We finished re-watching the television series Breaking Bad this past week, and I was actually surprised at how many things I had forgotten from the first viewing. What was more clear this time was that Walter White was evil from the get-go. He didn’t develop into a bad guy, he was a bad guy waiting to be given his chance. He taught himself to make methamphetamine, one of the worst of the addictive drugs, and sold it without a qualm.
The last episode of the series blew me away this time. Maybe the best single hour of TV I’ve watched. It was crafted out of that New Mexican desert, turning slowly and coloring like a water jar from an archeology dig.
There was a song played over the final scene that was perfect. So much so that I checked it out and found that the series’ creator Vice Gilligan had known for some time that this was what he wanted to be played when the five seasons came to an end. I’m not going to say any more just in case there are those among you who haven’t watched the series as yet. Listen up.
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It’s 0400 hours and the strong winds of the day to come haven’t begun as yet. Leaves on the ash tree in the yard are rustling just enough to trigger the backyard motion detector repeatedly and I turn it off.
Last night’s sunset was glorious. Everywhere its light touched in our house was overlain with a rich deep red, all due to smoke on the western horizon. There is the scent of a campfire everywhere in Montrose from grasses and trees burning sixty miles away.
Older parents tear up at scenes like this one from the Gold Mountain fire near Ouray, seeing brave children out there along such a precarious line. Looks a bit like an impressionist version of Hell.
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Many mornings here in the mountains are cool enough to make having hot cereal for breakfast a comfort food. For years one of my favorites was oatmeal. You know, those flattened things called “rolled oats”in the tall round boxes ? I became a sort of connoisseur of oatmeals, eventually settling on a 5-grain mixture from the Red Mill people as the best I could find.
I had tried the steel-cut oats on a couple of occasions but was put off by the long cooking times necessary. That was until the Instant Pot came along and made the process quick and easy. Now it is steel-cut for this (drugstore) cowboy every time. Here is one recipe.
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When you have a criminal for president, the outrages come at you several at a time and day after day. At first one tries to keep up with each one until you realize that is their plan. To numb you out. There is no dealing with this gang of stooges on their schedule. Pick out the most egregious scandals and stick with opposing those bits of awfulness until we get the whole sorry blood-stained bunch out of the White House, and then we can begin dealing with the stragglers one by one.
We don’t have to indulge in revenge fantasies, which can be personally poisonous. Crimes have been committed and there are still enough untainted judges to help sort out the innocent from the felons.
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I did search for learned quotes about revenge, since I did bring up the subject, and found these opposing views.
The person who seeks revenge should dig two graves. One for himself and one for his enemy.
– Author uncertain
We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged.
― Heinrich Heine
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On a recent visit to the REI store in Grand Junction, we found that visitors to the bathrooms were greeted with this sign.
I was in a bit of a hurry, and didn’t have time for pondering, but I found the idea of being nude in the REI restroom so unappealing that I chose to disobey the instruction.
There were no consequences.
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The Taylor Swift multi-day wedding extravaganza is apparently underway. I was not invited so anything I say about it could easily be interpreted as a spiteful reaction to being left out.
But my review of the whole proceeding is this: meh. Tone deaf and ultra-wealthy celebrities flaunt their wealth in a party of preposterous dimensions while the majority of Americans are struggling to pay their bills.
The ghosts of ancient Roman citizens are nodding their heads, because they’ve seen all this before.
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Lastly, this is part of an address given Friday morning by Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York. It reads like music, like poetry. How welcome are thoughts like these, how true observations like these.
For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best. It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshipping the wrong Gods, angering the wrong people. It sent peasants and serfs from slums and shtetls who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants for whom power was something someone else had.
We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else. The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence—that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all….
You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means.
The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.
How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another. Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest. But time and again—including 250 years ago—those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress. As Thomas Paine once wrote, “this new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty…hither have they fled.”
And yet today, too many of our leaders do not believe in a vision of this nation as an asylum for the persecuted—but rather as one that persecutes those seeking asylum.
As we mark 250 years, what do we see? We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world—one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans.We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands—those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone—and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few. Yes, we see America in a health insurance industry that exploits the sick, but that is not all I see when we look for America. We see it too in the nurse who works a double shift and then stops on her way home to check on an ailing neighbor.
Yes, we see America in corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model. We see it too in the father who tucks his children into bed beneath a ceiling stained with leaks, who wakes before dawn to go to work, and still believes his country can do better by his family. Yes, we see America when we spend our tax dollars on bombs and bailouts, when we sell our elections to the highest bidder.Yet we see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to we, the people. We see America each time neighbors link arms with neighbors—without asking how long they have lived here, or what papers they have—as ICE invades our neighborhoods. We see America each time those young and old stand in the beating rain or the stifling heat to cast their ballots. We see America each time working people demand more—not just for themselves, but for their fellow Americans.
There are some who respond to those who ask for more from America with a simple refrain: Love it or leave it, they say. But patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent, it is every march led under the heavy sun, it is every protest held a decade before its time. It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it. After all, who loves America more than those who have sacrificed so much to make it free?
…Those ideals upon which our nation was built—they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them.
Zohran Mamdani, 6/3/2026
You can watch the full address on YouTube by clicking this link. I do believe, at this moment in time, that this guy is my favorite immigrant.
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Little Home In The Valley 