Praises and Cautions For the Purple and Grey

8:50pm

Where I work, they’ve put in a new system for watering the giant trees between a lab and an 8-floor parking garage. It uses grey water, the non-potable but non-toxic water from your shower or from laundries. They haven’t got the signage in yet, but I recognize it by its purple color. All the tubing, both the flex tubing and the plastic pipes, are a bright purple. This color pair, this purple and grey, join green as the new colors of urban environmentalism.

I try to be a reasonably green citizen myself. But it can be overdone. I learned this the hard way. Literally, hard.

I don’t buy single-use water bottles. In fact, I don’t buy water in bottles at all. I’ve always thought privatizing water was a criminal scam, and after watching “Tapped” on YouTube, I also realized what a pollution source all those plastic bottles are. I can’t imagine anyone buying it that way if they have any access to public water systems…run by non-Republicans.

I have solar panels on my roof. It’s a small roof on a small house, built back in 1939, but I covered about half the roof and all of the garage with ‘em. It helps on the power bill, and also helps my conscience.

All the fixtures in the house have been replaced by low-flow versions, as we replaced and upgraded old systems. Dishwasher and clothes washer, both toilets, both showers. I even take ‘navy’ showers, turning the water off while I soap up or wash down. It’s only on to wet me or to rinse me. I’m in and out in 5 minutes or less, according to my water company’s free 5-minute hourglass, suction cupped on the shower door.

I even grey-watered the clothes washer and the main bathtub. The used water ran out to the front yard. Yes, yard. But I let in run wild. It lets the rain that’s soaked LA this winter month trickle to the aquifer below us all. The lawn just has to deal with the summer heat on its own. Fortunately, this kind of grey water system is legal in LA, and in all of California, now.

Unfortunately, it made my sewer line back up.

With all this upgrading of systems, through a new kitchen a couple decades ago, and a new bathroom ten years back, every piece of plumbing in the house got replaced. Except the line out to the sewer. But it never gave us any trouble. Just two adults here, no diapers, no more feminine products, so everything worked fine.

Then suddenly, it didn’t. I had an overflow into a shower stall in one bathroom. Neighbor’s recommended Roto-guy comes out, opens the sewer clear-out, and sludge just starts oozing out. He runs the rotor and then flushes the line with water from my garden house, then does a camera inspection. Old pipe, kinda bumpy, but otherwise all clear. Should be fine. Whew.

Less than a year later, have to call him again. I can smell shit. Outside. Following my nose, it’s near that sewer clear-out again.  Roto again, flush again, camera again. We basically pick up our conversation from last time, including age of houses, old-style plumbing, new trends in plumbing, and grey-water systems. And we figured something out.

Not enough water is going down the house’s old sewer line to make sure everything makes it to the city sewer. Between lo-flow everything, from shower heads to, well, to the heads in both bathrooms, there’s nowhere near the amount of water the original designers expected when they put in the diameter of pipe, and the slope angle of the line as it runs to the main sewer. Hell, when the original 1939 toilet in the house broke, it was illegal to sell me the same kind to replace it. Almost three gallons a flush. In California? Hell no.

Add in the grey water system. Or more precisely, take out the water from the grey water system. The bathtub doesn’t flush down through the sewer line anymore. And the forced pressure from the clothes washer’s water going down the same line doesn’t happen anymore either.

Apparently, I’d overshot the mark on water efficiency and cost reduction. Getting my sewer line roto’d isn’t cheap.  Neither was having the last piece of plumbing I could access replaced. It was the part of that old steel pipe that ran under the crawlspace below the house. The one the plumber kept running a video camera down. Buried a few inches below ground, starting to leak, with enough mineral and rust build-up inside it that stuff would keep catching on it instead of flowing through it. That part got replaced with a long, single, smooth run of modern plastic pipe. As of now, the only piece of 1939 left in my plumbing is the last forty feet that run under the garage floor into the sewer in the back alley. Too tough to dig up, but I might get it epoxy-lined, to get the same smoothness, and a new seal against wear.

I also changed my grey-water schedule from full-time to alternating months. Even months, water the lawn. Odd months, flush the sewer line. That all seems to have done the trick. No probs in over two years.

Recently, I had to pull out the grey water system for the clothes washer. Did you know people die in house fires caused by them never checking their lint traps? Yeah, I didn’t know either. I clear mine after every load. But that part of my grey water system was sacrificed so that those morons don’t die. Not a fair trade, in my opinion. But that story’s for another essay.

9:37pm

9:52pm

  

Remembering Grandma’s Tattoos

9:01pm

(Typing with a couple of fingers with splits at the tips, near the nails. Every strike of a key is a pain, but I’ve lived with this for years. Made my living as a ten-key operator for a bank most of the way through college, fingers often covered with tape wrapped around bandaids holding in neo-sporin to try to soften and close the cracks. Still works, too, until they dry out and crack open again. So anyway…)

I come from an era when men started growing their hair long, to establish a break from their parents, the generation they represented, the culture they’d created, the war they supported. I still wear my hair past my shoulders, although what started as a political statement is now an artistic comb-over. But my younger relatives have only ever seen me like this. I’ve been told I can’t cut it off, that I wouldn’t be me. It was intended, decades ago, as a statement, and now it’s apparently my signature. Well, that and my loud mouth.

The most recent generation still plays with its hair, shaving it in unusual patterns, asymmetrically, piling it on top of men’s heads, dying it in shades Nature never created. My generation barely notices. Certainly doesn’t get the rise our hair styles got out of our parents.

What to do, what to do, to make that break of disdain?

Why, tattoos and piercing, of course.

No, this isn’t going to be a screed of disdain. I have seen some lovely tattoos, in some lovely places. I have seen high art in a realistic and correctly placed heart on a pre-med surgeon hopeful, and a disaster of 8s, Hs, and swastikas on a prison lifer. A friend who doctored at a university and a local prison at the same time threatened to do a treatise on their comparative arts of tattoos.

As for piercings, I don’t understand ones through the tongue, but maybe that’s ‘cause I’m such a talker. And the ones through the eyebrows give me the heebie-jeebies. Don’t know why. Just do.

But these are permanent, at least the tattoos are. And they are often installed early, on what appear to my eyes to be children, although they’re probably well into their twenties. And installed profusely. I often warn them they’ll run out of space before they run out of the life they’re trying to memorialize.

But their colors are distinct, unique and permanent, and as they have kids, these become their signatures. Grandpa’s arm of coy scales, or back portraying an Iron Maiden cover (I’ve seen both.) Of course there’s Memaw’s tramp stamp, or the rainbow of feathers that starts at her neck and goes down her bosom to…well, I’ll leave that to your imagination. But these are just Gramma and Grampa, colors and all, climbed on by their kids, then attending those high school graduations, weddings, and another round of births, as the colors fade, and slide, but always are the signatures of those elders.

What, I wonder, will become of these signatures? Will they simply disappear into the final box, hidden by a good suit or a dress appropriate to a grandma? Will they just be memories?

Or will those colors, those designs be memorialized? Should there be a full-body photo service, to record the artistic efforts or foolish decisions of a lifetime? Regardless, by the time they are old and pass away, these folks are just folks, and their colors are just…their colors. Full-body photos would seem clinical. Individual photos of individual tattoos will seem disconnected from their context.

Or might we start to allow their removal, if so authorized in their host’s will, as an inheritance to a loved one or family member? We allow donation of organs, even while alive, and certainly after death. If permitted by the Last Will and Testament, why not the tattoos? A whole new industry, a new service from your local mortuary, including mounting and framing. Maybe contoured to match the body as it was when the tatt was first inked, before age and experience had wrinkled and sagged it into another shape.

Why not? A little something for each of the kids to remember Mom by. Of course there would be arguments at the hotel down the road from the hospital, where she lay fading away, as the siblings argued over their favorite tatts. They may be all she has to leave them. Those and their memories of her. So why not?

I’ve still got the two foot-long pony-tails I’ve had cut off over the years, once for employment, once for a girl. I’m going to leave them to someone. I haven’t got any ink to leave behind but the ink you’re reading by me.

But if I did, I’d be fine with offering to leave a tatt behind to a relative that said they’d like a memento of me.

Why not?

9:50pm

9:55pm

Maybe the Draft Wasn't Such A Bad Idea?

8:40pm

I’m from the end-times for real hippies. I’m not saying I am one, but that was when I formed my connections to a culture I considered mine, to the hippies of the mid- and late-sixties, into the very early seventies. The Viet Nam War years. The nightly, dinner-time war-on-TV years, with gunfire and gore, in color and black-and-white. Toss your guts by watching guts get tossed. 

My number came up in the top ten in what turned out to be the last drawing of The Draft. That’s how it always sounded in my mind: The Draft. Capitalized. An event of doom. I was definitely against the draft, especially after the war had been going on so long, and killed so many, both theirs and ours. Deferments almost didn’t exist by that time, for college, or marriage or for having kids. They needed meat for the front lines. I didn’t want to be meat. So I was against The Draft as well as The War.

I’m not so sure about that position any more.

Since the all-volunteer Army, and its siblings in the other services, was rolled out as the substitute, the various services seems to have gotten lonelier, less connected to America. They’ve also become more right-wing. Not just conservative. Almost anyone who’d volunteer to take orders is by definition a conservative, an authoritarian. Not all, but most.

But to volunteer to be shot at, to be sent into harm’s way repeatedly, especially into a set of wars that have been going on for almost 18 years now, takes a certain foolishness or desperation. The explanation of patriotism seems to be one of a person looking for a purpose, whether to belong, or to follow in the expected footsteps of the family or community around him.

But the segregation this brings, so that soldiers are found in clusters, both physically and financially, rather than spread throughout the fabric or the US, as they were during and after WWII, Korea, and the Viet Nam wars, has been a social experiment worth re-examining.

Only a particular class, a type of mindset, is volunteering to be shot at. And this affects not only the make-up and attitude of our military. The military is the feeder, the source, of many if not the large majority of our police forces across the nation.

And the desperation of the military to get volunteers, as it has lowered the bar to entrance and acceptance, has also lowered the bar of those acceptable to police forces across the country.

Unfortunately, this has hyper-focused an overly conservative, sometimes outright gang-level racist culture within our military, and distilled it into many of our police forces.

At least a draft got liberals and conservatives, both the wide-eyed and not-so innocent, rich-ish and poor alike, and stuck them in with one another, for a common goal: Get the job done, and don’t get killed, by trusting the folks around you, not for where they came from, physically or financially, but for what they could do in the theater of war.

Maybe we need to bring back The Draft.

Anonymized induction.

No addresses, except for the initial letter, or email.

‘Greetings, No. 453627, Your Uncle Sam needs you,’ it would start.

Some argue for a more generalized, compulsory Public Service. You might be assigned to build houses for teachers, or hang coaxial cable into First Nation reservations, or distribute food to the WV miners who couldn’t feed themselves off the coal that no one used anymore, because so much of the compulsory service was installing solar on every roof in America.

And while I’m actually all for that, the issue is, who’d volunteer to get shot at when they could stay relatively safe, building Habitats for Humanity or putting up solar? How do you keep a good socio-economic mix in the military? Because the home police forces aren’t going to recruit from solar installers or well-drillers. They’ll look for prior experience under fire, prior life in an authoritarian hierarchy, and the military-to-police pipeline selects for exactly that.

9:10pm

REDMAP to AmericanMap

Sure, we won 40 seats in the House, and took back leadership. But we had to out-perform the Republicans by 9% nationally, the widest margin between the two parties since the ‘50s, to do that. The Republican REDMAP program that gerrymandered state after state into unrepresentative majority-Republican House delegations after the 2010 cycle, has made House of Representative elections in the majority of states no longer, well, representative.

We can fix that. But not the way Pelosi has proposed.

Let me explain.

That HR.1 bill, the “For The People Act of 2019” that Pelosi opened the 116^th Congress with? It’s crap.

Sure, it’s a statement of principles of the Democratic Party. If it became law, it would give all citizens access to the ballot box, it would clean up campaign financing, replace gerrymandering, do lots of other stuff to undo what the Republicans have been doing to suppress the non-Republican vote across our country.

If it became law.

But it can’t.

It won’t even get introduced in the Senate, and it certainly wouldn’t get signed by Mango Mussolini.

So let’s actually fight fire with fire.

The Supreme Court allowed Tom Delay to redistrict Texas between censuses, because there’s nothing in the Constitution that said he can’t.

McConnell held open the Supreme Court seat left by Scalia’s death, until at least the next presidential election. He threatened to hold it open until a Republican was elected. Nothing in the Constitution said when the Senate had to advise and consent.

OK, let’s screw them with the same tool.

I’m going to refer to two documents. (Lawyers, watch the layman commit the opening foul.) The first is the Constitution. (There’s the foul. That’s not the law, the law is complicated, etc...citizens always quote the Constitution when they don’t know the law…)

Which is why the second document is at this link, from the Congressional Research Service.

In the US Constitution, Article I defines our Legislature, the Congress.  Section 4 of that Article says that each states’ legislature may prescribe the time, place and manner of holding elections for members to these houses of Congress, but that “Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations”. 

But again, that’s Congress, both houses, passing a law. Which isn’t going to happen while the Republicans hold the Senate, and Papaya Pinochet is in the Oval Office.

Maybe Pelosi is trying to show that she gave the Republicans a chance to see the error, the un-American-ness, the evil of their ways, by introducing HR. 1.

But they won’t.

And that’s where Section 5 of that Article comes in.

Section 5 opens with this: “Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members”.

Now, there’s been some case law, Supreme Court rulings, that qualifications cannot be added to those already in the Constitution. The Senate cannot say that members must be left-handed, for example.

But, as noted in that CRS report, in the same ruling, Powell V. McCormack, (1969), “the Court noted that anyone meeting those qualifications would have to be seated, and not excluded, if such person were "duly" elected”.

So each house of Congress has explicitly reserved to itself, by the Constitution, the ability to judge the elections of those otherwise-qualified persons.

Such as, are the districts of the Representatives, uh, representative?

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve read the facts on how tilted the gerrymandering is in Wisconsin, in North Carolina, in Ohio. Even when Democrats out-vote the Republicans by five to eight percent, the House delegation is often two-thirds Republican. That is an insult to the very name of the House of Representatives.

So let’s change that.

The Democratically-controlled House should institute a rule that members must be elected from districts that are drawn, not by the partisan legislature of the states, but by independent, non-partisan commissions. It’s actually (almost) that simple.

This rule could specify that this would apply to all House elections starting with the November 2020 election cycle. A year and a half is time to get this done, especially if the rule includes that NO member of a delegation elected any other way will be seated. Not a Democrat, not a Republican, no member.

Since the same Article I, Section 5, paragraph 1 continues, “a majority of each [House] shall constitute a quorum to do business”, so if the Texas delegation wasn’t seated, or even most of the South, a majority of those deemed elected is enough to do the nation’s business.

Several states already have these types of commissions to draw House districts. More were proposed, and passed, in the 2018 elections. And back in 2015, Republicans tried, as usual, to overturn the will of the citizens about this, but in "ARIZONASTATE LEGISLATURE v. ARIZONA INDEPENDENT REDISTRICTING COMMISSION ET AL" the Supreme Court pronounced these commissions constitutional.

So there we are. These non-partisan, independent commissions are constitutional alternatives to the partisan state legislatures drawing the districts. The US House has an explicit power to judge the validity of elections of its members. While the language of Article I, granting this authority, makes it unnecessary, the Supreme Court confirmed this in Roudebush v. Hartke (1972), described in the CRS report as affirming “the constitutional authority for "an independent evaluation by the Senate" of the selection of those presenting themselves for membership.” And the Constitution provides the same authority of each house over itself. If it’s OK for the Senate, it applies to the House, too.

Earlier, I said this was actually (almost) that simple.

Here’s the ‘almost’.

There’s a structural difference between the Senate and the House. Because only a third of the Senate, 33 or 34 Senators, stand for election each cycle, the rest of the Senators are still senators, so the Senate still exists as a legislative body. A “continuing body”.

The House is not a continuing body. Regardless of the high incidence of incumbency, every member has to run for election every two years. And since all the members’ terms expire every two years, mechanically, for a brief moment every two years, the House, as a legislative body, ends.

It is not a continuing body.

So the rules made in one session of the House do not necessarily apply to the next. This rule I’m suggesting would have to be immediately reinstated in the opening Rules package of the next, 117^th Congress, just as the new leadership of the House has passed a new Rules package describing how the House will be run during this 116^th session.

So for this to work, we’d have to hold onto the House. We’d have to over-perform the Republicans by eight or nine percent again, nationwide, to hold onto it.

We have a high probability of successfully defending it in 2020, especially if PussyGrabber tops the Republican ticket again. We might even get a majority in the Senate, as well as the White House.

But showing our hand, by putting this announcement on the House floor, will energize every Republican candidate and officeholder, and all of their billionaire donors. The money and vitriol will flow like the Great Flood, trying again, as in the 2010 REDMAP, to sweep the last vestiges of fair elections from the face of this country. Especially since 2020 is another Census year, and which states, and their legislatures, get how many House seats will be determined by that Census. And that will determine the future of our country.

You up for the fight?

I am.

An Essay A Day in February

6:05pm
I have a small writing project in mind.
An essay a day, for the month of February.

I was encouraged/guilted/realitied(sp?) into this by an author's admonishment to self-described writers: "If you're not writing, you're not a writer."
And, if you look back on this blog, you'll notice (and I was chagrined to see) that I haven't written, at least not here, in...well, in quite some time.
Then, expecting to launch into this, Nature screwed my schedule up. I woke up on Thursday, Jan 31st, sick as hell, lightheaded and foul-stomached. Skipped work and slept all day. First time sick in a couple years. Spent Friday trying to recover, another day lost from the office. That was supposed to be my kick-off day. I started writing, took a break, and woke up Feb 2nd.

Anyway, these excuses excuse nothing. Writing is always on my mind, essays usually, some analysis or weird perspective, on events of the day, or my boots, or the damned dryer.

So I'm going to post these, daily, maybe just under the deadline, but from here on in, daily.

A couple of notes. I generally do some timestamps around my pieces, whether I'm writing by hand, or beating another keyboard into submission. They're 'start time', 'finish time', and there may be a 'finish editing', if I take any time to edit. Might as well keep some metrics.

Speaking of metrics, the name for this blog was based on how many words fill a standard newspaper column, and I'd hoped my words would bite. Well, while they may have, no one bit on them. It's hard writing into the void. But it's the only way this gets out of my head, so I can move on to the next...whatever.

So here goes.
6:17pm