Like most places I’ve heard from, the weather here is fickle and atypical. Flowers and blooms are coming months early. They started early and got hit with a freeze. Another false start would be very tough for them, I think.

This time last year the ground was frozen, but it is easily tilled now. I dug some more irrigation channels and I’m prepping more garden beds. I’ve also started sprouting some of my seeds from last year. I’m worried I might be starting too late and that I should have gone for an early sow and harvest, before summer gets brutal.

My petty investments are going pretty well (always a bad sign), but maintaining employment has become a challenge more and more since I first entered the workforce. It’s been years since I felt I wasn’t entirely expendable, years of always dreading the next quarter’s layoffs. It doesn’t help that the first few pages of jobs on Indeed are contracting for military work, which I’m not going to do. I’d rather let my skills go to waste and take a job moving dirt around.

I think world economies are shifting for war. Those are the jobs hiring, and the investments doing well. Money is flowing out of entertainment, and nothing is being committed toward expanding public-oriented infrastructure and third spaces. I think collapse could prevent WWIII just as much as it could start it, so we’ll see what happens. It irks me quite a bit, though. It’s sunk money that makes the rich richer, while creating an excuse to participate in conflicts. It eats up valuable resources for speculative purposes, and quotas are never made with prudent judgment - it’s “the more of anything and everything, the better.” And the way it is done these days, with everything contracted to private businesses and with all of the tentacles going from the government to these businesses creating a 2-way street of corruption, screams fascism to me. Our work is captured and that wealth spent to provoke war. What probably irks me most is how normalized this is - how people consider it normal, the way things have always been, common sense. It’s not common sense, but the harm it causes is to abstracted for most of us to assign it to the root cause.

I’m jaded. I’m burnt out. I’ve had a rough winter (not the worst, but certainly not the best). I feel like a loon but I’m making the most of the “nice” weather as much as any denialist. Probably more because spend more time out of climate controlled spaces than that lot. Spring may not be what it once was, but my biological calendar still yearns for it.

The climate papers coming out recently have been stellar. The body of work has become large enough that we’re starting to see how clearly we fucked we are, however with that corpus comes an additional complexity that will make it even easier to muddy the waters with miscontextualized quotes and such. The public discussion is decades behind. For years I had hardly realized how little climate literature existed. Now it all comes out at once, with no time to digest.

I feel exhausted trying to keep up with everything in life. But I keep pushing because I feel now is the time to act - to garden, to discuss, to prepare, to live.

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