Yesterday morning my writer’s block seemed to lift somewhat and I wrote two pretty good pages before Andy got up. Writing about the good times is hard. It’s always easier to write about dysfunction. Yesterday’s stuff takes me past 40K words. I figure that by the time I come up with an ending and write my way through it I’ll be at 50K. And that’s a real novel, right?

It was a great weekend. We made hamburgers yesterday. They came out oddly shaped but delicious. Plus there was ice cream, macaroni and cheese, chips and salsa, carrots and dip. And you just can’t beat an ice-cold bottle of good beer with a hamburger.

Watched a lot of movies, and read a lot. Just read “Tomorrow Today,” by Bruce Sterling. He looks at what the next 50 years could be like, but he comes at it from an intelligent sci-fi point of view. Just fantastic. Must check out his other stuff.

In the morning yesterday we listened to “The Declaration of Independence” by Stan Freberg, and of course on NPR there was the usual 4th of July stuff. I definitely felt a very real albeit weird surge of patriotism, perhaps partly from just having read that biography of Benjamin Franklin and so on. An angry surge of patriotism, because of what people are trying to do to our country and our world. But something about Sterling’s book is rather hopeful. What the right wing has done, is doing, is trying to do–these things aren’t sustainable. This isn’t Orwell’s 1984. They can’t sustain a war and preserve tax cuts. They can’t continue to discriminate against minorities, not for very long, not when there are more minorities every day. They can’t legislate their morality, it won’t hold; there are too many of us. It’s a tide that will turn. The power of extremism collapses from its own deadly gravity. We can do what we can to help the tide turn faster.

Now I am reading Bob Dylan’s book, and it’s wonderful. Though, like David Byrne said, it’s best to read it as semi-fictional, Dylan’s persona as a kind of mask. It’s quite a story. You could enjoy it even if you didn’t know who Bob Dylan was.