As a planner, I book early, especially when I’m flying five people from three states to a fourth. My hope was for us to meet at the airport and share the rental car to our common hotel, and do the same in reverse on the way home, and I was able to accomplish this, at least initially.

This turned out to be a great example of the perfect being the enemy of the good enough.

As travel conditions change, so do airline schedules, and our arrival and departure times eventually diverged. Then one person in our party changed his mind about his travel dates, both arrival and departure. In the last two weeks, three of us were moved onto a 737-MAX, which I was compelled to redress, and that affected our travel times again, although at least we got to fly on a Dreamliner.

After the dust settled, we had to add an Uber trip incoming. We shared the rental car to the airport outgoing but three of us ended up with a four-hour wait, plenty of time to get our checked luggage preponed and (briefly) lost. Upside? Also enough time to forage for something approaching real food.

We don’t live in the airport, so we can afford the extraordinary food prices for a day. The tricky bit is for me is to find something approaching clean food. After a week of travel, I was really ready for some unprocessed, organic, fresh food. Was there any to be had?

I searched three food courts and found one purveyor with a salad bar. I was able to pay extra for organic spinach with three non-organic toppings of choice: beets, chick peas, and feta cheese. For dressing the server sprinkled some EVOO and some vinegar–from separate cruets, not emulsified–and back at the gate I added some organic walnuts I had brought. Not bad! I thought it tasted very good, and although taste is only tangentially related to quality, I felt my body was pleased by the relative lack of biocides and inflammatory or rancid oils.

It’s all part of the new normal. We met some of our travel scheduling goals, and I found some airport food that was not excessively harmful and may have contained some actual nutrients. For the 21st century, this felt like a win!

Last week our crew rescued a California sea lion that weighed, as we later discovered, 118 kg, a new record for me. It started with the morning crew taking a truck to Spanish Bay in Pebble Beach, a place I might never see without this gig. Short of having friends who live there, there are only two hard-to-justify ways to visit Spanish Bay: by paying for access to the 17-mile drive, which is flanked by fee-free world-class coast on either side, including the northern end of Big Sur; or by staying at the The Inn at Spanish Bay, which starts at just over $1000 per night and is less than an hour’s drive from our house.

We observed the CSL for about an hour, while also hiking along the shore and checking out one of many golf courses in the area, a series of putting green islands surrounded by swamps. Is that what Scotland is like? The animal seemed down, a term that means just what you would think, though at one point it shimmied about 20 yards closer to the water, the wrong direction from a rescue POV. Gulls were patiently waiting on the sand nearby, and a flock of turkey vultures flew over every twenty minutes or so to check progress.

The day was gorgeous, and though we were on a sobering mission, and the temperature was brisk enough to eventually induce us to stay in the truck, it was both relaxing and exhilarating to watch the waves continuously break. We discussed how sad it would be to rescue this animal and have it die in captivity, rather than expiring gently in this idyllic setting, although if it could be healed, we would prefer that. The decision would be made by our crew leader in any case; we were observing and reporting.

Eventually another truck and finally a van arrived, bringing us to eight crew members and an enclosure we call a large metal because it is made of metal and can hold a larger animal than the crates that are standard in the truck beds. It weighs about 45 kg. We used beach wheels, a contraption with four inflatable wheels supporting a metal frame, to get the large metal to the beach, along with seven boards, wooden rectangles about 4′ by 2′ with handles on one side, and a large net with a long handle. One crew member wields the net, while the others each crouch behind a board and sort of herd the animal into the enclosure.

Theoretically.

From our first approach, our down animal became very up. Entangled and encircled, it fought boldly, slamming its shoulder against the boards repeatedly, looking for an opening. When my board was taking a pummeling, I was honestly not sure I could maintain my position in the circle. Earlier we had had a conversation about being bitten, a fate I wished to avoid, and running seemed like a good option, but that might have resulted in someone else being bitten. We were so focused on the battle that when a freezing wave unexpectedly washed over our feet and ankles, we didn’t even cry out.

Inside the large metal, the CSL kept lunging, and apparently kept the van driver alert by continuing to leap about during the drive back. Meanwhile, the rest of us were stowing the equipment and interacting with the public, several of whom filmed the event. I suddenly found my limbs rubbery, and my hands not able to grip. Perhaps this was my body’s reaction after the adrenaline surge of, well, fighting a wild animal for my life.

The CSL was relatively easy to get into the outdoor pen at the center: we lined up the enclosure, slid the door up, and it jumped right out. It did calm down enough to drink some water, and when I left it was upright, gazing into the distance in the direction of the ocean, a few miles away.

It looked so peaceful I thought it would make it, but two days later it was found dead in its pen at the vet station in Sausalito. Should we have left it? Our leader says that in such a public place that would not be viable, as people would continuously call to demand a rescue, or removal of a carcass. Even the most well-intentioned volunteer work can benefit humans more than (the rest of) nature.

As someone not afraid to look critically into the mirror, I often find my hair lacking. While it can indeed be shiny, soft, and smooth, it can also be dull, coarse, and tangled. Its quality, like that of my singing voice and that of my housecleaning efforts, seems random, certainly not controllable by me. I know what competence feels like, and in the realm of haircare, I am forever a novice.

Nonetheless, during the past two or three years I frequently find myself the recipient of admiring comments about my hair, which is new to me. It’s unclear whether hair or technology is being admired, as my hair has not been naturally pigmented for years. I switched to a more-natural, if coloring one’s hair is in any sense natural, product since I moved to California, so let’s give credit where it’s due: Naturtint 5C.

The compliments have stepped up now that I find myself discussing hair products with customers at work, though these are often tacit. For instance, one customer asked me for shampoo advice and my only idea was to indicate the shampoo I currently used, with which he promptly absconded. I use that technique a lot now. If customers linger, I mention that everyone in my family has thick wavy hair, though no one has been deterred by this yet.

An elderly man in a wheelchair and his adult daughter came in recently to purchase hair color for their wife/mother. Both were Chinese speakers; he seemed to have no English so she was “translating,” from presumably fluent Chinese to a handful of presumably English nouns with an occasional verb. They wanted a color called sateen, by which I thought they may have may have meant satin.

Hair color adjectives are marketing terms, and provide no clue as to the tint or tone, and we don’t carry any that use the word satin in any case. What I really needed to know is the number/letter combo that is shared across brands, but I emphatically failed at attempting to explain that. They resorted to examining the pictures on the boxes, at the end of which they chose, from three shelves of product, the exact hair brand and color I currently use. What luck! I emphatically succeeded at indicating, mostly gesturally, that this hair on my head was that tint. They examined my hair closely, discussed it at length, and left with that box.

I love my wool–not plastic!–dryer balls so much I want to give more as gifts, but it seems we aren’t carrying them at WF any more, so I checked online. I didn’t see exactly the ones I wanted so I read some reviews. A surprising number of people who have purchased dryer balls claim the balls melt in the dryer.

What spell is this?! However, dryers are hot, and heat can melt some things. Don’t try to dry butter, for instance. If the balls go into the dryer, then don’t emerge, and your clothes aren’t visibly covered with dryer ball debris, and you don’t believe in small black holes lurking in your home, you might feel you are being logical to conclude that melting occurred.

Sadly, this is not how it feels to be logical. Personally, I think the small black holes are real. Dryers lose socks all the time, so the dryer is clearly a prime locale, though I also seem to have one that tracks my keys.

JK! Socks and dryer balls are cleverly hiding among your fresh laundry, though not at the same time, since the balls reduce the static cling that often adheres the socks to your other clothes. Dryer balls are quite skilled at sneaking into pant legs and shirt sleeves, as well as wrapping themselves securely inside linens. But they are there! You can find them! It is your quest!

Just one more reason to use a chest, rather than a laundry basket, for clothing storage.

Knowing that the dryer balls did NOT melt is just one of many happy things we can think about when the air itself seems filled with bad news. Odds are, everyone got home safely after the ball, the stove is off and the door is locked, the snow will (eventually) melt, the kids are ok, and your keys are somewhere in the house, though they may be in the refrigerator.

Whole Foods claims to pride itself on–and demonstrably makes a lot of money by–offering products derived from whole foods that are free of questionable substances, and although I certainly wouldn’t eat/use everything on offer, I think it does a decent job. The conjunction of natural food and health outcomes is a constantly changing landscape, partly because it has been understudied until recently, when the worldwide surge of reduced healthspan caught the attention of a few researchers, and also because regular people experimenting with their own health have discovered, and started to demand, healthier choices for both food and remedies. WF employs quite a few folks company-wide who try to stay in front of food and supplement trends.

Customers of WF represent a wide spectrum of awareness of these trends. Some seem to have recently left their spaceship, encountered their first human, who happened to be a marketeer, then stumbled into WF demanding, Take me to your Coke! Coca-Cola products check a lot of WF no-no boxes, but of course you knew that already.

Other folks are natural solution contrarians. One woman looking at a wall of multivitamins confided, I’m a nurse, and I don’t want anything based on organic whole foods. She must have gone to nursing school during the race to the moon, when Americans rushed to eat TV dinners and replace every possible utensil with a plastic version. I struggled with my reply, taking a chance with, I’m sure some of these have synthetic components, which luckily did not make her flinch. I eventually left her reading labels.

Another gal sought antibiotic soap. I offered her hand sanitizer, which occupies four feet of shelf space since Covid, but she didn’t want that, and I had to send her away empty-handed. WF has literally zero choices for skin microbiome-destroying soap products. It’s pretty much pro-germ.

Some folks have trouble seeing the connection between natural food and natural remedies. I had a couple of regulars in the other day looking for cold remedies; we have some herb-based ones and a lot of homeopathic ones, which contain no active ingredients at all. (They are very safe.) The woman kept examining every package, and the man kept saying, You won’t find anything you want here. We should go to the drugstore. Which they ultimately did. Presumably they were trying to avoid a trip to a second store by blurring reality, until it glared starkly back from the shelves.

On second thought, the real trend-bucker here may be WF itself. My impression is that most people, at least in the US, are perfectly happy with the products of the industrial food system, and readily adapt to the reduced health status of each successive generation. WF is a niche market. There is a great future in plastics, not to mention GMO foods and synthetic drugs.

I didn’t mean for this to end so darkly three days before Christmas, but sometimes the blog leads and I follow.

The fable known in America as Chicken Little, and in Britain as Chicken Licken or Henny Penny, has comprised a portion of the repository of oral tradition for perhaps 25 centuries, only emerging as text in the West after the Grimm Brothers rendered such transcriptions fashionable. Its portrayal of violent death as a result of paranoia leading to mass hysteria was one of many similar cautionary tales extant since the inception of advanced civilization. In our modern era this lesson has been inverted, with acolytes of conspiracy theories now comprising a plurality of the populace. Rather than being subsumed, however, CL now elucidates post-modern human mis-interpretation of the natural world.

The metaphorical nature of the tale, in which the avians are proxy for credulous, panicky humans exhibiting clearly avoidable foibles, has evolved to a literal interpretation: domestic prey animals lack cognitive ability (are dumb), while predators achieve their goals using aggression and subterfuge (are smart). Though most humans apprehend, at least vaguely, that animals neither speak human languages nor bow to a king, the perversities of the simpler interpretation permeate our culture, leading to the ubiquitous beliefs that 1) domestic and even wild prey animals are simple, dismissible, and eatable; and 2) predators are intelligent, opportunistic, and capitalistic.

Corroboration of the pervasiveness of these beliefs throughout Western culture abounds. A frightened person is chicken while a sexy one is a fox. Ruthless skulduggery inspires responses ranging from fascination to emulation. Taking the time to parse a perceived slight leads to anonymity, while killing and eating the offender goes viral. Virality is what all people seek, as espoused in aphorisms such as There’s no such thing as bad publicity.

That these beliefs are specious is manifestly demonstrable. Domesticated birds allowed even a modicum of freedom demonstrate problem-solving aptitude, and populations of escaped domestics, such as chickens in Kaua’i, readily thrive in the wild. Wild populations of predators and prey, such as rabbits and foxes, maintain stable populations over time barring ecosystem disruption. Predator animals struggle more to find food than do prey animals, and both predators and prey are more successful in cooperating groups. Yet while calmly evaluating evidence is the implied moral of the original, the literal interpretation urges us to catapult to imaginary nostrums.

Like CL, we prefer our own fantasies to observable evidence.

Most of the small jobs I’ve found and lost in the last several years have been a rough go at the onset, yet my first month at Whole Foods has been delightful. I enjoy working in the health and beauty section, the commute is short, my coworkers are friendly, and the environment is about as lax as that of a retail organization with shift work can be. Alas, I have recently realized even WF is not Lotusland.

Wait, you cry, a huge private corporation founded by the guy who blocked the public option from Obamacare, owned by an even huger corporation led by a guy who recently rode a phallus-shaped space ship to the edge of space then thanked the little people for paying, is not paradise? You’re right, I own this.

Everyone has a trigger and mine is sleep, so I was stunned to learn there will be regular 6:00 AM all-hands meetings at my store as well as quarterly inventory counts that extend until midnight. Both of those times are firmly within my sleep range, though I prefer staying up late to rising early given a choice.

I am not being given a choice.

I hope both events don’t happen on the same day.

Decades ago, I chastised a friend of mine, who happens to be (still) a bit of a mogul in Maine, for scheduling 6 AM staff meetings, pointing out that this eliminated potential employees who relied on public transportation or were solely responsible for child or elder care. I do not imagine this was an outlier in Maine, a beautiful state with the whitest population in the US (94.31% in 2021), many of whom believe the forest industry beats the government at conservation, and a majority of whom keep re-electing Senator Susan Collins, one of the people most responsible for Team Mitch, the group of jurists formerly known as the Supreme Court.

Also not Lotusland.

California is asymptotic to Lotusland, so perhaps I have an excuse to be gobsmacked by encountering such a policy at a business here. I once thought Canada was true Lotusland, perhaps excepting its weather, then I read Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree. Western Canada, it turns out, is pretty much exactly like the US: hypercapitalistic, armed to the teeth, and white-male dominated.

Perhaps to achieve my own personal Lotusland, I simply need to retire. I can’t honestly claim that most of my retired friends spend their time indulging in pleasure and luxury rather than dealing with practical concerns, as Wikipedia defines LL, but at least one does, so hope lives.

How lazy must one be, I once thought, to generate a missive for general distribution instead of writing individual letters to friends and family? The combination of full-time work and small children eventually converted me. At first, I printed the newletters, added a handwritten personal greeting to each, and sent them via USPS; now they are distributed via email. Although my job demands are meager and my children large, my available time seems to have shrunk, and Individual Card Writer is low on my list of Titles I Wish I Deserved, such as Hurdy-Gurdy Musician or Flamenco Dancer.

I didn’t even create a holiday letter in 2020, the least memorable year of my life, and while 2021 is much better, it’s still the second least memorable, at least so far. Perhaps I should say rememberable, because my goal is to forget as much as I can of living for years deprived of human faces and live music, even as that deprivation continues fitfully. I’m going to write the letter this year though, as a small snub to this sluggish, furtive, fearful world, in the if-I-don’t-protest-I-own-it vein.

In addition to their mass-produced tincture, holiday letters earned my disdain for their tendency to exaggerate good news at the expense of real life, much as the curated posts on FB and Instagram do now. As a person who views social media as a roaring river into which I occasionally insert then quickly withdraw a quavering toe, I am sorry to report that I have failed to escape the incessant trumpet blasts of self-praise, though not from the people I love and value most, and not to my personal detriment; as a skeptical elder I am immune from concluding that my own life doesn’t measure up.

So how well did I mange to balance the good and the bad in my own holiday letters? After re-reading a few examples, I grade myself a C-. I did mention negative events in each, but the letters are about 90% positive, and I was unable to resist providing escape hatches, such as countering bad grades with renewed effort, or miserable winters with an escape plan.

Maybe this is grade inflation. My Old Year’s Resolution: write a gritty holiday letter.

On Friday, Neal Stephenson dropped his new book Termination Shock, significant portions of which are set in Houston. I’m about a third of the way through it, and I’m delighted by how accurately he has captured the geography, neighborhoods, attitudes, diversity, and life-rhythms of my hometown. From casual references to the lack of zoning to observing that unlike roadkill, grocery store meat comes with an expiration date, his ambiance is pitch-perfect.

I mostly read fiction for the characters, and I rate fiction by how organic the characters seem to me, by which I mean that their actions are believable in the context of their traits and situations. Stephenson excels in that area, or I wouldn’t be downloading his books as soon as they appear.

Authors as varied as J. K. Rowling and Harriet Beecher Stowe have mentioned that their characters speak to them from inner voices, driving their own actions and choices; you can’t get much more organic than that. I recently read Dana Spiotta’s Wayward, which is well-written and entertaining, but I did not for a moment believe that the main character would do the things she did. Even if you’re a fiction writer, you can’t arbitrarily impose some action on a character, in this case a lazy, frantically self-obsessed middle-aged woman who can barely hold a job turning herself into a ripped body builder by going to the gym a few times a week while maintaining her diet of pastry and whisky.

I observe that this example violates both character traits and reality–don’t many of us wish we could have our cake and our waist too?–which reminds me that reality is also a criterion I use when choosing fiction. Since Stephenson describes Houston so well, I’m very willing to believe that his descriptions of royals in The Netherlands and a young Canadian looking for his Sikh roots in the Punjab are also grounded in facts. Factual grounding can even make fantastical elements stronger, for example as in Te Nahisi Coates’ The Water Dancer, in which both the harshness of slave life and the courage of those helping the slaves escape are illuminated by the magical transportations over space and time.

My ultimate example of character-driven writing is actually a non-fiction book, Mari Sandoz’ Crazy Horse. Sandoz found the historical figure of Crazy Horse compelling from her first exposure to his story. She traveled with an author friend who was researching the topic for her own book; circumstances intervened, and Sandoz was able to pick up the project. She wrote the entire biography conventionally, scrapped the manuscript, then rewrote it from within the Lakota world-view, using Lakota concepts and metaphors, and even replicating Lakota patterns of speech (quote from the Wikipedia page on Sandoz). Explaining the decision, she said Crazy Horse was in her head, asking her to tell his story his way. It’s one of my favorite books.

Climate change is in the news this week, and I did my part by ordering barùkas, The World’s Healthiest Nuts. Ok, that last part may be marketing hype, but the climate change link is real. The nuts come from baruzeiro tree forests in South America, which are being burned down to make way for yucky industrial ag products like GMO soy. If demand for the nuts rises, perhaps farmers can make a living from the natural ecosystem.

Or will Monsanto create Frankenfood versions of barùka nuts that grow nutrient-free in degraded soil? I tasted the roasted ones, and I’m guessing they won’t get that popular. Though papayas sure did, who knew? Good luck finding an organic papaya anywhere, even in the Philippines.

I’m trying to make some changes since climate change is here, which I know from watching the Weather Channel, an endless source of spine-tingling graphic videos. I got a lot of useful ideas from David Pogue’s How to Prepare for Climate Change, though it is a little overwrought–I am not maintaining three go-bags for home, work, and car–and crazy wrong about food; just skip that section. Mostly I am trying to use my brain to think of ways to do things differently, on a variety of scales. For example, a small scale change around petroleum-based fuels would be, drive less, and I recently changed jobs in part to reduce my car commute. A medium scale change would be, get an electric car. A large scale change would be, live car-free.

Water shortages and drought-related wildfires will likely be the biggest problem in California. That’s a tougher nut to crack, as it were. A small scale plan would be to use less water, something I try to do, but consistency is elusive. Medium scale would be to improve the efficiency of our plumbing and associated fixtures, or even incorporate gray water into our home, though we won’t have much since it rarely rains. The long term plan for water is unknown, since Pogue thinks California won’t have any. Campaign for a desalination plant?

My own efforts are pointless if I’m alone, and recently it has come to my attention that a lot of folks have not internalized that people have to change as the climate does. The condo board, of which I am currently vice president, recently reduced the number of waste and recycling receptacles in our complex, and resident complaints were immediate: We’re going to run out of space every week. Ok, so the idea is that we save some money by moving toward reduce/reuse and away from recycle/discard. Recycling is pretty much a plastics industry scam: people feel virtuous placing their containers emblazoned with numbers inside triangles into the blue bin, even though most are sent to the landfill from the recycling center. If we don’t change, yes, we’re going to run out of space in our bins, and also in our landfills, and also on our planet.

Last summer, the county of SC set up a new bike lane on ten or so blocks of a local four-lane road, by which I mean a road with stop signs and/or crosswalks at almost every intersection. The change added a protected bike lane on either side and reduced the lane count to three, one each direction plus a shared left turn. Traffic was pretty bad the first couple of days, and the comments on Nextdoor were vitriolic. A typical example: This makes it easier for bikes and harder for cars, which makes no sense, because there are more cars than bikes.

Hello? Having more cars than bikes is the status quo, but it is also the problem we are trying to solve, by making a change. These changes are very much small scale ones. I’m thinking humanity may miss the boat on this one, or more likely, a lot of us will be in boats, wondering what to do next.