It was a grand Thursday down in the country. There was a birthday celebration, gentle but extended through a mild day with lovely colors. Not the leaves- this is the Piedmont, after all, and not the hardy Northern brilliance of the seasonal passing of the green to brilliant hues of crimson and yellow. This local vista features seasonal candles, strange unworldly pumpkins, and more recovered debris from the cabin Way Up North. The Amish traditional signs of good luck have been transferred from Sitzmark West, the family cabin on the little lake nestled in the pine trees across the hills far away.

It was a welcome break from the conflicting narratives that rule the ether. Country living is something that requires a certain amount of adjustment. The connection to the globe is a relative thing. When Chairman Socotra bought the estate, simple things like a “telephone” was available only through the earnest work of trucks and linesmen and wires. Now we rely on the occasional functionality of geo-stationary satellites. Cell phone connectivity was in the same bin of things that almost worked, or worked sometimes, or required a careful positioning in the void between the garage and office suites and the barn. That was infrastructure we understood, but don’t any longer.

Rocket tried to get us energized about that. He had a long list of projects that are in the biggest bit of legislation ever passed by any society in human history. At least that is the story, but we have abandoned any trust in what we hear, since like the pandemic, it is based on an aggregation of tales that share only fidelity to a directed narrative and not objective truth.

Naturally, we are OK with that, since it is a tradition common in human history. The difference is that it has never been as pervasive as it is now, pouring without cessation from all our devices, phones, tablets, laptops and flat screens.

Rocket had a list. It included 42 items found in the 2,500-page bill being wrestled with on The Hill. He rolled it out by the Fire Ring. “Look at this,” he said. “It was done by Republicans about a Democrat-authored piece of legislation, so you can say it is just more lies about other lies. But why are all these things in one bill, anyway? They would have been individual bills in the system in which we were raised. Now they are just a jumble of hundreds of things that have lives of their own, all jammed together. It is intended to be confusing, and it is intended to become law without ever talking about them. It is absurd.”

He rolled the paper toward the group downwind from the smoke of the fire intended to calm some of the chill of the Piedmont morning. There were 42 points in the list, and each of them was pretty amazing. That they were all on one long piece of paper suggests no one wants us to even know what they are until they are the freaking law.

Rocket gestured at the long roll. “All of the points are worth discussion. Some of them might even be good. But we don’t know. He lifted up the long list somewhere near the middle. “Look at Number 9. That provision- just one of 42- that ‘Effectively forces Americans to get 40% of their energy from wind, solar and other unreliable forms of energy within 8 years. It is on Page 392, with 2,200 pages of rules to follow.”

Loma chortled. “That is exactly what was done in Europe and isn’t working there. And the Government is going to force Chairman Socotra to get 40% of Refuge farm’s power from things are only work intermittently? It is crazy.”

There was some nodding around the pit, and Splash threw a mostly-burned Marlboro at the long paper list. Part of it began to smolder under the new sun. “We all lived in the Secret World for a living, because if what we were doing were known, it wouldn’t be useful against the people and things we used to target.”

DeMille smiled. “That is the simple part. It is because we are now the targets of our own government. Want to talk about any of the other 41 points? Remember, a billion is a thousand million bucks. And a trillion is a thousand billion. There are at least three and a half thousand billion dollars worth in that list.” It was starting to burn in earnest.

No one seemed ready for that discussion. Instead, we decided to talk about something that wasn’t a pile of things that each cost thousands of millions of dollars. Like Lunch.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com