Category Archives: Notes from Self

Dear Readers:

First of all, I can’t believe it’s November already.  Where did October go?

I don’t care to say much more about Helene’s devastating aftermath.  For one thing, the tragic stories are anywhere you care to look and I have nothing to add to them.  For the other thing, our personal experience falls mainly into the nuisance category — a nuisance of hours, of physical and mental energy, of dollars (not sure whether FEMA will help on that account) that would not have been expended save for the deluge of rains and wind.

You don’t expect to hear the phrase “we were fortunate” from someone who lost power, phone and data for 17 days, running water for 20 days, and drinkable water for weeks to come.  Yes, we were fortunate, and saying this carries the weight of those who were not.

Consider that schools in Yancey County, 40 miles to our north, will remain closed at least through November 8.  Roads there are still impassable for school buses.  Many parents can’t drive their children to school or themselves to work, if their workplaces are still open in those parts.

Bad things dealt out by fortune, or by circumstances set in place long before their victims were born, form the basis of survivor’s guilt and one’s dealings therewith.

• • • 

Will Asheville recover?  Or will impatient tourists just move on to the next trendy place, leading to further economic struggle?  Local businesses are doing their best to rekindle the Blue Ridge Mountain flame from the waterlogged embers of our pre-Helene reputation.  But this will take years, and many businesses will not have enough capital to survive. Hundreds of service workers will leave to make a living elsewhere despite the draw of our ostentatious mansion and our colorful fall leaves.  Let’s hope that Appalachian tourism does not succumb to the same forces that doomed its furniture and textile manufacturing many decades ago.

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A mini-slide undermined a neighbor’s driveway, an expensive nuisance from Helene.

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The Asheville NextDoor website (your town must have one too) has witnessed a flood of “helpful” people post-Helene, offering used furniture for sale, handyman services for sale, massages for sale, everything for sale.  Because this is America, and America invented the idea that there’s no time like the anxious present to make a buck.

I do understand that many people might be desperate to raise cash.  However, the recent spate of sales pitches on our NextDoor site surprises even me.  It nearly surpasses — but not quite — the number of posts about lost cats and found dogs.

• • • 

Americans think that democracy means you can believe anything you want and that facts are up for a vote.  Which is why, on post-Helene NextDoor, I have been reading too many comments like this:

“The dust has some bad bad contimantents in it that will burn your skin, not to mention the lungs. I have a mammogram appointment coming up in November, I pray it rains enough to wash away all this mess!!  Stay away from this dust if you know what is good for you”

“it’s not lake water the water is not safe in any way get wa water test kit off amazon it has heavy metals chlorine is off the charts 8x stronger than safe human exposure all the chemical treatments they are doing in the north fork to settle the sediment is not safe for Humans to use no joke to and boiling it will not help even tough they are telling us that why do you think water is free everywhere a friends dog got gardia from drinking it fema gives you a hotel voucher to everyone to shower”

“I’ve seen too many posts from people who have gotten rashes and burns and skin peeling OR have gotten sick after showering in it. Supposedly it’s a combo of both bacteria and chemicals. I have showered in it twice but had intense dry skin that flakes off (never had that before!) and intense itching that lasts for days. When I washed my hair, it felt dirtier than before I washed it. With all of the chemical spills and findings in the water, I’m beginning to wonder if we will ever have water in our homes that we can shower in.”

For the record, I’ve been showering in the City of Asheville water and so far only four of my fingers have fallen off, which left me just enough to type this post.  If I stop showering now, I should be able to write another one next week.

• • • 

I want to hide in my bed starting Tuesday, November 5 at 6:59 pm and ending whenever the sirens stop sounding.  I will take a crossword puzzle book with me, with no dictionary.  Leave me alone until Thursday morning, then bring me a strong cup of coffee brewed with FEMA water and tell me the news.  Not that the people on NextDoor will have magically become astute between now and then.

A Kentucky country singer named Larry Redmon wrote and recorded a number called, “Can’t Leave Well Enough Alone,” which could very well have been the theme music for the many days I have spent cleaning/fixing/rebuilding our modest water feature over the past decade-plus.

But, didn’t you break your toe and decide you were done with all that last year, my readers may well ask!  Well, here’s the latest and greatest (unmute to hear water and bird sounds):

The big change I made this spring was installing a low platform in the pool, over which I laid a sheet of filter fabric to keep debris out of the pool, and then laying flat stones on top of that.  So the water reservoir itself is now invisible — there’s only a little water on the surface of the rocks, to make it easy to blow leaves out.  And hopefully no more sludge to scoop out in the spring.

Here is a brief history of the Pool at Pooh Corner.  Click the links, there will be a quiz.

2012:  The original platform for the statue, with just a dribble of water.

2016:  In the quest for ever more splash, I added the double cascade.  The water reservoir was just a 10-gallon pail hidden in a drain in front of the statue, which only accommodated a small pump.

2017:  We paid some people to rebuild the water feature and dig out a proper pool so that a bigger pump could be installed.  The thing turned into a rock quarry and took a good bite out of the walkway as well.  I had misgivings from the start.

2022:  Now known as the Pit of Despair, the water feature was continuously plagued by leaks and debris.  I decided that I would take matters into my own hands and rebuild it myself in the spring.

2023:  My rebuild project came to a pathetic halt after I fell and broke my toe.  The people I hired to finish the job did OK but I could see their hearts weren’t into it — it wasn’t their usual line-of-business, they acted like they were doing me a favor, and they really weren’t on board with my objectives (minimal maintenance).   But it looked nice.

Which brings us to now.  I never read Moby Dick but I wonder if I unconsciously turned the water feature into a Captain Ahab kind of retirement obsession.  It bothers me that such a trivial thing has grabbed so much of my mind and my time.  But in the words of Texas gospel blues singer Blind Willie Johnson, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.

Forgive me, Reader, for it has been almost two years since my last Note from Self.  That is officially a Long Time between updates.  The pandemic has been declared over — but is it?  I haven’t been wearing a mask out and about — but every time I see someone else doing so, I wonder, is it time for me to return to combat mode?

It takes me back to March 2020, when no one knew the power of COVID, what the worst would be like, or how we would fare.  There was a lot of fear in the air — we washed our produce in the laundry room before bringing it into our kitchen.  Now this didn’t sound silly at the time, maybe a bit Kosher, though I don’t know what that’s like either.

Everyday Americans behave as if “the worst” is now over, but anecdotal references to the Great COVID Resurgence are mounting.  One friend told my spouse how their choir recital led to half the choir contracting COVID.  In this light, we just scheduled COVID/flu shots at CVS and hope we’ve done it in time, before choirs around here start coughing their notes out.  So here we go once again doing our liberal duty for ourselves and the public, protecting us from others and vice versa, as it were.

We must have a dozen COVID test kits that one of us ordered during the pandemic, which I hope will go to waste.  (You no doubt have a few too.)   If every U.S. citizen were to stack our unused COVID tests end-to-end, the resulting tower of nose-swabs could have poked a hole in the Chinese balloon that did or did not spy on us earlier this year.  Now that would teach the Chinese to keep their viruses to themselves.  Tik Tok that!

An aside: I recall my parents fretting over things, but I never recall them trying to “time” or “optimize” things like we have done over our lives.  For my parents, life was all about “dealing with” — and one either dealt with or didn’t.  The whole idea of timing and/or optimizing one’s life choices is probably a Boomer phenomenon, enabled by those who brought us into this world, thinking we should have a better shot at things than they did.  Or maybe our being not only compelled to but entitled to optimize our lives was born of frustration with how older generations seemed resigned to so many things.

Answering such questions with finality is why God created anthropological sociologists and sociological anthropologists, not to mention arthritic socialists and social arthropods. Two‑by‑two on the Ark they boarded.

But back to reality.  Talking about the pandemic and its sequelae seems so dated, as if the millions who lost more life-years than they should have were mere statistics, and isn’t it time we all just moved on!  (Or, as a 1967 MAGA pop psychology book might have put it, “I Don’t Care, You Don’t Care.”)

The right-wing revisionist history of the pandemic grates on me and should grate on you too: the narrative that virtuous red states didn’t panic like teary children and stayed defiantly wide-open, basking in their hard-won freedom, while fearful blue states shut things down and destroyed their own economies to save people who were going to die anyway!

That is precisely the message of Political Social Influencer (the most accurate description of him) Ron DeSantis.  DeSantis, and other Republicans like him who emulate Trump, control the narrative by assuming the role of Playground Bully while pleading the case of Playground Victim.  Stop stepping on white folks’ toes, whines DeSantis and the MAGA elite, because half of you don’t belong in our country, the country everyone knows we made and is ours to do with as we choose!  Stay put, Venezuelans, unless you’re looking for a long and uncomfortable bus ride!

Regards global affairs, I haven’t yet mentioned the Israel-Hamas War.  This reflects (a) my lack of expertise in the political-social dynamic of the region, and (b) my conviction that enlightened people should have risen to the task decades ago and negotiated a two-state solution when there was at least a possibility of mutual give-and-take.  Some tried, but there would arise no Lincoln of the Middle East.  And thus co-intransigence lapsed into tragic stupidity.

Wow, it has been a long time since my last Note from Self, I say, as I wipe the rhetorical spittle off my freshly-shaven chin.  I was going to delete that whole political segment but decided it was truthier not to.

• • • 

I am a faithful listener of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown podcast but I am def not into his  dog-lover bits.  I am Lucy when it comes to dog kisses:

Meanwhile, my site Pet-Free Hotels is attracting visitors from various IP addresses across the US.  Not quite sure how folks are finding the site, but clicks are definitely ramping up.  I understand that, statistically speaking, readers of The 100 Billionth Person are likely to own pets and thereby may be unsympathetic to the objective of Pet-Free Hotels, but what can I say.  My spouse and I have the comfort of knowing the spittle on my chin is of human origin, even when we’re on the road.

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Lastly, returning to this here blog, you may have noticed a number of changes in the layout and navigation of The 100 Billionth Person.  It was long-past time for a more readable, larger-print, and easier-to-navigate site, with a similar look-and-feel on both desktop and mobile.  That said, I still have a number of quirks to fix, so your patience is appreciated as I continue to tinker.