There’s a story in the June issue of the Atlantic asking if American Pop Culture is in decline. I read it, but a debate is not worth the time because it seems to me that decline is hardwired into any form of popular culture. Things come. Things go. Tastes change. And a desire to talk about it critically is usually someone shilling for something he or she likes, and acting as though it can be measured and evaluated against standards. As though there’s an ideal to which we should strive.

Let’s mutter around some more in the gardens and talk about blackfoot daisies. I’ve got them planted in four spots, and they’re doing amazingly well, especially since the recent rains have fallen, and we got another inch last night. I set them up to get the soft morning sun then afternoon shade. The soil is well drained although it might be too rich for them. I’d like them to become a fixture and now that I’m once again spending time with the plants, maybe that can happen.

This is going to be the gardening equivalent of bragging about your kids, telling everyone they really knocked it out of the park in fifth or sixth grade band, as if no one has ever had a kid who did something, some time to make their parents proud. But here goes. My catmint walker low is blooming. Both plants. Bought this spring for the back porch garden, which is notoriously hard on plants.

My goodness, we got another dose of rain last night. The big storm fell to the south of us, but we got a nice taste of the action. We have another chance tonight. That would be sweet. I like these seasonably cool mornings as we head into summer. The baking days will come soon enough and last longer than anyone really likes. So, the soft, cool touch of a rain soaked morning is a nice memory to carry into summer.

When it came time to rise this morning, I pulled a pillow over my head and snuggled back down under the covers. And actually, I was already out of bed when it came time to rise, so the decision required me to get back into bed. And it did it. Unapologetically. It was nice and warm. As I lay there, I even thought for a brief minute that maybe I should have a whiskey drink to start my day. I mean, whiskey does make me feel good. So, why not?

I’ve always valued punctuality. Start times are when you get there. That’s why they’re start times. Yesterday, I was invited to a gathering that was to start at six. It takes me an hour to get to the destination in question. So, I geared my day around that travel time. I even left a little early to get gas. But at the station when I keyed in the destination it announced my arrival time as 6:45, which meant I was going to be, gasp, late.

As expected the raccoon came to the bird feeder. Climbed up the tree, walked the fence, and found his dinner. Delicate and precise. He cleaned his plate, too. I know this because I moved one of my cameras to the mesquite tree off the back porch just so I could watch. It wasn’t a great loss. I don’t put a lot of feed in the birdbath feeder. One of these days I might fill it with water again, just to see if he comes to get a drink.

A thunderstorm sent me to bed last night and another woke me in the middle. A quick peek at the rain gauge this morning shows we got a bit more than an inch of rain. And that’s how an acre of land in the middle of Texas in the southern half of the US, fared yesterday. A private report. A data point. Something to plot. No doubt the AI engines will scope it up to learn what they need to learn, and maybe we’ll be better for it. And you can use it however you choose.

I am puzzled by the mystery of what others see and hear and why. I could stand or sit for hours looking at the Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum. It’s the same with any painting by Turner at the Tate. I love Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor. Or Billie Gibbons playing Blue Jean Blues. I love the puzzle of quantum mechanics, geology, and chaos theory. They’re all things that strike a chord within me and release whatever it is my body releases when it sees or hears something of beauty or interest.

I’m on a new computer. Well, newer than my old but not really new, new. It’s used. Anyway, except for the operating system, I’m trying to exist outside the Microsoft Universe. I am not sure it’s worth the effort. I am an old dog and I miss the software where I performed my old tricks. At the moment, it seems as though I've simply traded one all encompassing tech universe for another. Still, I have to try because I’m engaging in a collaborative effort with my daughter and she knows the new universe.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Aesop’s fox and his unattainable grapes. He tried. He failed. He walked away. To ease the pain, he decided the grapes were probably sour and not worth having. Nice move actually. He kept his self-esteem, and moved on to hunt for other grapes more accessible. And while he was hunting, maybe he had time to think about how he went about getting the grapes and came across a new method, something different to employ so that the next time he encountered high grapes, they’d be his.

I think in the short term the new garden area along the north fence is complete. I moved the bottle tree from its old spot behind the big oaks and the new gazebo to a spot by the young chinquapin. Now, when I look out the kitchen window I see a tableau. The bottle tree, the oak, an upright rosemary, a statue of St. Francis, a talavera pot, a metal buzzard, a yellow bells, a sage, and gregg’s mist flower. The living and the inanimate.

Spent yesterday in mostly contemplative silence broken only by two requests for directions from store clerks and a song I sang in my bedroom as I played my guitar. Did three loads of wash. Practiced putting on the living room carpet. Took a short walk. Fixed a pot of navy beans. Watched the PGA championship, and spent some time sorting out my needs and desires. I’ve found it’s important that one gets those in the right buckets because you can go broke financially and emotionally if you mix them up.

I turned my bird bath into a bird feeder. It was an accident. The bird bath dried up and I watched a little finch land in it and start picking at whatever was lying about. I had some extra bird seed left, so I took it out and poured it into the dry bird bath. Here they came, the avian dinosaurs. A summer tanager. A cardinal. A house finch. They landed. They ate. They left. I’m going grocery shopping today. I think I’ll pick up an inexpensive bag of feed and see what happens.

I made a mistake. I started a new garden. Stopped. Changed direction. Here was the mistake. Rather than continuing to dig up grass and turn dirt I decided to put down landscape material. I have no idea why I thought that was a good idea. But I did. Hauled in mulch. It looked nice for about three months. Then the bermuda grass did what bermuda grass does. It grew. Through the landscape cloth, over the cloth, and in the cloth.

There are ups and down to living at the urban/country interface. Deer are the best downside example. Luckily, there’s enough country around me that the woods offer better habitat than my yard. Scorpions are another. Found one in the kitchen this morning. I took it back outside. Mostly I find their desiccated bodies in the house. There’s no water and little food. Once upon a time we had a pest control service spray the outside of the house, but stopped because of the dog.

It’s a summer morning in May. We touched 100 yesterday, and you can feel yesterday’s heat this morning. Still, there’s a special pleasure to be found in an early morning walk around the yard, feeding the cats, feeling the breeze, and looking at the plants. The Crape Myrtles, for instance, are getting ready to bloom and we have a fair collection of them around the place.

Stood outside last night in the light of the full moon. A glorious sight. The pasture was calm and well lit. I thought of our ancestors as they walked the savannah on such a night. Or did they walk at all because it exposed them to predators. And what did they think of that dim bright light in the night sky, so different from the sun, yet still a source of light in a time of darkness. A mystery to them for sure.

One of these days I think I’ll ask one of the AI programs to write me 300 words in three paragraphs on some topic that strikes my fancy. Although, frankly, I’m terrified it will do a much better job than I ever could. Still, I think it might be fun. After all, it’s drawing on the writings of some fairly good people, and I’d still have to edit it and get it ready for publication. And I’ve heard that the prompt you use to get the outcome you want is fairly important. So, that would keep me involved.

We graduated a grand-daughter from college yesterday. Now she’s on to graduate school, and work in her chosen field which appears to be sports information. I say this because the world is changing fast, and I think chosen fields in general are drying up faster than corn in a hard drought. We laughed, at first, about the commencement speaker, a local weatherman, but I thought his speech about preparedness was spot on.