cast [forwards or, as the company flack would object to, backwards] the first stone. So “he” would be like every PGE ratepayer, and let them cast those first of many stones at the forehead of the fuckhead [nattily costumed in his dayglo green hazard vest – hey, sheepdip, who’s your couturier and are we supposed to BELIEVE this? – maybe he’s just in from his day job flagging traffic on a county road somewhere] VP up in front of the TV cameras, throwing stones backwards at forest management while touting how they’ll be ramping up their deferred [a polite term for none whatsoever] maintenance real soon. Well at least they dumped the arrogant Sikh VP [he was having a hard time fielding questions from “inferiors”] and propped up a defensive white guy VP to say it wasn’t his fault, he wasn’t even around then; let’s let bygones be bygones and God Save the Shareholders.
On a much more positive note one had rarely if ever seen people [above] as happy as the day their cones came off and we were pretty happy, too…life immediately became [relatively] considerably calmer as did, for a warmer dryer bit, the waters
whilst the fisherfolk remained, fishing, and further east, facilitating for me a bit of
Vicarious Nevada, the photographer Bremner Benedict spent the week checking in while investigating springs, ours included, on the upper desert. Mining the Vicarious Past by night I searched for a Missing Year [the reel formerly between 36 and 37 in my slide library], 1996,
coming up with, among many others, a view of the Parker Ranch section house, ca.1995. Tuesday all this was temporarily abandoned in order to visit a secure undisclosed location
in the Arsenal for the investigation of artworks, architecture and
environs.
That evening the Search for the Missing Year was again postponed to field a call from B.C.
wherein it was good to hear from and until the vid locked up even see Izel,
Luz and Christine…everyone looking forward to our visit up there, as are we.
With unknown territories to consider a person really needs some maps to go by although
how useful, when or why these were drawn remains obscure.
Winds returned Thursday, giving PGE their excuse yet again. This time in addition to cutting off tens of thousands they kind of blew it as the Kincaid Fire seems to have originated, yet again, with their faulty aging non-maintained equipment. Ah, poor poor PGE; their stockholders are sadly suffering, as of course are the public and the environment to an unfathomably greater degree; gotta put those reflective vests back on the non-reflective flacks and trot them out to claim high winds at this time of year are highly unusual, which is a highly unusual claim as anyone who pays attention to California weather surely knows.* Equally unusual might be the claim that their thirty to fifty year-old equipment is an industry standard and anyway it’s really the trees’ fault for not only dying but failing to be self-trimming, as trimming trees trims shareholders’ profits disastrously. Disaster Capitalism, ya gotta love it.
I’m hoping this might force a move to decentralized, localized sustainable power generation on a granular level, from rooftop solar on up as appropriate faster than is humanly possible. Probably a futility, given the nature of the Utility.
In the interim [a VERY dry and breezy interim, as it turned out, the weekend] the exponentially growing puppies continued to grow, exponentially
and although no one will own up to certain of their projects, we love them anyway. The ongoing
Fire did not deter a pleasant visit from the San Jose Museum [which coincided with Benicia’s “Keep Hallowe’en Harmless” First Street merchants’ daylight trick-or-treating Saturday] though it did result in the cancellation of Saturday’s dinner party as the potential Oakland guests
had been advised to shelter, probably powerless, in place and our friends from San Rafael were similarly affected. Ah well, more time to Seek the Missing Reel as skies here merely yellowed.
The end times are the fun times, no? Benicia being one of the few locations mysteriously left with electrical power the fun times included trying shopping at Safeway while everybody from the surrounding blacked-out counties was trying that too or in long lines next door at the Chevron while fielding cellphone evacuation notifications, the latest and closest that morning
being for Crockett as a fire on the Vallejo side had jumped Carquinez Strait…fortunately it was out by afternoon without igniting another refinery. Life here increasingly resembles [on the TV especially] those flashbacks dystopian futurist filmmakers are fond of inserting
to establish disintegrating norms at the beginning of whatever apocalypse they’re about to
illustrate…interspersed with peaceable pre-collapse normalcy.
Might be time to leave this Sorry State for a bit…
* In fairness [to the unfair], October has been extremely dry and extremely windy, but this incremental change in the weather has been going on for decades,