Then there’s not so much we take with us from those days into these days.

The flashes of fireflies an hour after sunset. The battle against inevitable darkness, a summer evening’s fading light; sweat still running as the sun sets in an explosion of fire in a bank of clouds. The bone deep exhaustion and the toll taken by the days heat.

I’m taken to hayfields in moonlight when the measure of the days success was the number of deadly vipers avoided and the sweet memory smell of cut grass.

The painful acceptance there are many more of these days behind me than in front of me, and the very real need to make all of them that remain last until I’m all used up and gone.

Yesterday I took the grandboy picking in a junk yard. It’s one of the yards that still allow you to go pick and pull your own parts. Specht’s Recycling in Warwick.

Out amongst the ruins we found gold. First find was a B-61 Thermodyne Mack. I told him I used to drive one and he spent some time fascinated and confused as I tried to explain how to shift the compound shifter and the main, and compound split and low-split and all that old Mack transmission voodoo. He asked me if I thought he’d learn to work a clutch and a stick shift and I promised him he would.

We stumbled across some big old rusted excavators and he sat in the bucket and laughed. Finally, we came to a nest of twenty-five to thirty year old Mustangs, and I told him if there’s a heaven I hope it’s like this, and he said he got what I meant.

We picked junk parts and worked pretty hard as the near ninty degree heat baked the dust and old cars and me and the boy. He didn’t complain because he said, ‘We are Ford men,” and I almost cried thinking about my dad and me a million years ago working on his ’51 flatty.

Out there with the broken glass and the leaking crankcases and transmissions and the occasional snake and weeds and the boy I had one of the best days of my life.

I think boys need junkyards as much as old men do.

My friend Mike DeLucia posted from Germany earlier this week about packaging for items such as fast foods there. It’s largely paper, biodegradable paper.

That same day I met a client/friend for coffee at Starbucks in the afternoon. I had an unsweetened iced tea, about 12 oz. We talked for about 45 minutes, I finished the tea. We both commented we didn’t see a container there for plastics to be recycled. We just saw TRASH containers. I took the plastic cup with me back to his office to put in a container marked RECYCLE PLASTIC ONLY. So did my friend.

There is a one in five chance that the plastic container my tea was served in will be properly recycled into something new and again recycleable. There is a much greater chance it won’t be.

There is so much plastic in the world’s (and our own) ecosystems now there are small amounts of plastic inside each of our own bodies. There is plastic in the water we drink and the food we eat.

I didn’t bother to research, but I’m pretty sure before WWII plastic was largely unknown. It was post war 1950s the use of plastic exploded. That’s less than eighty years.

My question is if Europe can get it right, why can’t we here in the US? Is it just another example of the power of the lobbyists buying congress. My guess is it probably doesn’t matter. This American system is like a dying cancer patient when that horrible final line is crossed and hope is abandoned for palliative care. Guns, cigarettes, the greatest healthcare system in the world—unaffordable to about 40% of the population—air pollution, climate change, endless war, the rise of fascism, all kinds of stuff is going to end us. I can’t imagine congress will get to my Starbucks ice tea cup any time soon.

The thought that my cup will, in some form, outlive me, my kids and their kids and those kids children and still have a long way to go. The fact that cup that used for forty-five minutes and it may last in some form for the next thousand years, unless parts of it ends up in your gut will not leave me.

I don’t know how any of us can be ok with this, but we seem to be.

Thanks for the post, Mike. It was yet another great example of American exceptionalism.

It’s always early July when it comes. I suppose by then your stuff has grown enough to count for something. May’s grass is now high enough to cut for hay and corn is coming in about knee high and rhubarb, that beastly sour shit, is sprouting big wide poisonous green leaves. I never saw the point in eating something that’s leaves could kill you and was so bitter to the mouth you had to dilute it with sugar and strawberries so’s you’d not gag trying to swallow it.

July comes and nothing is ugly like February anymore. Those dark days, home, and going to school and the days off the farm are just a bad dream to be forgotten until that cold September starts to whip in from the north again. But by then the squash will be ready and pumpkins orange and round and resting on their dying vines and it will be a time to go hide away and eat the last of your fat red tomatoes barely hanging by the stem. We’ll pick them and eat them in the shed with the secret saltshaker and we will taste the last fruits of your July before the orange and blue pretty days of October betray the ugliness that’s waiting next and summer is gone again.

It’s always early July when my mouth is dry for the cold water from your spring fed well, with the thick mossy flavor and the slight rusty taste of the pail. And the rope on the pail is wet, not frozen. Drunk on the water from deep inside the earth, I fall asleep to the sound of a whippoorwill and wake to the scream of cicadas. The best days are the days that start with sweat, when the air is eighty-five before the sun is high.

It’s always early July when I can smell your barn for a mile up the road. The grassy-sweet smell of cow shit and Queen Anne’s lace line the fields.

It was early one July when I first saw the rubble and settled dust and splintered wood of your barn as it had fallen onto itself without the grace or dignity befitting such a place. A place where every child labor law written in the past hundred years was happily ignored with joyous noise and laughter and sweat and cuts that stung but didn’t hurt. And payment was large glasses of iced coffee with milk and sugar under your bean tree and a breeze off the Shawangunk ridge.

Some days in early July I close my eyes and dream of you and the words don’t come, they boil and stew and they cut at my gut, but they don’t come. I want to lie in your hot green weeds and clean your shitty barn one more time, so bad that some moments the tears come, but I don’t let them flow.

I can’t bring myself to drive down your road ever again. I’m pretty sure if I see what the bulldozers have done to you it will kill me and to be truthful, the only place I ever found worthy of dying was in one of your meadows in the full noonday sun.

“The Elections Don’t Mean Shit—Vote Where the Power Is—Our Power Is In The Street”.

—John Jacobs SDS, 1968 Days of Rage.

We were raised to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. We were raised to believe we lived in a democracy where your voice and vote matters.

I guess next week there are going to be nationwide protests calling for gun reform. I need to share this reality: Mittens Romney took $13 million from the NRA and he’s one of the good republicans. If public opinion mattered to Mittens and Mitch and even democrat Schumer and New York’s own liberal governor with her NRA ‘A rating;’ if the recent polls that show 88% of Americans want gun reform mattered to these assholes we’d already being seeing change. Not some bullshit jive about “Very narrow bi-partisan congressional discussions.” Fuck you. Fuck you hard.

A bunch of hipsters with beards and angry moms carrying signs and rubbing elbows with politicians who are dropping their ‘g’s’ for the day and leaving off their ties ain’t going to amount to a pinch of shit.

The NRA and the gun industry have more money than you. They own more politicians than you. They deliver a toxic and nonsensical narrative about arming teachers and single entrances and half of you goobers think it makes sense.

Remington sells 2 million assault rifles a year. Let’s assume they only make $100 profit off each gun—they don’t, but let’s really lowball. That would be $200 million a year in profit. They gave the Sandy Hook families $73 million. That is not even a piss in the ocean.

In ‘68 it was smashed windows and burning cop cars and mass arrests and broken bones. In 2022 it’s like the words of Steven Stills’, For What It’s Worth, “Singing songs and carrying signs, mostly say hoo-ray for our side…”

Everyone will go home pumped up and energized. Maybe stop somewhere for a couple of craft beers or some frappe-mocha-coffee shit and think they made a difference.

If you want difference we again need rage. I see angst and sadness and people looking to elected officials—exactly the bastards who allow this to happen—for answers. The answers are not there.

You cannot effect change working within the allowed confines of a corrupt and broken system.