Good Morning, World

I woke up after two hours of sleep. I really need to get that Ben-Gay, I can only use the bag in certain circumstances. Since I was up, "True Love Ways Gone Astray" went to Glint.

Back up at 7 am. I did some reading, some posts for here. Laundry started at 8:15 and done almost an hour ago. 

Here is my reading for the morning:

A Muncie Blog: Wasson's Nursery Having done a fair share of landscaping work for the United States Bureau of Prisons, I think you homeowners might want to read What’s Missing in Your Landscape: Winter Edition.

Indiana's solar power industry may have lost out to the Big Utilities. Solar opinion undermines growing industry:

Drive around Indiana and you’ll probably notice more and more homes and businesses powered by solar energy. This saves consumers money and creates a less expensive and more reliable grid for all Hoosiers. But a recent opinion issued by the Indiana Supreme Court could halt solar’s growth, unless our legislature takes action.

The issue is how solar owners should be credited for the electricity they generate, but don’t use themselves. When solar owners generate extra electricity, it flows out through their electric meter to their neighbors. Solar owners earn credit for this electricity on their bills. 

When the General Assembly first addressed compensation for solar owners back in 2017, they told Hoosiers they wanted to ensure fairness for all involved. But that’s not what’s happened.

The court destroyed the purpose of the legislation by allowing CenterPoint, a utility that provides electricity to customers in southwestern Indiana, to drastically slash the compensation customers receive for the extra solar energy they produce and share with their neighbors. Similar cases are pending on appeal for Indiana’s other four investor-owned utilities and now seem destined for the same fate. This radical change in solar policy makes it difficult, if not practically impossible, for many families, schools, houses of worship, farms, and businesses to offset the financial investment of installing solar panels.

I do not expect the Indiana General Assembly with its Republican majority to do anything that helps out Indiana's citizens with solar panels. The Republicans have been telling people for too long climate change is not real. Donald J. Trump pals around with the Saudis, who certainly do not want us to become energy independent. Maybe Hoosiers wanting clean energy should tie it to book banning ( Indiana lawmakers revive bill at center of book-banning dispute for 2023 legislative session) or abortion. In the end, all I can is: this is what you get by voting in Republicans.

Deviant obsessions: how David Lynch predicted our fragmented times from The Guardian had one great shock for me: David Lynch will soon be 77. We all grow old, and this is another unwelcome reminder.

Weirdly, that is not the case now. Lynchian is the go-to adjective to describe any sniff of the uncanny and esoteric on screen, from Donnie Darko to True Detective. It will never be a mainstream quality, but it exists explicitly in orientation towards the mainstream, often represented by the discordant versions of 50s Americana that appear so often in his work. And so his destabilising vision has become a common lens for discerning the truth about the “normal world”: that white picket fence America paints over deviant and sometimes evil obsessions, as in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, or that Hollywood is in fact a nightmare factory, as in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. Lynch playing John Ford, maybe the most establishment of all golden age directors, in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is a neat joke about his skewwhiff relationship with the mainstream.

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Online especially, we respond to this fragmentation with ever-more polarised positions, ones that seek to permanently separate virtue from vice. But Lynch’s great moral conviction has been to show us to what extent good and evil are inextricably wound around each other and coexist in the same person. Excessive zeal, like stainless Agent Cooper, is replaced by his scowling, mullet-haired doppelganger. Corruption and entropy are part of life; not exactly a commercial proposition, which is probably why Lynch hasn’t made a feature in more than 15 years. But even if not everyone wants to lend their ear, he burrows onwards – as in Blue Velvet – down into the cochlea and inside our heads. Happy birthday, Mr Lynch, and thanks for showing us the way to seventh heaven.

Which reminds me, I still have seen neither The Elephant Man nor Easerhead. 

Also from The Guardian: ‘I’ll never drink like that again’: Kathleen Turner on booze, health and falling in love with Michael Douglas and Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer by Richard Bradford review – a literary sucker punch.

The latter trashes the biography, but maybe answers my own question about Mailer - was he a novelist?

Bradford’s contention is that Mailer’s obstreperous life was the novel he didn’t have the time or the talent to produce. It’s a flippant misjudgment: his best work, in any case, is his nonfiction, in which he studied the “psychic havoc” incited by contemporary events. In response to the killing of the Kennedy brothers he elaborated the kind of nuttily ingenious conspiratorial plot that now proliferates on social media. He treated Marilyn Monroe as a goddess sacrificed to her worshippers and in doing so he came to see that celebrity is a kind of death cult, dooming those it deifies. Reflecting on the 1969 moon landing, he wondered how this human incursion might have disturbed the quiescence of outer space. Mailer’s abiding subject was America’s id, “the dream life of the nation”, and he ventured intrepidly into that irrational underground.

Having read his work on the 1968 political conventions and his novel The Naked and the Dead, I prefer the former. When I was young, Mailer was notorious, and maybe better known for his notoriety than his work. I do not think he was as great as he thought, but he needs to be remembered as having talent.

I meet with the counselor at noon, and I am catching the 10:30 bus downtown. That lets me get some business taken care of down there - like a meal.

No response from my PO about the time for my polygraph.

Music for his morning: WXPN.

Later,

sch 10:13 AM