Last Leg

I look at my entry from 13 December 2024, written in my motel room in SLC, and read, " . . . then I'll run the leg to Washington one more time," and I think, "Yeah, about that."

The run from the farm to SLC had gone without a hitch.  Got to Cheyenne in good time.  Next day I went over Lincoln Summit no problem, and the Big Malignant Zit decided to be benign.  Made it to SLC with a sigh of relief.  I knew from sad experience there were still many opportunities for fun ahead, but at least that much was done.

Headed northwest on 16 December.  Sweetzer Summit and the High Empty were fine, as were the Oregon Canyons, but when I got to La Grande, it was obvious something was coming in.  Got up on top of the Blues without incident, but as I was passing the exit for Deadman Pass, I saw something the idiots I was sharing the road with weren't seeing: We were driving straight into a fog bank.  Sure enough, we hit the beginning of the downgrade, and it was pea soup, visibility a joke.  Some people charged on like it was "Jesus, take the wheel" time.  I'm amazed there were no catastrophes, at least none that I passed.  I took my time.  I was only a dozen miles from Pendleton, and time was not an issue.  As it was, I was pretty much under the fog by the time I passed the casino, and I got to Pendleton in great time.  Time to relax a bit.

Then came the 17th.  Light rain in Pendleton.  That turned into real rain.  That turned into pitchforks and hammer handles all the way to Yakima.  While gassing up at Costco I collected info on road conditions.  Still open all the way across, but I'd played this game too often to think that wasn't in flux.  I didn't relish having to turn around and shoot the Gorge, but it's one of the risks of crossing the Cascades in Winter.  The Triples were pretty much as I expected.  Snow started before I passed the rest area going up South Umtanum, and Manastash was a bite I yet again had to crawl down to Ellensburg.  But Ellensburg itself was clear for once, and I headed west on I-90.

Then I hit Elk Heights.  The snow restarted, and it was accumulating.  And I was still 40 miles from Snoqualmie Pass.  Kept going.  Somewhere around Easton there started being signs saying chains or traction tires were required.  As I had neither, I feigned illiteracy and kept going.  All the pullouts were full of vehicles chaining up, right up through the massive area by Keechelus Lake.  The cops were busy helping vehicles in the pullouts and were ignoring me, so I kept going.

Got to the Hyak bend, and there were three semis spun into the ditches.  Funny thing about semis: The drive wheels on the tractor can be chained, but if that trailer starts to slide, you're screwed.  I stayed in low gear and ground up the slope.  And then I was at the crest.  And I STAYED in low gear and made sure NOT to gain speed.  Crawling back down off of Snoqualmie.  I figured by the time I got to the Asahel Curtis Exit, Exit 47, I'd be below the snow, and that's what happened.  Just a bunch of rain down to Bellevue and north to Glen Haven, but that was easy enough to navigate.  And I was here.

And that was that.  The Great Upheaval and Exodus of 2024.  It already feels like a tale echoing from ancient days.

Boy is at the farm.  I visited him in 2025 and again this year, to do some maintenance and reassure him he hasn't been abandoned out there at the Ass End of the World.  And now I'm hunkered down here.  I've gotten the firewood laid down and the garden crops brought in ahead of the rains, so I'll take the W there.  Property tax hearing season is in full swing for Salt Lake and Summit Counties, so that keeps me jumping.  Settling into a life based on seasons instead of days.  There are far worse ways to live.

Back and Forth

So I fill up a fourth Dumpster (By the time I was done, I hauled about 100 cubic yards of crap out of that house.  Surprised the poor old place's walls hadn't popped out.), then on 10 September I headed back to SLC because I had to be at the county office for an in-person session on 13 September.  I actually had something loaded in the truck to take to SLC: the old, dark brown sofa from the living room, which was just in the way since we were bringing in the sofas from Toni Circle.  I tried to donate it in Iowa City, and Goodwill, Salvation Army, and Crowded Closet (Mennonite) all turned me down flat because of pet hair.  And they weren't gracious about it.  The woman at Crowded Closet told me if I cleaned it up she might be able to take it, and I was standing there thinking, "Bitch, you think I'm going to spend four hours cleaning this just to hand it over to you gratis?  This is your brain on authoritarian religion."  So I hauled it to SLC to give to Deseret Industries, and they took it no problem.  The LDS Church has issues (OMG, such issues.), but DI is the shit, and everyone else needs to take a big whiff.

Got done with business, loaded the truck, headed back to the farm.  Arrived on 17 September, Grandma's birthday.  Turned around and on 21 September began the first long run.  Loaded the piano, the queen bed, my dresser, and a few other things and headed to Washington.  Stayed at a motel in Hermiston, which was a mistake.  Place was basically housing for migrant farm workers who liked to work all day and party all night.  I finally had to tell the management I didn't appreciate a fiesta going on outside my room in the wee hours.

Got to Glen Haven 28 September, unloaded here and in a storage unit in Ferndale, and loaded up my old cast iron bed to haul back.  Headed back to SLC 11 October.  Reorganized everything, closed down two storage units, including old No. 28 that I'd been in since November 2002.  Took another load back to Washington and got here 16 October.  This time I stayed in Pendleton, and it was much more restful.

By this time I had managed to get registered to vote in Washington, so I dropped my ballot off.  My plan was to leave right after the election because Winter was coming, but then our stupidest and most corrupt citizens reinflicted the Tangerine Latrine on us.  Frau was afraid the MAGAtards would run amok.  I wish they had, it would have given me an opportunity to reduce the surplus population, but I can't have nice things.  I didn't leave until 9 November, and after a last load up in SLC, including my cast iron bed, got to the farm on 14 November.

Got things wrapped up the best I could there.  Did the winterizing, and taught Boy a number of things about monitoring and maintenance.  Set up my bed in the main bedroom, complete with the old mattress and box springs I got nearly 40 years before at Stover Mattress in SLC.  Well I think they're comfy.  A little more sorting and organizing, and I'd done all the damage I could reasonably do.  I headed out 11 December.

The Road Goes Ever On

So it's 12 July 2024, I'm driving a truckload to Iowa, I've just left Laramie and am heading up Lincoln Summit, and suddenly the truck has no power and doesn't even want to keep running.  I had to pulling over to let it rest.  Finally got over the top, but she still wasn't feeling right.  Nursed it into Kearney, late.  Got to the farm on the 13th, got the truck into a shop, and learned the fuel pump was bad.

So.  Loaded up another Dumpster, flew back to SLC on 31 July for Board of Equalization training, picked up the Impala from Emma and Mike, got back to the farm 7 August and learned the truck wasn't fixed yet.  Filled another Dumpster and drove the Impala back to SLC to do some organizing and inventorying.  Got there on 29 August.

I was supposed to stay at the Hometown Studios by Red Roof in Taylorsville.  When I got there, I was informed that because my driver's license showed me as a Salt Lake County resident, they wouldn't give me a room.  I said that it would have been nice to have known that before, and the manager, a callow, tubby, little shit, got snotty with me and said it was plainly stated on the website (Narrator: It wasn't.).  Apart from the blatant lying and general inconvenience, this policy makes it more difficult for people to escape domestic violence situations.  Exactly the sort of fuckery one expects of the Theocratic Republic of Utardistan.  Gods I'm glad to be out of there.

Found replacements, though I had to break my stay between two places.  Rocketed out of there and got back to the farm on 3 September to learn the truck was finally fixed.  Yay.

To be continued.

So anyway . . .

. . . back to the year of living dangerously.

Movers came on 28 June to move the big stuff, including that monster white elephant of a china cabinet I'm still trying to foist on someone.  On 30 June June Chris Wootten (choir director) came by to help pack.  He was wrapping and stuffing, and I was busy with other things and couldn't keep track, so I didn't know what he'd packed where, and I just ended up marking his boxes "Chris Pack".  Didn't finally get them figured out until this last August.  But at least it was all packed.

The problem was getting all the stuff moved.  I was supposed to be out on 1 July so they could start remodeling.  I started shoveling everything into the garage so it would be out of the house and I could stage it there and load it straight into the truck.  I had to beg 3D and Spurge for extra time in the garage, and they really nicked me for it, but I had no choice.  What do you expect from crapitalist scum?

But there was just too much stuff.  I pulled everything out of the main floor and put it in the basement so the carpeting and painting could start, and then I started moving everything to the garage, but at the end of 1 July I was still moving things out of the basement, and I'd been running with very little rest all month.

I'd been deferring a nervous breakdown for nearly a half-century (That's a story for another time.).  That night it insisted on taking the stage.  About 0100 I had to rest a bit and laid down on a quilt on the old bedroom floor.  I fell asleep and woke up two hours later, panicking because I'd lost those two hours.  While asleep, I'd dreamed a bunch of people had arrived to help me move.  When I awoke, my mind decided the dream was reality and the reality of my doing it all alone was a dream, so all day I behaved as if there were people helping, right down to coordinating efforts with "the team".  I finally snapped out of it at the end of the day when I got the last of it out of the house and into the garage and truck.  I spent the next two days emptying the garage, and on the 4th of July, after 11 years, I was independent of Toni Circle.  Spurge and 3D had the house back.

And promptly wrecked it.  Oh the interior remodel was nice enough and years overdue (3D kept my deposit because of the condition of carpets, blinds, and appliances she had every intention of replacing anyway, but I actually won that game, and one of these days, when the statute of limitations has run, I may discuss it.), but they moved another mob of trust fund ski bums in, so who knows what the condition is now.  Not that I care.  But the exterior.  They ripped out all the perennials I'd planted in front for pollinators and replaced them with black rock (Great way to control soil temperature, yeah!) and "restored" the abomination of a garden in back.  And they cut down that lovely apricot tree.  Fuckers.  They need taken out back and Ol' Yellered.

But I was out, and I was no longer under the gun of a deadline.  I allowed myself to collapse for a few days, then I loaded the truck, and on 12 July I headed back to Iowa.

And then came a new adventure.

Good Book On The Wrecking Of Public Education

Allow me to recommend The Privateers by Josh Cowen.  Lays out in detail how the Maxwell Class has deliberately torpedoed the public schools as part of their plan to make us their serfs.

I have seen exactly ONE reviewer who didn't like it: Neal McCluskey at the Cato Institute.  It must be remembered the Cat-turd Institute is a mob of libertardians who claim everything is better if it's privately held.  Some are stupid enough to actually believe this; most are paid very well to claim it regardless what they believe.  McCluskey is the latter.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit I was once a libertarian.  Then I got over being 13.  Same way I got over thinking Heinlein was a great writer instead of a fascist hack who specialized in strawman arguments and couldn't write dialogue for shit.  All his characters sound like white people from a small town in Missouri c. 1925.

McCluskey acts like he makes all sorts of great points.  He doesn't.  He refers to Milton Fried-Spam-For-Brains' "The Role of Government in Education", which was basically a road map for white supremacists to get around Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education (Yes, Friedman was an even bigger piece of shit than you've heard.).  He even argues how historical "school choice" is by referring to all the denominations in the mid-19th Century setting up their own schools to preach their own dogma (Pro tip: If your argument for "school choice" includes "it would make religious indoctrination easier", you need to jump into a wood chipper.  Feet first.

On top of all this, McCluskey doesn't bother to mention he has a very large dog in this fight.  His bio at the end says he's the former director of the Center for Educational Freedom, but he doesn't mention this or explain what this means.  So I will.  He has spent the last several decades lobbying for public funds to go to Maxwell Class parents so they can send their spawn to Maxwell Class schools away from the rest of us.  Aside from the obvious irony of these scrappy individualists receiving tax money for Biff and Muffy's educations, it's quite obviously yet another scheme to transfer our money to them and further enshittify public education.

And I'm REALLY Glad I'm Not At Trinity In Iowa City

Have I mentioned I think C.S. Lewis was an apologist hack and a wanker who was about as deep as a tea saucer?  Well, I do.

Trinity Episcopal in Iowa City matters to me because it was the last choir I sang with (probably the last I'll ever sing with).  During the Great Move of 2024 I'm relating in this blog, I swung by one day and said I was visiting from the St. Mark's Choir (which technically I was still a member of), and they invited me to sing with them in their Vesper Service that Sunday.  So I did.  I've never met a choir that didn't need another tenor.  Managed to sight-read all of it and had a lot of fun.

The Gospel reading at Trinity this morning was Matthew 22, the parable of the king putting on a wedding feast for his son.  And this parable is a real piece of . . . work.  The king can't get anyone to come to the feast, probably because he's an industrial-strength dick, so he ropes people off the street to attend, then he calls out some poor schmuck who isn't in a wedding robe, I don't know maybe because he'd just been pulled in off the street, and condemns him to Outer Darkness.  And the lesson to learn is, "Many are called, but few are chosen."

I've always been like, "Josh, buddy, really?  That's the takeaway?  Not, 'You're dad is a dick and gets off being one?'."  And yeah, sorry not sorry, I'm about 128% right there.

But wait, there's more.  The Bishop was visiting Trinity today and gave the homily commenting on this.  And OMG.  She came right out and said that this is OK because God isn't fair.  Now I can get behind the "God isn't fair" part.  I have yet to see a god that wasn't just a deeply flawed human with superpowers.  Sort of like Homelander in The Boys.  Something to perhaps be feared; not anything worthy of worship.  But that doesn't mean the unfairness is OK, which is why I'm an atheist.

But she doubled down.  The unfairness is right, it's necessary, the wedding guest deserved it because somehow everyone else managed to show up in wedding robes.  Apparently it's all part of God's ineffable plan, although as far as I'm concerned, if He actually has a plan, it's pretty well effed.

Then she turned to Lewis for support.  One of his interminable metaphoric stories that he thought was witty but actually has more logic holes than a block of Swiss cheese.

Pro tip to the Bishop: If you're citing Lewis, you've already lost.

I'm Glad I'm not at St. Mark's Anymore

When Thurgood Marshall learned Clarence "Uncle" Thomas would be taking his seat on the Supreme Court, he remarked, "You had chicken salad.  Now you have chicken shit."  That's proved to have been an understatement, but it accurately describes the current state of my old musical home.

I spent seven seasons in the choir at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Salt Lake City.  It was great being back in a music group, especially one that was decent as opposed to the Turdville Chum Shovellers.  And we had good clergy.  Tyler Doherty, rector and then also dean.  And Holly Huff, rising through the ranks to assistant priest.  COVID hit, but we kept burbling along courtesy the powers of the Internet.

But it soon became apparent COVID had hit harder than we knew.  When I got it in January 2021, the gift it kept giving me was a torpedoed GI tract and a gut biome I had to rebuild and still have to monitor.  That was nothing compared to Tyler.  He couldn't get rid of it, and it was sucking the juice out of him.  He needed a cane to walk.  The services he conducted became fewer, and he had trouble standing for any length of time.   By the time he finally threw in the towel, resigned, and went on disability a year ago, he was practically a phantom.  His farewell service he had to sit through entirely.  Holly stepped into the breach to become priest-in-charge.  She was young (barely older than my youngest daughter) and managing a long distance relationship (a draining pain in the ass as I well know), but she held things together.  Then they announced the selection of a new dean, her partner finished grad school, and on my birthday she left the cathedral and headed for NYC.  Probably with a severe case of burnout and a deep reluctance to return to a second fiddle role, especially since the new boss will be far less than Tyler.

In the meantime they brought in another priest to help Holly and now fill in until the new dean takes over.  Steven Smith.  In all honesty I don't care much for him, and today's sermon was a good example of why.  The Old Testament reading was Jonah preaching in Nineveh, and Smith kept talking about how we know this and we know that with respect to the Book of Jonah.  No.  We.  Don't.  What we know is: 1) there likely was a man named Jonah in the 8th Century BCE in the North Kingdom, and he may have been considered a minor prophet and preached at Nineveh; 2) there was no big "come to Yahweh" moment at any point in the Neo-Assyrian Empire; and 3) the Book of Jonah was not written until several centuries later, after the rise of Aramaic.  The only people granting any historicity to the Book of Jonah are evangelical "scholars" like Donald Wiseman, i.e. hacks.  It's a fairy story, and while we know what it says, we do NOT know anything in it is a true story.  Quite the contrary.  If I wanted to hear sloppily ascribed Bible stories, I'd go listen to some vangie Bible thumper rant away.  It has no place in an Episcopal church.

But then he kept going.  Supposedly, the moral of the story is that God does not relent.  Right.  I would submit the moral of the story, as with so many of the stories in the Bible, is that God can't be bothered to do his goddamned job.  Time and again He sends frightened, barely literate bumpkins into harm's way to deliver His message, when He could do it Himself far easier and with greater effect.  So why doesn't He?  Apparently He's either cruel, lazy, a buffoon, a dick, or some combination thereof.  And in a hairy plot twist, God ultimately DOES relent.  Because Nineveh sorted itself out, God refuses to destroy it, much to Jonah's chagrin, who holds to the position that Nineveh should get what it has coming.  And God ends up having to chastise him about this.  And that's why many modern scholars view the Book of Jonah as misinterpreted satire.

And then he kept kept going, into the Gospel reading, the Parable of the Vineyard Owner and the Laborers.  Smith's takeaway, which frankly is the standard takeaway, is that the folks who have been saved a long time shouldn't be resentful of those who get saved at the last minute and still receive full salvation because God has infinite love and infinite salvation to go around.  Let's set aside for the moment the inevitable consequence of a parade of Musks and other evil rat fuckers receiving salvation on their death beds after lives of leaving nothing but destruction in their wakes, a result we can see as nothing but unjust (contrary to the message of the Bible) and reinforcing of the need to make them pay in THIS world (also contrary to the message of the Bible; fuck it).  The real takeaway is that finite systems do not scale to infinity.  God may be able to get away with payouts like that, but a vineyard owner can't, and he'd find that out in a fast hurry.  The next work day, all the laborers show up at 5, work two hours, and demand a full day's pay.  That can't work.  Obviously.  And contrary to what Smith preached, it isn't about "deserving", it's about earning.  The full-day laborers aren't telling the owner he can't pay the part-day laborers whatever; they're telling him he has to pay them more than the part-day laborers because they earned more.  This isn't some Golden Ticket for Salvation, where one is all you get because one is all you need.  This is their daily bread.  So the analogy is silly, worthy of C.S. Lewis, yet people have slurped it up with a big spoon for nearly 2,000 years.

And now we come to the crux of the problem.  This parable, and nearly every Bible story, was just an attempt by finite people to explain the infinite acting on the finite world.  People who had little if any idea that infinity existed in any sense other than "really effing big".  People who had little understanding of how any aspect of reality worked.  So their stories, when actually examined, have proved to be wrong or at least silly.  Churches should be explaining how these stories can still be considered to explain anything, if in fact they can.  This is the intellectual and spiritual heavy lifting that churches should be focused on.  And that they avoid every Sunday.