allegedly sabotaged an American Flag Blue swamp pond out of what can only be petty jealousy…or so sez the Dear Leader obsessively, which is, as Michael Wolff says, “mad king stuff”, I for one, as a person who grew up in swimming pool country, am inclined to regard the whole operation as hilariously incompetent, ironically worthy of the idiot who commissioned it and got just what he [but unfortunately not we] paid for.  Meanwhile out here out of what can only be described as an overabundance of Sympathy I relocated the woodrat from under the wellhead

to a more secure undisclosed location on my third and final trip to Alturas town,

vaguely espying Mt. Shasta  through the haze from Cedar Pass and after a brief and efficient

sortie into the Holiday was out of town ahead of the heat, over the pass to Rabbit Traxx,

down the valley

and across Duck Flat.  I traversed the Buffs finally feeling, five years and 24,000 miles later,

like the Tundra’s dialed in at last, so down to the desert and home to render myself

semi-comatose with an ill-advised lunchtime beer. The next afternoon an unlikely storm

brought us lightning, thunder, sheets of rain and winds so crazy they tore the sunshades

loose from the porch though come morning it was as if it never happened.

Sunday brought the poet William Fox with his companion and co-conspirator Sara Frantz whose chardonnay and chocolate-drenched frozen cranberries torpedoed us into torpidity in the Repo

after a lengthy and enjoyable lunch of books, news and conversation as the afternoon warmed.

They returned to Reno and we to more of the same warm days,

blissfully oblivious or at least for now unaffected by the idiot antics of MAGA’s Chosen Many,

though all too soon we’ll be venturing beyond the charmed circuit of Wall Spring and Alturas’ friendly groceries into who-knows-what…

America’s 250th is what, oh god…