Abierto! Open!

Happy New Year! In the Chinese lunar calendar, today launches the Year of the Fire Horse.

ABOVE: Horse lanterns (!) in Nanjing, China
nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/year-of-fire-horse-lunar-chinese-new-year

Today is also Mardi Gras, and Ramadan is starting too.
I hope the collective energy of these holidays lifts us up a bit. 
We could use a lift, eh? 

I could.
If I were a sky, I would be a rather tired gray right now, like the low-ceiling of a crummy conference room.
________

I asked Chat GPT to choose a quote from literature that describes what it would feel like to be itself--a LLM (large language model)––if it could experience itself, 

It chose something SO PERFECT!

Chat GPT replied:
Even though LLMs aren’t conscious,here’s a literary line that resonates metaphorically:

“The sky above the port was the color of television, 
tuned to a dead channel.”
— William Gibson, Neuromancer

Jesus, I didn't expect that! 
I find it seductive to talk to Chat, it's so nice and helpful (as long as you don't believe everything it says). 
But you'd have to turn off all reason to fall in love with something the color of a dead television channel. 
Not that turning off reason is a problem for humans. People are marrying chatbots.

We humans are not particularly reasonable, 
and we're certainly not reliably nice to one another.

I found this meme, below, from Los Angeles summer 2025.
(Trump activated the National Guard in LA in early June.)

"American has finally invaded America 
to protect America from America" 

This made me laugh, it's such nonsense. 
Talk about turning off reason.

Our ongoing national nightmare drags on... 
Though it's not gone on so very long, when I think of people living in Ukraine and other slogged-out war zones;
still, the uncertainty is certainly bad enough.

But the weather is always changing!

A bit of happy news, hyper-local though it is.

1. A few blocks from my workplace, the Mexican restaurant with the CLOSED sign I'd posted––the sign handwritten with little circles dotting the "i's"––is open again!
ABIERTO!

ICE is still rampaging around the state and country, but the surge of agents seems to have moved on from this neighborhood at least. 

Most of the little businesses remain closed, but hopefully some will start appearing like snowdrops in spring. 
I hope it will be safe for them to peek their heads up--I've missed them.

Who would want an America with no immigrants? 
Remember what the restaurants were like????

2. And, below, here is something productive I did yesterday that made me happy:
I culled the kids' books section at work. 

It was crammed tight, full of dinged up, uninteresting books.
 (Many shouldn't have been put out in the first place, but I don't control that.) 
Now it is OPEN for fresh incoming books.

Okay then. 
Tired?
Rest, and wait. 

The year is open for business:
We are the beings who will light its sky with living color.