I had to leave Birch behind today, because it was too hot for him to wait in the car. Even if I’d done the usual routine - blast the AC until the car is a meat locker, park in the shade - it would have been uncomfortable after ten minutes, and I wanted to do the full gym. He howled when I left. Sorry, but I must.

At the gym I got an alert: ALARM DETECTED AT HOME. I have the automation at Fred Base 1 to send me a note if if hears an alarm, and I can call up one of the HomePod Minis to hear it. I thought his barking was setting it off. I called up the system and listened. He was, indeed, howling. Criminey. Since I can talk through the system, I said BIRCH. QUIET. NO. He instantly fell silent, no doubt confused - okay well where is he, then?

That’s when I heard a little beep. Ugh. The fridge. Either the top doors were ajar, or the freezer drawer was open. But how? I closed the app and went back to thumping on the treadmill. Five minute mark, increased pace to 4.4 miles per hour, increase gradient to 1.5. (The other day it got stuck and went up to 15 and I thought I was having a stroke.) The phone crackles again with the warning sound: ALARM DETECTED. I dismissed. And again. I called it up and he was moaning, and and told him NO. He was quiet. And again. I called it up and repeated, and I do wonder what others on the row of treadmills might have thought.

It bothered me through the whole workout, because if the freezer was open I would lose the ice cream to the crystal infestation. But I did all the machines and then the free weights - back to 30lbs for the biceps. Sped home expecting smoke to be billowing out the window. Turns out it was the doors, not the drawer.

That will teach me to leave the house alone, I guess.

Productive day. Liked the column. Web work in the morning, then a radio interview (through which he barked, because now when I sit down and start talking he takes it as a cue that I will give him food to shut him up, and then he barks more for a stick), then assembled all of the month’s work - writing, photos, music, the daily videos I still do for some reason, - and backed up everything to cloud and archived drives. Thought:

Four months.

It has been four months since she left, since I saw her left, and probably . . . six weeks since we spoke. As I noted, the curt nature of her emails about $ matters indicate tit-for-tattitude: FINE, you don’t want to have a relationship going forward, I won’t engage either. To which I shrug: okay. I mean, I’m not one to mountainize a molehill and brood and nurse grudges, but you did divorce me, right? Surely you must have thought “there’s a chance he’ll never want to have anything to do with me” and you regarded it as a cost of doing business. She moves to a new place today and I sent her an email simply saying I hope it went well and that she likes her new place. All of which was true and nothing more needed to be said. As I probably said before: it’s not that there’s nothing to say, it’s that there’s everything to say.

Four months. Main accomplishment: I don’t feel like a useless bad lazy professional-failure bad person whose music “isn’t music” and writes lousy novels. I feel like a lone atom without a nucleus who’s done some nice nature photography lately, and taught a dog how to leap over a silt fence.

Look at this shameful situation.

TRASH EVERYWHERE.

Kidding, of course, but I noted it because I’d just read a long reddit thread about trash in Minneapolis public areas. We used to be - sorry, Minneapolis used to be known for its lack of trash on the streets and sidewalks and parks, but now it seems that some people just dump their stuff without care. There were two themes that stood out in the thread:

1. It is not the fault of the people who throw stuff on the ground. One poster began with Trump making everyone feel hopeless, and moved on to climate change, homelessness, and a dead economy. There was general agreement that people feel life is very bad and there isn’t much hope so there isn’t any incentive to walk over to the trash can and put your stuff in it.

2. Another poster, building on this idea, said that pointing out anti-social behavior like this was dehumanizing and made it easier to regard the strewers as unpeople, and the cumulative effect was to lose one’s sense of empathy.

Perhaps a few pointed to selfish, unintelligent people who have no regard for the social compact, but they were in the minority, but they didn’t stand out.

It followed the same script as the discussions about people setting up tents in the park by the swingset and doing needle drugs. Vast forces are at work and unless we solve them now, there's no point in doing anything else.

The conversations about the nightly incidents of car-window breaking are a bit different, because everyone really wants that to stop, but they inevitably end up blaming the cops for not doing anything, with a few voices blaming a system that doesn’t levy consequences. And then it’s an argument about ruining Young People’s Lives by getting them justice-involved, and besides don’t tell me you didn’t break some rules when you were a kid.

Smashing 30 windows on a street is Youthful High Spirits just getting some naughtiness out of the system before settling down into a life as a productive citizen.

I thought of this the other day while exploring a neighborhood I had considered choosing for the Last House, because it was in Richfield. And . . . no. It was a first-ring post-war burb, like the rest of the city, but this part was just shabby. Elsewhere neighborhoods of similar houses, similar age, are presentable, and you have the feeling that everyone cares. This was just disordered. Shiny new cars and leaning fences. I drew a big box around the neighborhood on the map for the realtor: NO.

And then . . . I saw nice little houses at reasonable prices, in Minneapolis. Surprisingly nice and surprisingly affordable. Instant suspicion. It’s damned odd but I am wary of my old city, not because I’m a-feerd, but because taxes are ridiculous and there aren’t enough cops. Every day up here at the Fred I see a cop pulling over someone for hot-footing it down 77, and I can’t tell you the last time I saw anyone pulled over for speeding in Minneapolis.

As I said in a text to Astrid today about not going to the Fair, I’ve lost so many connections to things I thought were permanent. The secret to rebuilding your life after that isn’t trying to force the issue and pretend that the connections will regrow with time.

They won’t, and it’s alienating to try.

I would never just dump TV s screenshots here because "I watched something and now I want to bore everyone with the complete details of a plot about which they do not care, and since it is fiction, it means little." I want ot keep going with the LABORATORY theme in old movies and TV - in this case, Outer Limits. A Charwoman is cleaning up a nuclear facility:

I use this ep as an example of how TV of the distant past was much more interesting than you might have thought, if your exposure to the old shows is limited.

Long story short: she hoovers up some strange errant nuclear material, origin unexplained, and it comes out of the vacuum cleaner as PURE ENERGY. A monster! The head of the institute controls it and uses it to keep his employees in some sort of slavery. It's not entirely explained. But man, these guys don't like the sight of it:

He does a great job of appearing terrified:

Back at the house where the guy was living with his brother, we meet the girlfriend:

She was instantly recognizable to me.

It was that look that did it. Her name is BarBara Luna, and online comments bring up an interesting point.

Her Italian, Hungarian, Spanish, Portuguese and Filipino background has led her to portray a variety of roles. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II cast her in the Broadway hit musical "South Pacific", as Ngana, which was spoken entirely in French.

Her work included . . .

. . . which led some nerds to suggest that this . . .

Was Star Trek's first interracial kiss. It's from Mirror, Mirror. (She shows up at the end in the real Trek world.)

While snipping that ep, I had to laugh:

That's Vic Perrin. The Control Voice who announces the opening credits of . . . The Outer Limits.

Anyway, eventually someon from The Law comes to investigate the facility:

He's very careful and patient and wary. Eventually he confronts the beast. This really doesn't do it justice, but it's all I could get for irrelevant reasons. It's an unnerving thing.

It's not high art but I am consistently impressed.

It’s 1953.

Curtiss had some nice stuff. I didn’t know they had Butterfingers at first. Otto Schnering, Curtiss’ founder, invented it in 1923.

I can’t imagine the artist had fun with this one, because the design makes some brands more important than others. No wonder Coconut Nibbles didn’t last.

What about Dip Bits? That would be a small version of Dip, which was like a 3 Muskateers.

Just the thing! It has water chestnuts! Everyone loves water chestnuts!

As I love to remind people, Chun King was founded by an Italian guy in Minnesota.

Old world fave, but out-of-this-world flavor!

Absent: meat of any form

Okay, well, a quarter cup of bacon drippings.

It’s 45 proof.

Of course you’d add this. Why wouldn’t you? Doesn’t the recipe ask for it?

Exploded gems from the jet process:

I have but one question: did anyone actually prefer it? Anyone?

Behold the PORTION-ATOR:

Popeye’s popcorn has a Facebook page, but it hasn’t been updated since 2015.

Bittra? That would be your dark variety.

Suchard was, says wikipedia, “one of the oldest chocolate factories in Switzerland until its closure in 1996.”

That will do. Sad news in Comic Sins today. Probably a somewhat melancholy Joe Ohio; haven't read it yet. But! Better days ahead.

Right?