The little dog, much improved [“better living through chemistry”!], raised our spirits

although the West, much of it still burning, didn’t.

Thursday we abandoned both crits; while L. left me for the greater part of the day in the Habib, making an inventory of the Miscellaneous Sizes [78] plus at least getting a count of the smaller mostly oils [94, mostly ca. 1984 – 94] she went to Pueblo, various errands, back and

home in a daze through the haze.

Rather ground down after that we merely managed a small wandering walk in the near woods before the daily BBQ-time rains came, which somehow never dissipate the smoke.

Friday Lefty took the lead up the creek until getting stepped on caused his erstwhile friend to

viciously attack.  While L. held her off we bolted home, but she caught up and nailed him again before we could make it into the house.  Most depressing.

Saturday was the weekly trip to the P.O. before a most entertaining dinner with dear friends from La Veta [not shown]…

Monday September 11, NIAD [National Insert Agenda Day], the day we remember for the Disastrous Events that preceded the precipitous adoption of the mysteriously prefabricated and draconian “Patriot Act”, began with a visit to Dean, who due to a mysteriously violent stomach upset had missed his flight to New York and opening at the Met Breuer, but is doing fine now.

Later, additionally distracting us from the contemplation of thousands dead [including but not limited to those reported for a nano-second on TV as “shot down by fighter jets” in an airliner over Pennsylvania until being very quickly re-reported as a hijacked airliner taken over and brought down by the heroic passengers, cf. Neil Young et al] as a prelude to the hundreds of thousands subsequently dead from the Inchoate Beast’s Revenge, Retribution or Reactions

as hastily justified by said Act*, it began to hail with a ferocity so intense as to quickly clog the

driveway’s diversion ditches, allowing pretty much the entire hillside to approach the house in liquid form most alarmingly.

With frantic hoeing and raking the giant soggy fluffs of hail-blocked debris out of upstream ditches we were able to divert enough of the flow so that neither porch nor laundry room overflowed into the rest of the premises, barely…the hail let up after maybe forty minutes but the cleaning and warming took considerably longer, preventing us from properly celebrating NIAD, when everything truly did change, oh yes it did..

Oh, well.

Happy NIAD, everybody.

• Said Act laid out Eternal Incarceration, War Without End, Enhanced Surveillance at home and abroad, Enhanced Interrogation [ditto], the erosion of “Our Democracy”, the establishment of [quite profitable] private enterprises such as the immediate implementation of Totally Stupid Assholes at every airport in the “Homeland”, privatized militaries, militarized police and much much more.  Sixteen years and whaddya get; Donald Trump.  Sixteen years on I got a grey and black-speckled dog, but he may be thinking about fading.