We’re leaving Houston. For me, it’s after 31 years. For Erin, it’s “only” 23. But who’s counting?

Many of you knew this was something we were considering; in truth, it’s been an idea for about 4 years after a vacation in New Mexico, when the idea of “shit, we could live out here!” took root. After all, my job is portable and Erin’s skillset is marketable.

Then the climate really started to wear on us — Houston’s always been hot, but it feels like the last several summers have been even more brutal than ever. And then Governor Hotwheels and his cronies started being stupidly punitive towards Harris County’s big blue dot, and the confluence of political climate plus ACTUAL climate came to a head for us. And we started saving searches on Zillow.

But I hear you’re not even GOING to New Mexico!

TRUE! Turns out, the whole of the west is going to have a serious water crunch in the coming years, and we figure trading Houston’s flooding for its opposite wasn’t the best play. So we thought about other places.

Like where?

Well, California was on the list for a while, but living near friends in SoCal would involve a drastic rejiggering of household budgets. Seems like living well out there means spending WAY more of your money on real estate than we’re used to in plain ol’ Houston, and so we dismissed the idea (despite how attractive it is).

So not Cali. Fine. What else?

The Pacific Northwest is LOVELY, and we know some folks out there, and the climate absolutely agrees with us, but there are some issues that made it ultimately a nonstarter.

PNW DQ, Pt 1.

The PNW is, not to put too fine a point on it, kinda at the other end of the melting-pot diversity stick from Houston. Houston’s diversity has all sorts of benefits, not the least of which being “meeting different sorts of people is good for you.” Kidding on the square, though, a massive influx of immigrants from every corner of the globe is how Houston became an insanely good food town. You’re not gonna get that in a place without similar levels of inbound immigration.

PNW DQ, Pt 2

My mom’s 85 next month. Erin’s mom is 75 this year. All her family is in Florida; my sister is in Philly, and my mom is in Jackson, Mississippi. Going that far away started to feel unwise.

And then: the epiphany

Moving somewhere random at 25 is scary, sure, but at 25 finding your people is easy because all the other 25 year olds are ALSO trying to find their people. We have no illusions about our middle-aged status; the other 55 year olds are in bed by 9. It therefore occurred to us that picking a place where we already knew a ton of folks would probably be smart.

Enter Durham

Longtime Heathen Co-Conspirator MAD has lived in the area since the 20th century. He’s been low-key trying to get us up there for a while, and he’s not our only pal there. Turns out, our Crimson alma mater spat out no small number of seeds who took root in Tarheel country — two of Erin’s college roomies are in the area. At least a couple former members from the honors dorm I lived in are there. A pal or two from the English department and the literary magazine I helped found in 1990 are there, too. And, wouldn’t you know it, there’s at least one or two folks from my hometown there, and they’re in the set of “hometown people” I wouldn’t mind seeing again.

Aren’t you leaving someone out?

Yup. See, I moved to Houston in 1994 after having attended a friend of a friend’s birthday party here that summer, at Eric’s urging. Thomas became a friend of mine, too; his girlfriend at the time was actually one of my first roommates here. They eventually moved to Austin, married, and now have three kids. Oh, and last August? They moved to Raleigh. I can’t tell if that’s a Sign or a Portent, but it’s definitely one of them.

But Durham’s in NC, and NC was red last time!

True, but Durham itself is far bluer than Houston, and North Carolina is a state that’s legitimately purple. Texas, god bless her, only has aspirations of purpleness.

What else?

CLIMATE. Yes, Durham is still the south, and it will get warm there, but not Houston warm. (I mean, they THINK it’s hot, but they’re adorable. They’re also adorable when they talk about traffic.) They have actual seasons, but none of them are trying to kill you (vs summer in 713, or winter in the midwest). The humidity gap alone is enormous. We flew home yesterday, and the temperatures were about the same there and here — but there was a 22 point difference in humidity.

There’s more.

Currently, it’s 81F feeling like 89 in Houston; in Durham, it’s 74, and feels like 71.

Sure, Chet, but it’s springtime! It’s nice everywhere.

Fine. The real proof is summer. In August of 2024, Houston was over 90F all but 5 days, and over 95F for all but 9 days. Houston dipped below 80F at night only once before the final week of the month, and at NO POINT in August was the nighttime temp low enough to cool off by opening windows. In the same month, Durham was mostly topping out in the 80s, and regularly dipped into the 60s at night — and had a low of 55F on the 22nd.

They have real winter there, Chet! Look out!

Yes, it does get colder there. But it’s not like midwest cold. It’s more like a winter happens, and you might need to wear a sweater or a coat. Fine! It’s also not unremitting, like our summers; even in January, Durham had 13 days over 50F, which is hardly a frozen hellscape. OTOH, I could’ve worn shorts to a Christmas Eve party this year in Houston, which seriously harshes my yuletide glow.

It still seems sudden!

I mean, you’re not entirely wrong. We’ve been house shopping via Zillow for about a year, and we’ve been open about our desire to go, but I honestly think most of you didn’t take us seriously. And the logistics of selling and buying in a coordinated way kinda gobsmacked us. The market’s behavior means liquidating investments to afford a down payment against a house there WITHOUT selling our Houston home first seems really dumb. So we were stuck. How do people who aren’t rich even DO this?

What changed?

We realized our Houston place is close enough to being paid off that we could just pay it off, and then rent a place in Durham while we sell Houston. And that allowed things to accelerate pretty quickly.

How quickly?

Well, last weekend we were in Durham looking at rental contenders. We’re about 2 shakes from executing a lease on one of them that’s literally walking distance from the aforementioned Agent MAD and his Librarian Emeritus partner — both of whom have been dear friends of ours since the late 1980s. If this goes through, it’ll start on 6/15, and we’ll plan to be in Durham on or about 7/1.

ZOMG!

Yeah, I know.

So can we get drinks / coffee / dinner / play a game / eat enchiladas?

You’re goddamn right. Call me.

I legitimately AM freaking out a little. Houston has been my home for my entire adult life. I moved here in 1994. I had no idea it would worm its humid, verdant way into my heart so completely and for so long. I always had intentions of living many places, and now I’ve spent more than half my life in the one I picked on a whim when I was too young to rent a car. I’ve lived in the home I bought at age 30 longer than I ever lived anywhere else, and it’s not close AT ALL. (Statistically, it’s entirely possible I’ll never live anywhere this long again — 25 more years puts me at 80.)

I’m wigging out, a little. But the Houston I loved is changing, too. We’re not the only ones on the way out the door in our social circle, so even if we stayed it wouldn’t be the same city. And the summer would still piss me off more every year.

So yeah, we’re leaving. But we love you all, and that part won’t change.

Comes now this alert, via my sister, about the upcoming holiday in our home state:

Sometimes, when it comes out in conversation that I’m from Mississippi, people ask what that was like.

This is a great example. The whole state is STILL mired in Lost Cause bullshit to the point that ROBERT E. LEE’S BIRTHDAY is celebrated ALONG SIDE Martin Luther King’s. Over there, committing treason in defense of slavery is apparently just as laudable as fighting for civil rights. This combination is not accidental — like most of the Civil War monuments, it came later, as a thumb in the eye of those who’d seek to diminish the myth of the Lost Cause. Coerced by the rest of the country to enshrine Rev King’s birthday as a holiday, they chose to combine it with Lee’s.

What assholes.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: in high school, we were taught — and had to parrot it back, on tests — that the Civil War was more about states’ rights than anything else, and that slavery was a footnote. This was only a viable pedagogical position because the curriculum went out of its way to NEVER EVEN MENTION that the seceding states literally wrote and circulated documents detailing in no uncertain terms why they were prepared to go to war over leaving the union.

Had those documents been mentioned AT ALL, teaching this states-rights lie would’ve been utterly impossible. Mississippi’s document for example, starts like this:

In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

Disingenuous people ask silly questions like “what even IS institutional racism?” This right here is a great fucking example: going out of your way to limit exposure to the historical record in order to suppor the teaching of an outright lie.

Obviously, everyone there isn’t terrible, but it’s safe to say the majority of (white) population mostly doesn’t mind this sort of thing. Why do I paint with such a broad brush? Well, it’s numbers.

See, it’s absolutely true that (for example) about 38% of voters there voted for Harris in November. That’s not nothing, right? I mean, as states go that’s a big margin, but it’s still a lot of votes.

However, if we go look at the demographics of the state, we see a very similar split; make of this what you will.

There’s a final note I’ll make. Mississippi is reaping what it’s sown. People with options don’t choose to live there. It’s a smaller state now, relative to the rest of the country, than it was when I was growing up. I was surprised, a little, to discover it’s down to 4 House seats now; in my youth there, it had 5. More shocking is the fact that, at one point in the earlier 20th century, it had 8.

You can measure that another way, too. When I was in high school, I was one of 8 National Merit scholars; a 9th young man qualified for the National Achievement program, so let’s work with that as a number. Of those folks, only one chose to make his life there. 1, out of 9.

Because we had options.

(Not for nothing, but it’s both tragic and heartwarming that today I saw a message from one of the others on Facebook announcing he’d lost his house in the Palisades fire, which was almost immediately replied by by another of our group who lives on the other side of the country. Nerdy kids stay friends, yo.)

As of Saturday, I am now 20,000 days old.

Nick Cave confronted the milestone with a film, but I reckon I’ll be content with this post.

I became an uncle for the first time in January of 2006. For a variety of reasons — mostly, I suspect, because phones weren’t cameras and I didn’t get back into photography until a later — the earliest picture I have of her is this, when she’s about 13 months:

Erin just sent me a new picture of FirstNiece. This is her with her packed car, about to drive away to college:

Time, man. It’ll get you.

Godspeed, Caroline.

Something interesting came up the other day: in conversation elsewhere, I learned that Joe Biden is the ONLY member of his generational cohort (“The Silent Generation,” born between 1928 and 1945) to ever be President, and given the age of that group it’s likely none will follow him.

After Ike, POTUS was always a member of the so-called “Greatest Generation,” born between 1901 and 1927. They fought the war, hence the name. So, after Ike — a member of the prior “Lost” generation, born in 1890 — we had a parade of Greatests for thirty years:

• JFK, born 1917, took office in 1961, and turned 44 his first year in office
• LBJ, 1908, 1963, 55
• Nixon, 1913, 1969,56
• Ford, 1913, 1974, 61
• Carter, 1924, 1977, 53
• Reagan, 1911, 1981, 70 (which was a huge point of discussion at the time)
• GHWB, 1924, 1989, 65

Then we skipped the Silent folks entirely, and the Boomers took over for nearly another 30 years:

• Clinton, 1946, 1993, 47
• GWB, 1946, 2001, 55
• Obama, 1961, 2009, 47
• Trump, 1945, 2017, 71

It’s only then that a member of the Silent cohort got elected, in what was really a black-swan electoral event in lots of ways — absent the very specific factors of the 2016 race, it’s easy to imagine a world where no Silent gets elected at all. Instead, Joseph R. Biden, born 1942, was inaugurated in 2021, and turned 79 his first year in office.

It seems clear he’ll remain the only Silent to ever sit in the Oval.

That got me thinking: Why?

Turns out? Numbers. The Silent cohort was comparatively small — especially compared to the groups that came before and after. There are lots of reasons for this, but the biggest ones are probably the Depression and the War depressing birth rates.

Pew suggests the Silent group was “only” about 47M births; compare that to the Boomers at 76M.

All this points me to an uncomfortable realization: my own cohort, GenX, is also a small group sandwiched between two much larger generations (the Boomers and the Millennials). That could lead to the Oval skipping us, too. :(

Oh well.

In 1977, we humans did something audacious. We launched Voyager 1 towards the outer planets, with an idea that maybe we’d get more. It was the second craft, after its sibling Voyager 2, to fly past Jupiter, and was the first to take close-up photos of Jupiter’s moons when it arrived there some 18 months later. By 1980 Saturn was in its sights, where it gave us the first images of Titan and Tethys.

By the end of 1980, it entered what NASA referred to as its “extended mission,” flying ever father from Earth. In 1990, just before its camera shut down forever, its operators pivoted it to take the famous Pale Blue Dot photograph, about which Carl Sagan said:

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Voyager was built in the 1970s, with the technology available in those years. Over time, the radioactive isotopes it uses for energy have decayed, as they are wont to do, and with that decay came a gradual loss of power. Systems had to be shut down, one after the other, including the aforementioned camera (though one wonders how much of a loss that was; where it is, there is nothing to see).

It left the Solar System 14 years ago, and kept going. They thought we might get a solid 3 years out of it, and yet here we are, four decades later, talking about it.

Voyager 1 is the farthest spacecraft from Earth, and the margin is not close. It is some 15 billion kilometers away now. Radio signals from Earth take some 22 hours to reach it. The reply takes, of course, another 22. That record is unlikely to be broken; as noted here, there are only two others in the race: Voyager 2 and New Horizons, and due to mission parameters both will likely die well before they exceed Voyager’s distance.

Voyager, though, is dying. In December the data stream back from it — data that spent 22 hours in transit — became gibberish. Nobody knows why; it could be a thousand thousand things, but there is no way to fix it. CrookedTimber continues:

Voyager Mission Control used to be a couple of big rooms full of busy people, computers, giant screens. Now it’s a single room in a small office building in the San Gabriel Valley, in between a dog training school and a McDonalds. The Mission Control team is a handful of people, none of them young, several well past retirement age.

And they’re trying to fix the problem. But right now, it doesn’t look good. You can’t just download a new OS from 15 billion kilometers away. They would have to figure out the problem, figure out if a workaround is possible, and then apply it… all with a round-trip time of 45 hours for every communication with a probe that is flying away from us at a million miles a day. They’re trying, but nobody likes their odds.

So at some point — not tomorrow, not next week, but at some point in the next few months — they’ll probably have to admit defeat. And then they’ll declare Voyager 1 officially over, dead and done, the end of a long song.

(See also: It’s Quieter in the Twilight, and excellent documentary from last year about the folks still working on Voyager.)

Of course, even dead Voyager will continue moving, forever, unless it hits something. It’s not pointed towards any star we know, but that could change in a long enough time scale. After billions of years (yes!), our Milky Way galaxy will collide with its neighbor, Andromeda. From this article:

After those 5 billion years, modeling is tricky. That’s when the Milky Way is due to collide with its massive neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, and things get messy. “The orderly spiral shape will be severely warped, and possibly destroyed entirely,” Oberg said. The Voyagers will be caught up in the merger, with the details difficult to predict so far in advance.

Meanwhile, the vicarious sightseeing continues. Oberg and his colleague calculated that in this 5-billion-year model-friendly period, each of the Voyagers likely visits a star besides our sun within about 150 times the distance between Earth and the sun, or three times the distance between the sun and Pluto at the dwarf planet’s most distant point.

Precisely which star that might be, however, is tricky — it may not even be a star we know today.

“While neither Voyager is likely to get particularly close to any star before the galaxies collide, the craft are likely to at least pass through the outskirts of some [star] system,” Oberg said. “The very strange part is that that actually might be a system that does not yet exist, of a star that has yet to be born.”

Nick Cave is perhaps the pinnacle of the “if you know, you know” artist. He’s kind of been quietly there now for decades, producing a staggering amount of material; his creativity and work ethic are remarkable. If he’s new to you, the most likely times you’ve heard his music are perhaps this sequence in one of the final Potter films (“O Children”, from the 2004 double album Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus), or, in a very different vein, at the end of the long tracking shot sequence from the first season of True Detective (“Honeybee Let’s Fly To Mars,” from his side group Grinderman).

Cave started out as a loud, post-punk rock and roller — not for nothing is he considered something of a godfather to goth — but as time passed, his material became a bit more contemplative. He wrote prose and screenplays and film scores, branching out in a way that honestly middle aged musicians quite often do not. In 1999, he married the former Susie Bick, a fashion designer and model whom you’ve doubtless seen in record stores, since it’s her on the cover of The Damned album Phantasmagoria, from 1985. (Later, she’d appear on the cover of Cave’s own record Push the Sky Away.)

All of this is context.

A year after they married, Susie and Nick had a pair of twins, Arthur and Earl. Nick also had a son from a previous relationship, Jethro, born in 1991.

Eight years ago this July, Arthur Cave fell from a cliff near Brighton, in England, where they lived. Grief for Arthur is the through-line on the two most recent albums from Cave and his band, the Bad Seeds: 2016’s Skeleton Tree, already in progress when he died, and the 2019 followup Ghosteen. Both are achingly beautiful, searing portraits of grief, loss, and hope, with a depth and power that always leaves me complete stunned. They are the work of musicians at the height of their powers, inspired by a profound and elemental human state.

This is still context.

Cave has run, since 2018, a site called The Red Hand Files. People write in; Cave responds publicly.

Earlier this month, someone wrote in:

Not a question at all.

On Sat the 30 December my beautiful 16yo son Murray took his own life. He was contacted online by what he believed was a girl he knew. He was extorted and then panicked, hanging himself. He was a wonderful guy who drew beautifully, played guitar and was a straight A student. He was private person and hated being the centre of attention. His world would have crashed around him at the thought of sexual pictures with his peer group. Our hearts are broken, literally agony.

The song we have chosen for the reflection piece at his funeral on Friday in the Cathedral is Distant Sky. In that space it should sound magnificent. I certainly hope so.

In writing this it helps to feel the reality of where we are as a family. We will keep going but fuck me it’s hard.

MARK, SCOTLAND

Cave’s response is beautiful and perfect, and it closes with words I wish anyone struggling with grief would carry with them. You should go read the whole thing, but those closing words are:

Be kind and patient and gentle and merciful with one another. Stay close. Hold firm. Forgive. Grief prepares the way. Joy will in time find you. It is searching for you, in the impossible darkness, even now.

Love, Nick

Four years ago today, I shared this news story on Facebook with the comment “Isn’t this how Contagion started?”

We had no idea. It begins:

A never-before-seen virus that sparked an outbreak of viral pneumonia in the Chinese city of Wuhan has now killed one person and spread to Thailand via a sick traveler.

On Saturday, January 11, officials in Wuhan reported that a 61-year-old man died January 9. Testing indicated he was carrying the virus, which researchers have confirmed is a novel strain of coronavirus.