Interrupted thoughts about outrageous and normal things

•  Dragonflies, ladybugs, butterflies and bats have benefitted from Denver's spring-summer monsoons. Hopefully, it's not a last desperate gasp of life, before more season-changed seasons.

•  Obama's tightening the rules about segregation in housing. But he's at least 50 years behind the times. Yes, you can still be kept out of certain suburban or gated neighborhoods if you're not the right color. But what goes on more is people of color being pushed out of their neighborhoods to make room for gentry Legolands.

•  My wife and I went downtown on one of our rare trips for Friday happy hour. Droves of the gentry passed us, on their way to a Rockies game. Why would anyone pay to go to one? Except to watch the other team.

•  Old downtown Denver once served combination appetizer platters featuring bits of all the munchies. Those are gone. Everything's a la carte. Thank the hipster bistros for that.

•  Yesterday, finished my daughter's custom table to go behind her sofa. It's 8 ft. long and 6 inches wide, for putting drinks on. An engineering nightmare: how to keep it stable. I learned some things. Like the limits of my furniture-building skills. Make it'll look cute.

•  The Portland-rainy season in Denver is not over, yet. 5 of our fruit trees died so the Koch brothers can get filthier rich. Global warming forces me to learn or invent new methods of planting trees. And flood control.

•  With July 4th fireworks over, my ACD wants to know when the thunder and lightening stop. I don't want to tell him the global-warming truth. He's already going to be 14, anyway.

•  A neighbor cut  a major branch off my maple out front. I think it died from roots being severed by the utility company. Years ago they came out and marked where the gas line was buried. Marked it wrong. From being severed, they came out to replace it. And maybe cut the maple's roots. There's probably no cheap way to prove this. So, the utility monopoly half-killed a great tree. Birds and insects will miss it. Me too.

•  Donald Trump is a distraction, but am I the only one who sees that? As long as he's clowning away with insane racist comments, the real contenders are campaigning without as much worry. Voters are being trumped.

•  In Denver and other inner-city areas, developers buy their way out of building low-income housing. Like a fine imposed for being a racist. Segreration is profitable, so they pay it. Development encouraging historical regression is not progress. It's something worse.

•  The mexicanos and Chicanos in my targeted neighborhood aren't just selling their coveted property. They're losing our people's wealth. What they buy in the near suburbs will never be as valuable. Plus there's the added costs of commuting, loss of time and irreplaceable community. The developers who buy those inner-city homes are laughing all the way to the bank--rupting of city life's diversity. Welcome to "America."

•  People who've read my children's story, A Cradle for Abuelo, generally like it. Some cried over parts they were supposed to. A teacher suggested I change the title because boys won't be intrigued by the word, cradle. To boot, the story's about a boy nagual-spirit. Have to think more about the title. But I choke up every time I read it, so what follows is fine.

•  Received a rejection of one of my stories--Fatherly, motherly, dragonly love, luck & touch. "Ultimately, we decided not to use it," it read. I call it a "cross-genre work of mestizo/Mexica/alien/Diné/folklore/Sci-Fi & fantasy." Did I cram too much into the title and genre? Or did it just suck?

•  What to make next? Bird baths from half-split spruce lodge poles? Bat houses for me and others? The bats will need cedar, requiring some trips down alleys to find pallets. But last night, drinking out back with the neighbors, one gave me a great design idea for tabletops. I wish, I wish, I wish…

•  Decided to put the wood-burning stove in the work shed. Then come global-warmed winter, I can do my woodwork. To keep the mind cleansed.

•  I'm rewriting the first children's story I wrote, a Mexican folklore retell. Some Anglo got the same story published, years ago. It was heartless. Mine can't risk that.

•  "He/she's so cute. So pretty!" I hate hearing people saying that about infants. Truth is, to guys a lot of kids are ugly. So the words mean little. Except that they begin the pressure of having to look pretty/cute. I search for expression, exploration, wonderment and engagement in the eyes and face of my nieto. If he looks good, too, well, that's a problem he should be intelligent enough to work around.

•  I've taken wild plants from the Rocky Mts. for my garden. I let patches of clover spread, wild cosmos have their own beds, sages too, various prairie grasses abound. I don't know all the names of  the wild plants, but it doesn't matter. I give them to family, friends and neighbors, to spread the wealth. By their propagating, I feel the battle's not lost.

•  I'd better get the chicken coop and aquaponics pond-vegetable garden built soon. And an air-heat exchange system for the house. Then there's the greenhouse, and solar for the roof. The dry, lightening storm last night was like to make you believe in the gods. They're coming for us. Better to shore up the ramparts.

•  Received a message from Rudy Anaya, author of Bless Me, Última. He's going to join me, and others. I feel blessed and honored to be a part of something he'd join. That's a good-feeling, non-outrageous place to end, today.

RudyG, a.k.a. Rudy Ch. Garcia, the only one on the Internet