So here I am once more, out on the front porch.
I pulled up the weather app to check the forecast, only to be told that the rains would be ending sometime this morning. It also promised it was going to be cooler today than yesterday. And yet, looking at the actual numbers, the temperature right now is higher than it was yesterday morning, with the humidity sitting heavy at 94%. Still, the skies overhead are clear. I really don’t know which part of the algorithm’s story to believe anymore—especially when it claims the “feels like” temperature is identical to the thermometer reading. Out here on the Gulf Coast, 94% humidity always has its own opinion.
All in all, for 6:15 in the morning, it’s remarkably quiet in this still-dark world. Morning traffic out on the road is light, though there are almost as many large commercial rigs as there are passenger cars. That’s just life along this stretch in front of the house; with all the ongoing construction deeper in the county, and this being the primary pipeline in, the heavy haulers roll past all day long.
Sunrise is still a good twenty minutes out. Hell, official first light isn’t due for another five, so the eastern sky is only just pale enough to reveal the faint silhouettes of low clouds drifting by.
That’s about all the time I care to spend sweating on the front porch this morning. The air is thick enough to chew, and truth be told, I’d really like to get back to my coffee—which I wisely left inside next to my chair in the air conditioning.
Back at the desk now…
I spent a good chunk of yesterday working my way backward through the first two months of my archives, trying to drag those ancient posts kicking and screaming into the modern era. It’s funny how quickly the mind lets go of the tools it once used daily; I can hardly remember all that raw HTML code I used to type without a second thought. Now everything on the web is built out of blocks. Blocks of text, blocks of images, blocks of video… just endless stacks of little digital bricks.
What caught me off guard, though, was how many of those twenty-year-old links still actually work. Two decades later, a surprising number of those original sources and forgotten websites are still quietly floating out there in the digital ether.
The other thing that struck me while reading through those old words was how little the noise coming out of Washington has truly changed. Yes, the tone has grown far more dire, and the sheer amplitude of the rhetoric is completely off the charts now. Both then and now, we had what I used to call the “Republicants” running the show. The heavy-handed social agendas have only dialed up the volume, unpopular conflicts grind on across the Middle East, and the same tired brand of convenient truths are trotted out to justify them.
If you had told me twenty years ago that I’d ever look back on the era of George W. with something bordering on nostalgia, I’d have laughed you off the porch. Yet here we are.
