Author: StevenDBrewer

Author of speculative fiction and poetry in English and Esperanto. Teacher of scientific writing. Lover of natural history. (he/his)
a group of dice

Since January, I’ve a lot of extra Tanuki Time, but I haven’t had the focus to work on my longer fiction. I have several projects that are essentially completed, but it’s beginning to look like I’ll need to find a different outlet for publishing them. While I’ve had less focus, I’ve been working more on shorter fiction.

What’s For Breakfast, Toasterella is about a wizard who patented a method for contracting with sprites to compel them to work for you, but he discovers a limitation when he needs to change the contract. It’s been rejected twice.

A Persistent Curse is about a dog caught between his owner and his witch grandmother regarding a particularly nasty curse. It’s also been rejected twice.

Exit Interview is my newest complete short story. It’s what happens when the entities that are running the simulation your universe is in decide to shut it down. It’s been rejected once.

Jimmy and Coral is a work in progress that’s not actually speculative fiction. It began as a series of vignettes posted to Wandering Shop Stories but, now that I’ve figured out the rest of the story, I’m just writing the rest in a document. It’s about a young woman whose mother is kidnapped and has to turn to her estranged father to try to get her back.

Now that the semester is over — and once I’m through the Nebulas — I’m hoping I’ll have time to get back to the business of writing. I plan to start querying to look for a new publisher — or maybe self-publish my current book projects. I also have made arrangements to use a recording studio to try to create an audio book for Revin’s Heart. I’ve had a lot of interest in have an audio book available, so I’ll see whether I can do a good enough job myself. It will be fun to try.

As May ends, I am enroute to the Nebula Awards Conference in Chicago. I am currently rusticating with my brother for a few days before we head up to Chicago on Tuesday. It should be a fun time.

I had originally planned to travel with my son too, by driving. Trapping him in a car to drive is a nice way to have long conversations, which we rarely seem to be able to do under normal circumstances. But this year, he had plans to attend another event and it didn’t work for us to travel together.

I like driving. I just wrote a post about taking the bus to avoid driving, but — in fact — being out on the open road is a pleasure for me. I really enjoy the feeling of flow: of having just enough engagement to keep me occupied, but not so much that I can’t let my mind wander and think about stuff.

It takes two pretty long days to drive here, but it’s a drive I’ve made many times before and it’s interesting to see the changes that have taken place over thirty years. Each time is a little different. This year, I took the northern route along the New York Thruway.

Gas prices were not as high as I might have feared. The highest prices I saw (in New York) were $4.78. The most I paid was $4.57. Prices were generally around $4.50, except in Indiana, where they have suspended the gasoline tax and the sales tax. I saw it for $3.82 at one place, and it was generally around $4.00. But it went right back up once I crossed the state line into Illinois.

Speaking of Indiana, I drove through the largest construction area I’ve ever seen in my life near Lebanon. It was an area that almost defies comprehension: 10,000 acres, or 16 square miles. It was immense. Evidently, Indiana has created a special regulatory/tax district called LEAP (Limitless Exploration/Advanced Pace) that is basically a scheme to enrich the extremely wealthy. The wealthy are incredibly happy to be enriched, so they’ve taken advantage of this opportunity and they seem to be building at least two gigantic projects, a $4.5 billion project for an Eli Lily “Medicine Foundry” and $10 Billion for a Meta data center.

I saw a lot of other interesting stuff on the way. There’s a place near Erie, Pennsylvania that has billboards for Big Woodie’s Fireworks. They sell not only fireworks but pepper spray, tasers, and swords. Nothing like enjoying fireworks with a nice squirt of pepper spray! Hoof Hearted Brewing sounded like place worth visiting: weird brews and weird artwork. I saw a car that had a bumper sticker that said “Serene Transportation” that was zipping frenetically in-and-out of traffic. And no trip would be complete without a stop at the Uranus Fudge Factory, which has to be the best name for a confectioner ever. “The best fudge comes from Uranus!”

Anyway, for two days, I can rest and visit with my brother in Champaign. We don’t have any particular plans, other than to write, take walks, and maybe drink some beer. It’s nice to visit with family.

PVTA bus in Amherst

Today, I started riding public transportation again. Amherst has a great bus system provided by the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority (PVTA). When we first moved to the Pioneer Valley, I lived for two years in Pelham — one of the “hill towns” that surround the valley. During those two years, I had to purchase an expensive parking sticker and drive to work. As a newcomer, the only parking stickers I could get were a long way from my office. I initially selected the closest lot I could find but when I asked my colleague he said, “Do you want to die? That’s on top of Orchard Hill. In the winter, you will slip, fall, and die trying to get down the hill.” So, I picked a lot that was essentially as far as you could get from my office and still be on campus.

When we purchased our house, it was about the same distance as that parking lot had been. But, even better, there was a bus stop at the corner of our property. It took about 15 minutes to walk to my office but, if I timed it just right, I could take the bus and get from my front door to my office door in under three minutes. It was so efficient, it made it kind of hard to walk. If I did walk, two or three buses would go past. Eventually, when I did want to walk for some reason, I started walking a slightly longer route that took me along a different street where I didn’t have to have it rubbed in my face that I could have ridden the bus.

During the pandemic, I pretty much quit riding the bus. Even before the pandemic, I had started my Professional Improvement Fellowship and was going to the Makerspace, instead of my office. The Makerspace was even closer than my office and not on a bus route, so I just walked to that. And once the pandemic started, I wasn’t going to my office anyway. And then I was hospitalized and needed to avoid respiratory infections, so I started working remotely.

Looking back, I also realize now that, even before I was hospitalized, I was already showing symptom of chronic lung disease. It became harder and harder to walk any distance. It was a very gradual process that I explained to myself by saying I was “out of shape” or that I’d gained some weight. In fact, my lungs just weren’t working very well and I was constantly suffering from hypoxia. Doctors would ask me if I suffered from “shortness of breath” but I literally didn’t understand what that meant. Since I had been suffering from shortness of breath for so long, it just seemed like my natural state. A respiratory therapist I worked with in the hospital said, “Wow. That must have been really hard.” I felt seen.

Although I didn’t need to go to an office anymore, I did take daily trips to visit and check on my son. This was particularly true after his hospitalization this winter. Since then, I’ve visited often twice a day to support him and take care of his boxer dog. While the students are in town, the buses tend to be very crowded through campus, so I decided to drive. And I didn’t think much of these trips until gas prices began to spike after our mad king’s unconstitutional war against Iran. Today, with the students gone for the summer, I decided to mask up and start taking the bus again.

It was fun to refamiliarize myself with the practices of riding the bus. The bus tracker website, that you can use to see when buses will arrive at the stop. The various bus routes and their vagaries. The unwritten conventions, like the fact that you don’t have to signal for stops at some places, like the middle of campus or Cowles Lane (my destination). And that you do have to signal for the stop nearest my house, but that you should wait to signal until you get past the previous intersection. (Over the quarter century I rode the bus, I learned that if you signaled too soon, the bus driver would occasionally forget and blow right through the stop. I saw that happen a handful of times when people signaled too soon, but never if you waited to signal.)

I was also reminded of the slower, more relaxed, pace of life the bus imposes. When you drive, you can stay busy right up until you leave. Then you’re busy driving. Then you arrive right at your destination. With the bus, you have a short walk to the bus stop, a brief wait until the bus arrives, a relaxing ride, and then you arrive at a short remove from your destination and have to walk a few steps to get there. It’s relaxing — and it fits well with my new-found freedom as a retired person.

Next fall, when the students come back, I might start driving again. But, for now, I’m having fun.

Money

The History of Money by David McWilliams (2024) is subtitled “A story of humanity.” It skims over a vast landscape, dipping in now and again for a deeper dive into moments when innovations in how societies created and managed money (or failed to do so) contributed to world-changing events. The complexity of our current world economy has grown up guided and constrained by the cautionary lessons of history, but ever spurred on by people’s greed and prurient interests. This book provides an enjoyable and useful introduction with a lot of fascinating details along the way.

He begins with the earliest known examples of commercial tallies, records of values, and transactions, going back to the stone age. The theme of money shifting between measures of commodities (e.g. grain or precious metals) or value (as anchored by fiat and monetary policy) plays out over and over throughout the book.

Many important historical figures are introduced with the roles they played in advancing innovations in monetary practice and policy. I’ve always lamented that, as someone in the sciences, I had little flexibility to study history and classic literature. McWilliams has prompted me to consider reading at least two important books out of history: Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, the foundational text of economics and Liber Abaci by Fibonacci.

The books ends with a pretty harsh dismissal of cryptocurrencies:

Over the years we have seen that money is a technology designed to solve a problem. I’m scratching my head as to what problem Bitcoin in particular and crypto in general actually solve. Despite the small foothold Bitcoin has gained in the mainstream US investment market, crypto looks set to remain on the fringes, a source of obsession for its supporters and aficionados, but not very useful or practical in reality. Bitcoin is to money what Esperanto is to language.

Other than the slur against Esperanto, I am in complete agreement. I mean, he’s not actually wrong about Esperanto either, but I would have preferred he slander Volapük rather than Esperanto to make his point.

If you’re curious about understanding how money works in practice and how it came to be the way it is, this book is a great place to start.

an old railroad pocket watch

Two years ago, I began a phased retirement. Last Thursday, I conducted a University class meeting for the last time, presided over my final Faculty Senate meeting, and (by coincidence) also celebrated my 38th wedding anniversary. And today — Tuesday — is special because, on my Tuesday/Thursday teaching schedule, I would have been teaching today. (I mean, I wouldn’t have because it’s finals week so class wouldn’t have met anyway, but you get the idea).

My brother, who retired fifteen years ago, recently had a piece of advice for me.

The weeks leading up to retirement, and the weeks after retirement, are particularly nice. Do savor them. Don’t just let them slip by as if they were ordinary weeks.

I’ve been trying to take this to heart.

Although we agree about many things, we sometimes actually come at things from quite different perspectives. He never really wanted to work and pursued a career with the goal of retiring early. I, on the other hand, aimed to find a career that gave meaning to my life and represented what I would have wanted to be doing anyway. I tried to embody the aphorism, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I am not a spiritual person, but I believe in the sanctity of work.

I decided to dedicate myself to science education. As an edutainer, I had visited hundreds of elementary-school classrooms and had seen how few teachers understood what science really was: Not merely a collection of facts, but a way of knowing and apprehending the world. I believed that improving science education was a potential way to help people make better, more-informed choices about the environment.

When the Internet happened, I was given a front-row seat to helping faculty transform education using technology. For a brief moment, I was in a position to show people how technology could be used, not merely to reproduce the existing paradigm, but to create new environments to foster learning.

The work felt important to me. It seemed like work worth doing. I could make a case to myself that it was worth dedicating my life to the task.

In part, I was motivated by Journey to Ixtlan. It’s a rather silly book. But I read it as a young man and certain themes appealed to me. In particular, the notion that, since death may arrive unpredictably, you should aim to use what time you have intentionally.

This was reinforced for me when I had a cancer scare in graduate school. A barber spotted a questionable mole on my ear and recommended I get it looked at. I made an appointment with the campus health service and a physician’s assistant inspected it. She studied it, pulled out an illustrated guide, studied it some more, paged through the guide, and then finally announced, “I think you’re OK because it looks like this one.”

I said, “You’re pointing at a picture that’s labeled ‘Deadly Melanoma.'” It was. It was literally labeled “Deadly Melanoma.”

She paled. “Oh. Oh! Oh… Let me me go get the dermatologist.”

They took a biopsy and, a week later, the results came back. It was not malignant. They still recommended getting it removed, so I scheduled the surgery. But a week of having that in the back of my mind was rather… focusing.

Similarly, my decision to retire was significantly influenced by my hospitalization when I was diagnosed with a chronic lung condition. This made working and teaching seem a lot less fun. And got me thinking that I had better things to do than keep beating my head against a wall.

As I’ve approached the end of my phased retirement, I’ve attended several workshops where people talk about retirement. One person suggested that, rather than “retiring from” one should aim to “retire to”. For a lot of people, this is perhaps a useful distinction, although it was never really in question for me. If I wasn’t doing work, I would be doing something else creative. I have no shortage of interesting projects I intend to work on in retirement.

I have plenty of things to work on. I have several fiction writing projects. I have several books in progress and a lot of short fiction that I should be shopping around to publishers. I have wanted to make a new book of haiku for a couple of years and just thought of an idea for an accompanying art project that might be fun to work on. There are also some gardening projects that might be fun to try. I would also have fun doing some technology projects again as well. And, of course, there are also my service commitments to SFWA and Straw Dog. There is plenty to keep me busy.

After my two years of phased retirement, I still have several months to savor as I approach full retirement. This week, I’ll get the grading completed for my last class. Since I’m on a nine-month appointment, the summer is a period of “non-responsibility” (or irresponsibility, as my brother likes to joke.) So, although I’ll still be formally employed, I won’t have any more official duties. I can attend a few Rules Committee meetings and join them to meet with the Campus Leadership Council. And August 31 will be my last day. I will have been a faculty member for 30 years and one month.

It’s enough.

Today, I was scheduled to attend the Watch City Steampunk Festival to sell books. But it wasn’t to be. After several days uneasily watching the forecast, this morning I checked the radar and made the final decision to cancel my appearance. It was a “perfect storm” due not only to the rain, but also a shortened festival and higher travel costs.

I was planning to bring a small selection of new books. I was ready with copies of A Familiar Problem, M.D. Neu’s Hawaiian Sun, and Lawrence Rafael Brother’s The Shadow Minister. I was also planning to bring Brightstar’s The Working (which had been released last year, but was out-of-stock during Watch City) and, finally, my own backlist including Revin’s Heart and Better Angels: Tour de Force.

Rain means death for book sales. Books themselves are particularly vulnerable to rain. Perhaps the only thing worse to try to sell in the rain would be cotton candy. Or maybe owls. Any books you put out for display are likely to get water damaged and become unsellable: nobody wants to buy books that have gotten wet. Moreover, the wet ground also makes it difficult to even protect the stock you don’t put out. And, of course, it suppresses attendance which also reduces sales. Furthermore, rain also often brings wind, which knocks over books, scatters promotional giveaways, and can even blow over the tent.

Last year it also rained. But last year, the rain was predicted to wrap up around the start of the festival. Although we got wet during setup, the festival itself was mostly dry (though cold and pretty miserable). This year, the rain is just getting started and it looks like it will only get heavier as the day wears on. There’s even a chance of thunderstorms during load-out.

In addition, this year the organizers were compelled to shorten the length of the festival. The town passed a new ordinance that events on the Common may only run for four hours. I suspect a lot of vendors were already planning to skip the event due to the difficulty of justifying the costs of attendance with the shortened time frame of the festival.

Finally, of course, gasoline prices are a lot higher this year. The trip represents about four hours of highway driving, which costs almost twice as much due to the mad king’s unconstitutional war against Iran.

As I wrote in my bookselling post at Planetside and on my blog, even in the best of circumstances, you’re doing well if you make back your table fee at these kinds of promotional festival events. It’s rare you actually come out in the black when you consider travel and other costs — to say nothing of labor. It wasn’t going to happen this year. As my mother says, “There are times when you just have to give up on things.” But at least I’m warm and dry.

a selfie showing some participants of the Straw Dog Writers Guild retreat participants

On April 25, 2026, the leadership of the Straw Dog Writers Guild gathered at the WOW Creative Arts Center in Westfield for a day-long retreat to discuss the organization. Fifteen people — the entire Steering Committee plus a handful of others — spent the day getting to know each other and the organization a bit better. By the end of the day, all of the world’s problems had been solved. Well, maybe not all of them. But we did have a productive conversation.

Due to my chronic health condition, I wore a mask for the event. It appears to me that respiratory illness is not particularly high right now, but I normally avoid spending long periods of time indoors with groups of unmasked people. I really don’t want to end up in the hospital again. The last time I attended an indoor Straw Dog retreat, I had persuaded the participants to mask for my benefit. But it was controversial and unpopular with some people, so I didn’t try to do that this time.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that the post that follows is not a comprehensive report of what happened at the meeting. I did not take sufficiently detailed notes to represent everything that everyone said. This over-represents what I said and offers reactions primarily from my own perspective.

We began with an ice breaker. Becky Jones called on each of us to identify some symbol or metaphor to define ourselves. I broke the ice by saying what I typically say in such circumstances. Other people had similarly whimsical perspectives about themselves.

Ellie Meeropol provided a sheet with a summary of Straw Dog Writers Guild accomplishments from 2025 and 2026. For 2025, there were around ten on-going regular activities (Writer’s Night Out, Straw Dog Writes, Second Sunday readings, etc.) and around twenty one-time events (workshops on the craft and business of writing, Author’s Showcase, etc.) and this year looks on track to be similar. It was impressive to see all of our work represented.

a diagram showing straw dog activities, committees, and how they're organized.

Jacquelyn Sheehan and Bill Mailer led a discussion to flesh out a diagram (click to see full size) listing all of the on-going activities. We began with just trying to catalog everything then show how they map into committees and standing bodies. Finally, participants were invited to initial the parts they are involved with. I’m listed for Straw Dog Writes, the Program Committee, and website. I’m currently scheduled to chair a committee to coordinate with Christopher J. Sparks and Electropoetics, that will start redesigning the Straw Dog website in the coming months.

Don Lesser brought forward a question of whether Straw Dog should charge non-members to participate in workshops. This generated a lot of discussion that included a consideration of Straw Dog’s mission and the history of this topic, which was tried before and rejected. Making non-members pay a nominal fee to attend both has the potential to get people to see more value in the workshops and actually show up, if they’ve registered. It also might give members an increased sense of value for their membership. It also could suppress participation and raised concerns about its alignment with Straw Dog’s mission. My primary contribution to the discussion was about practical concerns: It sounds simple, but would require a fair amount of staff support to build out the infrastructure to collect the money, track which registrations were by members, check attendees for payment, integrate with online registration systems, etc.

During the potluck lunch, I stayed inside without eating because I avoid unmasking indoors. The last time I attended a Straw Dog retreat, I took my lunch outside and ate by myself. But I found that rather stigmatizing because everyone else was having conversations that I was excluded from. (I had persuaded people to mask that time, but they all necessarily unmasked during lunch and I didn’t feel safe staying indoors.) So this time, I just didn’t eat and talked with people while they ate. This was also stigmatizing (as if being the only person wearing a mask wasn’t stigmatizing in itself). But it was OK and I had some nice side conversations with people.

After lunch, we did another community building activity where we interviewed another person and then reported a summary of the conversation to the group. I met a young woman named Emily whom I hadn’t met before. At least I don’t think I’d met her before. I summarized the blog post I was writing about work and she talked about how her conception of location or place had evolved as she transitioned from childhood to adulthood. It was charming to get to know her a little better —and to learn a bit more about all of the other participants from their reported conversations.

Julie Schlack and Mary Ann Scognamiglio led the final activity of the day, to brainstorm ideas to aid recruitment and retention of new members. There were a lot ideas about building and sustaining community. I had been spending the day making notes of ideas that I had, which I then shared with the group. My ideas were:

  • Recruit member representatives for local organizations in the communities we serve to facilitate communication and ensure our activities are made visible on event schedules, bulletin boards, etc.
  • Develop a recruitment presentation that members could use to describe Straw Dog to other audiences.
  • Bring some focus to a national recruitment campaign (as our workshops are increasingly available via zoom, we’ve already picked up a substantial number of members across the country, which we could grow.)
  • Offer support and coordination for book launches to members. (We have a virtual book launch coming up that we’re hoping to use as a template.)
  • More committees or advisory boards for program elements, to provide increased opportunities to members to grow into leadership positions in the organization. (We have only a small number of actual committees currently, but it was pointed out that the WriteAngles conference could always use more volunteers.)
  • Set up book vending machines to sell books for members. This is an idea I’ve seen be successful in other areas. It would require some capital, but I think a lot of authors would jump at the chance to have their books available via vending machines and the machines themselves would serve as advertising for Straw Dog and its authors.
  • Offer more articles via the website and coordinate with the newsletter. Offer posts about writing, about members, about events, and maybe book reviews. Have teasers in the Newsletter and use it to drive more traffic to the website.
  • Use communication software more effectively. Currently most Straw Dog communications occur via email which has a lot of downsides. Committees mostly communicate by people just using “reply-all” to the last message sent to the group, which has the potential to miss some people, propagate typos in email addresses, or include the wrong people (if someone was copied into a previous message). We could use Discord or a threaded-discussion system (or someone recommended Slack) to communicate more effectively. This would ensure the history of groups remains accessible so that interested members or newcomers could lurk and more easily get up to speed..
  • Use our CRM more effectively. We have a new CRM, but it could track more information about members and our previous contacts with them, so that we can target subpopulations and follow up with people better.

There were a number of other ideas as well, but those are the ones that I brought forward.

At the end, Bob Plasse, the President of the Board of Directors of WOW was given an opportunity to comment on our retreat and tell us more about the WOW Center. He had a lot of insight into a community organization like ours and described what WOW was doing that we could consider replicating or articulating with.

The retreat was time well spent and I’m hopeful that we can implement a number of the ideas in the coming year.

an istvan bierfaristo mug

After reading Riva’s Escape (a side story of Revin’s Heart), one of my beta readers commented about how they appreciated the way my writing recognized the value and significance of work. In the scene, Revin (who has just transitioned) is pressed into service working in the kitchen of a restaurant washing dishes. This got me thinking about how my own experience with work has impacted how I write about it.

I started working on a farm before I was legally old enough to work. At age 15, a friend and I were hired to bale straw. We rode on a wagon behind a tractor grabbing bales of straw that emerged from the baler — a complicated machine that was powered by a shaft from the tractor. We would take turns carrying the bales back and stacking them up until the wagon was full. It was hot, dirty, and dusty. Looking back, my current lung condition probably wasn’t helped by breathing all the dust. We would often work until it was starting to get dark. I remember coming home in the gathering dark, taking a shower with the dirt sluicing off me, closing my eyes, and feeling like I was still bumping along on the wagon. Years later, I tried bailing hay. As an adult, I was hired to work by myself on the wagon (ie, working twice as hard) and lifting bales that weighed twice as much. I lasted one day.

I spent two summers as a high school student working as an animal caretaker in a toxicology laboratory. It was a bleak, proletarian existence. You were required to punch a time clock within seven minutes (five minutes before the hour or two minutes after) to punch in, then punch out before legally required breaks and lunch, punch back in afterwards, and then punch out at the end of the day. I was on the “large animal” team that cared primarily for beagles. Other teams did mice, rats, rabbits, and monkeys. The entire windowless facility had tan walls, gray floors, and unfinished ceilings with black-painted duct-work, pipes, and wiring. The animal rooms had two banks of stacked cages with a big floor sink at the end. I would go into a room, clean and fill all the water dishes, then pull the trays under the cages one after another, wash them in the sink, then replace them. Finally, I would recheck the water dishes and clean/refill any that were empty. (Some dogs, desperate for stimulation, would dig in their water dish as soon as you filled it.) It became so routine that I could daydream during the process to the extent that, when I got my schedule out after leaving a room, I sometimes had to check to see if I had just finished a room or just arrived.

I worked for a year as a busboy at chain seafood restaurant. There, I had perhaps the worst boss I ever had as an employee. In the restaurant, there was a lounge attached to the restaurant with an entrance for patrons and a passage containing the busboy station near the ice and soft drink dispensers for waitstaff. The boss would walk through those entrances in a big circle and every time she came around, I was doing the wrong thing. “Why are you bussing tables! The floor is dirty! Sweep the floor!” So I’d carry my tub to the dishwasher, get the sweeper and start sweeping the floor and she would return, “Why are you sweeping the floor! There are tables that need to be bussed!” She was pure evil.

I worked for a while as a gas-station attendant. When I was in middle-school, they had kids take the “differential aptitude test” — one of the many standardized tests used for nefarious purposes by educators — that included a component that was supposed to help you identify potential career options. I knew that I wanted to be a field biologist, so I tried to pick options that I thought would be aligned with that goal: Yes, I liked working outside. Yes, I liked working with numbers, etc, etc. Eventually, the computer spat out an answer: it said I should be a gas-station attendant. So, when I actually worked as one years later it was a more than a little ironic. I actually liked it quite a bit, though it was not a particularly good choice as a career, with poor pay and limited options for advancement.

I had a lot of different jobs over the years. I was a dishwasher in a college cafeteria. I worked as an archeological faunal analyst. I was a Spanish-speaking bilingual teacher’s aide for a migrant worker education program. I was a substitute teacher for a time. (That was horrible.) I did scientific field work in many different contexts: catching birds, lizards, mongooses, etc. For several years, I was an “edutainer” traveling to elementary schools to teach about science. I visited hundreds of schools in a dozen different states.

Eventually, I returned to graduate school. I pursued a PhD in Science Education. (I also got a Masters in Earth Science studying wetlands hydrology). While I was doctoral student, I got tasked with setting up a computer lab and then the Internet happened. These experiences led directly to my career as a faculty member serving as the Director of a computer center at an R1 institution. In this role, I performed a vast number of teaching, research, and service activities. (My curriculum vitae is more than 20 pages long.)

These work experiences have all informed my writing in multiple contexts.

I find that “work” is actually a somewhat loaded and conflicted word. On the one hand, it can mean the drudgery you are required to perform. But it can also have the connotation of your calling, your “life’s work,” which for many people becomes nearly their identity. Some people detest work while others strive for the ideal of “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I have deep respect for the work that people do in all walks of life. And I was pleased that this was reflected in my writing to the extent that someone noticed it.

a rocky outcrop covered with mosses, ferns, and lichens

Relatively soon after I moved to the Pioneer Valley, my father gifted me a membership to the Trustees of Reservations and encouraged me to visit Bartholomew’s Cobble. It’s a bit of drive, in the extreme south-west corner of the state. But it’s an amazing place with the highest plant diversity of any site in New England. This spring, I visited again to see the spring wildflowers.

A friend and I made a road trip out of the adventure. We masked up (due to my health issues) and drove on back roads so we could keep the windows down. We drove first to Westfield and stopped at Skyline Trading Company for lunch. Then we took a new (to me) route through the back roads, criss-crossing over the Connecticut border to get there.

I’ve always been fascinated by plants. As a child, I frequently went with my father to natural areas where he introduced me to plant identification. As an undergraduate, I took a lot of botany classes: plant morphology and structure, spring flora, and plant systematics. And, as a graduate student, I studied wetlands hydrology, for which plant identification was essential.

Bartholomew’s Cobble is a promontory of quartzite and marble situated by a bend of the Housatonic river. This creates four distinct zones: cool dry, cool wet, warm wet, and warm dry. Plus the marble limestone, relatively rare in Massachusetts, creates regions with higher pH which adds to the range of available microhabitats. This produces the high plant diversity at the site.

We arrived in mid afternoon and, after paying the admission fee, set out walking. There are several trails through the reservation, but the one I always take is the half-mile Ledges trail. It simply follows a route around the promontory and takes you through each of the habitats. You start at the cool-dry quadrant, then pass into the cool-wet segment along the river, then turn west into the warm-wet, then warm-dry, and then finally return to the parking area.

a rocky outcrop with wake robins and dutchman's breeches underneath.

The progression of spring wildflowers was markedly different between the cool and warm sides. In the cooler areas, spring had only just started to arrive. There weren’t many flowers or fiddleheads. But mosses, lichens, and older growth were apparent. The warmer sides had many of the classic early spring wildflowers: triliums, dutchman’s breeches, trout lilies, spring beauties, etc., etc. It was lovely.

My friend is a molecular biologist who was intrigued by the variety of plants. Like me, he teaches the writing class at the University. He was fascinated by the number and variety of plants and began thinking about adapting his version of the course to have students look at plant diversity in the fall. It’s a lot easier than it used to be.

I spent years and years studying plant identification. Nowadays, I find that although I can still recognize a lot of familiar plants, there are vastly more I never learned. I even wrote a haiku (published in Ideoj Ĝermas) about the experience of seeing the plants that bloom after your spring flora class is over.

Also identifications have changed. A lot of the nomenclature I learned has been replaced, as molecular systematics has reorganized the phylogeny of plants.

Nowadays, you don’t need to learn plant identification at all. People can use apps to identify plants. I’ve used LeafSnap and, more recently, iNaturalist, that also keeps a record of plants you’ve observed and has experts that help confirm identifications. This can allow students — even with little experience with plant diversity — to make observations about plant species and distribution.

I’ve visited Bartholomew’s Cobble perhaps five times over the past thirty years. Maybe someday, I’ll walk some of the other trails.

old jelly jar

After Donald Trump was elected for a second time, he began to systematically destroy the “rules-based order” that the US had painstaking constructed after World War II. It’s elements included having an independent bureaucracy and judiciary, floating the dollar as the reserve currency of the world, keeping the world’s communications networks centered here, maintaining an enormous military to be the world’s policemen, etc. Although somewhat expensive, this arrangement provided enormous benefits.

In little more than a year, these are all in tatters. The US is now the largest and most powerful corrupt mafia state in the world, run entirely at the whim of a single dictator who maintains a masked paramilitary force to terrorize cities, who arbitrarily attacks dairy farms and fishing boats, who abducts the leaders of other countries, and who unilaterally begins wars.

People argue whether he is the cause or the symptom of an electorate that is too stupid and provincial to understand what immense harm he’s doing to the standing of the country. But I would like to argue that the moment that the US actually jumped the shark and began on the path that led inevitably to this moment was when Ronald Reagan was elected.

I think this graph pretty much sums it up:

Post by @Lightfighter@infosec.exchange
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Ronald Reagan had a handful of bad ideas and pursued them vigorously. He began the process of undermining confidence in the ability of government to be a force for good. He began the Republican practice of appointing cronies to govern incompetently and cynically, so that people would see government negatively.

Critically, he presided over the decoupling of productivity gains from wages for workers. The voodoo economics of “trickle down” began under Reagan. Prior to his administration, as productivity increased, wages for workers increased commensurately. After Reagan, productivity continued to increase, but wages were flat. And basically have been flat until today. The rich got richer, but everyone else got poorer and poorer.

These two factors are what we see playing out today. People no longer believe that government or expertise are forces for good. Even though they enjoy the fruits of science, technology, and medicine, they have been impoverished economically, and they blame government.

To be fair, the Democrats have not distinguished themselves. Under Bill Clinton, the Democratic party became a kind of Republican-lite. He created the Democratic Leadership Council that began pursuing funding from the wealthiest in the country. Democrats pushed back against the worst excesses of the Republicans, seeking at least to govern competently, but remained in the pockets of the wealthy and failed to effectively advocate for working people.

I could see these things happening when Reagan was President. I kept waiting for the country to realize the enormous damage he had done. But they kept naming things after him, as if he had done anything other than preside over the destruction of the American dream. Now, finally, people seem to be realizing the enormity of the injury he inflicted on the country. But the damage is done and things are likely to get worse for a long time to come at this point.

Donald Trump has made the United States an international pariah. The rules-based order isn’t coming back. The rest of the world is never going to trust the United States again. So the country is likely to get poorer for the foreseeable future. Sorry. I mean the population of the United States. The billionaires will probably keep getting richer.

Donald Trump is the one who actually took an axe to the world order that had been so painstaking constructed to benefit us. But the seeds its destruction were sown by Ronald Reagan. And we are left to reap the bitter harvest of his cynical crop.