Even cowgirls get the blues on Detroit's mean streets
Wednesday, July 23, 2025. It's Odin's day . . . Another heat-hammer day in TulseyTown. Blazing sun and strong Southerlies. 100+ indices.
It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have. – Cheryl Strayed
Missed this one … Joanna Macy, visionary teacher and author, died quietly this past Saturday at her home in Berkeley.
Yesterday . . . novelist Tom Robbins was born on this day 1936 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. And, painter Edward Hopper, (“Nighthawks”) was born in 1882 Nyack, New York.
Today … Fifty-eight years ago tonight, a five day riot began in Detroit after a police raid on an African American club. It is considered one of the catalysts of the militant Black Power movement and initiated the economic collapse of the city. Detroit has yet to fully recover.
It’s the birthdate of detective novelist Raymond Chandler. The author of the wisecracking private eye named Philip Marlowe was born in 1888 Chicago.
“In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man.” – Raymond Chandler.
Things seem a little unstable at the White House. The panic continues … Trump appears to be touching all his greatest hits in an attempt to regain control of the narrative. But the more he protests that he is not connected to the Epstein files, the more he reinforces the idea that he is. – Heather Cox Richardson, in Letters From An American.
Echoing this blog's intent …
It’s not enough to resist what we don’t want; we must generate a new beginning. . Every day, in each of our lives, we can do the new thing, make the next call, refuse to procrastinate at whatever it is. We can let the universe know we mean business. Make new contacts. Reach out in new ways. – Marianne Williamson, Transform, online 7.23.25.
Self-transformation is a continuous process, not a one-time event. Every aspect of your being is in constant transformation: physically from the dna to your behavior as you read this;psychologically as your brain adapts to each moment by moment instant; spiritually: as the universe evolves so do you.You can't hold on to any of it.
“There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better. [That said] There are only two mantras, yum and yuck, mine is yum.” ― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker
. . . allatonce everything everywhere . . .
Monday, July 21, 2025 Monday, July 21, 2025. It's the Moon's day . . . The heat dome remains over the U.S. with TulseyTown at the center. Forecasts are near Xeroxes from yesterday with moderate Southerlies maintaining clear skies with heat indices in the 100º+ range this afternoon into the early evening.
Marshall McLuhan was born on today’s date in 1911, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The communication theorist, social philosopher and prophetic media critic, his books and theories are still relevant and influential.
Speaking of McLuhan
Consciousness emerges not as an operation of a mechanical mind but as an embodied interaction between an organic mind and world — a dynamic flow of exchanges in which the whole organism, not just the brain, participates and, in the act of participation, creates itself. – Maria Popova, “Making Up the Mind,” The Marginalian.
Turns out, The Way really can't be told. Is there something necessarily wrong with dark energy and our current cosmological story? Or can we fix the problem and find the right answer, or is science a limited model and not a direct description of reality at all? – The Institute of Arts and Ideas, 7.20.25.
In an age of coral reef bleaching and ecological devastation, researchers playing the sound of a healthy reef with underwater speakers to a dying reef can quantifiably call back the fish and coral polyps and species that have fled, setting up the ecological groundwork for repair. – Sophie Strand, “Ghost Songs & Ecological Resurrection” [not to ignore human]. In Make Me Good Soil, online 20 July 2025.
And, today is the birthdate of Ernest Hemingway. The prolific author was born in 1899 Oak Park, Illinois.
Here's the the wrap up for the past week from Sunday's Civil Discourse by Joyce Vance.
Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of [such a] society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.… In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.
– Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, original publication by MIT Press, 1964.
By the meaningless sign linked to the meaningless sound we have built the shape and meaning of Western man.
– Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962.
The moon's a harsh mistress . . .
Sunday, July 20, 2025. It's Sol's day . . . Extreme heat warnings are in the forecasts for TulseyTown today with indices to 106º under clear skies and moderate to strong Southerlies.
On this day in 1969, U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped from Lunar Module Eagle to the surface of the Moon. Heather Cox Richardson remembers, in Letters From An American.
Today in 1875 the largest recorded swarm of locusts in American history descended upon the Great Plains. It was a swarm about 1,800 miles long, 110 miles wide, from Canada down to Texas.
In 1869, Innocents Abroad was published, firmly establishing its author, Mark Twain, as a serious writer.
It's the birthdate of novelist and screenplay writer Cormac McCarthy. The author of All the Pretty Horses and No Country For Old Men was born on this day in 1933 Providence, Rhode Island.
And Francesco Petrarca was born on this day. The Italian humanist, scholar, and poet better known as Petrarch, was born in1304 Arezzo, Italy.
Sunday Sermon
Collective greed is killing America today. We make everything about money—everything … How can we look at the suffering taking place in Gaza, Ukraine, or Sudan and be anything but sad? It’s sad beyond words or concepts...I recently turned eighty and the older I get, the more it feels like I must forgive almost everything for not being perfect … Forgiveness of reality—including tragic reality—is the heart of the matter. – Fr. Richard Rohr, “Grief, Anger and Compassion,” Meditations, The Center for Action and Meditation, Sunday, July 20, 2025
The moon taps at my window.
Stars spell out their concern.
I pretend I do not see. ― Darshana Suresh
[...]
Yang wants to name and possess
all it names, to become the Sun God
fearful of the changes brought by the Yin moon.
In dreams, the Sun does not blind.
– jab