The Art of Understatement

It's breezey in the desert, winds consistently between 40 and 55 miles per hour, shaking the foundations of my home and rattling my brain. Our local weather readers evidently are not allowed to exclaim, "Holy high winds, Batman!" because it might scare away the tourists. Likewise the warming trend: we're into the low triple digits, but we call it a warming trend. Actually, it's hot outside, and if you're visiting from one of the winter white lands, it's going to seem hotter than hell and burn the skin right off your bones, so come armed with a head covering and factor 50 sunscreen.

One local store ad suggests that customers "come on in and save some money," which, although a tempting offer, leads me to conclude that I'll stay home and save even more. Local communities are decrying the closure of several big box stores and wondering how to entice businesses back into them. That's what got you into this mess, offering huge financial incentives to the big box chains to build obscene megastores on opposing corners so you could jack the brands for tax revenue. Remember the smaller community stores, the ones that have been driven out of business by these big box bullies? Those were local folks who stayed the course through the best of times and the worst of times. Those local business owners now work part-time for minimum wage at the chain stores, while their former downtown businesses are gaping wounds to the greed.

In the desert, there's a new gladiator sport: hit and run traffic accidents. So far, the autos are winning. It's not bad enough that a driver speeding through a yellow light while talking on a cell phone hits a pedestrian, but they don't realize it? Cannot tell from the extensive front-end damage that the car hit something? Hear about the accident on the media and not connect the dots? Don't grasp the concept of "doing the right thing" just because it is the right thing to do?

We're down to the last couple of classes of the semester and the litany of failure rages, including all the many reasons for why a student has not completed an assignment, but little actual comprehension of what that means to the final grade. We're not a government program that factors in cost over-rides and misses deadlines because that's what pads the paycheck: when the grade is due, it is computed based on what has been completed, not good intentions and/or bad excuses. To use the vernacular, it is what it is: deal with it.

Several annoyances have somewhat abated, while others continue to irritate, including the radio antenna that does not function in the dead spots between home and my worksite. After 2 antennas were forcibly removed from my truck, I replaced the external antenna with an internal one -- and it does not work as well as the external antenna. However, a query call to the installer ended with the admonition that I was not to be "argumentative" with him as I tried to explain to him that returning to the shop so he could compare the reception I receive with other vehicles at that location would not change the fact that my antenna does not work in specific geographical locations between my home and work site. I laughed when he explained that the signal in the hi-desert fluctuates hourly, so I cannot count on any kind of steady performance from a car radio while driving therein. He didn't comprehend that until the new antenna was installed I had excellent reception anywhere I traveled in SoCal, including between my home and work site, so I thanked him for being obtuse and surly, and disconnected.

My family home is in Mission Canyon; my brother, his wife, and their children have again evacuated. There is nothing to be done but sit and wait to see which way the winds blow today: toward the structures or across the tops of the mountains covered with dense vegetation. We have dictionaries filled with words, but somehow we fall back on "stressful," a word that loses its meaning when a wildfire rages uncontrolled toward a canyon filled with homes above a sleepy little coastal town.