I have not addressed the large sinkholes in the dailiness of the spill at the beginning of the year and I still don’t want to.

Holidays … no. I still don’t wanna.

Today was another day of brilliant sunshine and as I often do, I looked for a productive excuse to be out in it. I ended up clearing something like seventy percent of the branches out of the power lines out back, and 100% of the ones that were getting seriously and dangerously entangled.

It was hard but shockingly easy compared to how hard it sounds.

There is an enormous pile of long spiking cottonwood branches clogging my back patio now. I expect that my outside-in-the-sun excuse will be: Alex Vairtere, esteemed belletrist and human woodchipping machine, for some time.

This was from a video I watched in the dusk. I love this cultural geography sort of thing. Absorbing its patterns into my own is what I’m good at. This is not a particularly marketable skill …

Digression: Currently Jimmy Dore is standing alone, almost unchallenged, at the top of my viewing habit (in spite of some quite interesting up-and-comers). Today his guest was Matt Stoller, who said some things I violently disagreed with, and some that I felt were quite insightful, as in:

“The basic problem on the progressive side is that progressives are just not interested in business … a lot of power in America flows through business, and I don’t mean that it flows through big corporations controlling things, but (little ones too, essentially)”.

Yeah. I’ve never cared about business. That’s why I worked in places like libraries and classrooms, and I reacted very badly when there was movement in those places to called patrons or students “customers”.

But now in my feverish PTSD brain, those places are Institutions, and the saving anti-business graces they once offered are less and less in evidence, like vanishing sea ice.

I’m still an anticapitalist. I still would rather not think about money or especially how to get more.

But the paradox of anti-institutionalism in a world where the mortgage still needs paying is that there are not many choices left, when it comes to paying it, other than to become one’s own institution, and generate one’s own capital. At least a little. Until UBI is more than a pipe dream, in a country where health care too costs money.

The people I’ve been admiring most lately are precisely engaged in threading this paradoxical needle, living in a world of ideas and having good ones, and, apparently, having Enough green come out of that endeavor, like an afterthought or as a by-product … to live on.

Mainly as writers.

I’ve said it all before.

I’ve predicted that I will be on that road any day now.

I’m still saying soon.

Hold tight.