Recently June 2026
Every day I think of things I want to tell you via my blog, and sometimes I jot those things down so I don’t forget, but mostly I don’t jot them down and I do forget, and time races on, or my perception of time speeds along, and then I think of something else I want to tell you, and so on.
This morning, being at a stopping point in my current writing project, which seems to be a novella and a collection of short stories, and having recently completed my latest musical adventure, the album Much Too Beautiful, and with the morning foggy so I am less inclined to go out and putter in the garden, I will seize this opportunity, before my quixotic ego decides to go elsewhere, and tell you some of those things I’ve been wanting to tell you.
The clouds have been extremely photogenic of late.
When I was a boy and spent lots of time looking at clouds, I discovered that most other people, both my age peers and teenagers and adults, did not often look up at the sky and were oblivious to what was going on up there except to possibly be aware of the day being sunny or overcast.
Thus throughout my life when the cloud gods are putting on a good show, I have brought joy and wonder to many people by suggesting they look up at the sky. Invariably their eyes grow wide and they say things like, “Oh my God,” or “Wow,” and sometimes they thank me for drawing their attention skyward.
Yesterday at the Mendocino Farmers Market, I encouraged several people to look up at the sky, and their exclamations of wonder caused others to look up, and the collective mood became jubilant, or so it seemed to me.
Recently an enormous earth-excavating machine working on the big water project just down the hill from our neighborhood made a U-turn on our street and in doing so bashed both the street sign and the Not A Through Road sign. I alerted the county transportation department and expect a response within the next year or so.
Whenever I see a Not A Through Road Sign my brain wants to change the word through to thorough, which I find much more intriguing and nuanced and true. Not A Thorough Road.
Big news on the Getting-Enough-Protein front. Because I do not happily digest eggs, nut butter, dairy products, or gluten, and not wanting to eat meat all day long, I am ever searching for good organic sources of protein. Marcia, who can eat everything I can’t, keeps an eye out for things I might eat, too.
Recently she found a recipe for bread made of garbanzo beans, lentils, and flax seeds, and I just made my second two-loaf batch. Zowee! A game changer for little old me. Experimenting now with adding spices to the magical mixture of proteinacious goodies.
Today is foggy, but for the past few days we’ve had lots of sunshine that has been most appreciated by the vegetables in my tubs and by humans and dogs who like going to the beach. I recently spent a morning on the sand overlooking Mendocino Bay musing about life, eating rice cakes, and wading in the revivifying shallows.
Wednesday was 10%-off day at Harvest market in town. We like to go early in the morning for this monthly money-saving event and beat the crowds. This week in the Harvest parking lot we encountered a man with an enormous dog the man told us weighs 200 pounds! I especially like the conjoined shadows Marcia, the dog, and the man created.
This year we have two resident fawns, siblings, and they are endlessly fun to watch. We used to have lots more deer hereabouts and therefore more fawns because our former neighbor put out feed for a dozen or more deer. When our neighbor died a few years ago and the food source for the deer disappeared, most of those deer went elsewhere, and now we have at most two resident does and their offspring.
Because we also have resident mountain lions and resident car drivers, many local fawns do not survive beyond their first year of life, and so our delightful fawns also remind us of the fragility of life and the fleeting nature of youthful innocence.
And there are the ongoing wars against Iran and Lebanon and the Palestinians being waged by Israel and the United States. I think it is important to realize that our tax dollars are paying for these genocidal wars and that people we elected to represent us are facilitating the genocide as well helping to create an economic and humanitarian disaster for the entire world.
It is folly to blame Trump and the Republicans for what is happening because our government has been carrying out these same foreign policies for the last sixty years at least, regardless of who was president or controlled Congress. What has become crystal clear with this latest psychotic adventure is that forces transcendent of political parties run the show in America, forces dedicated to maintaining a status quo where a small number of people have most of the wealth, and everyone else lives in continual insecurity.
My hope is that Iran’s defeat of the United States and Israel will coincide with enough moral outrage in America to not only shift the balance of political power within the United States, but shift the dominant ideology away from weaponry into what Buckminster Fuller called the ideology of livingry.
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Groove for Wen from Todd’s new album Much Too Beautiful
