Trent Lott on BET:

I’m tired. Really tired. I just got back from spending some time with my dad in New Braunfels. He’s a geeky old guy, from the time before it was OK to refer to yourself as a geek. He’s a scientist.

We spent most of yesterday afternoon walking up the bank of the Guadalupe river, under the limestone cliffs. There was a huge flood in the valley last July, so we were looking at how the river had changed.

One of the obvious things is that there’s a huge sandbar across the river from my parents’ house up there. It didn’t used to be there. A few hundred feet long, and maybe 15 feet wide on average. Where it meets the river, it was arranged by the floodwater into three sort of embankments, forming three little lagoon-like eddies. The explanation being that as the water slowed after leaving the limestone outcrop just upstream, it lost the gravel in a big pile. As the pile grew higher, the top was eroded away again by faster water, which then slowed quickly as it dropped off the downstream side of the pile. Thus the river picked up and rearranged, in sections, pebble by pebble, the sandbar.

We talked aboug things like that. Like, for instance, the limestone I mention above has these deep channels in it. It’s almost like a chunk of an LP record, grown giant. We saw where some of these channels had been made wider, and some had filled up. One in particular, that used to be really deep and had swift water flowing through it, is now dammed by the aforementioned sandbar.

We took turns noticing things about it. Dad says something like, ‘You can see where the water would carry the sediment through this channel, and drop it where the channel narrows.’ I’d say, ‘And the current acts as a filter for the size of the stones. See how the upstream rocks are larger than the downstream ones? They filter this way all the way down to the sandbar.’ And my dad points to the first stone that had been dropped in the channel, which is about the size of a football and says, ‘Upstream from here is erosion, downstream is deposition.’

Two nerdy geeks in nature. We did this all afternoon. Mostly my dad talked about dolemitized limestone and sedimentary uplaps. He’s a geophysicist.

Later we went up to a place I hadn’t seen in over a decade: Devil’s Playground rapids. It’s a really pretty rapid, with two main lines of whitewater formed by cleaved shelves of limestone.

When I was a little kid, the whole family would be floating through that rapid, in three or four boats. I especially liked the trail that led up to the top of the rapid from the bottom. You could just hike back and drop yourself in, wearing a life-vest. Have a fun float down again and again.

Mostly I stayed on the banks, though, looking at the exposed tree roots, noticing the way the light came through the cedar leaves, and wondering why no one made tennis shoes that were comfortable when your feet were wet. An infinitely friendly place.

The far bank, the one inside the curve of the river, was much more mysterious. (You can see it on the left of the picture from the link above.) No one ever went there. It didn’t have the convenient landing spot on the limestone bed, and it was opposite the main road and attendant development that follows the river. An unvisited land not far away. Choked with trees and low vegitation.

That was all before the flood. After the flood, the rapids and the trail remain, though many of the roots are now more exposed than is entirely safe. But the far bank is now a huge gravel bar. All vegetation removed except the hardiest of trees. And not just the bank, but a quarter mile or so back.

The river, you see, forms the right side of a sort of T-intersection. The left part comes down from a smaller creek. The rapids are just down from this intersection.

The energy of the flooded river, however, missed the turn. It slammed into the bottom part of the creek’s channel, tearing away half a hillside. Since the water level was so high, that half-hillside was spread evenly across the whole of the left downstream side of the T-intersection.

It was stunning to see the change. Where before had been green mystery, now was the surface of the moon.

For our Canadian friends.

Don’t worry. YOU’RE not Muslim. YOU haven’t done anything wrong… Have you?

Sometimes I wonder what country I live in.

Note that the Justice Department won’t tell us how many have been so detained. This is not justice, and it does not reduce the terrorist threat. It simply makes people vanish, without a trace.

Now is the time to be asking yourself: If you were a German in the 1940s, and you objected to the death camps, what would you have done?

Hundreds of Muslim Immigrants Rounded Up in Calif.
Thu Dec 19,12:05 AM ET

By Jill Serjeant

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Hundreds of Iranian and other Middle East citizens were in southern California jails on Wednesday after coming forward to comply with a new rule to register with immigration authorities only to wind up handcuffed and behind bars.

Shocked and frustrated Islamic and immigrant groups estimate that more than 500 people have been arrested in Los Angeles, neighboring Orange County and San Diego in the past three days under a new nationwide anti-terrorism program. Some unconfirmed reports put the figure as high as 1,000.

The arrests sparked a demonstration by hundreds of Iranians outside a Los Angeles immigration office. The protesters carried banners saying “What’s next? Concentration camps?” and “What happened to liberty and justice?.”

A spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service said no numbers of people arrested would be made public. A Justice Department spokesman could not be reached for comment.

I haven’t been saying much in my ‘blogs lately. The Xmas Cheer deficit I mentioned earlier is still unresolved. I’m filled with the desire to call my friends here in Houston, but I’m also afraid I’d end up being The Depressed Guy Who Can’t Stop Talking About How Depressed He Is. I have opportunities to go to the TX hill country, but being alone there is being *really* alone, as opposed to being *kind of* alone here.

In happier news, my parents took me to the new boardwalk in Kemah. Kemah used to be a dock and the kind of place respectable people stayed away from. Now it’s a big entertainment complex with a zillion restaurants, a hotel, boutique-y stores, and a Ferris wheel.

Had some good seafood: Mahi-mahi and snow crab. I would have ordered something more representative of the Gulf coast, but local catches scare me. We could see the refineries out the window of the restaurant.

The Galveston Bay ecosystem is interesting that way. You’re riding on a Ferris wheel looking at an oil refinery. You’re eating fish that was flown in today from the north Pacific, even though you’re watching the shrimp boats pull into docks across the inlet. You’re watching them build an apartment building that will collapse in the next hurricane. That kind of thing.

‘Homer,’ you ask, ‘Why can’t you just eat the crab legs and enjoy them?’ And my answer is this: Why can’t you just read this and enjoy it?

I had another hugely vivid dream Sunday night. The day started quickly after I got up, so I forgot most of it. It was a mutual dream, co-created by a number of people.

I was in the role of a super spy, trying to gather information on the soul-crushing activities of a certain shopping mall. The mall had a big machine to crush people’s souls. It was a big metal hoop-shaped sculpture, not unlike the stargates in that show Stargate SG-1. People would be guided through the hoop and it would appear that nothing was happening, but their soul would have been crushed without their knowledge. Apparently very few folks knew the difference.

Some other folks and myself found the soul-restorer machine. But I woke up before we could figure out what to do about it.

I woke up thinking that it was a great dream. It was suffused with meaning and wonderment and a sense of mutual play. The idea of a soul-crushing machine at a shopping mall is sufficiently silly to make up for the Heavy Meaning stuff. Better to tell a joke than to lecture, perhaps.

What interests me most about it, though, is the sense that not everyone understands the narrative in the same way. What was a silly B-movie for me might have been a totally different experience for other participants. Perhaps this is why other participants act so strangely sometimes; they’re in a whole other world, with a whole other set of rules. They end up getting represented in my world, however, as something that fits my narrative sense.

I wish I could have more of these vivid co-dreams.

“Did you think you were God?”
–Jimmy Stewart, in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’

Fun web site: Creatures In My Head

I’m finally getting around to ‘blogging a dream I had last night.

I was travelling with my dad. We were in a place that was a mixture of Colorado and Montana. We stopped to visit some relative, a cousin of my dad’s. It wasn’t anyone I had known before.

They cooked dinner for us, and while my dad and his cousin and his wife sat and talked in the next room, I stayed in the kitchen, feeling awkward.

I started washing the dishes from dinner, because it was something to do. So for the whole rest of the dream, I did dishes. With great attention to detail, I removed food particles from eating implements.

As I did this, the pile of dishes grew while I wasn’t looking. I’d be looking at a pile, and a new pile would appear where I hadn’t been looking. The first pile would grow while I was noticing the second one. Dishes would appear under the soapy water in the sink.

I began to merely organize them. Plates in one pile, baking pans in another, silverware and utensils in a big bowl. And so on.

Finally, after a subjectively infinite length of time, the wife came out and picked up a pyrex dish and showed it to me. “Is this one yours?” she asked.

I was dumbfounded. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that any of these would be our dishes. We were visiting, not moving in. I shrugged. She said, “I thought maybe it was one of yours.” She tossed it in the pile and walked out.

Then I woke.

If you don’t know what to get me for Christmas, this is it.