i'm going to write this one all out because i need to do it in the process of thinking about it. i'm sure it's best to omit names because of people's privacy and there are a lot of people who wouldn't appreciate having all this get around. but nevertheless it's important because it's a human life hanging by the wayside.

my wife has a fairly common last name so it makes it difficult to do searches of this kind. but we got a notice from the oregon social services saying that a child was falling through the cracks and wondering if any relatives, distant or otherwise, were interested in getting involved. the child turns out to be the grandchild of my wife's cousin. my wife did not jump at the chance and in fact had an aversion to having anything to do with this particular cousin.

i did research to find out what i could on the web. the child's father is in prison for meth-related things and won't be out until november 2026. the mother disappeared, i coulld not find record of their marriage, who she was, what happened to her, etc. a simple call to the oregon social services would resolve some key questions: first, is it a girl or boy? (name doesn't tell definitively) Second, how old? Third, what happened to the mother? Fourth, would the father have any chance of coming back after this kid after his release?

so the social worker would definitely have an answer to these questions, and they might influence our ability or desire to take this kid on, but at the moment the two stumbling blocks are this: i don't do well with phone calls, and my wife doesn't want to. she's the one who would be doing the lion's share of the work, so there's no way i'd push her; she wouldn't be doing it for me. but i'm curious anyway.

in our favor, i'd say this: we've been in the business of rescuing kids for the last few years anyway. we're good at it (or rather, she is good at it - though we're clearly tired and in need of a break. but also: we are the last known family, probably, to keep this kid from just going out of the family. one other thing in our favor: we're known to social agencies. they don't have to do all the studies and background checks. they love to put a kid in a family like ours even though we have some dysfunction just within our own.

is there a family bond that says, our family takes care of other people in our family? i think about that. i have a cousin with three daughters, six granddaughters, all in a state of abuse/crisis. two of the grandkids are launched and capable but one is being fought over as we speak. fortunately in that case i don't have to intervene because other closer relatives are fighting over custody. let them fight, someone who wants the kid will get the kid.

what about a kid in a family where nobody wants them or can handle them? it seems like we are about the only ones left in this wide family (though this may not be true) which seems too have the addiction gene running rampant throughout. a good argument can be made that the addiction gene is rampant and that modern society makes it too easy for the addiction gene to take over and simply wipe out whole families. we are lucky that way but i also know we are walking a fine line. aa is our closest ally.

a kid, out there somewhere, no home, family seems to have just fallen away.

if i had it all to do over again, i'd go live in a commune. that's what i told my family and they kind of scoffed at me. but i was serious. when i look back at almost fifty years of raising children, what strikes me the most is that sometime in there, you could no longer let your child walk out the front door. and, sometime in there, teachers lost their ability to do their job well.

as for having a community close-knit enough, friendly enough, and watchful enough that kids would be ok wandering around most times of the day, there are several small towns and probably even the valley we lived in in new mexico, where that would still be possible. i remember those neighbors in new mexico reaching out to our kids, who were already almost grown. but our kids had grown up in another world, without atvs, without hunting rifles, etc., and had very little in common with those kids. those kids probably did have the run of that back area, with the creek, the woods going up into the reservation, plenty of wild country to tromp around. but by then it was too late. all they wanted to do was play grand theft auto. and that was probably because they knew they would look bad trying to shoot a hunting rifle.

with schools, i'll say that teachers are saints and teachers are generally competent. what compromises their competence is two things: pure number, in the classroom, and percent or number of students who are antagonistic. both of those have risen dramatically in even normal schools, like galesburg and alamogordo, the two i know best at this point. but there are also cloudroft, carbondale, iowa city, pittsburg kansas: every school in the nation is suffering from too large class size and too many antagonistic students. my explanation. for the antagonism is unusual: it comes from the parents. twenty years ago schools failed a large number of kids and those were the ones who had the most babies. now that's a bad cycle. but if the parents dislike and distrust the schools, you're doomed. you can't do your job. and separating them out won't solve the problem (actually it might, but i'm not sure how one would do it).

there's the aftermath of a storm here - large trees fallen, soaked ground, standing. water, lots of puddles. i need to mow but it's too wet. it's been very hot and humid for some time now and will probably continue this way for some more. i've kind of backed off dashing for the moment, as it was wearing me out and wearing the car out too. today i drove around helping this one 17-year-old go to an interview. he's having bad luck; apparently at the last mcdonalds he walked off without giving notice, and not only will they not hire him back, but the other mcdonalds won't either. and these are mcdonalds that need workers and hire regularly. one has to keep going to place after place. but i hang in there with him because i sense it's a turning point in his life. either he will give it all up and turn to a life of crime, or, one of these places that i take him to will simply take him on. he's a pretty good worker when he sets to working. he's careless. when we mow, i have trouble getting him to hit all the grass. but he does the work and he has a sense of responsibility. i need to stay on him. sometimes all it takes is one person who cares how it turns out, and that makes it turn out better.

in this weather, the easiest thing to do is curl up, do my reading, try to do my writing, text the fam. fam is in all different states of stress and change, some of the change is good. I'm at the age where i take naps spontaneously, suddenly, briefly, any time of day - it's about to happen now. what can you do? aside from multiple cups of coffee (just seems to make it worse) - nothing.

took another day off dashing and have been catching up on reading, laundry, etc. but the most pervasive problem is opening up facebook and getting drawn into flood pictures in the 'reels' part.

it is set up by algorithm to draw you into the reels and keep you there and that's why there's a lot of flood pictures there these days. nothing draws your eyes better than raging currents of water sweeping people or cars away, or trapping them on rooftops as the water rises.

the heck of it is they're from all over. it started with texas and there are a lot from texas. texas is familiar to me because i lived there and have been to kerrville. but every fifth or sixth one is from ruidoso and i know ruidoso even better. we used to go to ruidoso often and even stayed there a few times but then, there are more. one is from davenport, which is only forty miles up the road. a couple have been from oklahoma. and quite a few are from pakistan or bangladesh. those places have real problems, flooding that makes ours look like puddles.

what we see is very dramatic and the reels function is set up to perpetuate that. in short, it appears the world is ending, being washed away by torrents of rain all over the place. but, with the exception of texas, most of these flood events don't even make the nightly news.

i have to admit, and i'll only do it here, as it's not fit for polite company, that i take a perverse pleasure in raging storms, although of course i hate to see the loss of life, destruction of whole houses, upending of lives, etc. but in a way it's like the earth having its last stand against ignorance, humans who in spite of having the technology continue to ignore the warnings and not only keep burning oil but demand that we keep doing so infinitely. can't you see the damage you've done? perhaps the earth needs to show us/i> a little better that it's at its tipping point.

one can give the earth some agency in this - as if it is hurting, and it hurts us back deliberately - but it's not necessary. the earth is simply at its tipping point and it's going to hit us whether it has any awareness of it or not. it's just the havoc we've wrought upon ourselves and which will continue until we get a clue. let's just say we are going in the absolute wrong direction and it's absolutely the worst possible fallout from all the political events of the last year.

it's going to be a long summer - hurricane season is about upon us.

i've squandered away a sunday morning, partly because i'm tired and partly because i left my glasses in the car and was too lazy to go out and get them.

sunday morning is often my time to delve into family genealogy, which i find comforting in an era when fascism is rising, people are going to war against their own people, etc. family genealogy assures me that people survive through such travesties as the american revolution, civil war, irish potato famine, etc. they manage to survive and have children even, sometimes more than one.

but often it's somewhat uncertain. i look into relatives and find too many with the same name, or too many guesses piled upon guesses to the point that i don't believe any of people's constructed trees. what do they know? they appear to pull names and dates out of places and slap them around like they must be the truth. it makes it all the more obscure what actually happened, and it sucks out my motivation.

i'm also deep into a novel which is essentially a retelling of Beauty and the Beast. A little beyond me at this point - namely, that i should be able to retell the story with some kind of accuracy or parallel to the original stories. i have lots of work to do.

and meanwhile, i have unfinished projects - an unfinished leverett book (bluffs leveretts), another novel or two (sorry for late, legends of powder rock), a language-theory book (vowels in the elevator), and more. all backed up. me making incomplete sentences. me just sitting here wishing it wasn't so humid.

i feel like we're hip-deep in kids we have run out of steam to foster. at our house now are a 16-almost-17 year old boy, a 17-year-old girl, and an 8-year-old girl. Connected to the boy and the 8-year-old are two more who we have our eye on. Out three miles away is a 20-year-old son and his 17-year-old friend. Right there, way more than we can handle. We're old and need to shed, even the three dogs and one cat are too much. The ones that are ours, well they're ours, there's no shedding them. but you reach a point where you say, no, i know when it's too much to take more on, and now's that time. i can say that if i don't feel like i'm being a good enough parent, maybe they can find somebody who would be a better one. a 47-year streak of continuous parenting might be ready to wind down a little,

i have a puppy though, and he's on my lap, and he's happy. the fireworks are over, and he can get some serious rest.

people are getting on the blogs these days; 24,000 or so saw this one last month, so i want to welcome you if you are new. this particular blog has lots of things on it and i actually wrote a book with some of its stories; mostly however as you see it has my ramblings where i try to keep a sharp mind amidst the daily fog of raising twelve kids in modern america. i keep to small letters to distinguish that i am deliberately in free-form and not professionalizing it for sale or anything else.

24 thousand? that's quite a bit. let me also direct you to the template, which has links to other blogs, and to the lighthouses, which, if you click on them, will always or usually take you to another interesting blog. my main press is a blog; so is my quaker press.

all this is important because seeing all the social media moguls, from facebook, twitter, amazon and the like, lined up behind mr. "truth social" made me sick and severely cut into my motivation to keep pounding the social media and leading people to it. if they are all behind this president and his death camps, they can have him and i'll find another way. now here's a good question: are the blogs any different or better? they're free and have been sitting here for years. this one is one of the oldest ones "out there" and just has tons of things on it, though like i said, mostly my own rambling. i could theoretically make them much slicker and harvest some of these 24 thousand views and turn them into views of my books, which even today doon't sell a whole lot. obviously i'm missing something here. what that is, is that i don't have a commercial bone in my body, but i like to be out here on a kind of public square just running my proverbial mouth, and having it just be a record of my vitriol or my fantasizing. because i do these blogs (there are 28 of them) mostly for myself, and to develop my own ideas, i've managed to keep them going for a long time.

the world has become very hot, sunny, glaring, uncomfortable. we got some mowing, but that's hot too. the car runs hot. i should wait 'til night. and i feel about fireworks about the same as i feel about the circus. they can have it. unfortunately when you have kids, not to mention twelve of them, there's no way you can say, "we won't bother this year." You have to join in a small town gathering

of course they started early, and the pets are already alarmed. such is the season.