Author: Mike Hoffman

Down and out semi poet who is down and out in the Low Country of South Carolina after living in Atlanta which is not to be confused with the south, the old south or the new south. Atlanta was a global metropolis with all the pluses and minuses that comes with that. The low country, low because it is low, 8 feet above sea level, is not Podunk but once you get to Podunk, turn left. I try to chronicle a small part of all that through my daily haiku for you.

2.3.2024 – hype train leaving the

hype train leaving the
station doesn’t mean we need
to all get on it

What else could I be talking about but the weather?

In the story, When the Storm Online Is Worse Than the One Outside By Shawn Hubler, Mr. Hubler writes:

“The online environment in 2024 is a mess,” said Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.

In recent years, amateur weather trackers’ posts have quickly spread through social media. Some have responsibly shared the latest information from experts, but others have found that extreme language can result in more shares and likes.

Brian Garcia, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service’s San Francisco Bay Area office, said he and his colleagues had become more aggressive in combating misinformation.

“People want to increase their following on social media, and one of the best ways is to go catastrophic and alarm people,” Mr. Garcia said. “But just because the hype train is leaving the station doesn’t mean we to need to all get on it.”

The weather.

The poor old weather.

Everybody talks about the weather but nobody every does anything about it.

2.2.2024 – here we are again

here we are again
the days of the long shadows
were we ever here?

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

My wife and I try to walk around out in the neighborhood everyday, twice if the weather and my schedule work out.

It is an exercise regime that works with my outlook on physical exercise.

I have noticed that several times a year (it really should be only twice a year but the time change throws a curveball into the mix) the sun lines up low in the sky with a length of sidewalk and produces these long shadows.

From the picture, you can see we are some minutes or maybe a day or two away from the shadow lining up exactly with the sidewalk but you can’t count on sunny days even here in the low country of South Carolina so I thought I better grab the image while the grabbing was good.

I have, by the calendar, seen these shadows stretch out and line up about 16 times since we moved here.

The sidewalk is the same.

The street ahead is the same.

The shadows pretty much look the same thought the bulky of our clothes changes from early spring to late fall.

The sun is the same.

What has changed in the last four years?

Truly the more things change the more they stay the same.

With this in mind though, I agree with Delwin Brown, who in his 1994 book, Boundaries of Our Habitations: Tradition and Theological Construction, (State University of New York Press) wrote, “There must be some continuity with the past, “or else the world is a madhouse.” Hence, the more things change, the more they stay the same; the more things stay the same, the more they change.”

Full disclosure I am not familiar with this book but when I looked up the the saying to get the french spelling of Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, I came across Mr. Brown’s quote in the lazy man’s best friend, Wikipedia.

I am reminded of snow.

If you grew in the western part of the State of Michigan in the back half of the 20th century like I did, you saw a lot of snow.

Early in your life, your learned from your Mom or your brothers or your sisters or your kindergarten teacher that NO TWO SNOWFLAKES are the same.

I put it to you that NO TWO OF ANYTHING are the same.

No two snowflakes.

No two days.

No two nothing.

But besides being different, all snowflakes are snowflakes.

They are all the same.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The more things stay the same, the more they change.

Then again, there is the shadow.

Here and gone.

Dark and bold in its outline in bright sun and a cloud comes along and covers the sun and the shadow is gone.

Was it really there?

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The more things stay the same, the more they change.

Maybe we weren’t really here in the first place.

2.1.2024 – everything changes

everything changes
everything changed yet almost
nothing changed at all

I’ve come to think of our current condition as a kind of long Covid, a social disease that intensified a range of chronic problems and instilled the belief that the institutions we’d been taught to rely on are unworthy of our trust.

The result is a durable crisis in American civic life.

Just look at the election cycle we are about to fall into: It seems like the world turned upside down several times, and yet here we are facing the prospect of another contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as though the country hasn’t moved forward an inch.

Everything changed, and yet almost nothing changed at all.

From the Guest Opinion essay, “Why America Can’t Recover From That First Awful Covid Year” by Eric Klinenberg in the New York Times (Jan. 31 2024).

I live near the seashore and I walk the beach whenever I can.

One of the redeeming aspects of my job is that the office where I work is about 5 blocks from the beach and I can walk down to the east coast of the United States of America on my lunch break.

Over 330 million people in America and a fairly small percentage can be found actually standing on either the east or west coast at any one moment.

I understand and embrace the privilege.

Being this close to the ocean, it is odd that the tide becomes such a part of your life.

You are aware of its highs and lows.

Here in the low country of South Carolina, known as the low country as it usually less than 10 feet about sea level, when the tide is out the pluff mud, the top layer of land in the salt marshes is exposed.

You don’t need to see low tide to know its low tide, you just have to smell it and it smells like pluff mud.

One of my grand daughters got a good whiff and said ‘someone farted.’

I told her nope, that down here that just means its low tide.

Twice a day, the tide comes in and goes back out.

The beach is made and remade as the tide power washes the beach and scours everything in its path.

Tons of seawater plow across the sand and wipes away everything and then retreats, leaving a brand new beach.

Everything is changed.

At the same time, though.

It is the same beach.

Nothing changed at all.

More and more, history I realize, is just as subject to the tide as is the beach.

1.31.2024 – lights red lights green lights

lights red lights green lights
stop lights go lights caution lights
on streets, not on life

Rules of the road.

Stop on red.

Go on green.

Caution, warning, take care, changing soon on yellow.

This works really well at the moment as I drive to work, as I have driven to work for almost half a century and it hasn’t been improved on.

But who is to say this will last?

I always thought that one of the first signs of the final decent for mankind would be a disregard for the basic fairness of a four way stop.

Four way stops work if everyone behaves, shows some respect and follows the rules.

You take your turn.

Sometimes you wait to take your turn.

Once someone decides to not follow the rules, the implied momentary contract between drivers to follow the rules is dissolved and chaos follows.

Roundabouts are the coming better solution to the problem of how to get people to take turns yet I find it difficult to grasp how this is an improvement.

Roundabouts work if everyone behaves, shows some respect and follows the rules.

Proponents state that the data shows that T bone accidents, accidents where cars crash at a 90 degree angle to one another have dropped 95%.

It is data likes this that gives breathe to the concept of lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Most folks think Mark Twain said that but Mr. Twain said that Benjamin Disraeli said it but I digress.

Is it true that T bone accidents dropped 95%?

Yes, you bet.

Is it also true that in a circle, cars are no longer approaching each other at a 90 degree angle making the CHANCE of a T bone accident drop 100%?

Yes, you bet.

Lets go back to the four way stop.

The rule of thumb is that the driver on the right has the right of way.

Makes it easy to remember doesn’t it?

I put it to you that had someone back in time had decided that drivers on the left had the right of way, that culture today would have rejected this as leftist woke theology and four ways stops in Florida would have been outlawed

With round about going counter clockwise, they would have been outlawed as counter culture.

I am not sure what people if Florida would have been left with in the way of traffic control as obviously red lights are pinko, green lights are, well, green and therefore a myth and yellow lights must lead into some sort of peril.

Better to just buy a gun and park the car in the garage is where this line of thinking will take you.

Red lights.

Green lights.

Yellow lights.

Pretty simple stuff.

Until someone decides it isn’t.

Simple as it implies a basic social contract.

We have to agree together to make it work.

Some one will get to the corner first and will have to agree that that is how it is.

Not a lot of interpretation there.

Some one gets to go and someone, well, someone has to wait.

We all have to take our turn to make this work.

Regulated cooperation?

Goodness but that sounds so …