The Sequel
Might as well put the links here as well.
American agriculture is fundamentally unsustainable. When people talk about crop yields from this or that method, this is really important to bear in mind.
The Arkansas delta, where I grew up, was a popular place to grow rice as the temperature was good, the whole area was Mississippi floodplain, and it rains heavily there (Iāve lived in Arizona and Thailand and never experienced rains as heavy as those weād routinely have in spring or fall).
Still, Arkansas farmers were pulling water from the aquifer at a net rate of about a foot a year. My parents lived just outside of city limits, so we had a well for water. They had to re-dig it twice in 15 years.
The city of Tucson and Pima county have already gone through this. The 5 "C"s of Arizona, apparently a grade school staple here, are āCopper, Cattle, Climate, Citrus and Cotton*ā. Pima county mostly focused on the latter two: Pima cotton is famous world over (though not much grown here anymore), and most of what is now Tucson was miles and miles of citrus orchards. In fact, most of our neighborhoods were originally defined by single orchards.
This was all fed from aquifer water. After about 40 years or so, the three rivers of Tucson ceased to flow, and now only carry water briefly during significant rainstorms. The citrus died and the cotton became too expensive.
Tucson now uses itās allotment of water from the Colorado River (which also no longer runs its full course) in part to attempt to re-fill our aquifer. And in recent years theyāve attempted to keep water year round in small parts of the Santa Cruz. But if the monsoon is truly dead, then we will soon be forced to switch to drawing down on the aquifer again.
* Corrupt Christofacist Conservative Cocksuckers somehow didnāt make the list.
I so want to hug it. They are so big and fluffy.
Brave Wilderness has a video on them (sadly he doesnāt test out how painful their spikes are):
And their mƶth form is even more resplendent:
That moth looks like Abe Vigoda.
I like your additional 4 Cs to the 5 every AZ schoolchild learns.
Itās kind of like Zip Code + 4, the first five digits are common and the extra 4 zero in precisely.
(my 20 years in the desert hell of AZ informs me well on this)
Iāve gotten less sleep in 2020 than any other year that Iāve been alive. Itās just anxiety all the time. It only goes away for a little while but then it comes back in the middle of the night and I just canāt sleep. Itās not about anything in particular. Itās just this overhanging, free floating anxiety about the world, work, everything irrational and rational all rolled into a giant ball of no sleep. Meh.
For some reason when he said ānonsense boy, Iām a scientistā I read it as āIām a centrist!ā
Iām having real problems with centrists today, a local journalist wrote a report on a fascist march and a small, heavily policed, protest at fascism which was quite literally āboth sidesā.
Jan 8th: slipped on ice (looked like snow) and landed on a iced-over pile someone shoveled. Doc said I broke āfive of my largest ribsā. I asked āwhat about the rest?ā. He said āHumph. After what you did to the bottom five, it really doesnāt matterā. I was given the option of surgery to plate them or just chill out for a week or two. I chose the later since I went through 3 surgeries and 2 broken feet back in 2018 (what I thought was the worst year ever) and was done with it.
FF a week, and I wake up in the middle of the night and canāt breath. Running a fever, delusional, shaky, off to the ER. After a quick CT scan, they try to act calm (can see in their eyes they arenāt) call an ambulance to take me downtown (45 min from Lowell to Boston) and I hear them frantically calling for an OR and ICU slot open ASAP. This is where things go fuzzy. Bye-bye, January!
~Feb. 1st I start to come to. I just had 2 weeks of messed up dreams (and I mean really, really messed up and they were so vivid and dovetailed with my reality somewhat so I didnāt know what was real or not). Iām strapped to a bed, tubes coming out of my neck, nose, canāt move but am somewhat aware of my surroundings. I canāt see my torso because itās straight-up covered in bandages. Turns out they had to drain 2 liters of septic fluid and blood from my lungs via a thoracotomy (donāt google it before eating; they slice from front to back under your armpit to drain).
Another month in the hospital, then I get transferred to a ānursing facilityā which was basically an assisted-living place. Iām the youngest person there by at least 2 decades. Fought like hell just to go home (they only me there for an IV antibiotic straight to my heart via a PIC line). They showed me how to use a home IV so Iām finally back, a little miffed that I missed the first 1/4 of 2020.
Then the whispers of this āCoronaā virus starts filling the papers. I never got tested (they werenāt doing that in the US at the time) but some of the doctors think I may have had that, end not a bacterial infection. The cultures were making it difficult to figure out what the pathogen was. The nursing facility I left EXPLODED with cases about a week later, and I just hope I either didnāt have it or wasnāt the vector since a lot of those people passed away.
So in a way, Iām lucky: I missed 1/4 of 2020. But if you think of 2020 as a roller coaster, I missed the slow, creaky ascent, and got my wits about me just as you hear the āclickā and things go silent before the screams.
Yeesh, sorry you had to go through all that, and glad you got through it.
Holy shit, dude! WTF!?!
Hopefully, even with the lockdown, the year has improved for you!
The worst part was not knowing what was real or not. I was sobbing like crazy to the nurses because my 8 y/o died in a plane crash while I was outā¦or so I thought. It took my sister showing me a phone video from that day to convince me otherwise.
On a funnier note, one of the nurses gave me her phone (mine died) with an ear-bud microphone (again, pre-Covid precautions) so I could say hi to her. I stuck the earbud in, but I still couldnāt hear anything. āHello? HELLO? Hello?ā. When the nurse came back I told her it wasnāt working. She then politely informed me that you donāt stick the ear-bud in your nostril. I was insistent that I was doing it right and thought she was just trying to get me to stick something my ear for fun!
A day later while I was slowly re-entering reality from the coma, I realized what I did and I offered to buy her a new one, but she just laughed and said she was getting a wireless bluetooth set that weekend, so donāt worry about it.
Other highlights: I met Donald Trump after I successfully campaigned to have my wife become a Senator. I raided the basement of the MA statehouse where they kept all the medieval weapons and brought the whole cache back on the T to my apartment in Allston. There was a board-game that sucked me and my friends in Jumanji-style and we had to fight off the Yakuza to escape, the procedures they did in the hospital left me with lycanthropy so had to be tied down every full moonā¦I could write a book of short stories. I havenāt had dreams that crazy or realistic since I was on the Nicoderm patch many years ago.
Wowā¦ justā¦ thatās just crazy stuff! The human brain is a weird and wonderful thing.
Thatās awful! Brains are jerks.
I doubt you were the vector after a month in the hospital.
Iām sorry you and your family had to endure that but glad you came through.
Iām just glad I have decent health insurance. Bills came out to well over $250,000. That there is bankrupt territory. And since Iām the primary source of income, glad I have %100 short-term health coverage, too.
It really helps to keep things in perspective that I healed eventually (mostly) and Iām not any more broke than I was before going into this. Single payer, people.
You gotta NaNoWriMo that shit!
Phew, thatās good. I only have 80%, although the one time I could have used it i was too sick to make my way through the paperwork, so I didnāt get it. I was single and renting, so it wasnāt the end of the world.
