Today is longer than yesterday by 2 minutes and nineteen seconds. The temperature, instead of flirting with minus 40 as it did earlier this month, is a balmy 27 degrees Fahrenheit, on its way to 46 if the forecast proves accurate. Last week the last of the early season snow slid off our roof. Julie and I spent a morning clearing several tons of wet snow off the northside deck. When we finished, I got a ladder out of the garage, leaned it against the north side of the house, and climbed up with a chimney brush.
The chimney looked okay. Enough creosote to sweep, but not enough to have made a chimney fire a negligent possibility. I left the stove damper open and after I swept, a pyramid of fine black dust sat in the firebox. A fair amount of that black dust had escaped the chimney pipe and noticeably darkened the hearth and the surrounding floor.
I built a hot fire to get the catalytic converter going, and the pile of creosote added to the flames. All sorts of complex organic molecules turned into carbon dioxide and water before they could redeposit themselves at the top of the chimney.
It took five minutes with the vacuum to clean up the hearth and floor.
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It's been a couple of millennia since the Stoics said the key to happiness is to know the difference between the things you can control and the things you can’t. Their advice still stands, and not just at AA meetings. I look at the stove now, with its warming fire and its clean chimney and, beside it, a full woodbox, and just outside, a clean and dry deck, and I feel better about my ability to get things done in January.
The Stoics didn’t address the issue of 8 billion people putting carbon dioxide and water vapor into the atmosphere. What starts out as an exercise in self-actualization if you’re a Roman citizen starts looking like mindless species suicide if 8 billion others are doing the same thing. Having a woodstove with a catalytic converter isn’t a solution if carbon dioxide and water vapor are the problems.
At the moment, gaining a couple of minutes of daylight each day is good for morale. But by fire season, it will be a problem. When the next heat dome hits the West this summer, and pyrocumulus clouds start looming on the horizon, we’ll start thinking about all that good firewood going up in smoke, and no catalytic converter to detoxify it, and amounts of carbon dioxide and water vapor beyond the atmosphere’s capacity to tolerate.
Something else we can’t do anything about: the presidential election will be over by the time we hit the darkest 2 months of the year again. A bad fire season might not be the only reason we welcome the cold and the dark.
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When I worked in construction, I had a boss whose response to any standing around on the job was to say, “Do something, even if it’s wrong.”
It wasn’t as foolish an instruction as it sounds. There are lots of delays on any construction project, but usually there are two or three things that need to be done that you know how to do.
If a cement truck was late or an electrician or plumber didn’t show up, I would grab a broom and start sweeping.
Contractors tend to be Stoics. Subcontractors, not so much. They count their income but not their time when they line up their jobs, and if they’re in debt for new pickups (the usual existential condition of subcontractors), they commit to too many projects, and end up not able to do what they’ve promised.
As a result, subcontractors, as a class, have a reputation for not telling the truth. They’re not happy because they’re always behind schedule, always blaming someone or something else for their failures, and always feeling like they go through life without agency or free will, even as they deny others agency and free will.
Over the decades I saw that the subcontractors who managed to stay in business had somehow stopped buying pickups and lying. They had quit overscheduling themselves. Their pickups grew dented and rusty, with beds full of salvaged hardware and scrap lumber and obsolete tools which could save the day in a pinch.
They would always make you wait longer than you wanted, but if they said they would show up, they would show up. If they needed to improvise, they had the material they needed. They were more trustworthy than someone with a new pickup with a sparse, neatly-organized bed who said he would show up the very day you wanted him to.
The Stoics said you can trust other human beings as long as you don’t expect too much of them. In practice, that creates a certain amount of alienation, cynicism, distrust, and a general resignation that things aren’t going to be perfect. Happiness for devout Stoics comes with myriad qualifications and disqualifications, but it comes.
Often enough, it comes down to you and your broom, or vacuum, or scrub brush, or dust cloth against the world.
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It’s no longer dark when we start dinner. A couple of backcountry ski trips—two good days with a half-foot of powder on a solid base, one not-so-good day with breakable crust atop layers of air and buried wind slabs—have ended late enough that we would have walked home in the dark, had it been December. Instead, it was still daylight, and almost warm.
I continue to pack wood like a good Buddhist should. I would have been carrying water—lots of it—except our drain field, which almost froze in December due to lack of snow, remained partially thawed. Under the snowy insulation provided by the early January storms, it continues to function.
It’s not often the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics works in your favor, but when two feet of snow traps the heat escaping from the planet’s core, and it warms your septic system, it can happen.
Had it not snowed, and had our drain field frozen up completely, we would have set the thermostat on 50 degrees, locked up the house, put our ski equipment in the car, and headed out for an extended vacation in whatever resorts had good skiing. There aren’t a lot of them this year. It’s been a low snow year over huge areas of the West.
But even with a functioning drain field, it would have done our sense of agency good to get in the car and drive—to go somewhere, even if it was wrong. We probably would have taken off weeks ago, except that I’m still waiting on tooth and skin appointments.
I should have known that when I signed up for a complete mouth remodel there would be trouble with subcontractors. Some of my new teeth didn’t fit and had to be sent back for modifications. Another week of standing around, waiting.
Medicine in general has become so specialized that almost everyone’s a subcontractor. Our medical system, as it’s set up now, hasn’t done much good for anyone’s sense of agency or purpose. I suspect that a sense of purpose and the ability to fulfill it is an essential component of health, mental and physical, patients or doctors and nurses, and it doesn’t do anyone any good to have one’s smallest decisions made by a vast and impersonal system.
Anyway, my new teeth will be installed tomorrow. In four days, I should have an all-clear signal from my dermatologist. With those two seminal events out of the way, we’re going to cut loose in a frenzy of fossil-fueled free will.
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Contemplating things I can’t do anything about is dangerous, as it breeds a why bother attitude that can turn an old man’s fancy toward nihilism. More people than Nietzsche have found out that when you gaze into that particular abyss, it gazes back, fluttering its eyelashes invitingly.
Things I can’t do anything about:
Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president, in spite of his character disorders, his uncontrolled rage, his criminal betrayal of supporters, clients, and benefactors, his ever more brutal acts of violence against powerless scapegoats, and his refusal to admit he lost in 2020.
The climate.
The weather.
The Yellowstone Supervolcano.
The Ukraine War.
The Hamas-Israel War.
The Sudan War.
Nuclear war, if and when it happens.
Problems associated with capitalism and fossil fuel extraction and its use.
Subcontractors.
Obviously, a partial list.
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You may be thinking that I’m picking on subcontractors for no good reason, but there’s a disturbing parallel between subcontractors and politicians, and it explains why so many of them operate with little regard for the people they supposedly serve: you start out in a competitive field where to survive you must promise more than you can deliver. That sounds innocuous enough, but it starts an inexorable progression toward an integrity crisis.
You quickly run out of clients or voters and face a choice between telling the truth and operating sustainably at a modest level, or doubling down, buying a whole fleet of new pickups or running for Senate. In other words, you keep expanding your territory to include people who don’t know you lie like a rug.
Most of us learn to operate in a microcosm where we can get something done. It’s usually a smaller arena than our estimation of ourselves would suggest. For most of us, life is a process of running into limits.
It's the doublers-down that I’m interested in, though. Lying to one’s self and others is pathological narcissism, a violation of the world by the self. Most of us get over pathological narcissism at age 3 or 4, through a painful process that involves giving up dreams of omnipotence, accepting our animal limitations, and embracing the distasteful idea that reality is immeasurably bigger than we are.
Not everybody accepts limits. Consider a short list of history’s evilest people: Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Mao, Pol Pot. (I’d add Putin, Netanyahu, and a 2nd-term Trump if it weren’t for the mandatory 5-year postmortem evaluation period. They’ll get there.)
All these people have a similar story, one starting with a deep and destructive emotional abandonment/abuse by a parent, usually a father. Then a gradual accumulation of power by pretending to be someone else, a moral cluelessness that involves physical or emotional destruction of political opponents and, on the final straightaway, an accelerating series of Gotterdammerung decisions in which everything achieved disintegrates into a national madness that ensures other people—lots of them—die, too.
It's the dark side of doing something, even if it’s wrong. But it suggests that under the right conditions, narcissism is so full of self-reinforcing feedback loops that it can result in a runaway psychic greenhouse effect that kills whatever it’s supposed to keep alive.
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Subcontractors, save of the medical/dental variety, have not been a part of our lives for years. We like it that way, and wish we could say the same about politicians.
We have found that most subcontractor-level problems become features, not bugs, if you ignore them long enough. Either that, or they yield to YouTube videos.
Even so, the driveway is a mess. The snowblower doesn’t deal well with slush. It throws a sloppy stream of ice and water a few feet, and then the exit chute clogs. I have to shut the engine off and clear things out. After the second or third attempt, I give up and put the machine back in the garage. I’m learning to not take it out in the first place.
If Julie or I get stuck in the berm between driveway and highway, we’ll get unstuck with snow shovels, which do just fine with slush. The exercise will be good for us.
In a much vaster arena, the passage of time will result in a change of seasons. A lot of people who see themselves as movers and shakers will stop moving and shaking. Stars will be replaced by understudies, and the critics won’t like it a bit.
The good news is that fifty or a hundred spring equinoxes will solve most of these problems without help from any of us.