Everything is connected. Everything is changing. Pay attention.

Remarkable how quickly one loses muscle tone & wind at my age.

The Schlock job requires a lot of sitting on my ass. And I haven't really had the time to exercise formally. I noticed that yesterday, when a stroll up New Paltz's hilly Main Street left me breathless.

Yes, I should make exercise a priority.

But honestly?

It's all I can do to force myself not to quit the Schlock job.

Adding more "must"s to the list would be ill-advised at this time because I won't, and then I'll feel very guilty, worthless, & inadequate.

###

Meanwhile, by the time I made it to the New Paltz Community Garden, clouds were coming in, and the temperature had dropped. Weeding was not going to be fun. So I contented myself by circling back to the casa and weeding the Patrizia-torium instead, which is now a veritable dell of enchantment and clean! So clean.

I had quite a good time doing errands in New Paltz, tromping dyspnea notwithstanding:

Banner off somebody's porch:



Front window at the Cat Café mit bonus reflected Portrait of the Artist:



Solar power-operated Frida. Tough battle, but somehow I convinced myself I could live without it:



I splurged on books instead. Hard covers! When I closed up the house in Monterey, I swore I would never buy hardcover books again, since I had a library of something like 3,000 of them; I loved them all, but transporting them to the East Coast was completely out of the question, and nobody else wanted them, nobody! I did try. On the West Coast, libraries don't do periodic book sales to raise cash the way they do on the East Coast.

I do read digitally, but truth be told, I prefer physical books. I like the heft of them, I love the faint smell of bookbinding glue and the texture of paper pages.

My extravagant expenditure sparked a momentary tizzy. Books! Great! You can burn these for heat & light when an Iranian drone takes out all the power plants. Fahrenheit 451 was actually a survival guide!

###

On the way to New Paltz, I took a wrong turn & ended up on an unfamiliar road. But, of course, there are no such things as wrong turns; you are always exactly where the Universe wants you to be, and the Universe clearly wanted me to enjoy spectacular views of the Shawangunk ridge:



Plus bonus view of dead-seeming orchard, longing to become a symbol of spring & rebirth when it jumpstarts those pink blossoms in the next month or so—always assuming the brutal winter that now finally seems to be ending didn't murder it:

Scary, scary, scary world.

Even before the Iran war, the U.S. was falling apart. In February, wholesale prices jumped 0.7%, twice the predicted inflation rate. When retailers pay more for goods, they pass those costs on to consumers through higher prices at the checkout counter.

And so far in 2026, there have been literally only slightly more than 18,000 new jobs created (in a nation of 365 million people).

The war adds a whole new level of economic misery, of course, since higher energy prices ripple through everything.

The cost of gasoline obviously hits consumers at the pump, but it also increases utility bills and transportation costs of goods, since so little of what we consume is produced close to where we live. The housing market is insane, and the world of imaginary money—the stock market with its more-or-less arbitrary valuations—is showing signs of unraveling: The Dow and Nasdaq are now in correction territory, meaning they’ve fallen more than 10 percent from their recent highs.

Nor will American exceptionalism be the only victim of Trump & Netanyahu's megalomania: The basis for almost all nonorganic fertilizers is ammonia, primarily manufactured from fossil fuels. Much of it is manufactured in places like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and, yes, Iran, and shipped through the Strait of Hormuz to places like India, Bangladesh, Brazil, and Pakistan. Without access to these fertilizers, agricultural production is going to plummet, so we can anticipate famine—which is going to increase the whole unwanted migration phenomenon.

It's a fuckin' mess, in other words.

How's a defenceless little mammal like me supposed to survive in this world of thundering dinosaur stupidity?

By scampering out of the way of their colossal footfalls, I suppose.

But just how exactly am I supposed to do that?

###

Anyway, this is the reason why though I loathe working for Schlock, I am determined to last out the season. Grimly determined, though I can see the toll that work is taking on both my physical & mental health. It is wise right now to position oneself as far ahead of that plunging economic curve as one can possibly get—though on my stumpy little mammal legs, that is not very far. The whole thing is gearing up to come crashing down very fast if Trump doesn't get bored enough with the Iran War to end it very fast.

###

When it happens, it happens very fast...

I remember thinking that after Sarajevo fell in 1996 because in 1970, when there was still Yugoslavia, I spent a couple of days in Sarajevo on my way to Greece, and unsophisticated little naif as I was back then, I remember marveling that Sarajevo was so much like Oakland, California. The same fading post-industrial architecture, and the sky wasn't orange or anything, it was blue!

How could a place that reminded me so much of another place I knew intimately be the site of a bloody civil war? My mind truly boggled.

And it was kind of like the Universe was whispering in my ear: When it happens, it happens very fast.

###

Schlock is truly awful. I like doing taxes, but I don't do a whole lot of those.

Mostly, I sit in a cubicle doing absolutely nothing beyond surreptitiously Googling Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell analyses. (Definitely the one book I would smuggle on to that desert island.) Doing nothing doesn't sound all that bad, but it's absolutely lethal. Boredom is not the worst thing in the world; the worst thing would be torture. But having the sort of mind that relishes facts & figures most other people find excessively dry, I am hardly ever bored, so boredom is a relatively unusual & unpleasant experience for me. It makes me feel invisible. It makes me feel... extinguished.

I did finally cop to the insanity of working every single day for 90 days straight, and thus carved out two days off in a row for myself.

I had all sorts of plans for yesterday, but found myself so exhausted that I did very little beyond vacuuming and refurbishing my purple hair. (...only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your purple hair)

Today, I have Big Plans to toddle off to the New Paltz Community Garden and begin weeding. Though if I don't, I will be gentle with myself.

Honestly, the most pressing dilemma I face at the moment is that the company that makes the hair dye I've been using for the past seven years has discontinued its production.

I'm pretty sure Schwarzkopf does not ship through the Strait of Hormuz, so what the hell is their problem, huh?