Summer is upon us

Storm clouds gathering

Monsoon season is upon Pima County and adjacent areas. Since the second week of July, frequent late afternoon rains have occurred regularly. They have replenished groundwater, greened up everything that wasn't, and reminded the mechanical/industrial world that storms always win. Getting to this point hasn't been easy.

I was headed to my brother's house across town on July 14 when storm clouds began to gather on the east side of the city. Having wised up about the hazards of being caught out on the streets in a monsoon storm, I decided to steer my little car toward a gas station where there was a large roof over several rows of gas pumps and a small structure where the attendant hangs out. Impromptu plan: I could buy gas and then wait out the storm. No sooner had I pulled up to a pump, the wind began to blow, carrying with it a whole lot of nearly-horizontal rain. With the wind and rain was a whole lot of trash that the wind had picked up from somewhere and was now flinging through space at 30 or 40 miles per hour. I was parked next to a gas pump, but the car was obviously larger than the gas pump, so protection from hurtling objects wasn't really an option. I watched as a large plastic tarp and maybe a banner or sign or something with strings fluttered across the parking lot about 30 feet away. Whew! Dodged that. I was texting my brother to let him know that I had pulled over to wait out the storm when a huge slab of flat, wet cardboard slammed up against the side of the car, which caused me to perk up and pay more attention. I watched as the box slid over the windshield and continued its travels, trailing after the plastic stuff that was now flying over several rows of parked cars. A few seconds after that, a cardboard beer carton smacked into the rearview mirror; the impact caused the cardboard to rip and fly off over the hood. I watched the carton as it vanished in the torrent. To my right, nearby Stone Avenue had turned into a river. Cars were still driving through the water that was nearly up to the curb, or they were turning into parking lots or turning around and heading back from whence they had come. Driving had become a free-for-all. I was contemplating the dark dark gray sky over the "river" when a flash of lightning occurred, which was followed by a flash of the lights in the gas station roof under which I was parked and then the lights and pumps all blinked off. There would be no gas purchase now. I waited another 15 or 20 minutes for the rain to slow and the wind to die, and then headed south on what I hoped were roads and not rivers. 

Clearly, I didn't wait long enough. At nearly every intersection, several inches of water flowed from east to west. My car does not know how to swim, and its undercarriage is only five inches from the road surface, so timing was everything as I drove through the intersections. If cars were entering the intersection from the other direction, I had to wait until the wave of water their wheels had pushed out of the way had cleared my lane. Then I had to drive stealthily through the shallower water before more water rushed in to fill up the space again. I kept thinking I probably would be better off with a raft made out of logs and a long pole to push myself away from other objects in the stream. Nonetheless I got pretty good at driving through the waves after several blocks, so much so that I had a chance to look around at the damage the monsoon had caused. A bus stop kiosk near the university had been blown down, trees were uprooted, branches were down, trash cans lay on their sides. What must have been a quiet street an hour earlier looked like the aftermath of an angry dude on a bulldozer driving through. 

I cruised through a nearly empty downtown. When I eventually arrived at my brother's house, he was dismayed that a large limb in his ancient Rhus tree had broken during the storm. About 12 feet long, the limb was still propped against the tree but its tips sprawled all the way to the outdoor dining area on his patio, where they rested on a table and chair. An early-morning session with a chain saw would eventually be conducted to clear away the limb.

Since that day, it has rained a few times a week -- I have not been keeping track -- and the intensity of each storm has varied. The quick storms are the best. Wind happens, then rain, then wind, and then everything's quiet again in a matter of half an hour. 

Last weekend, after a break in a thunderstorm that had been going on for a few hours, I opened the back door of the casita to let in some cool fresh air. I was at the computer, and there was a light on in the living room a few feet from the back door. After several minutes, I noticed there were several little bug creatures flying around my computer screen. I just swatted them out of the way and kept working... until they called in reinforcements. I grabbed a paper towel and started squishing the little guys that I thought were flying ants; they disintegrated into little piles of sawdust when they were squished, which seemed a little weird. Maybe these weren't flying ants? I glanced toward the back door, which has a steel security storm door with lots of holes in it. It was covered with little creatures, many of whom were trying to worm their way through the holes to get inside, where they could join their friends in fluttering around the light that was turned on. I got up to investigate. Nope. These were not flying ants. They were termites. Hundreds of termites. Maybe thousands of termites. So many termites. Yikes! I turned off the light and the computer monitor and then flipped on the outside light next to the back door. I hoped the ones that were inside would go back outside through the little holes, but having the light on outside only seemed to encourage more termites to show up and cling to the storm door. On the patio at the base of the door was a very large toad snacking on whatever termites dropped to the ground, but he obviously wasn't eating fast enough or maybe he was now full and didn't want to eat any more. I watched him for a moment and then did the worst thing I could imagine to try to shoo the termites away: I spritzed household cleaner on the storm door, dousing the termites with soapy "Brand New Day" scented disinfecting cleaner. The toad hopped away. He knew this wasn't going to make the termites taste any better.  And then I shut the inside door and turned off all the lights and went to bed. When in doubt about how to manage a termite swarm, sleep always seems like a reasonable option.

Termite tragedy

The next morning, the crosspieces on the storm door were covered with little dead and dying termite bodies. The toad was long gone. I looked around in the living room, not really sure what I might be looking for. There were no great holes in the ceiling near the indoor light where the termites had congregated the night before. And the only indication that any of the termites had ventured all the way across the living room was a single pair of tiny termite wings on my laptop. Just the same, I let the landlord know that there had been an invasion so she could get an inspection or a treatment or maybe just burn down the casita as a precaution. She told me that the next-door neighbors had destroyed a huge termite mound a few weeks earlier when they poured concrete for a new building in their back yard. These little vagabonds had been homeless for two weeks, and when they saw the back door of the casita open, they apparently decided to make their move. For my landlords' sake, I hope the would-be squatters were sufficiently discouraged by my lack of hospitality. 

And now it's August. Rain is still in the forecast, although it seems to have lost some of its gusto. And there are days when the temperature reaches 107, like it's doing today, when the possibility of rain is a toss-up. As I write, storm clouds are gathering to the southeast, the mesquite trees are rustling in the wind, and rumbles of thunder are rolling through the neighborhood. It's not clear if the rain will actually fall here at the casita or just go around, like it sometimes does. 

But the mountains are fuzzy and green now.  It's a reminder. And a good look. 

Greening on the Santa Catalina Mountains

Never stand in the way. Of anything.

This is a narrative about the evolution of depression. Don't read it if you are uncomfortable with descriptions of awkward mental processes.

In a renewed effort to find a place to live before the November election fucks up interest rates and house prices and all we can afford to live in are those yellow Goodwill clothing drop boxes in the corners of grocery store parking lots, I went on a couple of house tours today. The places I looked at were not great. I had many thoughts while on these tours. Here are a few of them.

First thought for the day: The places I looked at were condos. There were limits and restrictions and requirements. These are not things that I get excited about when I imagine spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to live in my own home. Conclusion: Living in a condo is like willingly giving up one's adulthood and reverting to that stage of childhood in which one must co-exist with parents who require one to ask for permission to do all of the things that a reasonable adult would know how to do and be able to manage on one's own. Why? Why oh why oh why do people agree to do this? Do they not trust their own instincts? Can they not handle decision making?

Second thought for the day: Most real estate listings have some sort of sales history. One can tell by looking at the sales history whether a place was owned by one party for a length of time. The length of ownership often correlates to the degree of maintenance a place has received; the longer one party owns the place, the more likely it is to look deteriorated or outdated. Places can look "frozen in time" with light fixtures, cabinets, decorations, appliances and such from decades gone by that suggest that the home's last occupant was older than Joe Biden and probably in poorer health and didn't keep the place up very well. One of the places I looked at today had an old-fashioned cuckoo clock on the wall. It had been painted white just like the wall it was attached to. The bedroom hallway smelled like cleaning fluids and medical equipment and supplies. I wondered how sick the occupant was before they moved away. Third thought for the day: For a hot minute in the late 1990s, I became president of a homeowners association board because, as a "know-it-all," I argued that the existing board president's decision to prevent the installation of small satellite dish antennas on homeowners' roofs was a violation of the tenets of the federal Telecommunications Act. Elated homeowners forced out the existing board president, I was declared board president by acclamation, and thus I served as such for a few months, during which time several small satellite dish antennas were installed on various roofs in the neighborhood. I stopped being board president when a different neighbor, whose husband was a cop, threatened to use her husband's gun to shoot me because she didn't like the way I was presidenting and she wanted to be board president so she could manage the neighborhood pool. Never stand in the way of progress, I say. I resigned, gave her the notebook of meeting minutes, and am still alive today.

Fourth thought for the day: I am going to go look at another house tomorrow morning. The people that lived there previously operated a copier repair shop. They sold the house to a flipper last December. The flipper spent some quality time and money remodeling it because it looks great inside now. They didn't pick it up and move it to a different neighborhood, which would have been great, too, but they installed new floors, new fixtures, new windows, and repositioned the front door, painted it inside and out, and generally made it look pretty pleasant. But in a city where houses are sold in a matter of days, this one is long in the tooth. It has been on the market for three months. I am already imagining the worst. Aside from the lengthy time factor for the listing, the fact that the lot and house are zoned for business rather than residential, the fact that there's a really busy and noisy main thoroughfare about 800 feet away plus maybe some other kinda clunky neighborhoods just a few more blocks beyond that, I have no reason to imagine the worst. Do I?

There were other thoughts, too, even more tedious and dark than these. I will spare you the details. Suffice it to say that I felt so bad I took a COVID test just to reassure myself that I was not sick.

Final thought for the day: Just thinking the accumulated negative thoughts of the day should have been sufficient. They put me in a foul mood, which is precisely what accumulated negative thoughts do. But I could have let them go. I didn't. I am going to bed tonight blaming myself for all of these ills, some of which are nearly 30 years old. I did nothing to cause any of these things to be what they are -- well, except maybe for the little uptick in satellite dish antennas in the New Mark neighborhood in 1997-98 -- and as a bystander, I should have been able to watch these matters blow on by. But I have internalized every one of these things and decided that I am somehow simultaneously responsible for and a target of all of this crap because of the bad choices I have made in my life. This is not accurate, but this is how disappointment and frustration turn into depression. This is intriguingly fucked up. I am looking forward to sleeping so my brain can sort it all out.

I know. No one asked me.

It's time to speak up, even if no one asked me. After listening to Biden's ABC interview last night and reading the interview transcript this morning, I'm more than slightly concerned about the capabilities of Biden to process information and communicate it clearly to others. I'm an editor, so I'm a little picky about effective word usage and the continuity of the story line. I thought Biden’s word choice skills seemed diminished, even for speech, and the complexity of his ideas seemed much too simple for a man who's supposed to be managing all the tigers in the metaphorical global circus. In addition, his sense of responsibility to people living in the United States seemed overshadowed x1000 by his perception of the importance of his international role and obligations -- an imbalance that seemed to emphasize his connections to the past over his role in the future. 

The interview's purpose was to reveal the true/unscripted/unteleprompted character of the man whose behavioral capabilities have recently come under scrutiny because they didn't meet the media's and his political party's expectations during a 90-minute debate with his opponent. Pundits said in advance of the interview that the president's conversation with a respected journalist would reassure voters that the president was fine. Or not. It didn't. Biden's demeanor was aptly defensive from the start, and many of his responses were similarly framed. He maintained that position from start to finish, much like the cranky old man who yells at the neighbor kids to get off his lawn. If this is his true character, then it is problematic, in my opinion, for what it reveals about the deleterious effects of aging and stress on mental capacity, and for what it conveyed about Biden's reluctance/defiance/denial to acknowledge the significance of these effects. 

Fox News and others have criticized Biden for stating "I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about" in response to the question "And if you stay in, and Trump is elected and everything you’re warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January?" While the word "goodest" was a conspicuous gaffe (and has now been edited out of the transcript by ABC), targeting a single word is too easy, too lazy. What's significant here is how Biden's response focused on a sense of intensely personal vindication for maintaining status quo, as if he were a Little Leaguer who knew he would get a shiny little participation trophy at the end of the game even if he didn't hit a single ball. Missing was any forward-looking observation about the importance of rallying the party and the public to do everything they can to prevent the new president from enacting policies that will plunge this country into an abyss. Missing was the sense of connection to local, national and world leaders who view the United States as the strongest nation in the world and how he, as an elder statesman, might figure into that scene. Nope. It was just Biden batting the best he could in the big election game of 2024, and if striking out were to happen, then oh, well, trophies all around. 

Biden gave too many answers like this during this interview. He introduced several campaign-related economic, social and internationally political talking points, but then his remarks looped and wound themselves around each other and strangled his original intention or the idea itself to death. Take, for example, his remark about the computer chip:

     “I’m the guy that got Japanese to expand their budget. I’m the — so I mean, these — and, for example, when I decided we used to have 40 percent of computer chips. We invented the chip, the little chip, the computer chip. It’s in everything from cellphones to weapons. And so, we used to have 40 percent, and we’re down to virtually nothing. So I get in the plane, against the advice of everybody, and I fly to South Korea. I convince them to invest in the United States, billions of dollars. Now we have tens of billions of dollars being invested in the United States making us back in a position — we’re going to own that industry again. We have, I mean, I — I just — anyway. I’m — I don’t want to take too much credit. I have a great staff."

This explanation has a lot of great visual content, but the ideas are so disorganized it's hard to understand whether there's a point to the story. This was a classic senior moment, a brain fart, a “What was I going to say? Oh, never mind” attempt to explain something that the brain could not sustain. This was a mess. If this is how conversations unravel at the G7 summit, then something is wrong. 

Similarly, I had concerns about Biden's answers to the questions about his willingness to take independently administered cognitive and/or neurological tests: "Look. I have a cognitive test every single day. Every day I have that test. Everything I do. You know, not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world." Forgive me, but this sounds like the rationale of a kid who thinks he can drive a car just because his feet can reach the pedals. I don’t want a president who believes he can manage the government of the country just because he can sit comfortably at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. 

Make no mistake; I don’t want Trump to return to the presidency. The country has already had an unhealthy dose of exposure to his practice of bad decision-making and even worse leadership, and his mental abilities are broken in very sick and dangerous ways. On the other hand, I am unnerved by the possibility of returning a president to the White House who thinks every day is a cognitive test and that he should be allowed to lead based on his past record, his presumed rapport with international leaders, and the support of a great staff. One of the questions in a cognitive test involves being able to draw a clock face with the hands positioned thusly to reflect a specific hour and minute. Both candidates are falling short in their ability to tell time.

Learn from home!

I am living in a lovely little casita situated in the back yard of a larger home on a 2-acre property just slightly east of Tucson. (After my discouraging foray into the world of house-buying, this is probably where I'll be living for the next few months....) The resident owners are 21st-century homesteaders. As a family, they have created a delightful garden/playground for their children, and in one corner of the yard is a chicken coop of about 30-40 hens and one rooster. The casita is situated opposite the chicken coop, which can be a mixed blessing: all the eggs I want to eat, but kind of chicken-poop smelly on rainy days. The family doesn't know it (and the chickens probably don't either), but this big back yard is serving as a fascinating classroom for me. Don't know something about desert environments? Wait a few days. Something new will appear.

The back yard is planted with an assortment of mostly columnar cacti, including saguaro, bishop's cap and totem pole species. There is also a prickly pear, the pads of which are occasionally knocked off by the youngest child driving her toy Jeep around and around in a big circle. There are several large agave plants of the type with wicked little black hooks at the tips of their leaves. The owners have also planted plenty of desert flowers, including yuccas, poppies, milkweed, vitex bushes and others to attract bees and hummingbirds. There are a couple of very tall pine trees near the main house and maybe a dozen or so mesquite trees scattered around. And there are several raised flower beds filled with more flowers and many many tomatoes. There is no grass. There might have been some sort of grass when it was cooler, but it has withered and dried as a result of several weeks of 100-degree days. The Catalina and Rincon mountain ranges are visible to the north and east respectively. In all directions, there is sky -- usually blue, with white puffy clouds. That changes during monsoon season, at which time I can see four or five different types of weather taking place as I scan the sky from east to west and north to south. All of this adds up to enough visual stimulation to keep me occupied and out of mischief. However, due to my horticulture background, I am particularly intrigued with the business of being a plant in this place. And plants here are forever changing. Often rapidly, or so it seems. A few weeks ago, shriveled black blossoms of the saguaro cactus began dropping to the ground. These were all that were left of the beautiful white flowers that appeared at the top of the cacti in mid-May. The shriveled blossoms were brittle and papery and had rows of tiny yellowish spines. They fell if a flower was not fertilized and therefore on its way to making a fruit. (More on saguaro fruits in a bit....) My ancient French bulldog thinks everything she finds on the ground must be tasted to determine whether it belongs in her life. She thought these shriveled little nubbies were manna from heaven, and she sought them out for a few days -- until she started noticing the spines. That's when she stopped chewing on them.

Last week it was mesquite bean pods, which Ms. Frenchie with the Indiscriminating Palate assumed were all meant for her, as well. They are edible, and they are safe for dogs to eat in moderation. But these were like crack to her. She liked them so much she was inventing excuses to go outside to find them. I plucked a few green pods off the trees to feed her because they weren't so tough and fibrous. She wanted more. She sought pods on the ground that had already ripened. The beans in these ripe pods were fat and hard, like pieces of gravel, and the pods were leathery, but she was still chewing on them as if she needed them to get through the day. Well, she chewed on them until she realized that her tummyache was from eating too many bean pods. She has tapered her pod habit somewhat.

Then came the saguaro fruits. These are pods of a different type that form at the top of a saguaro about a month after the cacti bloom in May. When the fruits are ripe, they split open to reveal a seed-filled sweet red goo much revered by the birds, bats and bugs that can reach them at the top of a saguaro. Humans either have to harvest them with long poles or wait for them to fall to the ground, and then we must compete with the ants and other sweet-eating bugs for a taste. I first noticed these red fruits about a week ago during a drive through Saguaro National Park East. Since then one or two have fallen from the saguaro in the back yard of the casita. Ms. Frenchie with the Indiscriminating Palate sampled one and decided that the ants were too numerous to really enjoy the fruit. I tried sampling it, but at that point the goo was kind of a combination of dog saliva, ant spit and whatever else had crawled into it, so it didn't taste very good. Last night it rained. This morning there were half a dozen or so fruits on the ground at the base of the saguaro in the back yard. The dog and ants still hadn't found them at 6 a.m., so I sampled a bit of the goo. It has the texture of a mashed strawberry -- including numerous small, black seeds -- but the taste is not as sugary as that of a strawberry. It tastes like -- red goo.

The Tohono O'odham harvest the fruits and make jams, syrup and wine of the goo and flour and animal feed of the seeds, according to information on the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum website. Ripening of the saguaro fruits marks the start of monsoon season and has special significance in their calendar and ceremonies. The things one learns....

I didn't take a bus to get here

I'm in Tucson these days. After leaving here in 2015 to return to the midwest to help take care of my aging parents, I have finally returned to southern Arizona to enjoy the sun and the gifts of the desert. I didn't take a bus to get here. My family and I packed all of my belongings into a rental truck and we drove 1,200 miles in three days. And now here I am. 

I am fascinated by the wide skies in this place. Having grown up in the midwest, where deciduous trees do their darnedest to cover up the space of the sky and conceal pending changes in the weather, I am enamored by the way the open sky stretches for miles in every direction here. Sure, there are occasional palm trees that add exclamation points to the sky drama, and once in a while the peaks of various mountains conspire to create a barrier to the view, but palm trees have to point somewhere and those mountains are a pretty impressive view on their own. 

I am intrigued by this place, in part because I don't know that much about it. Any time I have moved to a new location, I have arrived there with only a modicum of knowledge about its better known features. I have had to learn about its lesser features through observation and experience, as it should be. A person does not, or perhaps should not, enter a place expecting the place to explain to the person within 48 hours of arrival everything the person has to know. It is up to the person to observe and experience the place in order to understand how its elements fit together (or don't, in some cases). That takes time, and work, and usually more time and more work to understand the relationships between all of the things.

For example, I have lived in Tucson previously during two summer monsoon seasons. I recall standing or sitting in the yard of the places where I was living and observing how the sky changed at the start of each season, becoming less filled with puffy little cumulus clouds and making room instead for more cirrus and nimbus clouds of various types. The sky's blue color became richer and deeper; its texture, less translucent. I recall looking out of the window of my brother's house to watch the monsoon rain runoff flow like a river down the street, swelling outward from the curb until it reached the center line of the street. I remember rushing out into the rain to move my parked car so that the engine would not be flooded by the runoff and then just sitting in the car for many minutes at an intersection because the water wasn't as deep there and I was confident the water wouldn't reach the engine. I remember another time, shortly after a monsoon rain ended, when I thought it would be okay to drive a couple of miles to the Safeway store to get groceries – only to discover that the rainwater had not receded on the main thoroughfares and I still had to drive through standing water to get into the parking lot of the store. I thought at that time that there was something wrong with the city's sewer system. But those were the only times I observed the effects of the summer monsoons here. 

Until yesterday. Yesterday my daughter and I drove to DeGrazia Gallery in the foothills on the north side of town. Rain and rainclouds lingered over the Catalinas and the Rincons, but they seemed stuck in place. While we were in the gallery, they started moving. Rain fell hard and drenched many parts of town. We didn't know that, though, as we got into the car and left the gallery to head back home. We soon found out.

Driving during a monsoon is a dangerous pursuit: The streets fill with water, low places where washes cross swell with rushing water, cars drive wherever and however they can to avoid driving into said water, traffic lights go dark, people speed to get out of the water zones, and chaos ensues. I was worried initially about hydroplaning; I quickly piled on additional worries as we traveled farther. We eventually pulled into a parking lot filled with rushing, swirling ankle-deep water and found a parking area on a slight incline where we could get out of the "lake" that filled the lot. My daughter pointed out a grocery store customer who was wading through the ankle-deep water as she pushed her grocery cart full of bagged groceries to her car. We waited a long time before the rain stopped and we thought it might be safe to drive the rest of the way. It wasn't. Traffic was a mess. We made it home eventually but not without becoming wiser for the observations and experience. 

That's what a new place is about. That's part of the fascination, part of the intrigue. I am looking forward to it.