and why?  Depressing to think that 44% [or more?] Americans aspire to the TrumpVance Values [whatever they are, whoever the fuck those two are] and are eager to live in a country that embraces them, treating the world as if every lie is truth because no matter what the Messy Messiah spews it’s true because he spewed it, ditto for Pete Thiel’s little Yalie. All fact checking petulantly dismissed, though “facts”, being just some woke affectation, never meant much to the Faithful anyway.  Certainly not to E. MuckFusk and the 200 million X-twits that follow the World’s Most Obnoxious Billionaire*…Well, November…The Donald has again promised he’ll only believe the result if he’s allowed to stumble back into the oval office long enough to hand it over to the Hillbilly Puppet.  Yippee, but…

meanwhile we had to get home for a birthday call from Vancouver

and then a celebratory wake for Aggie of salmon and anchovy caviars on smashed potatoes

with cream cheese and a New Mexican Brut to usher in Linda’s eightieth year…

Sunday sorely followed with a walkabout up the creek as Orly smoothed the gravels

and Tuesday was town, tax dollars at work out on 69, back to Gardner in time for Desireé

to address our backs and one mysteriously swollen knee, all needing more work, more ice,

all wobbling up Dry Creek nonetheless at dogs’ insistence.  Days of many laundries in

preparation for Ben and Meridel who came up from New Mexico** for intense conversations and

forest bathing…duly performed with a good long walk up the creek, Ben turning out to be one of those people I’d heard about but never met who is constantly, no matter how otherwise

engaged, on his Device, alerting us to, among many other things, the billions of years old our rocks are while Meridel was wondering whether she should return this November to her Eden in Iraq  project in light of the fact that not only last year one of her colleagues was kidnapped

and tortured but in this one Israel continues to “defend” itself, perpetrating mistrust throughout the region [not to mention death, destruction and genocide], and will continue in that vein up to and including a third world war if that’s what it takes to keep their beloved Bibi*** out of jail. In our opinion M., a small Jewish-American female, ought to postpone returning to her humanitarian endeavors at least until the onset of World Peace.

Well we’ll see…Saturday morning Linda and Meridel went down the meadow

to investigate sculptures from the previous century and wandered back up through the woods as Ben packed up their SUV hybrid [plugged in all night to add, maybe, that glorious maximum

range of – wait for it! – 42 additional electrickle miles****] and after long fond goodbyes headed down the road to Embudo, where they were going to canoe across the Rio Grande to their friends’ for the night…

 

*A heavily contested title, believe it, but Musk remains the reigning champion for all sorts of reasons.

**and dog Djinnia, a sweet red heeler mix, perturbing the Inkies coming as she did less than a week after a similar sized dog with a very different personality had disappeared from their lives.

***Beloved, anyway, by those Uzi-toting super-subsidized-settler bullies who are to my mind perfect exemplars of asshole religiosity run amok. But then isn’t that who the Izzies are, really? Maybe if I grew weird facial hair, put on a silly little beanie, grabbed a machine gun and went out brutalizing the neighbors I’d understand their point of view better…especially if I never had to suffer any consequence or pay for it. Free housing, free guns, free ammo; what’s not to like?

****These things don’t work very well for those few of us whose only commute, grocery-getting, varies seasonally from a couple of blocks to 130 miles each way but obviously what the demographic needs and “consumes” is something [something large, too] with the ability to go 28 to 42 miles from plug to plug, which is then somehow factored in to “gas mileage”. Way easier to understand the benefits than Trumpworld for sure.