Second Great Depression

Economists had laid out the sequence of causes and effects in a “hard landing,” and it worked just as they said it would. Once the run on the dollar started, everything seemed to happen at once. Two days after the Venezuelan oil shock the dollar was down by 25 percent against the yen and the yuan. Two weeks later it was down by 50 percent. By the time trading “stabilized,” one U.S. dollar bought only 2.5 Chinese yuan—not eight, as it had a year earlier.

Interesting piece from the Atlantic Monthly from the perspective of the 2016 presidential campaign. Kind of old but still pretty pertinent.

Ok, I lied…

I got inspired and threw up a new masthead, with a more summer-ish theme. I really am going to leave things alone for a bit here as I undertake the great domestic realignment of 2007.

Out to lunch

Be back later next week…

Reimers Ranch on a Thursday

Thank god for cool bosses who let me go outside for recess when the whole work thing just isn’t doing it for me.

The Warda Race

We rolled out to my first cross country race this weekend, in Warda. I placed a respectable twelfth, a little over the middle of the heat. I think i would have done a little better, but I was a bit nervous at the start and I got off trail at one point during the race. oops. Overall, good times and a beautiful day to be riding.

Lots of people eat very healthy, well-rounded meals before an event like this. We roll with donuts.

Holy crap, I look cool.

After the race. We don’t look happy, because once you stop pedaling your legs get a bit angry

There’s a spot on this trail called the Gas Pass (i like to call it the Pass Gas, because apparently I’m twelve). Basically the trail drops about 60 feet pretty steeply down a dirt embankment that the trail owners have unwisely covered in cement to prevent erosion. Thus if you endo here, you’re looking to loose a substantial amount of skin and teeth as well as dignity. Hence the ‘oh shit shit shit’ look on my face. More epicness on the Pass Gas can be seen on Germ’s site here.

We race again this weekend at Waco and then later in May in Eldorado, out near Sonora. We’ve approached Shipley’s about a sponsorship but so far they have not returned our calls.

Note: thanks to Mike Brooks/Commiebike.com for these photos. Obviously since I am on the bike, I did not take them.

TV

It’s not often that I associate art with television these days. Leave it to public broadcasting to buck that trend.

Tonight I happened across PBS’s America at a Crossroads a series dealing with our current state of affairs in the post 9/11 world. This particular episode focused on the writings of Americans who’ve served in Iraq. The most moving piece (in my mind, they were all gut wrenching) was authored by an officer escorting the body of a fallen marine back to his hometown in Wyoming. (The full text is here)

All along the route (to the cemetery), people had lined the street and were waving small American flags. The flags that were otherwise posted were all at half-staff. For the last quarter mile up the hill, local boy scouts, spaced about twenty feet apart, all in uniform, held large flags. At the foot of the hill, I could look up and back and see how enormous the procession was. I wondered how many people would be at this funeral if it were in, say, Detroit or Los Angeles—probably not as many as were here in little Dubois, Wyoming…

Now, as I watched them carry him the final fifteen yards, I was choking up. I felt that, as long as he was still moving, he was somehow still alive. Then they positioned him over his grave. He had stopped moving.

Now, he was home to stay and I suddenly felt at once sad, relieved, and useless. It had been my honor to take Chance Phelps to his final post. Now he is on the high ground overlooking his town.

There’s many things that you could amend here. Tack on a piece of spin, political hyperbole. As they say, the silence is deafening.

Tax Day

I was sitting at the post office today. Tax Day apparently. When I pulled my little number out of the red-round-justice-and-order-number-dispensing-thinger it said, 26. The wall said – now serving 80.

Well crap, its not my fault I had to go buy 1200 stamps for work on the second busiest postal day of the year. So I walk to the coffee shop, grab some caffeine, a copy of the onion and settle in (by the time i get back we’ve progressed to 87).

So there’s bajillion people jammed in to this sorry excuse for a strip-mall post office – two clerks working the counter, several screaming children and a general air of financial anxiety as all these Westlake residents collectively stew in fear for their SUV’s, 15-car garages, and the future of little Johnie Jr’s trust-fund (Westlake is where Austin’s hippy-shtick slams into a brick wall off modern yuppieism). Amidst all this I hit upon my horoscope:

Thank you, onion staff for putting my post office experience into perspective, and indeed, summing up the last few weeks so succinctly. You are the Shakespears of our time.

The Economist

Randomly, while checking the sites google standings, I discovered one of my photos being used on the The Economist. It’s not a real article or anything, but still kind of spiffy.

City Lights

I’m sitting at Café Mundi on the Eastside, seeing a show when the whole place goes dark. A line of thunderstorms is dropping out of the hill country bringing a fair dose of wind, lightning and mayhem. Suddenly jerked from an experience of musical immersion into a whole different reality. Like flipping a switch.

A darkened city is an interesting thing to behold. You jam so many of us into one place – there’s a certain kind of madness to it. A narrow band of societal norms and municipal amenities hold us back and allow us to coexist right on top of each other. In the dark, a piece of that’s gone. City blocks black as wilderness, lit only by cars headlights and the spectre-like glow from downtown. In the absence of the shackles of propriety that the light bulb provides people are nervous. Everyone leaves, citing the weather as the culprit. Dogs to attend to. Homes to save.

To his credit, Andy continues his set anyways, which is pretty impressive for a guy who makes most of his music by singing over a playback loop. The wind starts throwing the rain into the porch area of the coffeshop, taking wild potshots at the windows. I stand there just watching the trees get pounded by the wind as the last stragglers flee to their cars, their homes (or for a few back to the music – a different and comforting world in it’s own right). Cold Canadian air swirls and alternates with its balmy Gulf cousins to creating a confusing, exciting medium, like traveling to a different place while standing still.

Then its over. Some quirk in the way the city sits at the base of the Hill Country means the storms never seem to hit us for too long. The moment is past. The lights are back on. The show is finished.

So it goes

Vonnegut leaves us at 84. Kilgore Trout lives on.