fires and containment

While swimming laps the day before yesterday outside at Highland Park, I didn’t notice anything particular about the air I was gulping. Likewise, when I drove back to the Vintage Center to hang out with Dad, there may have been something about the air in retrospect but I didn’t note it at the time. But by the time we left a couple of hours afterwards at 3pm, a yellow haze blanketed the city, obscuring buildings just a few blocks away. Someone else leaving with us speculated that it was debris from the implosion of the Commercial Street Bridge earlier, or smoke form the Canadian wildfires.

Screenshot 2026 07 17 at 09 35 21

I knew that they were replacing the bridge, that the contract provides bonuses for finishing the work early and penalties for going beyond schedule, that the scheme involves a clever slide of the already constructed replacement bridge. How could I not know? The Parkway East is shut down before and after the Squirrel Hill Tunnel, redirecting all of those cars through the East End. I braced for bumper-to-bumper traffic in my neighborhood, because that corridor can get jammed, especially during rush hour. However, they reprogrammed the lights to go longer, including an extended green on the left from Penn to Fifth, so the major arteries actually flow more smoothly now. In my opinion, they should permanently eliminate the stuttering green lights in Oakland driving east from the cathedral to Shadyside. I suspect these were intended to prevent speeding, but unfortunately the effect is to slow traffic to half the legal speed limit, frustrating drivers, and wasting time and petroleum. One downside is that the capillary streets feeding in can get backed up, especially the left turn from Craig to Fifth near my parents’ place.

While I knew about the construction, I didn’t know the timing of the detonation of the old bridge — I would have expected them to have accomplished that a little sooner, rather than on the sixth day of closing the highway. Anyhow, I figured the bad air that afternoon at 3pm couldn’t possibly have been particulates from the demolition. 376 is too far way, the event happened hours ago, and I thought the firm doing the work would mitigate dust by spraying with water afterwards (although I don’t actually know if that happened here).

Yet somehow I didn’t know about the Canadian wildfires this year. How could I have not known until the evidence was right before my eyes, and entering my lungs? How could I not have anticipated this, which I have observed before as a snowbird?

For the past couple of nights, I kept the house shut tight, in place of my ritual of throwing open the windows and closing them in the morning. Usually I have the house respiring rhythmically during the summer, circulating cool dark air, then holding its breath during the day. Instead, I turned on the air filter.

…

On the Fourth I took the busway down to Point State Park for the fireworks. I had not intended to go because of the extended heat wave, but to my surprise it broke that afternoon, while I was attending the biweekly Spanish language Meetup at Whole Foods. Two weeks later, we’re towards the end of another heat wave. Smoke and heat.

I had seen fireworks downtown several times during First Night, but this was only my second time seeing them at the Point. About fifteen Julys ago, before my colleague Susie artfully arranged for close proximity shows for CMU’s pre-college programs, I once took a yellow school bus downtown with the students and our older child. I can still remember the weight on my shoulders as we both gazed at the sky. And I remember, once upon a time, as I carried our younger child up the steps to the front door at the end of a long drive home and then up the stairs to his bed, I said to my wife: There will be a last time when we hold them like this.

Now they are launching. Fireworks in the sky.

The show, billed as the largest in Pittsburgh’s history, was spectacular. I thought there were going to be drones too, but instead it was an old-fashioned pyrotechnic display. I remembered others throughout my life — at Olin Sams’ farm when a spark fell into my eye, at a grandstand in Ithaca, on a hillside in Providence, on Patriots’ Day in a taxi along the Charles, in a field in Santa Fe on New Year’s Eve, on Roosevelt Island looking towards the Statue of Liberty, from a hotel balcony in Louisville before the Derby.

Los fuegos artificiales. In high school the jokers would say chemistry was for those interested in explosives and drugs. I loved it anyhow, it made sense of the world. Geometry was fun for its proofs, French for new perspectives, English for building with words.

The crowd spontaneously sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the first shells launched from the river barges. The American sense of defiance, we call it the day of independence, but the emotional undercurrent is resistance, and the fireworks I love are cousins to the bombs we drop. At some point the crowd broke into shouts of “USA! USA!” for a half-minute, delighting the South Asian Indian family near where I stood, but I was a little embarrassed for being in midst of the World Cup red card fiasco.

I used to believe that fireworks would explode in outer space, that it would be easy to create a spectacle out there. After all, a shell is a packet that incorporates the fire triangle of heat (to overcome activation energy), fuel (aka reducing agent or electron donor)l, and oxidizer (aka oxidizing agent or electron acceptor). The oxygen in the atmosphere seemed irrelevant.

It’s more complicated than that, as I found after pulling vacuum and attempting to ignite gunpowder a decade ago with Matt and his students. It’s true that an atmosphere containing oxygen isn’t strictly necessary, because potassium nitrate (saltpeter) is present as an oxidizer. However, there must be some atmosphere or other way to keep the fuel, oxidizer, and heat in adequate contact with each other. The mean free path on Earth at sea level is a fraction of a micrometer, but on the Moon a particle typically travels kilometers before meeting another in the lunar atmosphere. The air on Earth forces fuel and oxidizer particles to collide with each other, as well as prevents heat from dispersing too rapidly. It’s rocket science.

The finale was amazing, I have never experienced one like it before. Not just their brightness and colors. I could feel the concussive shocks deep in my chest, the heat on my face.

I was in middle school the first time I visited the Point, on a field trip from my small town in Ohio. The fountain was relatively new at the time, having opened in 1974, and my teachers remarked they hadn’t seen it before. The little things we remember, I lost my Snoopy comb on that bus. And I remember we were riding around Pittsburgh and someone called out, “Hey, look, there’s a black person!” Nearly everyone of my classmates rushed to the windows on the right of the bus, pressing the glass. Only Jeanette and I stayed seated, looking at each other. The shock must have been apparent on my face, the heat in my chest.

Light and heat. Smoke and ash.

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the word drips as poison

I’m sitting in the Subaru dealership in Monroeville, waiting for Jade to get an inspection sticker, oil change, and usual annual checkup. The television in the waiting room is on HGTV (Home & Garden Television), no doubt selected as an innocuous channel. After all, everyone has a different idea of which genres are entertaining, financial information can be stressful, and forget about any of the news channels in this political climate. Food channels could trigger people on any number of diets. I suppose there’s the weather, that’s what I would have chosen.

But even shows about home redecoration can be triggering. Two strangers across the room remarked on how much they enjoy these programs, but how do these people have a spare two hundred thousand lying around to remodel?

As for me, I sometimes become annoyed by the privileged way the people on these shows speak. In particular, I’m triggered by the word “classy” — especially when the first vowel is pronounced in a long nasal whine. Look, I appreciate when something is well-designed and well-constructed, I have a sense of beauty and style, even if I don’t often reflect it myself. But this notion of “class” — I can’t deny it exists in their minds, but to live in a world where you continually compare and rank yourself against other people — I would find it tiresome.

The irony is how critically I myself judge those who utter words like “classy” or who otherwise behave as though they are above others. Do I not notice the log in my own eye?

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words are as a honeycomb

On Friday after dropping off MM at a medical appointment, I asked S where he wanted to go after La Bonita supermarket — to walk along the Las Vegas Strip, to visit the Atomic Museum, or to go to the library. Being our child, he immediately rejected the Strip. We ended up at the museum, but only after we swung by Tropicana and realized the library was closed for Juneteenth.

Libraries have always been there for our family.

Since last summer I’ve been to libraries in some of the places I visited. Downtown Reno is filled with so much greenery that it feels like being in a terrarium. Pittsburgh‘s South Side holds a fantastic board game collection, and Homewood still feels like my local even though many familiar staff members retired during COVID. The Vancouver branch has an extensive shop. The Juneau branch is on the water, with a marvelous stained glass window depicting salmon, and restroom signs in both English and Tlingit. The National Library of El Salvador in San Salvador is brightly lit and brand-new and open 24 hours, and has a spectacular overlook of the plaza. The National Library of the Philippines in Manila devotes an entire floor to historical and cultural manuscripts, and the staff helped me find the best available digital scans of Rizal’s work. I stayed only long enough in the Bangkok City Library to appreciate the quiet setting. The National Central Library in Taipei is across from the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall and has a convenient 7-Eleven on the lower level.

To my surprise, the library in Taipei allowed me to encode my transit card so that I could tap in anytime, after filling out a short form. (I had chosen a transit card with Winnie the Pooh when I arrived, only later realizing that it could be construed as a dig on Xi Jinping.). At the library in Manila, for a nominal fee I purchased a photo ID to show instead of my passport at the entry. In addition, I bought a T-shirt there, as well as in Juneau. I figure that if I’m going to buy a souvenir, I’d might as well support the libraries in the local community.

Of course I’ve also visited various college libraries for work and on tours with S, including at Bard, Allegheny, Chatham, Pitt, and UNLV. Last month I also saw the medical library attached to the Műtter Museum in Philadelphia, although I don’t think of it as a proper library, since the stacks were locked away.

For all of this, I hadn’t visited any of the local public libraries here in Henderson for a very long while, until last weekend. These days I mostly read in digital format. Furthermore, since Marissa changed schools and doesn’t drive in that direction during the academic year, I no longer frequent the Paseo Verde, Gibson, or Heritage Park branches, and as a snowbird I’m usually not here at all during the brutally hot summer months.

I’ve severely slowed my purchase of physical books in the past couple of years, because I already have shelves and stacks and boxes. But last weekend at Paseo Verde I couldn’t pass up a hard copy of A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish, in its third edition from 2000, though I already have an electronic copy of the sixth edition from 2018. I have always enjoyed the sweet combing through reference books in hard copy — grammars such as this one, lexicons like the Big Liddell, dictionaries including for rhyming, the CRC handbooks for math and for science, thesauruses, atlases both real and fictional, concordances, manuals — in retrospect who could be surprised that I married an encyclopedia editor.

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purgatory

Today I awoke with a start, in utter darkness. Is it after noon? Did I miss the meeting with my scavenger hunt teammates? I reach for my phone — 09:10. Nine in the evening? No, I use ISO 8601 time. But it’s not really nine in the morning, not yet, not here where we are, wherever we are, in the middle of the ocean. I need to set back my clocks one hour, as I did yesterday morning, as I did the morning before that, as I did a couple of mornings before that, during this long transatlantic voyage.

I am barely able to communicate with the outside world: obviously there are no cell phone towers, and I did not spring for satellite and anyhow it’s Starlink and I won’t give another penny (let alone hundreds of dollars) to Musk. So I sip on the 150 minutes of data included with my cruise, an average of fifteen minutes per day. I upload and download email and text in batches. If I have a factual question, it goes on a list to look up later, or I simply rely on memory: just like the old days, the “before” time.

Even when I do connect to the Internet, my MacBook Air (M1 2020) and iPhone (14 Pro) don’t update automatically to the time onboard the ship, so I adjust them manually. I, the human being, need to inform these machines of the hour, rather than vice-versa. However, for whatever “user-friendly” reason, the Apple UI does not allow the user to simply define timezone in terms of UTC offset. Instead, I enter the name of a city that happens to share the same timezone. Far from land, how are we to do this?

Fortunately I maintain a habit of making lists and spreadsheets, and fortunately I store most of my data locally rather than in the cloud. We have moved far enough longitudinally over the past twenty-four hours that ship time is now shared with Santiago, Chile rather than Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Before that, it was Fernando de Noronha, Brazil; Praia, Cape Verde; and of course where we began in Lisbon, Portugal.) 

Oh, wait, even that methodology does not work. I suppose because Santiago and Rio don’t share the same {Daylight Savings Time / Summer Time} convention? My spreadsheet is based on timezones as defined by my trusty Oceanus (OCW-S100-1AJF) watch, so another possibility is that the timezone convention for those places has changed since the watch was manufactured. Another question to look up after I return to shore. In the meantime, I find a way to change the hour directly on these devices.

With twenty-five hours in a day, I sleep in. I seem to recall a circadian rhythm study in which someone entered a cave and allowed their own body clock to flow completely independent of external influences such as sunlight, temperature changes, clocks, and mealtimes. That person settled on a twenty-five hour day. I think this was conducted in the 1960s, in order to understand the sleep patterns that astronauts might prefer. I wonder if this study has been replicated, and whether the results hold across age, gender, and other variables, such as whether a person is alone or in a group. It’s the sort of research that is low cost, relatively easy to perform, and should easily receive IRB approval. 

On this ship, the Norwegian Epic, I was assigned one of the least desirable cabins (inside stateroom, without any windows, and at the fore, where the rocking of the ship motion is stronger than in the middle). Fair enough — the $89 fare I paid after CruiseNext credits to travel east to west, from Lisbon to San Juan, is even more affordable than the $129 fare on Norse Airways to cross west to east, from JFK to Rome. And in addition to being conveyed thousands of miles, I’m receiving ten days of food, lodging, entertainment, amenities, and service.

Upon arranging my four pillows to block the glow of the phone and my chargers, I sleep in complete darkness. The twenty-five hour days allow me to enjoy late breakfasts.

…

Here is what I ate at breakfast today:

  • mushroom, onion, mozzarella omelet, seasoned with Tabasco
  • baked beans
  • hash-brown potatoes
  • roasted, seasoned tomato
  • toasted English muffin with butter
  • yogurt with dried cranberries, dried apricots, walnuts, canned peaches, honey
  • peach pastry
  • pain au chocolat
  • regular and decaf coffee blend with cream and sugar
  • two glasses of cold water

I sit in La Cucina, one deck down from the Garden Café, because it is quieter and I can always find a seat near the prow. I look out onto the water, more blue today than any other. The second morning of our crossing, just before it rained, I thought I saw some flying fish leaping in front of the boat. I also saw a bird, hundreds of miles from land, and wondered why it didn’t alight to rest. I’ve occasionally seen seaweed and rough waters, but not today. The white caps are infrequent, and I already tknewll we were in relatively smooth waters, from the rocking of the ship when I’m in my stateroom.

I bring back to the room a couple of cups of crushed ice, in order to scrub the walls of my high-walled 1400 ml Nalgene bottle, which has a couple of stickers from my Alaska cruise in September. Over the summer I discovered that black beans work well to clean the walls of the bottle, rather than trying to use a long-handled brush. It turns out that ice, some liquid body soap, a bunch of good rinsing work well too, to remove the musty smell.

…

Here are the sorts of things I have been thinking about at breakfast each day:

  • how swiftly and safely we are crossing the Atlantic, in comparison to centuries past
  • how deep the water is, what kind of life is present, and whether the ocean is more like rainforest or desert
  • the ocean is my heritage as a Filipino (my father’s habit of describing the Philippines as a country of a thousand islands)
    • the Filipinos who serve on this and every cruise ship
    • the Filipino-Americans in the Navy —  according to Romer, whom I met three nights ago at Noodle Bar and who served as a radio technician on a nuclear submarine, there are many Filipinos in the Navy

Yesterday morning I revisited my childhood thought that Filipinos would make ideal astronauts, crossing the vast ocean of outer space. Reducing payload is essential when overcoming the gravity well of the Earth, and Filipinos generally occupy less mass and volume. Similarly, we consume fewer calories and breathe less oxygen — our bodies and mind run efficiently, at least based on my limited observations as a scuba diver whose tank runs out more slowly than others’.

Maybe this is on my mind because Apollo 13 is on the TV at the moment. I think this is the fourth time I have seen it on the TV. It repeats, presumably on some cycle, along with movies such as Interstellar, a film where Carey Mulligan plays a singer of a folk duet, Captain America: Winter Soldier, and the most recent Captain America movie in which Falcon has become Cap and the President played by Harrison Ford nearly goes to war with Japan over adamantium (this same movie promoted at a pop-up Marvel store near Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo last January).

Yesterday the two movie channels started to put on rotation the one where Kurt Russell plays Herb Brooks coaching the 1980 US Olympics team, maybe it’s called Miracle or Miracle on Ice. I also spotted part of Roman Holiday yesterday afternoon. In that movie you can see the Spanish Steps and the interior view of the Colosseum, but on this trip I didn’t see the former and in fact didn’t enter any of the usual tourist sites in Rome. I only visited outdoor spaces around the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, and my beloved Pantheon.

In fact, on this trip I dedicated about as much time awake in Rome as in New York City, having decided to explore Naples for the first time instead. I took only one day in Sintra, and just a couple of hours in Lisbon, because I had visited last year. I tell myself that these decisions are fine because I will have other opportunities to visit these places again. I tell myself that I will have other opportunities because I firmly believe this to be true.

…

During this trip I continue to make spreadsheets and lists, including of the places I visit, the activities that I do, how much things cost. And the day before yesterday I began to a spreadsheet to figure out how many days I am at home each year versus how many days I have been traveling, from 2019 onwards.

The other day I checked out some books from the ship’s library. I have been reading Saving Time by Jenny Odell while waiting for shows to begin, since sometimes the theater and smaller venues fill up. In the first chapter Odell describes how spreadsheets reflect a drive for mastery over time — the drive of capitalists to control the how laborers move their bodies, which perversely becomes the drive of ourselves to increase our own efficiency, so that we bind ourselves in servitude to time.

To build on Odell’s observation that time is not fungible: The bare reality is that a day in the life of a 17-year-old is not the same as that of a 60-year-old. The minutes on first awakening are not experienced in the same way as those before going to bed. The capitalist seeks to give equal weight to every unit of time, but they are manifestly different. We have created the idea of money, which is fungible and countable. But then when we say “time is money”, we enslave ourselves to the idea that our time is also fungible and subject to accounting.

Our society is in general obsessed with quantification. Imagine life before being railroaded. We used to perceive time through the movements in our heavens, the beating of our hearts, the rhythms of our songs. Imagine life before stickers were placed beside your name on the kindergarten door. We used to learn for the pleasure of knowing and sharing.

…

When I was a child, we would say bedtime prayers. We would ask God to bless family members. I wondered what it meant for the dead to be in purgatory. How did they experience the passage of time? How could we pray to them or for them, how could we communicate to God, if they were approaching or experiencing eternity, while I manifestly continued to grow older all the time?

Yesterday I awoke with a start, in utter darkness.

Posted on by William Alba 1

among us

Who among us has not been isolated, judged entirely for our appearance, the color of our skin? And not just in the places where one might expect, it can happen anywhere. I grew up in a conservative small town in Ohio, where some peers called me an orc or a nigger, but I’ve also encountered deliberately nasty prejudice in Trader Joe’s in Pittsburgh, at a high-end stationery store in Manhattan, before orientation at my beloved alma mater in Ithaca, at a gift shop purporting to be inclusive in Chicago, and in the hallways of the chemistry department as a grad student at Berkeley — just recollecting a few incidents off the top of my head.

Meanwhile, I have been aware of the Surrounded web series produced by Jubilee, or at least it’s been on the edge of my awareness from reading about Pete Buttigieg convincing some undecided voters before last year’s general election, and of Jordan Peterson floundering to define himself as a Christian. The format of the series involves a couple of dozen people surrounding one person, who debates each of them about claims.

Yesterday the YouTube algorithms decided to feed me the most recent episode of Surrounded, entitled “1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives (ft. Mehdi Hasan)”. I took the bait. Although I was unfamiliar with Hasan, I was curious to see how well he would represent his progressive views. I was also prepared to witness some uncivil behavior towards him. 

However, I was unprepared to see the extraordinary degree to which these young far-right conservatives were willing to go, to reveal the emptiness of their arguments while remaining stunningly petulant and clueless that they had in fact lost those arguments. So far I have been able to bear to watch only the first half hour.

The introduction teases us with several exchanges. In one, a green-shirted angry man questions why Hasan, a naturalized citizen, should have any stake in the claim “Donald Trump is pro-crime and pro-criminal”. Another openly declares that he is a fascist, to the laughter and applause of many in the group. The third becomes stone-faced when Hasan says that he is an immigrant:

Get the hell out.

I should get out? Why?

I don’t want you here.

As for the actual sequence of events, in this episode Hasan claimed that “Donald Trump is pro-crime and pro-criminal” based upon the data that Trump pardoned January 6 protestors who violently assaulted police officers as well as those who committed financial fraud, that Trump associates with criminals, and that Trump is himself a criminal. The first interlocutor Jace had no real response and was swiftly voted out by the rest of his group. The second interlocutor Richie admitted that Donald Trump is pro-crime but that it simply doesn’t matter to him. The third, Gerard, attempted to argue that progressives are also pro-crime and that Hasan’s claim is in bad faith, but his argument didn’t land. The fourth interlocutor Samuel claimed that it’s possible that Trump pardoned criminals for other reasons, such as to unite the country, and that Trump’s intent is important to determine whether he is pro-crime and pro-criminal, but Hasan successfully countered by stating that knowingly releasing violent criminals renders someone pro-crime, regardless of intent. The last interlocutor of this segment, Lance, attempted to “whatabout” Joe Biden’s pardons, but Hasan noted that Trump is himself a convicted criminal and associated with criminals.

In summary, from what I have watched so far, Mehdi Hasan established his positions and held his own against attacks, not only on those positions but also his views on what it means to be a US citizen.

I do not know whether the outrage Surrounded elicits in viewers is actually helping us to see others’ points of view or whether it further polarizes us. I do not know whether a video that shows others applauding a self-proclaimed fascist is good for our country. It does seem to me that Hasan was waylaid, believing that he was going to argue with rational far-right conservatives rather than outright fascists. Nevertheless, here it is, among us.

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a tale of two campuses

Today I learned Macalester College is supporting their international students to stay in the United States this summer, in order to mitigate their fears that they would not be able to re-enter and continue their studies if they go home between terms. Both the college and the surrounding community have pooled resources to take care of these students.

As far as I can tell, Macalester is helping their international students not because they are compelled by law, not in order to raise money, not because it helps their college rankings, and not because it makes them look good. Indeed, the news of their generosity isn’t even on their website; I can’t find it anywhere, at least as of this moment. I learned about this good deed from an email newsletter of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the main trade journal of the industry.

Macalester is helping their international students this summer because it’s the right thing to do. Imagine that.

Meanwhile, yesterday Carnegie Mellon University hosted Trump, who is destroying the ability of students from around the world to study in the US, who is throttling funding from the sciences and the arts, and who is threatening to shutter the most prominent universities in order to silence all of them.

Having worked at Carnegie Mellon for seventeen years, I know how the university operates. I concur with this professor that CMU is image conscious “beyond comprehension and beyond the bounds of what universities used to be about, which was the interaction of civil discourse … If it’s just a private sort of a corporate brain-think with no opportunity for question and answer … maybe a university campus isn’t the right place for it.”

What a world of difference between these two institutions. They both have Scottish roots — tartans in their logos, bagpipes at their ceremonies, Scottish animals as their mascots. But in their hearts, how very different.

I am so happy to be free of Carnegie Mellon. I am so proud our eldest will study this fall at Macalester.

Posted on by William Alba 1

todavía no somos Gilead

I had a dream last night that I told you to give the bones of my wrists and fingers to the dogs after I died. We were in a car, a dark car of the sort you might see driven by a Driver in The Handmaid’s Tale. i had decided it was time, so we were headed to some place where I was going to die.

But in reality, I’m not ready for that, not any of that, not at all. 

…

Yesterday at the No Kings Day rally at the City-County Building, I felt a sense of hope, surrounded by thousands of people, peaceful and polite, protesting against the current administration. Walking together towards Penn Station, there were lots of great chants: Education not deportation. No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here. Trump’s a jag-off.

I like the name “No Kings Day” because it’s memorable, inverting “Three Kings Day” and recalling the revolution against King George III, the very raison d’être of the United States. On the other hand, I recognize some great countries remain monarchies. It’s just that “No Tyrants Day” doesn’t have the same ring to it. Plus we’d miss signs like: A faux king loser and No faux king way.

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where life wants to be

When we drove to and from Reno this past week, we didn’t take the quickest route. Marissa had done this road trip twice before and preferred skirting the Sierras instead of going exclusively through Nevada. In fact, during our travels she remarked several times how you could tell we were in California because it was more beautiful. Well, there is a subtle beauty to the high flat desert, but it doesn’t compare to a greener alpine landscape, with vistas of snow-covered mountains.

On the way back approaching Beatty, there is one place in the desert unnaturally blanketed by acres of grass, irrigated in circles. There are no crops, the lawn didn’t seem for pasture, and the boundary between the lush sections and the dry dust is stark. Immediately I realized that someone had water rights and was using them, only so as not to lose them. The place is called Oasis Ranch and according to this article from last January the property is for sale at $9.37 million dollars, with an annual water allotment of 3.27 million gallons. As of today it is still listed at that price on Zillow. That water usage is about 25 times more than the average house in the Las Vegas Valley. And for what? To have an enormous lawn. It’s outrageous. With that money, just buy a house in a part of the country where the grass grows.

In Pittsburgh during the summer, I’m continually mowing the lawn, cutting down trees volunteering along the fences, pulling ivy from the walls of the garage and house. Life wants to be there.

It’s similar to when I was leaving Santa Fe twenty-two years ago. As I walked the edge of Central Park the first evening I was there temporarily for a few weeks, I laughed as the rain misted my face. Santa Fe is beautiful in its own way (The New York Times has a strange obsession with the place), and the first summer I visited it thirty-three years ago I was stuck in a pounding thunderstorm that turned to hail as my friends and I descended Atalaya. But usually it’s so dry there. When I was walking through water in New York it was like a dream, a dream come to life again. And then when we moved there cross-country and reached Pennsylvania, Marissa saw the rolling green hills and she, who had lived in flat Illinois her whole life before we moved to New Mexico, she said it was like paradise.

…

When we lived in Manhattan, I walked around the city a lot, which of course is what New Yorkers do. This transformed my mental map. I thought I knew the city fairly well: I was born in Belmont near Arthur Avenue, and also lived as a child in Bensonhurst and the South Bronx; I visited Midtown and the Village frequently even after we moved to rural Ohio; my college girlfriend grew up in Bay Ridge; and I had plenty more personal and professional opportunities to visit over the years.

But walking around the city made me see it differently. I previously would take the subway to get around, popping down in one place and then back up again, as though Scotty were beaming me via transporter. I knew the lines well enough to get myself from Coliseum Books to Book Scientific to the Strand. I knew the Compleat Strategist was next to the Empire State Building, but that FAO Schwartz was closer to MoMA and Radio City, and the Met and the Guggenheim were on the Upper East Side.

Yet in my head these were distinct destinations. When the electricity went out across the entire Northeast the month we moved there, I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and up Broadway until reaching our apartment off Columbus Circle, and even in the dark I began to stitch together what once was separate. As I became more of a pedestrian, I realized how Chinatown, Little Italy, SoHo, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Union Square, and other neighborhoods connect to each other. 

The same sort of thing happened on this trip. Fifteen years ago I took Green Tortoise on my first and only trip to Yosemite, and afterwards we saw the tufa at Mono Lake, stopped at a Chevron station where I emailed the family, swam in the fresh water of June Lake. Seven years ago I visited Reno for my first conference with the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology, although I saw only the section near the Truckee, up along Virginia to UNR. At various stages in my life I considered studying or applying to teach at Deep Springs College. These places were separate in my head, but on this trip they began to come together.

…

A necklace of episodes. A highway of memory.

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lines for lenses

For no good reason, I fell asleep on the couch last night. I woke, not to this sound of the garbage truck in the alley, but from the dappled light of the sun. At this time, in this season, it fell across my eyes.

The light entered my eyes, after traversing the frosted pane with its stained glass emblem, the storm window still down for the winter, the leaves of the neighbor’s tree, the skin of the atmosphere, the eight-minute space from the surface of the Sun, the millennial-long random walk from its birth at the core.

Eighteen years ago, our eldest was rocking in a wind-up swing. The swing, likely now in landfill if not some other living room, was named Flip A Way. Flip A Way 1 2 3, it was written on the top of the apparatus. Our child, she would stare enchanted at the window while rocking. Nor’easter, we called it, because it’s the window in the northeast corner of the house.

Last night he officially committed to college, placing the deposit right after or while we spoke. As I write this, the Sun and Earth are dancing as to change the light through Nor’easter, so the shadow of the branch of the tree in the neighbor’s yard falls in this direction.

Eighteen years ago, five years ago, that shadow would not have passed through the type of glasses that I now use for intermediate distance. I can use this pair again after bringing them to Costco the day before yesterday, after dropping off my parents and sister at the theater to watch the movie about the saint-to-be, the beatified boy who died some days before our eldest was born.

I bought the glasses last year at a Costco in Nevada. The left lens had fallen from the frame. Just give me twenty minutes while you shop, she said. She didn’t ask for proof. They only need a top and bottom line.

Posted on by William Alba 0

and then

This morning I completed the Duolingo tree for Spanish. I had expected to receive some colorful animation, musical fanfare, or at least a badge to note the occasion. Instead a new section called “Daily Refresh” simply revealed itself. It’s fine, just as with pilgrimages and birthdays, it’s less about recognition, more about the journey. But a little celebration is also always welcome.

Anyhow, I had already planned to continue with Duolingo. I did not complete all of the sections to Legendary status on purpose, leaving about half of them to review and turn gold. There are “side quests” too — additional exercises and word matches. I’ve considered doing the reverse tree (Spanish to English), or returning to French, or taking on a related language such as Portuguese, or an entirely different one like Japanese or Mandarin.

Of course there are other ways to learn Spanish and other languages. I could focus more on Repaso Total; Clozemaster; and immersion through Dreaming Spanish, movies, music, travel, Pimsleur recordings, and online and in-person classes. To help people move in the other direction, I’d also like to complete my TESOL certification.

Yet I’m still likely to continue with Duolingo. I probably will ease up a bit, after Sunday. I currently hold first place in the Diamond League finals, so it would be great to finish there, making my own way to mark reaching the top of the Spanish tree.

Posted on by William Alba 1