Snow

 

January 31, 2026

Beethoven string quartets on CD.

Snow began gently after midnight and has not stopped. At 6 PM it is thick, cold, shearing almost horizontally from the north. Pedestrian traffic down the street of kids and parents dragging sleds behind. I’m trying to think of where the sledding hill would be. A week ago I arrived in Charleston to avoid such an accumulation of events. Many birds at my feeders. I couldn’t account for the mob of robins and others not interested in seed, until I noticed that my gallant little pond pump is the only local source of liquid water. My swollen feet will not permit me to acquire boots, so if I need to go out in this, sneakers are my only available footwear. I’m unduly agitated by winter storms, which more often than not pass without consequence. Beethoven was actually not the right music to play right now. 

It has been suggested, as the Epstein files emerge, that all the agitations of Trump’s administration have been to distract from his criminal pederasty. What a world I aged into! It’s a good bet that those who have clung to him all this while will cling still, the sting of having chosen wrong being harder to acknowledge than atrocity. 

Naledi

 January 30, 2026

For the second week in a row, public run on grocery stores for supplies for a winter disaster foretold. I’m not fleeing to the beach this time. That will probably be a mistake. 

Chaotic but amusing rehearsal last night. Good fellowship, good-enough music making if what you want is good fellowship.  

Four days without alcohol. Without craving and never impaired, I didn’t worry about this issue until several health professionals recently wondered if I should cut down. “No problem,” I said, until I decided to do it, and the idea made me grumpier than I thought it would, reaching that end taking more determination than I imagined. A hill, but a little one. I like to do it, and invariably do it where it has never had much consequence. Drinking is part of my night ritual, but by that I mean the intake of liquids: turns out tea will do just as well. I sense practically no difference in my life, except that I can sleep longer sober, wake up less abruptly. I’m not sure those are necessarily improvements. But also, my dreams are vaster and more durable, able to return after a trip to the bathroom, able to mutate into epics. I like the feeling of going to bed tipsy. Also, I hear alarming creakings and scrapings in the house that I don’t hear inebriated. Anyway, the alarm abates somewhat, seeing how stopping is possible, so merely cutting back remains an option. 

Cold. You spend some time deciding what to wear indoors so you can be warm enough for the cold spots in the house, and yet endure the overheated ones. Tied a towel around the outdoor spigot, as if it were a little animal that could generate its own heat. Filled all the bird feeders.

Watched a documentary about the Naledi, a diminutive species of the genus Homo that seems to have been burying their dead with some ceremony and carving their emotions on cave walls a quarter of a million years ago. The experience was holy. We do not understand the abundance– no, infinitude– and variety of the stories of this little world. 

 

January 28, 2026

Rooting back into the home sod. 

Jackie

 January 27, 2026

Woke to a perfect beach dawn, drove hard, entered my driveway at the stroke of noon. Almost no trace along the way of the terrible storm that was to have been. The power failure I intended to avoid by gong to the beach did not happen. In one sense, the journey was a waste. In the other sense it was a good time and (for the most part) exactly what I needed. In the bar last night I met Jeff the bartender, a through-hiker who’s looking for land in Black Mountain. Jackie floated in on a cloud of Ariana Grande perfume, which has a fluffy tassel you can add to your key chain when you finish the bottle. I noticed Jackie the whole time I was there, with her leopard coat with a Rolling Stones logo, and her provocative black gown. Turns out she is actually the stripper and club entertainer one assumed her to be. She showed me photos of her last gig in Asheville, where she wrestled and, apparently, made love to another stripper, who had one hand. They looked like sisters.  “She’s a sober woman with one hand; I’m an alcoholic with two hands. That’s how you tell us apart.” Her impression of Asheville is not entirely favorable. “There’s a lot of performative wokeness in that community.” 

Grackles

 January 26, 2026

Breakfast at the Drop In, still bright with Christmas lights. The “Red-neck Home Fries” was immense, and I may have finished a third of it. Walked to the end of the pier. Strolling seaward in the sunshine was comfortable, but walking back with the cold wind blasting from the continent was a tribulation. Encountered a woman named Logan, who I thought looked familiar, so I called to her, which was a mistake. She pursued me thereafter, wanting to talk about being seen by God and about “the only name of God’  acknowledged by the scriptures.” I made my getaway. People who open with some nicety of theology known only to them and their little group are always liars. The pier was thronged as it normally is by grackles, but the abnormal things was that every one of them was male. Where were the lady grackles? One imagines them saying, “You go out in that blast if you want to; I’m staying home by the fire.” Cut a day off my stay, going home tomorrow rather than Wednesday. There’s not that much to do here– but eat and drink– when the weather is bad. This allows me what most people would call a real vacation, just lounging about, with no anxiety about getting my money’s worth out of the local attractions. Whirlwinds of pale sand on the edge of the beach. 

Evening: The lady who sat defiantly in a deck chair on the beach all the windy day folds her chair and retreats at fall of darkness. The white volleyball net shimmers out of the gathering dusk.  

January 25, 2026

News from home inconclusive, but no power outages reported from my sources to this hour. 

Sat at the hotel bar last night with a big Alpha male who ate steak and asked for suggestions where to buy his third house. He lives in LA, but wants a foothold on the east coast. He saw what credit card I was using, and counseled me on how to get more value out of it by using its various special offers. He lost a friend in the LA fire last year, and said that there were insignificant natural causes, but rather that the disaster was caused by governmental neglect and incompetence. “They blamed dry grass because it couldn’t fight back.” Dry hydrants, low reservoirs, cut-backs in the fire department. I believed him. He was clearly used to holding forth and being heeded. 

Walked along the beach at sea’s edge. I don’t believe I did that once when I was here in September. The wind is less and the weather kinder than yesterday. 

Kayakers, swimmers, surfers. It amazes me. 

Blood on the bedspread this morning from my split heel. Already made my apologies to the management.   

Strolled to Jack of Cups for lunch. The first person I met had fled Leicester, as I had Beaver Lake, to escape the storm. His cap suggested he was a cop. He wanted to buy me a drink, but as I was having water, the intention was taken for the deed. Bought candy from a girl who said she loved her job. Bought postcards from one of those beach memento stores. The clerk had been stopped for speeding this morning by the SC Highway Patrol, and she observed that her wages for that day would go to paying the ticket. The road was so rural she didn’t know it had a speed limit. I wouldn’t have bought anything without the sob story. Her friend, the kid who rented bikes from the shed behind the store, came in to exult at having two rentals that day, to the same man, who rode off on one while holding the other. He has cognitive issues, which gives him, as a grown man, the shining demeanor of a happy boy. The food at Jack of Cups, while interesting, gave me almost instant diarrhea, which I discovered accidentally. Luckily, I was in my room then, so the clean-up job, though complicated, was private.  One brings so few changes of clothes one must be meticulous. I divined that housekeeping would arrive just in the midst of it, as in fact she did. Wrapped myself in a towel and told the smiling Filipina that I wouldn’t need her today.

Low tide now, a gray lake of calm water separate from the sea, a happy dog soaring after a frisbee. The girl at the souvenir shop admired my purple cap. 

Folly

January 24, 2026

Third floor of the Tides Hotel, Folly Beach. My window looks directly at the pier, against whose supports the sea dashes with considerable fury. The drive was long, but easy. In the opposite lane battalions of plows and salt trucks headed north, lights flashing, to aid in the expected disaster. Overhead the sky was a ruffled gray the entire way, like old cloth folded and darkened at the seams. Flat darkening steel now. The wind when I went out for a bite to eat was almost unbearable, far worse weather here–now– than what I thought I was fleeing back home. Still, a few walkers and joggers on the beach. Everyone at the hotel is kind and forward and eager to tell me their names and learn my story.  My mood was quite contemplative through the ride, picking up the theme of the last few days, when I’ve wondered if I’ve accomplished anything. Part of it was surely the gloom of fleeing my home in the teeth of a storm, rootless and a refugee, at least for the moment. But that was a house built on older, darker foundations,  God is not us, nor does He speak our language, so He must send any message he wants to convey a number of times. As I sat over my seafood platter at Rita’s, Shelley’s great “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” invaded my thoughts– “I vow’d that I would dedicate my powers to thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?” I wept over the cocktail sauce. I wept so hard I prayed the waitress wouldn’t see me. That was the message. Whatever the results, I have kept my vow.