It had been a harrowing time, especially for them. They had lost their cabin in a water heater explosion the year before, but this time the danger was the possible destruction of their entire community. Estes Park had been evacuated. It seemed apocalyptic. Somehow the fires were stopped just north of the Glen Haven valley, which is on the north side of the Big Thompson Canyon. Estes Park was spared, as was the YMCA camp.

The idea that something so beautiful and beloved as Estes Park, and the camp itself, could be destroyed like that was only one of a series of events in the last few years that had caused me to feel as if we are living in some kind of end times. The burning of Notre Dame in Paris in April 2019 was certainly among those events. The fires in Larimer County were another. I can barely wrap my mind around how much was burned, in the high country where I have sometimes explored on the back roads, and in the upper reaches of the Poudre Canyon. This last area was to me one of those places that I have long kept in my mind, as a place of refreshing refuge where I could always return, to feel the purification from the world in a way that I have felt in the past.  For now it seems too painful to go there. Someday I'll drive up the Poudre Canyon again perhaps and it will feel the way it used to feel, even though certain recognizable structures, beloved little places on the map, have been wiped out.

But just as Notre Dame refused to collapse, and the rose windows ere intact, so the YMCA Camp was spared. The important things remain. I feel lucky that they are still there.

I can't help feel the extension of this to my family. The visit to the YMCA Camp this year left me further way from my sisters than even before, worse than last year. I don't think there is any chance of having a decent conversation with them in the near future, maybe for years to come.

My middle sister and I tried to have a talk, sitting beside the columbarium at the camp where our parents' ashes are interred. It did not go well. We could not even agree upon the things upon which we disagree.  We could not agree that there are two sides, hers and mine. We are that far apart.

So much about the normal world of the past seems gone, and is not coming back.

In a way it takes a psychological burden off myself to know that it is not just me. Everyone is going through this.

Just a Guy With a Clipboard

 Hard to imagine, but just six days ago we were in my hometown of Fort Collins, standing outside the administration building of the local school district, both of us with clipboards in our hands while circulating among the crowd of people that were arriving in the large parking lot. 

"I remember being here many years ago, almost forty years ago," I told Ginger. "I'm pretty sure this was the place. We came here, a bunch of us, to speak out against a plan to put undercover cops in the high school."

I added that I think they didn't go through with the plan. I was obnoxiously outspoken back then, and used my theatrical skills to punch up the moment.

Now many years later, an old man with grey hair, I had a different agenda. The last thing I wanted to do was call attention to myself. I simply wanted to gather as many signatures as possible on the piece of paper on the clipboard, as a favor to my friend Heather, who was one of the people who had signed up to speak at the meeting. Her two sons attended schools in the district.

I had agreed to help her when we were at their cabin up in Glen Haven a few days earlier, having dinner at their invitation, as we had last year. We had stopped at the same liquor store to get a bottle of rosé, as we had done a year ago. Randy had led us up into the mountainside for a walk before dinner. He and I splintered off while the women talked and headed back to the cabin. It was a good chance to catch up on old friends.

The previous year, their new house in Fort Collins--designed of course by Randy himself--was still under its remodeling. They had wanted us to come down into town to see it, and have dinner out at a restaurant. Heather had jumped in to ask us if we wanted to help gather signatures at the school board meeting. We said yes. She said show up at 5:25 and gave us directions. Heather is very to-the-point. She doesn't beat around the bush. She has been doing vaccination-rights advocacy for many years. Now her strength and experience is coming to the forefront at the moment when we are in the midst of the drama.

The protest at the school board was specifically over the issue of whether students would be forced to wear masks during the upcoming school year. Hundreds of people showed up, many with homemade signs. 

The signature petition was specifically for parents of children in the district, to ask if they wanted to be part of a demand letter to the school board that had already been drafted by an attorney. They would simply be counted as one of the people behind it.

At first when Heather handed us the clipboards, I was sure I would disappoint her by coming back empty. The last thing I wanted to do was accost strangers in a parking lot with a pitch to sign something, even something as worthy as that. But part of me knew I would get into it once I broke the ice, and that is what happened. Soon I was far into the parking lot, intercepting people before they got to the main bulk of the crowd by the building. I gathered several dozen signatures in all. I was proud to be able to hand in my clipboard.

To be certain, it was easy work. About 95% percent of the people there were against the mask mandate. Most of them were eager to sign. 

There were less than a dozen pro-mandate people there. They arrived early and stood away from the main crowd. A news crew showed up, a young woman in a tight dress with an obese cameraman wearing a baseball cap. They set up their camera to interview the tiny group of pro-mandate folks, with the camera aimed away from the huge group behind them. They must have spent twenty minutes interviewing them.  I don't know if they bothered to cover any of the huge crowd behind them. It was a poignant reminder on how the media manufacturers their coverage.

Soon the school board members arrived and were greeted with jeers as they entered the building through the side entrance. While the meeting was in progress, parent-speakers were allowed into the building through the front entrance in groups of ten, escorted by police officers. The meeting was broadcast outside. All the speakers I heard were against the mandate. After they spoke, they came out one-by-one through the front door to a hero's welcome from the crowd.

We didn't get a chance to hear Heather speak, as the meeting ran late and we had made dinner reservations.  Randy showed up in the parking lot and gave us directions to the restaurants. We gave our clipboards to another member of the Heather's group.  

As we stood in the parking lot, I reminded Randy of the protest from forty years ago. He vaguely recalled the issue but not the meeting we attended. I don't think he was one of the speakers that day.

We talked about one of our old friends, Sarah, with whom Randy is still in contact (as he still talks to everyone). She and her husband live just a few blocks from the place we were standing. I had never been invited to their new house, even though I had been their friends for decades and had lived in their basement before they moved to their new place. It had not been my favorite time of life, living in their basement apartment. 

Randy said that their youngest daughter, who is in high school, had spent the entire last year confined to their basement of their new house, because of the shutdown. This coming year is likely to be the same. Poor girl. I know how she feels.

Hercule Poirot, Matchmaker

 My previous entry that began a Structuralist critique of Agatha Christie's Poirot works focussed on the use of underplayed family relationships that turn out to be important in the story. Certainly that was continued in Ackroyd. There were multiple such relationships, including a "hidden marriage" and a hidden mother-son relationship that play such important roles this time.

But the theme that leapt out at me this time, and which struck me as being important in all three of the novels I've read so far is the degree to which Poirot as a detective, in becoming an agent of justice, explicitly seeks to allow two characters who are in love to find happiness by the solution of the murder, which they would otherwise be prevented from achieving. 

In The Mysterious Affair at Styles, he explicitly says as much, and indeed the estranged husband and wife find happiness with each other at the end of the story.  This is also very obvious in The Murder of the Links, in which he not only provides the means of happiness for two in-love suspects, both of whom are accused of the murder by the police at very times, but he also furnishes the means by which his "Watson" character, Arthur Hastings, finds his true love and get married (and leaves Poirot, as we find out in Ackroyd).

In Ackroyd, this theme is certainly continued. We have a couple who are allowed to discover that they love each other, and able to get married. We a secretly married couple who are able to "come out" as married to the world, all because the murder is solved and justice is served.

Thus in Christie, we see part of the arc of justice is itself the establishment of conjugal love between husband and wife, whether in an existing marriage or a new one, by freeing them of the situation of injustice in which they have found themselves, with Poirot acting as the Cupid-like agent of this.

It should be mentioned that this was a theme is not one that is dominant in Conan Doyle, but it is certainly present in The Moonstone. But as everyone knows, The Moonstone, published in 1868, contains, in some form, everything present in every detective novel that has come after it.

Old School Book Borrowing in the Rockies

 I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd not on my Kindle iPad app, as I had the previous two Christie novels, but in a trade paperback version that I had checked out from the camp library. 

I had been coming here for years without being aware that the camp even had a library. It's in a quaint little two story building behind the main lodge. I had gone there a couple days specifically looking for Christie novels, and specifically for the very one that I checked out. 

The library is wonderful. Inside the screen door is a section on Colorado, including a whole shelf that is not surprisingly dedicated to works connected to Isabella Bird. In fact I wound up checking out a book about Bird which I am planning to read in the time remaining here, as years ago I had read her famous memoir about Estes Park on the recommendation of a friend, who gave me a copy.

The best part of the library experience was checking the books. The volunteer woman behind the counter apologized that they didn't have a computerized system. Instead they used the old style card-in-pocket that those of us above a certain age remember as being the method by which books were checked out. The volunteer wrote the date of my checkout from the camp on the white slip that tells that due date, and which remains in the pocket of the book. Of course they have an old style card catalog too.

When the woman made her apology to me for this old procedure, I told her "I hope it never changes."

It was refreshing to read a novel in an actual paper version. I loved sitting on the porch of our cabin with my coffee cup, feeling the paper in my hands. Moreover, I knew I was getting the real deal which included the diagrams that Christie included in the original edition, but which are often missing from Kindle versions.

Postmodern Murder at the YMCA Camp

 This afternoon, Sunday, Ginger wanted to go down to the main lodge at the YMCA camp. While she went inside to buy ice cream at the general store, I found a pair of the comfortable wooden chairs on the outdoor deck and waited for her return. We proceeded to spend the next three hours sitting there in leisure as the scores of other guests went by us, or played in various activities in the sprawling lawn that descends from the lodge.

The view of the mountains was better than yesterday, when the air quality was so bad. Ginger couldn't stand to go outside from the smell of smoke. It is all coming from the fires in northern California. Denver had the worst air quality in the world yesterday.

For much of the time I was absorbed in reading most of the last chapters of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is the third of Agatha Christie's novels, published in 1926, and is largely cited as the one that made Hercule Poirot famous as a fictional detective.

Throughout much of the story I had began to see why it was so highly rated (or so I thought). It is in many ways the perfect classic detective story set in an English mansion with a mysterious butler and a suspects hanging out in a billiard room. There are doctors and colonels, servants and widows. It felt like the inspiration for the board game Clue.

Like I said, I thought I knew why it was so popular. But if you've read the book, you know that it has a huge twist in the solution, one that was no doubt revolutionary in literature at the time. It is no exaggeration that this novel, in which Christie has found her form, is a landmark of Postmodern literature in respect to the use of the narrator, in a way that evokes later  works in that category such as Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov and Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. As a landmark in detective novels, it is right up there with The Moonstone and The Hound of the Baskervilles. 

I could write more, but it would be in danger of providing too much information to someone who hasn't read it, and certainly one of the pleasures of this novel would be in the surprise of the twist. Yet I would probably read it all the way through again, just to experience the clues to the solution that I missed. That latter part is what makes it great literature, I believe.

When I finished, I imagined what it must have been like for Christie to have had the inspiration for the twist ending. It must have hit her one day, and I can imagine her telling other folks the secret. Or not. Did she make everyone read her book to find it out? That would be very much of what actually happened in the story. Super Postmodern!

As for me, the narrator of this blog, we have a couple more days here. There have certainly been a few twists while we have been here, some of which I cannot discuss here. They will have to be a mystery.

A Structuralist Critique of Agatha Christie, By Way of Jean Racine

 Acting in the spirit of Roland Barthes' famous Structuralist work c, in which he finds the "universal Racine play" that lurks inside all of the dramatic works of that famous French playwright, I shall, at least for the moment, and based upon only two early works featuring the character Hercule Poirot, attempt to begin to describe the "universal Agatha Christie story."

Side note: On Racine is a fantastic read, as suggested by Professor Paul Fry of Yale, whose literary theory course I went through on Youtube three years ago. He had highly suggested it, and to fulfill my ambition to understand Structuralism, I read every single one of Racine's plays in translation (and one also in the original) over the next year before reading Barthes' work and, yes, having my mind blown.

Anyway, back to Agatha Christie. Just now, in the fading light of day in our cabin outside Estes Park, I finished the second Hercule Poirot story, The Murder on the Links, which is Christie's third overall novel. The setting in this one is villa on the English Channel coast of France. The title refers to a golf course next to the villa, where the corpse of the victim is found.

I read this book on Kindle, in this case springing ninety-nine cents for a version that seemed to have good reviews as a digital experience. I had no beefs with the edition, outside of a few harmless typos. I enjoyed it even more than The Mysterious Affair at Styles. One sees Christie advancing in her storytelling very quickly.

My contribution to the Structuralist analysis of Christie so far is to notice that family relationships involving minor characters who are not considered suspects initially play in important part in the story in an interesting way. In the first story, a cousin relationship turns out to be more important than one realizes. In the second story, we have a pair of twin sisters. Both of these relationships are mentioned early in the story and then not at all until the climax. This is something to watch for going forward.

Rainy Day Cabin Reading: the Post-War British Detective Experience

I have no intention of reading all of Agatha Christie's novels, at least for now as part of my self-created college course. For my first Agatha Christie novel, however, there was no choice. It had be her first complete novel, published 101 years ago in 1920, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. 

I obtained it for free through Kindle Unlimited. I used the AmazonClassics version in this case, after a little bit of research. It turns out that there are many versions of these classics on Kindle and some of them are just awful in digital form.  Some of them are apparently transcriptions fo audio version and include things that "[garbled]" in the text! Or they missing entire pages or paragraphs.  In this case the AmazonClassics version was sufficient for the most part although it was sadly lacking the illustrations of the original, which are part of the narrative (for example in presenting handwritten notes). In this case it didn't mar the experience much, but it left me feeling a tad incomplete in the experience.  

This particular novel also happens to the debut of Christie's most famous detective, Hercule Poirot. The parallels with Holmes are obvious and well-known, namely that the story is not told through an omniscient narrator, or through the detective, but through a friend of the detective who tags along, amazed at his powers of thought and deduction. 

I also noticed the progression from the theme of the British colonial experience in India that dominates the tableaux of the Victorian era detective story. Christie was writing in the wake of the trauma of the First World War, and we get an update of this theme of overseas experience "coming home" to Britain in the form of a crime story. The narrator Hastings, Poirot's "Watson", is coming back from being injured on the European continent. Poirot himself is from Belgium the main theater of the war, where the British Expeditionary Forces suffered enormous casualties. His Belgian background is critical in the set-up the story, in linking him to the victim of the crime. 

That being said, the story itself takes place in a delightfully stereotypical Essex country house. Anyone who watched Downton Abbey would feel right at home. I particularly loved the grey-haired servant Dorcas, who is never a suspect, but who supplies a critical piece of information to Poirot.

Christie's novels are easy reads, as I remember from the ones I read years ago in my youth. I read this one in less than a day, finishing it yesterday while the rains poured outside our cabin and the mist was rolling over the mountains nearby. I never guessed the solution. It felt like a little bit of heaven.

A Peaceful Retreat into Crime and Intrigue

 After my tour of Verne, I decided I wanted to switch back to my project of reading detective fiction that I started last year. I had wanted to do this in historical order, the way you might do a college course. So in early 2020, I had started by reading the Auguste Dupin stories by Edgar Allen Poe, which are often cited as the origin of the detective genre. I remember reading them as a young man and not really understanding them, because of Poe's style, but in this case I found them quite entertaining and lucid. It was well worth it to see how Poe's Dupin truly is the prototype for the consulting detective who solves the case that no one can solve.

After that I had moved on to read The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, which is often cited as the the first detective novel, and introduced certain conventions that have become standard in the genre, such as the red herring. I had often seen this title among the classics in bookstores and had never considered giving it a read until now. In the course of reading it, it became, and remains, one of my favorite novels. I absolutely loved it. I had checked it out from Kindle Unlimited with audio narration, and in this case, I found the audio to be highly entertaining. It was one of the books that I was sad to finally finish.

From there I moved immediately onto the next phase of my syllabus, which was Sherlock Holmes. It was my intention to read all of the canonical Holmes in order of publication, and I nearly did so. I began with A Study in Scarlet, of course, and moved onto the short stories. 

Right away I noticed something uncanny about Conan Doyle's stories featuring his famous detective. It had to do with similarities with The Moonstone, which was obviously a huge inspiration for Conan Doyle in creating his Holmes character. But that wasn't the uncanny part. Instead it was about the role that British colonial India plays in both Collins' novel and in the early Holmes, in particular in The Sign of the Four, but moreover in the very character of Watson as he is first introduced, as returning from the Northwest frontier of India (i.e. Afghanistan) after being injured.

There is something deep there, I think, in this realization. Somehow it is not an accident that the genre of gothic crime mysteries sprang out of the British contact with India and its culture---the mystery, allure, and inscrutability of that place. If I were a graduate student in literature, I think I could write a thesis about this topic.

As I said, I had intended to complete my tour of Holmes. I read (and listened to audio on Kindle) all the way through "The Final Problem", in which Holmes is apparently killed in his battle with Professor Moriarty.  Of course I then read The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is published after that, but set in the time before Holmes' death. Next to The Moonstone, it was one of my favorite reads in this project, and clearly deserves its reputation as a classic, and moreover as the finest Holmes story that Conan Doyle wrote. As a novella, it is quite complete in almost every way. Of course the weird thing about this story is that Holmes is absent for most of the story. He disappears early on and only reappears near the climax. Most of the story involves Watson playing detective on his own. 

Having come this far in the Holmes project, it became clear how much Conan Doyle found Watson to be the real central character of the series. Holmes is too much of a caricature, and too unreal at times, to be sustained. Watson is flesh and blood, and this is why  The Hound of the Baskervilles is the best and most complete work by Conan Doyle.

After this I began to tackle the later short stories, in which Conan Doyle resurrects Holmes by asserting that his death was faked. One can imagine the excitement of readers. I felt it too. More Holmes! Yeah!

But this was quickly dashed. Even in the first post-resurrection story, one could feel that Conan Doyle's heart was not in it. Six or seven stories in it, I began to go bored. The stories felt recycled from earlier ones. The demands of the genre were too much to be sustained over such a number of plots. I could begin to see the solutions telegraphed to us half way through the story. This feels like reading Encyclopedia Brown, I thought to myself, remembering the boy detective story collections from grade school that I loved so much. When that realization hit me, I lost interest in reading any further in the later Holmes' works. Maybe I'll come back and finish them. By the time I get back to London and visit the Baker Street museum at last, I want to have read them all.

That lapse in my detective project was over a year ago now. I went on to read other things, including this recent spate of Jules Verne novels. But like I said, I needed a change from Verne's somewhat loose narratives of adventure stories, and the tension that creates in them.

So I thought it was time to move on from Conan Doyle to next famous fictional detective in my self-taught college course. There was only one obvious choice.  I could relax from the worldly adventures of Verne, and in my cabin in the mountains, take myself away to an English country manor, where a matriarch is about to meet her doom by poison. It was time to start reading Agatha Christie.

Around the Absurd World of Jules Verne

On the first night in our cabin, I managed to blaze through the second half of Around the World in Eighty Days on my Kindle iPad app.  It was the fourth Verne novel I'd read in the last two months, all of them checked out for "free" using my Kindle Unlimited subscription, which costs ten bucks a month. In each case I had checked out the AmazonClassics version, which has a distinctive cover, and usually includes the audio. I had used the audio in the past, but I find I often get too impatient and want to read faster than the audio will take me.

Around the World in Eighty Days was the first of the four Verne novels I'd read that did not include constant life-or-death situations in which the characters escape impossible dire predicaments, sometimes through means which seem beyond belief (such as ascending the column of a volcano on a raft that is being pushed up by the lava). Nevertheless those are some of the things one learns to cut slack to Verne, given his genius as futurology in his narrative.

Around the World in Eighty Days was thus much less stressful in a way. The biggest drama is about whether Fogg and Passepartout would be able to catch a certain boat that they needed, and what happened when they invariably didn't. Several of the sea voyages had a requisite moment at which a storm might overwhelm the boat and sink it, but this was small drama compared to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Throughout the book one of the things that fascinated me was the difference between the book and the Hollywood movie starring David Niven that (somewhat bizarrely) won the 1956 Academy Award for Best Picture. It is, legitimately I think, often cited as one of the least deserving Best Picture winners (don't you DARE say How Green Was My Valley or n the name of the late great John Ford) I will find you and punch your lights out).

It's not that the Hollywood movie is bad, per se. It's quite entertaining in its own way. It begins with a narrated short documentary about Verne himself before starting the story. It's clear that it won mostly because of the scale and magnitude of the production, more than the story itself, which,  like most Verne stories, is not the strongest part of the work.

The strangest part about the movie, after reading the book, is the addition of an entire sequence in which Fogg and Passepartout are forced to use a hot air balloon to go onward from Paris over the Alps. This is not in the book at all. Verne skips over Europe entirely, picking up the narrative in Suez after leaving London. The balloon part of the book is clearly absurd and is shoehorned into the movie based on other Verne stories, namely Five Weeks in a Balloon and The Mysterious Island. In the movie it gives the story a gratuitous excuse to have the main duo detour into Spain so that Cantinflas, a famous Mexican comic actor, can do a spoof a bullfight. Absurd!

As for the novel, it's a fun read, although it is flawed at times by Verne's inability to consult an atlas in regard to American geography. Arkansas River in Nebraska? It goes to Verne's underlying sloppiness as a storyteller throughout all his novels, which as I said, is forgivable.

My biggest beef with the story? I simply don't buy it for one minute that Fogg would lose track of a whole day because of the International Date Line. He would have noticed this while crossing the United States. Unfortunately this is a very important point in the story, and so you have to overlook the absurdity of this in the end.

I think that will be all for Verne for now in my reading list. I have other things I want to read. Maybe I will come back and pick up a few more down the line, when I ready to face the life-and-death struggle again.

Priority Number One at Camp

 On Monday, our first full day in our cabin at the YMCA Camp, I went for my customary light hike on the trail that circles the property, descending through the cabins near us down to the little brook, then following the trail along the water until it reaches Mill Creek, a gushing brook that marks the boundary between the camp property and Rocky Mountain National Park. 

Upon reaching the water, hearing the roaring torrent for the first time in a year, and feeling my soul refreshed, I always sit and listen for a long period of time, whiling the minutes away in prayer, meditation, and thought.  I usually bring my REI tripod portable camp stool so I have a place to sit on the black earth. I am home.

Next Week, Business as Usual

 The prevailing expectation is that August will be a pivotal month, and that monumental things are currently underway. The expectation is that next week may be the week that everything breaks.

The idea is that the audits in Arizona and other states are forcing the hands of the Cabal. They are panicking. This is augmented by the symposium that Mike Lindell is giving on August 10-13 on the packet captures that he claims will prove beyond any doubt that there was massive foreign interference and manipulation in the 2020 election tantamount to an act of war. Lindell has been promoting this event as being the launching point for Biden's downfall and Trump's return.

Meanwhile the scuttlebutt is that the Cabal is panicking so hard that they are trying to restart the lockdown under the guise of the phony Delta variant, that supposedly even vacc'd people can contract (and for which there is not test, by the way---such is the phoniness of this all). Rumors are swirling that Biden will give a speech next week proclaiming a nationwide hard lockdown, as hard as the one in March 2020.  All of this will be as a last minute panicked distraction from the election audit news, and other things possibly happening next week.

The more conspiratorial minded folks assert that the impending hard lockdown will be accompanied by some time of Internet blackout that will force all information to come through mainstream sources. This will be accompanied by Antifa-instigated riots that will be blamed on Trump supporters. These people assert that Trump is already one step ahead of them, and will resort to the Emergency Broadcast System to reveal what is going on.

Wild. Odds are none of this will happen next week. That's just the odds, of course.

All of this will be playing out as we sit in a cabin the Colorado mountains. If I had to bet, I would bet that all that will happen by next week is that tensions over all these are even higher than there are right now.

The one prediction I can make with certainly is that if Biden and the Cabal go the route of imposing a new nationwide hard lockdown (and possibly mandating the vaccine in some way), then there is going to be massive noncompliance to the point of destroying the Cabal entirely. This may be part of the plan, to force them to make this move. It is too late for them to lock us down again. We are not going back to shutdowns . We are not going back to mask mandates. We are not going back. Now recall what I said above about Antifa riots in major cities being blamed on disgruntled Trump supporters. They want us to get violent and do their dirty work for us. If not, they will fake it and blame it on us (as they did on January 6th).

Of course if you believe in the Movie Theory, then this is all theater on the part of the Good Guys, to prepare us to understand and wake up. Part of the goal is to convince a substantial majority of the public that the news media is completely untrustworthy and spouts nothing but lies. If the Movie Theory is true, it would support the idea that next week will be anticlimactic for those expecting some sort of breakthrough. The ramp up to the revelation must be slow. It is torture for those wanting a big revelation, but it is what is necessary to finally wake everyone up.

A New Boulder Phrase

 We are back in Estes Park, checked into cabin. We drove up from Durango two days ago, coming through the San Juans on our familiar route, including stopping at the top of Molas Pass as we always do, to take in the mountain air. On the other side, Ouray was much busier than last year, as busy as ever. We then came up through Montrose and Paonia to find our hotel in Snowmass Village. Ginger had wanted to visit Aspen, so she had booked the place there. In the late afternoon, before we got to the Roaring Fork Valley, we detoured six miles up the canyon to the tiny town of Marble, site of the quarry where the stone used in the Tomb of the Unknowns and the Lincoln Memorial was extracted.

Yesterday, after I gave Ginger a tour of Aspen by car, we came over Independence Pass, which was shrouded in clouds, denying us the magnificent view.  We then came through Leadville. "We seem to come to Leadville a lot," said Ginger, as we pulled into a gas station in downtown.

In the late afternoon we made it to south Boulder, where we stocked up on groceries at the Whole Foods that is located next to the shuttered King Soopers, the site of a recent gun massacre. It was sad to see it boarded up. I remembered buying potato salad there ten years ago for a party at my friend Charles and Tamera's house, when they lived nearby.

In the Whole Foods, we noticed the change from last year in Boulder. No masks and no one wearing gloves, and far fewer signs telling you what to do at every turn. People in Boulder love being told what to do, and telling others what to do. It means we can have the perfect society. I love Boulder, by the way.

Checking out at the register, Ginger told the female cashier "I love your hair." The other woman who was helping her at the register jumped in to one-up Ginger. "I love her SMILE."

From the cashier, Ginger learned a new phrase: "What's good today?"

"She asked you that?" I asked in the car.

We dissected the phrase as meaning "what's good in your life today?"

"Boulder is place to learn cutting edge phrases like that," I said. Ginger agreed.

Devolution Explained (Summary)

The phenomenal Brian Cates just posted a very concise summary of Devolution on his Telegram channel, summarizing the recent articles from Patel Patriot. In the interests of public education, I duplicate it here in its entirety:

A Summary of Patel Patriot's Articles on Devolution

For those who have not had the time to read the articles, here's a brief summary of the theory we refer to as devolution.

The word "devolution" as it is used in the context of government is the delegation of powers from a central government to regional entities. 

The idea that President Trump may have created a plan to remain President was proposed not long after the election. A number of people have uncovered documents and events that support the possibility that Trump put in place a mechanism by which he could remain Commander in Chief, even as Joe Biden appears to be the President. 

The premise that Trump could do this is based on the idea that America has been in an undeclared war with China since at least January of 2020. Trump has said on several occasions that allowing the coronavirus to escape Wuhan, China could be view as an act of war. When the U.S. is at war, the President has powers not available to him in peacetime. These powers do not require congressional approval and many times, when they are exercised the public is not aware. In essence, the President can, in wartime, take whatever steps he deems necessary to save the Republic. 

The theory revolves around a number of presidential memoranda, executive orders, and personnel changes made in 2020 related to national security. The key players are Chris Miller, Kash Patel, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who held positions in the Pentagon and the National Counterterrorism Center just prior to, and after the election. 

Central to the devolution theory is the fact that Trump knew the election would be stolen (as an act of war) and covertly took steps to invalidate the outcome (in response to an act of war). The measures he took are known only to a handful of people, but they effectively make him the true Commander in Chief. The theory proposes that a decision was made to allow the public to believe Biden is President, but at a future time, they will be informed of the truth. 

Further, the theory proposes that a few, key military assets around the country are covertly supporting Trump, while the rest of the military believes Biden is calling the shots. At a future time—perhaps when indisputable evidence of election fraud is made public—the military and Trump will make their big reveal.