I suppose that if I were a nervous Nellie, right now I would be beside myself, but oddly enough, I can't really say that I am all that worried about things.

I am currently in the area of a flood watch. Since it has been bucketing down rain lately, the Willamette is pretty high and the creek that feeds into it (1/4 of a mile from my place) is as high as I have ever seen it, this would seem pretty normal to me. The folks here are treating it like the ass-covering by government officials that it is. There isn't a house that is threatened, the worse that could happen is that in a couple of places, folks might have to detour around some water on the road while on their way to the grocery store.

Look, the government should do exactly what they are doing...I really don't want to keep them from warning people that things are "different" for the moment. But like all things, such warnings should be tempered by the populace keeping their "twitterpating" over-reactions to a minimum. That seems impossible to a fair percentage of the population. So here in Stumptown (yet another Portland Nickname) there are folks demanding that the government "do something".

Nope, I have no fix. People will be people. Bad shit happens and sometimes folks get in the way of bad shit. Luckily for me, the whiners this time are a very small minority and I don't have to listen very much. But I just wanted to point out that this kind of thing happens at all levels and that you really have to look outside to see if the "crisis" that folks are whining about is real or just someone somewhere crying wolf.

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I have worked hard over the years to get over my doomer self. I think that the systole and diastole of civilizations and cultures is a real thing. Simply put, "Laissez le bon temps rouler" isn't a way to run your life 24/7.

But you see, here in the West, we have come to the point where the party is over and the taps have run dry and it is time to go home, sleep it off, and go back to work tomorrow.

It isn't the end of the world. Your individual opinion of what we should be doing isn't particularly important to the folks running the show who have bet their already fractured reputations on the idea that the party can and will go on. These folks are in the process of losing their bet, but that process isn't one amenable to a news cycle, so be patient and watch whatever peculiar haruspicy works best for you to try to stay a little ahead of the curve.

Myself, my methods for adapting to the world and predicting what is heading our way involves reading headlines and maybe the first paragraph of things out there on the nascent nervious system of the world (the internet) and try to stop as soon as they stop reporting facts and start telling me what the facts mean.

This is, at very best, a stupid and low-accuracy means of getting into the bottom of things. But if I am careful, and watch things from 30,000 feet, I can sometimes see outlines that have a slightly better chance of occurrence than not paying attention. Right now these, at least to my readings, show that the downhill slope of this particular cycle is starting to steepen. It doesn't signify the end of the world, it just means that the party is over and it is time to go home.

I thought the picture below fit this piece very well.

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I have been stuck at home for a couple of days now. The current buzzword for "lots of rain" in the Pacific Northwest is "atmospheric river". It has been dumping rain here. I suppose that if I were a real Pacific Northwesterner, I would "damn the torpedoes" and don layers of raingear and savor those rainy moments.

Fuck that!

So I am inside more than is my preference. So lets talk about isolation in the modern world.

At my age, isolation is not the huge deal that it was in my salad days. Truth be told, isolation is preferred about ninety percent of the time. So there is an approximate 2 hour window every day where I do enjoy human interaction. It doesn't have to be much, a phone call or a greeting during a walk or a conversation with a neighbor while getting the mail does me just fine. But serious rain does limit the opportunities for these interactions.

I still kind of wonder about the place of conversations in settings like the one we are reading. I am enough of a geezer to remember sending and receiving physical mail and how important that was in maintaining connection. In the infantry, "mail call" was an important time and letters were cherished (or feared, depending on the correspondent). But they were always an important tie to the outside.

I was (am?) a science fiction junkie. But the sheer number of wannabe science fiction writers. I have been pondering an old Isaac Asimov tale "The Naked Sun". How much of the semi-isolation of communication via the internet is "good" for a person? This simple question then expands into something that was brought to my attention: What are the implications of folks using what is laughably referred to as "artificial intelligence" as a cope for lack of interpersonal communication?

Big can of worms there, I think that it might even require a formal sit down and ponder month.