Father's Day

Happy Father's Day, all you dads out there. I don't have kids of my own. I envy you. You matter to someone.

Dad and I went to IHOP (his request) for Breakfast. We're going up to Truckee river bike trail today. It will be nice. Its a lovely day in the mountains, clear and sunny. Should be a really good time on the bikes. I will take pictures. Try and get some different from last time. Maybe the parking lot at Squaw Valley Road so folks can see what it looks like.

I still want to go to Sardine Lakes, but next week is Mom's ashes, so that's a weekend rather grimly shot through. Dad wants me to give a speech, an anecdote. I suppose I'll talk about stealing plants from the forest. We were both fond of that, and getting through the challenge of having a brown thumb. Its no worse than being a Perfumier with a poor sense of smell.

My boss is on vacation for the next two weeks, so my coworker Kate is full time for the duration. I suspect we'll talk about plants and soils this week. I'm pretty interested in that. Soils are all about finding out what kind you've got to start with, then checking for parasites or contamination. Then correcting it until you reach the soil that will support the plants you want to grow, and growing plants during the change. The initial step is a soil sample, followed, usually, by rototilling in the corrections. Around here, with most clay soils, we need lots of aeration material added, which is best done with rice hulls or gypsum or both. And they need to be tilled in a good 12 inches so the roots will drain, and further drainage pipe below the bed might be a good idea to you don't see the roots suffocated during watering. Or use raised beds if you're on rock. Around here, that's absolutely possible. And with the cost of wood, raised beds aren't cheap. In an ideal world... well nevermind ideal worlds. That's for video games and the dreams of Socialists everywhere. I'm not one of those.

The local woods change when you go from one rock type to another, and just down the road is one of those transitions. Since the original river, carrying the original gold bearing sediments ran north south, prior to the current drainage pattern of the Sierras which is east west, you get some odd shelves of red dirt and conglomerates. Those with gold in them were mostly destroyed by hydraulic mining, which then caused flooding downstream in the central valley leading to the current levy crisis. Serious flood events would break those, and so far they haven't happened. But they will. Its inevitable, like Inflation, National Bankruptcy, or Revolution.

I keep expecting one of those atmospheric rivers to come into play again, like in 1986 or 1997, but so far no dice. I would find riding a bicycle or motorcycle in that continuously wet, drizzling for weeks, moss growing on everything weather, to be very irritating. I'd need oilskins, and a lot of nerve and utterly paranoid riding style. With our luck, that will happen AFTER an oil emergency. Not before. So we'll be dealing with not being able to get to our jobs, standing in the rain with umbrellas waiting for our carpool or bus, or riding in shitty wet weather on two wheels with a combined tire contact patch less than a single wheel of a Toyota Pri(o)us. I still think its hilarious that the place where an Anglican Bishop lives is called the Bishoprick. They should be required to drive a Pious: a full electric version of a Prius that only goes golf cart speeds because that's what it is. A golf cart with windows. Maybe I'll put that in my next book.

Motorcycling in the wet is a bad idea, just as it is motorcycling after dark. You're less visible, have poor grip, tar snakes and manhole covers are utterly slick, cars pull out in front of you because there's no wipers on the passenger windows. Its a bad deal. And getting fired and replaced because you didn't show up for work just because its raining? A worse deal. This is something we'll have to accept and deal with, and people will die. But so what? That's life. It isn't safe. Nobody is getting out of here alive.

All my memories of whining cafe racer engines late on a Saturday night, or hot rods with the headers off try for a quarter mile speed record on the straightaway, most ending with a loud crash heard for miles, followed by sirens from the ambulance and the fire trucks officiating in the first place, well it was grim. The 1980's were Nihilistic. We expected to die suddenly by nuclear hellfire, with little or no warning. Why worry about drunk driving or being safe when death is a flash of light and burning to death or worse dying over hours or days from radiation poisoning? My whole generation lived through a couple decades of this terror, and then it was suddenly over and suddenly we have to be Moral and Upstanding when the people telling us to do it were the worst bastards in history? Really? I am looking forward to the end of the Baby Boomers. When the last one dies, or perhaps when their voting block is a minority, I will celebrate. Everything wrong with America today is their fault.

I admire my own generation and the later Hipsters for mocking the Boomers childishness and hypocrisy. They Hipsters are ahead of the curve, perhaps unintentionally, by embracing indifference to most materialism, and paring down their ambitions to extremely modest and achievable ones. They already know that Education is a scam because most have college degrees and can't find work. Most of what the Boomers want is probably a bad thing, and should be carefully examined for its unintended consequences. In the end, the Boomers were a destructive force. Their ideas were bad, their time is over. I suggest we leave them to their smug rest homes and wonder why they're ignored by their children, us, busy raising vegetable gardens and riding bicycles and motorcycles. We're the future. Time for us to step up.