Blues for a Blue World
The topic of the Anthropocene is so vast and, well, everywhere, that sometimes you just have to make brief forays into the muck and see if anything makes sense or connects.
The topic of the Anthropocene is so vast and, well, everywhere, that sometimes you just have to make brief forays into the muck and see if anything makes sense or connects.
We headed up the Pungo and quickly ran into the line of thunderstorms we had been trying to beat. Visibility was zero, and the wind high enough that we had to retreat from the river to wait it out.
Chris paid a lot of money for the boat. It was the trip he wanted to take, a way of life. So far, over several weeks of hard work, first high and dry in a boatyard in a Florida summer, then on this “shakedown cruise,” he has gotten everything coming to him.
I tried to imagine what I would do if I was suddenly alone, since I do not have the experience to dock this boat in a falling tide among 80-foot yachts tight in their slips. If it was the apocalypse I could figure the range based on fuel in the tanks and choose where to ground it. The boat did not cost me anything, and after all it would be the apocalypse.
The bigger the venture, the more the universe messes with you.
A friend texted recently to say he had bought a new yacht. He asked if I would like to help him transit it from Fort Pierce, Florida, to his home port in Maryland, a trip of about a thousand miles up the East Coast. “I can probably do that,” I said, spilling my coffee.
I never met or shared a stage with Kinky Friedman, but we were label mates in the 1990s along with none other than Charles Manson, who had more news obituaries (in 2017) than just about anybody, but was still, of course, a profoundly unenviable man.
What I have been wondering—as I have for years—is why Dems cannot seem to counter crude schoolyard putdowns and the verbose, word-cloud attack called the Gish Gallop.
Everybody wanted a piece of Sister Wilhelmina. Not a relic; those days are over. But they wanted to touch her, know her, maybe leave with a CD of the sisters’ music or a copy of the biography that was hastily whipped up. Even people who held religion at arm’s length read the national news stories, hungry for awe. And who does not need a miracle?
Macoupin County, Illinois, which holds Virden and Mt. Olive, has other important labor sites. But Mother Jones’s grave and two-story granite monument on the outskirts of Mt. Olive might be seen to mark a split in the soul of working-class America that is still evident in our nation’s division.