Six people at Court Square Tavern

Only six people came in to Court Square Tavern this evening, but I worked a full night anyway. Because it was slow, I cleaned as much as I could. and scrubbed some things that hadn't been scrubbed in a while. As it was Boxing Day, I cleaned up a lot of packaging material in the office.

The six people who came in were all fantastic. At one point, two couples met. They didn't know each other before, but now they do. They have a lot in common. They also got to listen to me ranting a bit, as I am wont to do behind my bar, on my stage.

The third couple was made up of two high school friends who had the chance to catch up. At the end, I asked the one who lives in the area why he picked Court Square Tavern. He said he used to bring people from Europe there all the time when he worked downtown, and that the guest he brought always remembered they would always comment on how authentic it seems. That's what hooked me in from the very beginning.

Next year will be my fifteenth working at Court Square Tavern. That's a third of my life now. I don't work there all the time, but it's a constant to me that grounds me to this place, even if it isn't popular. In fact, I'd argue that it's the obscurity of the place that draws me to still remaining there.

The guy who lives here hadn't been there for over ten years, and so much has changed in that time. I can mark my life by the eras I have worked there. For so many it was a place to pass through, but for me it is one of the only constants I have.

If we had not been open tonight, people wouldn't have met. I love the idea of a place where you can go and meet people, be they strangers or long-time friends.

I do wish that more people came in, not because I want to make money. Instead, I love seeing people interact and communicate in real life. I love being in a space that has been so much part of my experience. So many of my own memories are there now, too.

I'll be there again tomorrow, and on Friday. And then I'll be there on January 2 as well. After that, I don't know. The whole point of a New Year is that you don't know what it will bring.

(originally posted to Facebook, but I wanted to document it here, too. Also, we don't

Recovered Facebook Post #1

Last night I saw many of you in a dream I had where I was at a conference somewhere. There were so many absurd vignettes, including one scary one where I was told one of you is dead. You're not dead, though, and I woke up grateful for that.

In the dream I dealt with angry people, dealt with a close-talker with an enormous face who was really interested in my views on planning and fell in love with someone based on the appearance of a star in her eye. While I was helping with crowd control during the break between two sessions, two bumbling idiots decided to walk into a decorative buffer next to a staircase.

The latter action caused a tremendous disturbance in a small stream that flowed through this room, making channelized nature slightly dangerous.

But what woke me up was the site of a man whose head was opened and his brain had been scooped out clean, and his skull was made of plastic. As he died, he told me what I needed to be careful of. Music from a spy film played as I woke up and wanted to get back to sleep to hear the rest of his pronouncements.

A report on whether the world is ready for carbon dioxide reduction

I just read a report from the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative on whether governance structures all over the world are ready for programs that reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Such efforts might be necessary if humanity as a collective cannot lower greenhouse gases in an effort to stop the rate of global warming. 

In 2015, everyone who participates in the climate change agreements brokered by the United Nations agreed to put policies in place to limit the increase to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. 

"The goal is to be operationalized in part through achievement of a balance between the anthropogenic emissions by sources and removal by sinks," reads the opening paragraph of the report, which is not written for a lay audience. 

Admittedly, I skimmed the report. It took about 45 minutes or so. Much of the same information is repeated several times and I'm going to refer to it in the future as it contains much that is important to my current job. I study and analyze land use policies in Albemarle County and surrounding communities. This is an offshoot of eleven years of reporting for a nonprofit media organization.

I'm writing this post because I was going to tweet a link to the report, but I thought I would instead give a little summary. At the moment, I do not have any kind of a writing outlet. I used to write five to seven stories a week. 

The issues I write about are still continuing, and other people are writing for the publication. I'm still attending the same meetings though now I get to speak at them. I have traded one voice for another, but so far I don't seem to be saying anything. 

That will change. In part because I need to do a better job of explaining why I believe what I say when I advocate for certain policies. We need to think a complex civilization like outs interacts with the land. Increasingly we must take into consideration the impact our small choices have on the bigger picture. The stakes are high.

"In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC  warned that the impacts of warming at Global Warming of 2 ºC would be significantly worse than those at 1.5 ºC," reads the second paragraph of the report. 

In general, the authors of this report lay out the case that reduction of greenhouse gases will likely not be enough to limit temperature rise. Additionally, a series of somethings will need to be done in order to remove carbon dioxide. There are known in the report and in the scientific community as CDR's and range from planting forests on a very large scale, using bioenergy and capturing carbon, as well as directly capturing carbon from the air. 

"The rapid scaling-up of large-scale CDR options is untested and will require international governance systems capable of addressing a range of sensitive issues and challenges," reads page 9 of the report. 

Source:  Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative

Some questions considered in the report: 

• Who is responsible for paying and implementing potential CDR options? 
• What accounting system should be in place to measure the details of how carbon dioxide is removed?
• What are the environmental impacts of efforts such as planting forests where none have been before? 

Each of these interventions is at a different stage of development, and the report acknowledges there are other techniques as well. I'd recommend anyone with an interest in this issue to download the report and review it. I suspect we're going to be hearing more about this in the weeks and months and years to come. 

What happens next after Facebook?

I just completed a long day at work in my new job. I worked on the Downtown Mall to get ready, and felt charged by the snow falling. It's winter now,  my favorite season, and I wanted to just watch it happening while I prepared two public comments I made at the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors meeting.

I didn't want to put the above on Facebook, but that's the kind of status update I used to feel comfortable rattling off without any thought. When I joined the site, I was a reporter for Charlottesville Tomorrow. I think. I think that was back in 2008 or so? At the time, I had gotten so used to posting on this blog, which I consider public record. What I have written on this site since 2005 or so is a document of my life during that time. 

I stopped posting here on a regular basis a long time ago. I would post items to Facebook, in part because I wanted a larger audience. I wanted to communicate to more people than I could reach here, and I wanted interaction. This blog didn't have the reach, and so I stopped nurturing it for the most part.

I did post on Facebook today that I would consider just writing on my blog again if for some reason I needed to leave the site. I won't go into detail about what those reasons might be, except to state that I have grown less interested in writing candidly to an audience on a platform that I trust less and less with my information.

Even though I'm 45, I still consider myself a digital native. I have been online since the late 1980's when I finally figured out how to connect a modem to the phone line at my family home in Lynchburg. Even younger, I knew that our Atari 800 could connect to the world through things like Compuserve, but we couldn't get a device to work properly. My dreams of being connected to world were dashed for a while, but even then I was aware that there was a brave new world ahead of us.

When the modem attached to the PC, I quickly learned about the bulletin board systems that were hosted by other people in town. In those days, long distance calls cost money, and long distance was anything outside of your city. So in high school, I got to meet other nerds and geeks from across Lynchburg, expanding my universe through a combination of online and offline interaction. 

Thirty years later, I think many of us have the online interaction down, but the offline interaction is lacking. So much of our public discourse seems to be in little white boxes, in conversations that seem like shouting. And all that conflict has seemingly been monetized by corporations that appeal to our basic human need for connection. 

And here I sit at my front room table, writing this and not even knowing if anyone will read it. I don't have to worry that that one person who hates winter will take the opportunity to tell me I'm wrong for enjoyment of the cold. I can acknowledge that I am no longer a reporter, or worry that someone will take that opportunity to take a cheap shot at me. 

I am guilty of writing a headline about something this post is only tangentially about. I don't know what happens next after Facebook. I do know that I will post here more, even if no one is reading. 

I ran my own bulletin board in high school. I called it Dead Letter Office after my favorite R.E.M. album. I did it as an experiment, and somehow that translated into me entering into the field of communications. I don't have any of that archived, but I used to write comedy bits and I had a platform to mess around with language, and to try to be playful. I wanted people to laugh. 

I did tweet just now that I was able to prove that I was part of an interconnected network called FidoNet. I loved the idea of being connected to a larger world, and that was the beginning of my career, which has taken me to a very different place than I ever expected. My life has always played out on a digital canvas, and I was always trying to experiment. 

And now here I am at a time when all of us are connected to the digital canvas. I prefer to think that most of it has been for good, and I don't think we can go back to a time where we all have an opportunity to express ourselves to friends and strangers. We all want to be part of something.

I know I still do. 

I sit here at my front room, alone after a day around people, about to pass through an important milestone in my life, and I like the idea to post something into the digital ether. 

And after I post this? I'm going to go to my journal and write things I'll never post here!