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I am sitting here at my computer waiting to see if the Winter weather warning of snow forecast for today will come to pass. The first ground covering snow of the season where I live in New York is predicted for today. I just read about how large areas of California, that are on fire, are desperately hoping for rain. I am wondering what the powers that will control today’s weather will do about my snow storm and somebody else’s inferno.
For centuries, men have had the primary responsibility for preparing for poor weather and praying for favorable atmospheric conditions. Yesterday, I drove to a big box hardware store in my heated and air-conditioned car. The store was, of course, heated and air-conditioned. Today we generally expect the places we are in or are going to, to be climate controllable. We travel under the same conditions.
I felt the need to buy a rock salt spreader for my driveway. The driveway is quite steep. I’ve got a bad back and some balance problems. I don’t like huge, brightly lit, big box hardware stores. I’d rather not have to ask where things that I want to look at are. This time I decided to order the spreader online for easy pickup and spending as little time at the store as possible. I chose to trust reviews that the thing would spread rock salt. This is not my father’s hardware store.
The pick up was far from easy. It took three employees looking at computer screens before a female employee decided that she was ready to get the item from the store. She was gone awhile. It is a big store.
The spreader she came back with was filthy. I complained that it looked like someone bought the spreader, spread something with it and then returned it. She assured me that the various forms of particles, composing the filth in the spreader, were a result of the spreader having been in the outdoor gardening supply part of the store. She cheerfully offered to find a cleaner spreader. I cheerfully accepted her offer and volunteered to carry the dirty spreader back. She said that she would be happy to do the lifting. I muddled through thinking about what to do. She seemed physically capable of returning the spreader. She was getting paid for her efforts. I didn’t want to appear sexist and carry the spreader just because I was a man and she was a woman. She didn’t seem to be in any kind of a rush. I wasn’t either. I forgot about my bad back and carried the spreader back to the garden center and put it down next to about six other spreaders of the same kind. I picked out another shredder. I’m not sure as to why. They were all equally dirty to the one I had brought back.
At this point, I decided that I no longer cared, if I was being a good guy or not. As she led me to the rock salt, past all sorts of winter warrior supplies, I did what many men do when they have run out of things to say. I complained about the forecast for the season’s first snow. I left out acknowledgment that the season’s first snowfall, along with snow clearing work in need of doing, usually brought out the boy in me, that would have to make and throw a few snowballs should the snow come. If it snowed it was not going to be all bad.
I never have been that comfortable with “small talk.” I have often relied on chatting about the weather present, past and forecast future, to fill some need to be a polite neighbor, citizen, friend, or customer. I knew the lines. Complain that the weather is too hot, dry, windy or wet. Comment that the weather has been weird for the season lately. Express hope that dire weather forecasts are but hype to sell advertising.
I sometimes conclude with the cliched line about everybody liking to talk about the weather, but nobody wanting to do anything about it.
I talked to the hardware store lady about the weather the same way I usually do. She replied that she hadn’t been following the weather lately and asked me if snow was being predicted for our area. I replied, “yes, 4 to 7 inches.”
She said she wasn’t ready for that. Maybe she needed a dirty rock salt spreader too, but I didn’t ask.
I told her that I was wondering if our area would be getting the same strange slushy precipitation that we saw a good deal of last year. There was no reply.
I had the thought, “I am tired of seeing the effects of geoengineered weather and not knowing who is doing it and why.” I kept that thought to myself.
I am sharing this thought with you. If you have been to GeoengineeringWatch.org, or the many other sources of information on the mechanics of artificial weather creation let me ask you, “do you still talk about the weather like you did in the past?”
It seems like many people did more than small talk the weather when there was concern about there being a “hole in the ozone.” There was a big jump in the price to recharge a vehicle’s air conditioning system, but I guess that took care of it for most people, except for the people who report that the ozone is in much worse shape than ever before.
Some people still talk about “greenhouse” gas emissions in the context of global climate change. The alarming warming of the Earth is now mainly attributed to Donald Trump. Previously it was attributed to carbon dioxide emissions from factories, power plants, and cattle farts.
As dire as the forecasts of global climate changes, for whatever reasons, are and continue to be, there seems to be little interest in talking about it much. It seems that talking about the weather in the way that it has been done for generations is a potent form of social interactional relating that is not to be tampered with.
Local weather, regional weather, and global weather have been weird, but just close enough for most people not to notice or if noticed, not to be talked about in an alarming way.
It has been cold in Winter. Warmer in the Spring. Hot in the Summer and some really nice weather is often found in the Fall. In this business as usual model, record-setting high and low temperatures keep occurring with little more than an, “It sure has been cold lately.”
Being on the East Coast of the United States, I have not been noticeably affected by the horrific forest fires closer to the West Coast. I, like I’m sure most living in the US, feel terrible for those dealing with what they have lost in the flames. I, like a smaller number, keep wondering why video after video, from multiple sources, keep showing unburnt trees standing next to smoldering ruins of homes and vehicles. I have never been near a big forest fire. I have always thought however that it is burning trees and brush that go up in flames first. Homes and cars second. Sure swirling winds might reverse this order, but that would be an exception, not the rule evidenced by the videos.
A few news sources mention Direct Energy Weapons targeting private property, as being the cause of this strange pattern of destruction. This is not normal. I imagine that talking about this would not go well at the hardware store or around the Thanksgiving Dinner table. It would not be considered appropriate weather “small talk.”
Perhaps a planned trip to fire-ravaged Northern California by Donald Trump will get more people talking. However, I fear that some will conclude that these strange forest fires were somehow caused by Trump. Speaking of President Trump raises the question as to how many important global events can mass media distract the mass from, by focusing on this one man.
I imagine that more and weirder weather theory will make it into weather “small talk.” as time goes by. Information on patented weather modification technologies is easily found online. Speculation on the existence and use of Direct Energy Weapon use abound online as well.
Many have called into question why the buildings that collapsed at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, produced clouds of fine particles and much less than expected rumble. Sure there piles of smoldering debris where giant buildings once stood, but they were very small piles for the size of those buildings. Many speculate that the World Trade Center destruction was a combination of timed explosions, as are often used in planned large building demolitions and Direct Energy Weapons with holographically projected passenger jet airliners for the show.
Come to think of it, burned Northern California houses in the videos I’ve been looking at, could be a little or a lot short on ruble too.
My hardware store hassles are ridiculously trivial compared to those of many men around the World, who want to do what they can afford to do to protect their families and communities from the ravages of weather. Earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanos, floods, fires all seem to be in the news more and more. Less and less are these events considered to be wholly natural in their occurrence. There is more and more speculation about forces other than or in addition to a god being involved.
Maybe an angry god has begun contracting out punishments for unclear discretions, to corporations.
This all gives me some things to think about, while I wait for the snow. I wonder if there will be a white Christmas.
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