Summer sunrise, with rain that looks like snow.

Video by Meade.

Raindrops on purple water.

"The cloud-being in the pictograph... includes the symbols of a snake, which is associated with lightning, and a hummingbird, which is believed to be..."

"... a messenger with prayers to bring rain. The outstretched arms of the cloud being have rain as well as its full body consisting of rain. The lightning snake under its arm is stimulating the rain to fall. It looks like a storm cloud with lightning that has a heavy downpour in one region and lighter rain falling in others. There are examples of cloud beings with lighting that have a very similar appearance to modern photographs of storm clouds that have captured lightning bolts. Clouds can seem to be standing on lightning feet, which look like plant roots going down into the ground...."

From "Prehistoric Art of the Colorado Plateau: It’s All About Clouds!" (Cloud Appreciation Society).

"Walking hand in hand with the one I love/Ooh, how I love the rainy days."

Neil and his Grandson sing. You can tell Neil is so proud of him! Looks like it they enjoyed it! pic.twitter.com/ur4rvKe7iN

— Johnny Midnight ⚡️ (@its_The_Dr) March 3, 2026

At the time of his death (last week), Neil Sedaka was still married to that grandson's grandmother. They'd been married for 64 years. I thought Neil Sedaka was gay, but I see that he was one of those heterosexual men who seem gay to a lot of people. I think it's good for heterosexual men to see that it's fine to be... whatever it was that made people think Neil Sedaka was a gay man. 

Lovely grandparenting! 

Sunrise — 6:00, 6:38.

That's the sunrise.

Tonight is the full moon — the blood moon. Meade was out just after nightfall, getting moon video, with the hooting of barred owls:

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

UPDATE, 6:09 a.m.: That wasn't the blood moon back when Meade made that video. The blood moon was a moon eclipse that happened, I'm told, over the past hour. We were up and ready to catch it, but the cloud cover was 100%. So, as usual, it all depends on the clouds. The celestial orbs do their thing, and it's powerful, but the mere clouds decide what will filter through to us Earthlings. It's raining too, just in this one hour, the sunrise hour. Such is our fate, in the clouds.

"[M]y notes weren’t always as illuminating as I’d expected them to be. 'What does ‘Alt’ mean?' I asked Hugh over dinner one night."

"He looked down at the page. 'It’s not "Alt,"' he said. 'It’s "A.L.T."' Then I remembered. We’d been out early that morning, observing a short parade of ostriches. It was misty, and I pointed to a vague shape on the horizon. 'What’s that?' I asked Dalton. He followed my finger and told me it was likely an A.L.T. 'Animal-looking thing,' he explained."

I'm so glad to see a new David Sedaris essay in The New Yorker, "Notes on a Last-Minute Safari/We saw every animal that was in 'The Lion King' and then some. They were just there, like ants at a picnic, except that they were elephants and giraffes and zebras."

I liked seeing the first syllable of my last name in a new context, but more important was the opportunity to find out David Sedaris's opinion of going on "safari," because I had quite recently asserted, to a complete stranger, that going on safari was really basically the same thing as going to the zoo. These things are packaged. It's not as though you're exploring the authentic natural habitat of elephants, giraffes, and zebras.

"But who knew (other than paleontologists) that there was a time in Earth’s history when it rained for a million years?"

"Or about the forty million years when moss dominated the planet? Or about how plankton, by inventing photosynthesis and thereby giving off oxygen in the course of some two billion years, transformed Earth’s yellow methane-filled atmosphere into blue skies, and the lifeless landscape into forests of green? In William Steig’s book 'Rotten Island,' illustrations show erupting volcanoes and creepy sea creatures and thorny plants and vicious land animals. One day, a jealous battle starts over a new life-form: a flower. Violence, destruction, giant insects, and ice and fire ensue, and lead to a mass extinction. I used to think that 'Rotten Island' was about the disastrous pettiness of human wants and behaviors, and about how much better life might be without us. Now I see it as a reasonably accurate visual history of our planet, with extra polka dots and stripes, in watercolor...."

From "Reinventing the Dinosaur 'Life on Our Planet,' a new Netflix nature documentary, renews our fascination with our most feared and loved precursors" (The New Yorker).

We watched the first episode of this series last night. I wasn't going to continue, but now that I know that moss and plankton will get their due — that it won't be all lumbering CGI dinosaurs and Morgan Freeman speaking ponderously about who's fighting and winning dominion over Earth — I might give another episode a chance.

"New York City’s sewer system is built for the rain of the past—when a notable storm might have meant 1.75 inches of water an hour."

"It wasn’t built to handle the rainfall from Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy, or, more recently, Hurricane Ida—which dumped 3.15 inches an hour on Central Park. And it wasn’t built to handle the kind of extreme rainfall that is becoming routine...."

Writes Nancy Walecki, in "New York City Is Not Built for This/The city is seeing rainfall patterns that look more like Miami’s or even Singapore’s, an official said at The Atlantic Festival" (The Atlantic).

More than 8 inches of rain fell in NYC yesterday.

⚡🇺🇲 #USA - People grocery shopping in knee high water during the apocalyptic flooding in New York City today. #NewYorkFlood #NYC #flood #WeatherAlert pic.twitter.com/TokYZtxmdx

— X News Monitor (@xNewsMonitor) September 30, 2023

At Twitter, low-level wit flows like rain...

98% of the crowd literally makes the same joke...

 

More like you always hated Burning Man anyway.

Sunrise color story — 5:51, 5:54, 5:58:26, 5:58:48, 6:04, 6:05.

Perhaps you can tell I ran through rain to get to my vantage point and the rain had passed over me by the time I got there and luckily it hadn't got to where it would block the sun. It produced a sunrise unique in my collection of approximately 1,000 sunrises. 

Write about anything you want in the comments.

Heard just now: the rain drops became tiny ice pellets.

It's a gentle transition, barely audible.

Here's how it looked on the radar map:

The cloud cover is 100%, so I'm skipping the sunrise — 7:05 today — and perhaps waiting for some of the 5 to 8 inches of snow to prettify the landscape. It isn't cold. It's 34°, but it's windy and the National Weather Service is saying the snow will be "wet" and "heavy." So it's a good time to get clobbered by a falling tree or tree branch. 

Just 4 TikToks tonight. Let me know what you like.

1. Singing "Hey there, lonely girl" to a random woman in the supermarket.

4. Some nice young people harmonize singing "Landslide" quite sincerely. 

2. The Drew Barrymore Effect. (If you watched #5 on the July 19th post, you'll get this.)

3. A man dresses for summer, Regency style.

(Just talk about these videos in the comments. If you want to rag on TikTok, there's a specific post about that: here. This post is purely for the enjoyment of videos, not discussion of the platform that happens to host them.)

From a walk in the rain at 5:43 in the evening.

Talk about anything you want in the comments.

"But I say, this is the greatest rally in the history of our country, this is the greatest movement in the history of our country.... And it’s probably the greatest movement in the history of our world...."

"Call it, make America great again, call it America first, call it what you will. I believe it’s the greatest movement probably in the history of the world. It’s just starting. It’s just starting. We are one movement, one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God. So with love of our nation, swelling in our hearts, and it does swell in your hearts. That’s why you’re standing here in the rain, listening to this person. You’re saying, 'Darling, it’s raining. Let’s go home.' But nobody is leaving all the way back hundreds and like football fields behind, football fields. 'Darling, it’s raining,' but they say, 'We’re not going home because we love our country.' But with swelling in our hearts, the spirit of America is stirring ourselves. And I say these words to you, and you’ve heard these words before, in some cases many times before, we will make America powerful again. We will make America wealthy again. We will make America strong again. We will make America, despite what you’re seeing today so sad and so pathetic, we will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. And you know what it is, we will make America great again. Thank you Alabama. God bless you all."

Donald Trump dished out hearty helpings of intense hyperbole and corny warmth at his August 21st rally in Alabama. The transcript is now out: here. 

The hearts are swelling —  swelling! — and the rhetoric is wholly swollen: It's the greatest movement the history of our world — probably. 

Despite what you’re seeing today so sad and so pathetic, we will make America proud again... and don't people want to feel proud? How easy is the other side making it for Trump when they're pushing shame — imposing shame. It's obvious that Trump is running for President, running hard, though he can't say it yet for legal reasons having to do with campaign finance law. 

I'd say it will be hard for any Democrat to run against his hugeness and his logic-transcending emotional power, and yet we just saw Joe Biden run against him, run against him and win, using a minimalist, barely-there approach. 

Love = lonely sadness.

"During the era of the Man'yōshū, the native Japanese words today known as yamato kotoba (大和言葉, lit. 'Japanese words') were starting to be written using kanji, and the word for 'love,' koi (today written 恋) was written as 孤悲, or 'lonely sadness.'" 

From the Wikipedia article about the movie "Garden of Words," which I happened to watch last night. Recommended, especially if you like looking at animated rain and sun shining through rain onto the sides of people's faces. And handmade shoes. And tanka poetry. 

Quite aside from what is in the movie, I'm interested in the development of Japanese writing and the understanding of love. Actually, that is in the movie, because the director, Makoto Shinkai, who wrote the screenplay, has said that he intended to examine the traditional meaning of love as "lonely sadness" (or "longing for someone in solitude").

Here's the trailer:

 

(To comment, email me here.)

"If you can’t annoy somebody … there’s little point in writing" —Kingsley Amis/"Whatever they criticize you for, intensify it" —Jean Cocteau.

A couple quotes that jumped out at me from "Garner's Quotations: A Modern Miscellany," a book I'm enjoying immensely. Garner is Dwight Garner, a NYT book critic. It's a very smart sequence of quotations. 

Just a few more:

"I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it."—William S. Burroughs 

"Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation" —W. H. Auden 

"Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane" —H. P. Lovecraft 

"A monster is a person who has stopped pretending" —Colson Whitehead, “A Psychotronic Childhood”

"When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split" —Raymond Chandler

"If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with Let’s Make a Deal" —Fran Lebowitz, in The New York Times 

"Don’t own anything you wouldn’t leave out in the rain" —Gary Snyder 

"All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante"—Samuel Beckett 

I hope that annoyed some of you or what's the point?

September rain.

"The ecologically minded smart city was supposed to replace neglected docklands and disused warehouses with a sea of wooden towers, protected by raincoats."

"Mechanised awnings would protect pedestrians from rain and snow during Toronto’s harsh winters, while traffic lights would optimise the flow of self-driving cars. A network of machines, including subterranean parcel delivery bots, and sensors tracking residents’ behaviour, would provide a blueprint for the connected cities of the future.... Only Toronto has welcomed Sidewalk Labs, making it a test bed for the company. Many residents baulked at the idea of surrendering control to Google, and technology experts expressed concerns over the possible erosion of democratic norms."

From "Google’s sister abruptly cancels work on 'smart city'" (The London Times). So, don't worry, it's not going to happen. Democratic norms can continue uneroded.

"Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky. This sense of being abandoned..."

"... which might in time have given characters a finer temper, began, however, by sapping them to the point of futility. For instance, some of our fellow citizens became subject to a curious kind of servitude, which put them at the mercy of the sun and the rain. Looking at them, you had an impression that for the first time in their lives they were becoming, as some would say, weather-conscious. A burst of sunshine was enough to make them seem delighted with the world, while rainy days gave a dark cast to their faces and their mood. A few weeks before, they had been free of this absurd subservience to the weather, because they had not to face life alone; the person they were living with held, to some extent, the foreground of their little world. But from now on it was different; they seemed at the mercy of the sky’s caprices—in other words, suffered and hoped irrationally."

Wrote Albert Camus in "The Plague" (pages 75-76).

Those are words I heard in my earphones — "A burst of sunshine was enough to make them seem delighted with the world" — at 6:56 a.m. as I aimed my iPhone at this:

The dawn run in the 35° rain.

1. A little colder — with snow — would be warmer — emotionally — but I celebrate diversity — not just in human beings but in the inanimate aspects of nature.



2. It's built into this sunrise running project that some days will have more brilliance and pleasing comfort. You've got to value the full range, perhaps think of a morning like this in terms of "subtle nuance." I put that in quotes not for sarcasm but because I thought of the phrase at the time — I'm quoting my brain — and "subtle nuance" really did help me enjoy the experience. I thought of the analogy to human personalities: Today is an introvert.

3. My AirPods were dead, so I had to run — not in silence — in the sound — the subtle nuance sound — of nature. The raindrops were tiny and soundless. A little rustling wind. Some duck quacking. I think of the music as giving energy, making the run easier, but oddly enough, it was easier without the podded-in music. There was a mindless, timeless feeling. The songs mark out time and they have words that release old memories and draw me into elaborate ideas.

4. There was the sound of conversation — some, not all of the time. I mentioned the idea you see there in point #3, and Meade said something that made me say, "Thoughts meander like a restless wind..."

5. And then there was the sound of singing, not me, but Meade, not "Across the Universe," but "And I'm proud to be an American/Where at least I know I'm free/And I won't forget the men who died/Who gave that right to me...." I said, "Oh, no, you're going to blow my cover," meaning: Remember where you are and be discreet. In fact there was one other runner coming down the path. But don't worry, he said, she's wearing "ear tampons" (i.e., AirPods).

6. If you're going to sing "Proud to be an American," then you ought to sing "You Can't Always Get What You Want." And Meade sang out his version:

I saw her today at the convention
A glass of Miller Lite in her hand
I knew she wanted to make a connection
At her feet was a socialist man
No, you can't always get Bernie Sanders
You can't always get sleepy Joe Biden
You can't always get Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren
But if you try sometime, you'll find
You get Donald Trump...

7. No one heard that, no one but me, and we made it back to the car without getting our fair share of abuse.

8. Driving home, we had to stop for turkeys — a dozen turkeys making their way across the road. What are they doing here? Why are they not eaten? I rolled down the car window and congratulated them: "Good work! You made it! Thumbs up!"

9. The turkeys survived Thanksgiving and their mindless crossing of the road, we survived the trip home from the sunrise run, and words are flowing out like endless rain, so I'll stop this list at 9.