Marlow is off-site, but he started off discussion with a rumination received late yesterday about conditions today. He talked about the change of life many of us call “retiring.” It hit the group standing around the Fire Ring with half-drunk coffee and an occasional puff of gray Marlboro smoke for those who still do. It is a decision point on vice. Some have eschewed the latter noxious habit but continue the former. Others have tried a reverse approach to try to maintain health and sanity. Neither provides a rational approach to life in retirement, but there is general agreement that some of our old and valued pals who continued to try to do both with vigor would have been happier still alive. There is some general but cordial disagreement on that one.

This morning there was confusion. The imagery available to the media included nighttime footage of the impressive artillery bombardment of a once-modern city in Ukraine. You can pick whatever target name you choose- some of the worst of it is happening to an otherwise pleasant port city on the Black Sea, or maybe it was the sprawling capital city on the big river. There is uncertainty on that, since you can choose your own version of the spelling. “Kiev” became “Kyiv” overnight a few weeks ago. In the interest of clarity, the intrepid international reporters pronounce it “Keeve.”

There was general agreement on issues beyond the spelling of cities under siege and only slight controversy on which of the youthful vices we would try to either quit or embrace as the symbolic “last one.” All of us, male and female, are generally pleased that our active libidos took care of themselves in the aging process, since that was how most of us wound up in the ungainly life situations we did.

So, the question this morning was what to be alarmed about. The artillery attacks on civilians was pretty good, since most in the circle either served in the Cold War or just had to pay for it. But we noticed a certain distancing from the issue of of raw naked Russian Aggression with an exclamation point at the end. We are opposed to the slaughter of civilians unanimously. But some of that Narrative seemed to be influenced by some other discussion about how Ukraine’s current government came to be, and who profited from that process, and who was funding the bio-labs there which had actually been Soviet-built, and staffed by people who just needed work.

Plus there was that thing about NATO and the European Union. The twelve original members of the first organization has expanded to 28, including some that many Americans would have difficulty locating on a map. The nations of the second organizations are still alarmed about Britain’s exit. We don’t mind, but understand the confusion. NATO is old and EU is new and the relationship that includes Foggy Bottom, Brussels and London in only half of them is sort of unplumbed territory.

Ukraine itself may or may not be a NATO member, if you were inclined to listen to a senior US government official dispatched to what used to be a Warsaw Pact nation aligned with another country that doesn’t exactly exist anymore to explain everything in clear unambiguous terms.

Speaking of which, even the Old Cold Warriors are a little concerned about things closer to the Virginia Piedmont, which is the gas station by the big road on the way either to the Belmont Farms Distillery or the Smoke Shop, depending on which symbolic last vice you were trying to hold on to.

That led directly to Buck’s professional analysis of the Consumer Price Index, which contains some sort of alarming news about the other part of the Ukraine war. The F150 truck we use runs on regular-grade gas, thank God, and we let the Chairman worry about the 93-octane version his fancy sedan requires. But Buck pointed out that they have actually changed what figures are included in the “CPI” since Mr. Jimmy Carter was Chief Executive. The change was in response to some other crisis we have collectively lost track of, since it has passed. But if you calculated the numbers the same way this week as they did forty years ago we would be even more alarmed.

Clearly that is a problem area, since we are supposed to not be alarmed about that.

Whoever does the Narrative programming seems a little unbalanced. Not the “alarmed” part, since of course we are, but rather in terms of what we are supposed to be alarmed about now to replace what we were alarmed about yesterday. We think it was Covid, which is sort of still around, but before the bio-warfare thing yesterday. A professional tradesperson stopped by the farm yesterday to collect notary-validated signatures on papers signifying something we also couldn’t quite remember but seemed important. She asked if she had a minute to cover her nose and mouth before donning plastic surgical gloves to shake hands. We all just laughed. That was so three days ago.

We took a poll, scientifically based on age and gender (we don’t have much confusion on that part, despite what seems to be a continuing crisis of some sort we don’t completely understand). Memories of once compelling libidos suggest use of the term “sex” is still appropriate when talking about chromosomal details but emphatically not in an active voice. Some of us consider that to be a crisis, of sorts, anyway. See how difficult this production stuff is?

This morning was a delightful sunny affair that happened on schedule. Assuming we actually reset the clocks- but we saw on the flatscreen that there is an attempt to bring back the Climate thing as the big existential threat we need to be completely alarmed about and re-jigger everything in our world for a tipping point they assure us is always precisely ten years in the future.

We have cooperated to the extent we can. We were alarmed about the Coming Ice Age when we were all ecologists about fifty years ago, and then concerned about the Global Warming thing until they updated that crisis because the carbon dioxide has gone up a bit and the temperatures haven’t, though that is only for the last seven years and things might be in a tipping point crisis in only ten years.

There didn’t seem to be much point in being more concerned with that than the accidental eruption of an exchange of the five or six thousand nuclear weapons still at readiness positions in the inventories of Russia, the US, China, France and Great Britain, and the uncertain state of the ones in Iran, Israel, India and Pakistan. Special Envoy John Kerry reminded us nuclear war could affect the climate, but we sort of lost track of his train of thought after he got on his private jet to fly somewhere else to discuss tipping points and crisis.

But talking about nuclear war was another thing on the menu. There was some concern about the Indians, not the indigenous ones, but the other ones, much larger in number. They apparently accidentally fired an advanced cruise missile into Pakistan, which used to be part of India, by what was said by New Delhi’s Ministry of Defense to be an “unfortunate technical glitch.” The military folks in the circle remembered when an unfortunate event like that could have provoked an enormous exchange of nuclear weapons and the near instantaneous deaths of millions in great plumes of fire and radioactive smoke. But this one was a “glitch,” and “unarmed,” we think, and were not supposed to notice. So we didn’t.

DeMille called everyone to order to talk about production for the Writer’s Section, lack of which is either a “glitch,” or simple laziness. It is something to be mildly alarmed about before lunch. So there was a general shuffling of Cold Warriors, adult women, our Attorney of Record, and a noted Economist Emeritus to their appropriate seating places around the ring of ashes under bright almost Spring sunlight. “Shouldn’t we be alarmed about the onset of Spring? There was snow in April one year!” said Splash.

DeMille held his right hand up. “Stop. the Chairman wants us to stay on message, and when the media decides what crisis we are actually in today to keep us from talking about all the other ones, we can be on message for tomorrow.”

“But that is tomorrow,” said Melissa. “We may have moved on by then.”

Buck stood as though he was about to address a graduate seminar of disorganized and impressionable scholars. “On that, I believe I can announce the next crisis.” We all looked in his direction. “There will be a crisis about lunch, and we can write about it now for release tomorrow while we write about it. Before Lunch.”

His logic appeared unassailable. Then we talked about what sort of impact the Ukrainian wheat shortage was likely to have at the Safeway next to the gas station behind the Smoke Shop on the way to the Distillery. It made as much sense as the rest of it, and DeMille smiled. He waved his hands in the sign that signified successful conclusion and adjourned the meeting as “Mission Complete.”

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
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