PopWars

Helena wrote lyrics for a song about how she first met her husband. He was born in Jamaica, so she had AI put her lyrics to a reggae song. It was really sweet. There were six of us listening to it on her phone, and the discussion turned to AI in general. Someone said, “I feel sorry for kids born today,” and someone else agreed. I held my tongue.

Now, I have no idea if I’m right about this, but I have always felt that youth is a glorious time no matter what decade you were born in, and the youngest generation today will witness all sorts of marvels we can’t imagine. More generally, when one generation acts like theirs was the best, it sounds sort of full of yourself or worse, like you have given up trying to figure out our current day. That’s why that World War II-era Greatest Generation talk always bothered me. Do we have to have another world war to stack up? Maybe it’s just that every generation feels theirs is the best.

I understand the concern about the state of the world the next generation will inherit. We continue to make a mess of the environment, social media is dividing us for profit while leaving people with fewer friends and the country id openly flirting with fascism. But like Kahil El’Zabar reminded us, nature is stronger than these forces.

We recently spent time with some old friends, and we were talking about technology when one of them said, “We just got old about two years ago.” I had a friend and roommate more than forty years ago who wanted to be old. He was already settling into routines and prepping to shut down.

Near the end of my father’s life, I asked him straight out if he felt life was better when he was growing up. He started out talking about all the innovations he had seen in his time, how wonderful the personal computer was, etc., and then he started to pivot to how the priest in his old westside neighborhood knew everyone and kept a tight rein on wayward kids. Sort of a mixed report.

We shopped at the Co-Op yesterday, and as always, we stopped by to visit Pete, who lives nearby. He showed us his newest mixed-media pieces in what he called both the world’s oldest and newest mediums. Pete was born the year WWII ended, and I couldn’t wait to hear his perspective. He told us about his father turning Frank Sinatra off when he came on the TV. And rock ‘n’ roll, that was all about sex! How the Vietnam War ruined so many Americans’ lives. About forty-five minutes later, he said the idea that one generation has it better or worse than another is complete bullshit.

I’d like this straight before calcification sets in.

We haven’t listened to our recording from Wednesday night. We left for the mountains the next morning. The gig with Bernie was an odd one in that the crowd, mostly regulars, was especially intent on listening. Bernie had sat in with us before but not on the Little’s new stage. He set up in a way that we couldn’t hear what was coming out of his amp for the first set. So Peggi and I were playing sparsely as we strained to hear Bernie, afraid to run over whatever it was he was playing. It was especially nerve-wracking. We talked during the break and the second set worked.

We left after breakfast and stopped at the Fastrac in Walworth to go to the bathroom. The only newspaper on their stand was the Epoch Times, and they had a whole pile of them. I looked it up on Wikipedia and found it described as right-wing or far-right, known for its strong support of Donald Trump and the promotion of conspiracy theories. We made plans to stop at the nearby Mi Hacienda Jalisciense on our way back.

Driving up to the mountains at this time of year is like traveling into the future. Here, by the lake, our fall colors are just rolling in, but as we drove north the colors grew more and then less intense until we arrived post-peak. Our hosts live off the grid, so in one sense we arrived in the past, no internet or running water, but in a very real sense we were far more grounded in the present.

It is always tempting to take detail photos of their minimal but artfully constructed home in the woods, the perfectly stacked woodpiles, the burnt pots on the outdoor grill, the titles on the bookshelf and the glass tabletop on the hemlock stump.

Shelley took us down to the beaver dam on the marsh, where she pointed to the vertical supports the engineers used to support their thatched wall. The dam had raised the level of the marsh by three and a half feet, and the creek, where I was standing when I took this shot, had slowed to a trickle. So Shelley suggested I remove a few pieces to refresh the creek.

After a few days in the woods, we pulled up in front of the Mexican restaurant in Alton. It sounded like they were having a party inside. At four in the afternoon, some farm workers were just getting off work, and there were twenty or so, all men in their early twenties, eating at tables. Mexican music was cranked in the kitchen, and the subwoofer was rattling the building. Peggi went back out to the car to get our earplugs. Another couple showed up and sat next to us. They ordered margaritas. Peggi and I were having Negra Modelos with guacamole and enchiladas. We came home, made a batch of pimientos de Padrón and watched Atlético defeat Alavés 2–1.

Our friend, David Greenberger, has a fine arts degree in painting. After graduating he took a job as activities director at the Duplex Nursing Home. He met the residents of the nursing home and abandoned painting in favor of conversation. “This is my art,” he said. David created the Duplex Planet, his life’s work.

For the next four days he has an auction on eBay where he is selling his collages on postcards at insanely low prices! 

I couldn’t remember if we had ever taken Steve to the Genesee Brewery. He’s been to Rochester many times, and we usually just carry on like no time has elapsed instead of running around town.

But Steve got fascinated by a story in our local paper about two women who had tried to rescue a dog—I didn’t read the article, but as I understand it, the dog was dead and it had been stuffed into a bag. One of those grisly stories I don’t pay any attention to. They saw someone throw the bag into the river gorge from Maplewood Park, and they climbed down the gorge and had to be rescued by helicopter. Steve wanted to see the site, so we had an outing.

We started by orienting Steve as to how the Genesee River runs through the city, indeed formed the city as one of America’s early boom towns. The Genesee Brewery is a comfortable vantage point.

We ordered three Twelve Horse Ales and sat outside on the third-floor deck of the brewery with this view. A guy sitting next to us had a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt on with Hendrix’s 1969 tour stops listed on the back. I saw Hendrix in 1969 with Kim in Indianapolis, so I had to ask him to lean forward so I could study his shirt.

The dog incident happened at Maplewood Park, another of Frederick Law Olmsted’s, near the Lower Falls, north of the High Falls (pictured above) and closer to where the river flows into Lake Ontario. The last time we were here was with Peggi’s mom when we toured the rose garden.

The park is a little seedy and was the scene of a shooting a few years back. We parked next to a car in which the occupants were enjoying some skunky weed. And before we walked down the steps to the gorge, we had to wait for a bicyclist to finish taking a piss. There was a couple making out down there, and the guard rails along the gorge had long ago crumbled into it.

When we got back, we heard Steve talking to Brad on the phone and telling him where we had gone. In his telling, people were shooting up down there and the couple was fucking out in the open.

We ran into a couple of women from Laos in the park. We knew what they were up to because they were sort of walking in circles at a short distance from one another, each carrying a bag and looking down. We stopped to chat with one of the women and she showed us what she had found. We were surprised at the incredible variety. Our friend, Shelley, knows her mushrooms but we would be scared to death to eat something we found in the park. I take that back. We have brought home some pawpaw fruit and eaten that.

I would guess this has been an especially good year for mushrooms. We have hardly watered our garden all summer and Lake Ontario is still more than a foot and a half above its long-term average. Our neighbor showed us a puffball he found by his firewood, firewood he had had neglected to cover. It too was covered with mushrooms.