You say Iceland, and I say Island…let’s call the whole thing off.

But we didn’t, and on cold drizzly summer night we landed at Keflavik airport in Iceland. We bought duty free alcohol and chocolates and went to our hotel near the airport. Keflavik was used as an air base and then a US naval air base from the second world war up to a decade ago and we stayed in a hotel that has been converted from base housing. When we stepped out of the cab, it was very very windy. A few minutes later Vivian, Evan and I stepped out of our hotel for a short walk and Evan was almost “blown away” by Iceland : – ). It was also not the slightest bit dark at 11pm. The only place open was a Domino’s Pizza so that was what’s for dinner. Then we pulled the blackout curtains close and turned in.

Morning came about four hours early for our bodies due to the change in time zones. That night and every night since, I’ve spent countless hours going down all kinds of rabbit holes on the internet reading about Iceland and things Icelandic. The thing is, there will be unintentional volcanic explosions of random Icelandic factoids in this blog, scattered among stories of our trip.

We picked up our rental car and fortified ourselves with good coffee and baked goods at the Kökulist bakari where a fat kitty cat found Evan. And then we caravanned for about 30 minutes to the Costco outside Reykjavik to stock up on car snacks for the next two weeks. And finally we are ready to sally forth and see Iceland!

Jo had set up our day. And our hotels. And our itinerary. And the entire trip. Today we do the famous golden circle and end up in the town of Borgarnes. It’s about a four and half hour drive with four stops and three hundred and twenty five kilometers of amazing scenery. Our first stop is an off-the-beaten-path location called the Kerid crater. The crater is a visually striking contrast of three colors – the deep blue green of the lake, the brilliant red streaks of the crater walls, and the vivid green of the vegetation. It is still very windy but the light showers have stopped. Evan and Vivian go down the path to the crater lake and then we walk around the crater rim. Jo and Vivian are the rightmost human shapes along the rim in this photo.

Our next stop is Gullfoss – one of Iceland’s many famous waterfalls. In the photograph below, you may be able to see a ledge and a few tiny figures above Vivian’s head where there is a viewing platform. Vivian and I walked out there to get a closer look and we were drenched by the spray.

Then we went to Geysir – the grandfather of all geysers. But grandpa has been dormant for the last few years. No worries – Strokkur next door erupts every 6 to 10 minutes, according to the park literature. The people across from us are all holding something in their right hands. They are waiting with their phones out ready for Strokkur to do its thing. This is the biggest crowd we’ll see in Iceland over the next fourteen days. Iceland, even with the crush of tourists, is no Barcelona or Florence. It is the sparsest populated European country. Once you leave the city of Reykjavik, the roads display individual signs of family names for each farm along the way. I so want to buy a small sheep farm out somewhere just to have an official “CHATTERJEE-CLARK” sign of our own on the ring road.

Stop #3 of the day is Þingvellir National Park. When we get there it is drizzling and the wind is still blowing pretty hard. Pronounced in English approximately as Thingvellir, this area is described as the heart of Iceland. It is the place where the AlÞingi or parliament of Iceland met from about 930 AD up to 1798, and where modern Iceland got its independence in 1944. The AlÞingi is described as one of the world’s oldest surviving parliaments. In the commonwealth period before Iceland became a part of Norway and then Denmark, all the chieftains of Iceland and “at least one in nine” of his farmers met at Þingvellir once a year to sort out matters of common importance, decide on laws, and dole out justice. Even common free men could bring up any matter of importance. And somehow, unlike most of the world around them, especially their European brethren who are still intoxicated by their antique cartoonish kings and queens, Iceland, like a more recent Athens, was a beacon of representative government. Now, I can’t determine otherwise, but it is safe to assume that serfs, slaves, and women got the shaft even in this precocious and otherwise commendable parliament. But the spirit of Þingvellir lives on and Iceland continues to be a national and international supporter of rights for everyone today.

Behind Vivian and Evan is the Öxarárfoss – a waterfall on the Öxará river as it flows over some rifts where back in the day, the people attending the annual meetings in Þingvellir bathed and gathered.

Speaking of rifts – Iceland is one of the few places in the world where the earth’s longest mountain chain peeks it’s head up over the oceans. This section of the mid-Atlantic ridge is where the north American continental plate is drifting away from the Eurasian plate at the rate of about an inch a year. The ridge cuts diagonally from the southwest of Iceland to the northeast and right through Þingvellir where the Öxará flows.

The showers ended and we got a dazzling rainbow over our heads. Almost to the day we were here eight years ago. Here are some pictures of Evan and Vivian at Þingvellir and Gullfoss, almost exactly at the same spots!

Leaving Þingvellir, we returned to the ring road (Road No. 1), dug under the Hvalfjörður fjord through a six kilometer long tunnel, and reached our hotel in Borgarnes late in the afternoon. Onwards to the Snæfellsnes peninsula tomorrow. But first a nice soak in the hot tub and a few sips of Ólafsson gin and tonic.

Our trips to Alu and Michelle’s every summer revolve around grilling and chatting and walking along the sea wall or the lovely arc of town beach and this year was no different, except that both Alu and I worked – which felt very normal and very weird at the same time. We still visited Brickley’s a sufficient number of times and enough salmon and steak was grilled. The weather was mostly great, especially compared to the hottest June on record in Austin, and we spent quite a bit of time around Alu and Michelle’s new back patio and fire pit – including an evening of making s’mores.

During one of our walks on the beach Alu and I reminisced about our childhood trips to Puri beach and our lovely stays at the BNR hotel, with their vast collection of silverware – the salad fork and the meat fork and the fish fork and knowing which was what. My dad taught us to swim over the waves or into/under the breakers depending on how they were about to break and the four of us spent many happy hours upon hours swimming and walking along the beach.

I reflected that we have spent every summer at the beautiful beaches around here – at Narragansett, Scarborough, Judith, and East Matunuck. Vivian and then Evan started out as babies in Jo and my tight grasps and then under our watchful eye. Now they stroll along the sands, plunging into the waves at will. Thank you, Rhode Island.

And Alu & Michelle!

I didn’t have anything figured out for Mother’s Day this year (like any other year). Thankfully Jo had planned a lovely morning for her mother in the hill country and we stopped at several small towns that I had never or rarely visited before. We started at Boerne, strolling along Cibolo creek and the stores on Main street till we chanced upon a beautifully landscaped old stone building. It turned out to be a linen and soap store and the woman was an expert sales lady. The store smelled amazing. I begged Carol and Jo to help themselves to soap to make up for not having got mother’s day gifts for them. Evan and Vivian, and yes, I too, jumped into the soap frenzy and a good bit later we staggered out laden with local handmade soaps of the most exquisite fragrances. Having secured our personal hygiene for the foreseeable future, we drove to the tiny town of Comfort (next to the town named Welfare) where we ate a light lunch at High’s Cafe and Store. We continued through the hamlets of Sisterdale and Kendalia before taking back country roads back to Canyon Lake. Happy Mother’s Day!

A few weeks later the ads on the radio were hawking the Big Green Egg and beard oil for Father’s Day and Evan said “What – there’s a Father’s Day?”

We were going to be traveling on Father’s Day, so the day before Jo and the kids gave me my Father’s Day gift and a lovely card. Jo had ordered this very cool kitchen knife from a Japanese company. The knife gets free sharpening service for life as long as I pay postage both ways to Japan. The knife company used to be the emperor’s sword maker, but after the Meiji Restoration and the end of the Shogun period, they switched to making kitchen knives and scissors instead of samurai swords. But a little sign on my knife bears the royal chrysanthemum and below the company logo, it modestly says “Established 1279”. No stalk of broccolini will every feel safe around my kitchen again. Thank you, Jo. Happy Father’s Day to all you dads, your dads, and everyone identifying as a dad out there.

Here’s a non-chronological inaccurate account of the last few months while central Texas went from winter storm to summer with a quick stop at a few blue bonnets along the way. If you blinked this year you missed the wildflowers and spring.

Evan celebrated his birthday with a sleepover. Vivian and her friends got invited back to her alumni school gala. Jo went to Jordan on a whim and did all kinds on adventure travel things like camping in the desert and hiking up a river along with the more mundane stuff like walking around Petra and swimming in the Dead sea. We went to New Braunfels with Nicolle’s family and Greta on a very warm afternoon for Pride celebrations and the kids and I saw our very first drag show – a very interesting and unexpectedly not smutty event. Devyn made sure that my presence was memorialized on the banner. Jen visited for a weekend at Becky’s mother’s lake house and Jo and Ouiser made it clear that they didn’t like speeding around Lake LJB in a boat which Becky drove like she drives her minivan – very very nonchalantly fast. We sorta felt like the pandemic finished again and then almost everyone got Covid but mostly the garden variety.

Zeus got chunky and decided she’ll only sleep on top of one of us. Ouiser and I walked most mornings at St. Edward’s park or Turkey Creek. She’d jump in the creek for a swim and later my car would smell like wet swamp dog.

Summer vacation finally got here. Everyone survived another year of school. Vivian made some good new friends at her new high school and kept a few old ones. They changed pronouns, created art, had fun, and would have won the award for Freshman Who Made Honor Roll With The Least Work if only that award existed. Vivian went off to Chestertown with their friend and their family for Memorial Day weekend. Evan came to terms with being a science nerd and that he doesn’t hate math. He told his humanities teacher that “emotions are for the weak” during a class discussion and we were notified, just in case he’s a nutcase. He was (momentarily) the tallest and fasted kid on the soccer team and his team finished another championship season. When not asleep, he’d rather be playing Minecraft with is friends, Hollow Knight by himself, or watching YouTube videos of others playing Minecraft or Hollow Knight. He went to an obligatory video game designing camp and Vivian to mural painting camp so we can say the kids did something cerebral during the summer break.

Then we went to see Aaron become Colonel Clark, USAF, Ret., at a lovely ceremony at Langley AFB in Virginia, during which time Ouiser stayed with June and Elizabeth in Austin. Jo and the kids stayed on and visited with Jen in Fredericksburg and Jo’s Wash Coll friends in Chestertown. I returned to Austin and Ouiser and I spent a quiet week at home during a part of which Jen came and stayed with us while she was in Austin for business. Then I dropped Ouiser off at Grandma’s in Dawson for the rest of summer and and left Zeus in Ava and Sofia’s care and met Alu in New York for a fun day at the Consulate General of India. In one of those small-world moments we met up with Mayura, Hansa, and her husband in New York for lunch. I go back to Wakefield with Alu and the rest of my crew will meet us and Michelle there during the 4th of July weekend. Can’t wait to get a bowl of Brickley’s ice cream and a walk on Narrangasett beach.

Meanwhile it’s a 105 in Austin. Stay cool, y’all.

A very belated Happy Birthday, kiddo. This was the year you became the second tallest member of the family (which isn’t saying much). You grew a shadow of a stache. Your voice dropped. You thought you got pretty good at playing central defender. You got interested in good grades. You had a date and took her a rose for the middle school dance. You played a lifetime of Hollow Knight and Minecraft. Your humor is as quirky as you are. You are maddeningly obstinate but you don’t hold a grudge. You are brazenly transparent when you need something. But you seem to need very little.

Twelve years into this project you are still our adorable thought slightly less cuddly baby you were. Love you to Jupiter’s moons and back.

We have developed a very bad habit of running into schools and shooting kids when we are having a bad day. It has to stop. It is unlikely that we will all stop having bad days. So it needs to be a lot harder to shoot other people’s kids. Whether you believe guns kill people or people kill people or people kill guns – it is undeniable that if there were no guns no one would be killed by guns (yes, psychos would write Nazi manifestos and then hurl rocks at elementary school kids till the History teacher shooed them away). The opposite isn’t true. Work logically forward from here. This isn’t fucking rocket science.

A certain reading of the strangely worded 2nd Amendment by the Supreme Court in the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller case protected the right of individuals to keep and bear “Arms” for the first time in America’s history. So we have a system of laws where the Robb Elementary school shooter legally bought an assault rifle but would not be able to buy a beer. There is no defensible wisdom to that. Either we are reading the Constitution wrong or the Constitution is wrong. The Constitution has been wrong before. There wouldn’t be amendments otherwise. The justices of the Supreme Court recently decided that the law regarding abortions has been wrong for the last 50 years. People, even long dead colonial slave owners blubbering on about freedom and equality, make mistakes sometimes. They could not have predicted everything they needed to know about our world today to help us lead meaningful safe predictable lives.

To quote (or misquote – I haven’t verified this) Mike Tyson, “everyone’s got a plan until they are punched in the mouth”. An elementary school shooting is a massive punch in the mouth. We didn’t have a plan the first time it happened. But for fuck’s sake, it’s been 10 years since Sandy Hook Elementary. Our inability to stop elementary school shootings as a people and a nation is shocking. It is a failure so massive that it is the defining American exceptionalism of the day. We are killing our children while the world watches with shock and amusement.

We live in our Tower of Babel. A third of the country believes that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. If we voted today, we wouldn’t be able to decide if 2+2 is 5. The once mighty American mind no longer has the will or the ability to solve difficult problems. Fixing our gun problem would be hard in the best of times. Today we have both hands and a third of our brains tied behind our backs. We are structurally and systemically fucked.

I was in a school board meeting in Austin the morning after Robb Elementary. The chairperson’s voice cracked as she asked us to remember the families in Uvalde. I looked around the room at my fellow board members. The overwhelming emotion was one of helplessness. It could have been our kids. It could have been this school. There is a terrible randomness to school shootings, like being struck by lightening. But we keep making and selling more powerful semi automatic lightening bolts. We keep arguing over why everyone needs as many assault lightening bolts as we can carry. We keep talking about mental health every time more elementary school kids are struck down by lightening. Our mental health is to blame – we are fucking insane.

In 2012, three months before Sandy Hook, I wrote a post about why gun control doesn’t work (here’s a Venn diagram from back then). The two sets – those who will pass background checks, and those who will shoot up an elementary school – are not disjoint. There is an overlap unfortunately. Background checks let enough crazy killers through. Likewise, raising the age for buying assault style rifles from 18 to 21 helps but only sometimes. The 20-year old Sandy Hook shooter didn’t have to go out and buy a gun – he borrowed one of his mother’s many guns and shot and killed her earlier that day. But it would have precluded the Robb Elementary shooter for legally buying his guns. Gun control built on background checks and age limits is a leaky sieve.

After their mass shooting in Tasmania in 1996, the Australian federal government outlawed semi-automatic weapons and bought back and destroyed hundreds of thousands of guns. After a Scottish mass shooting at a primary school, also in 1996, UK enacted similar buybacks and very strict gun laws. But we don’t have it in us to be able to enact that level of change. In fact, Texas loosened gun laws in the first legislative session after the El Paso Walmart shooting where 30 people were killed. The Supreme Court will most likely *expand* gun rights soon when it rules on a New York state gun control case. It is possible that state legislated assault weapon bans and age limits on buying guns will be deemed unconstitutional.

The Australians and Scottish live in countries and cultures not that different from America – law abiding developed rich economies with high levels of education and low poverty. Their need to constantly defend their families and homes from invading criminals and government overreach is fairly low – much like yours and mine, unless you imagine a monster or a conspiracy behind every door. There is no data or reason to believe that the mental health of Americans is a few orders of magnitude worse than that of Australians or the Scottish people. But we have let the emotions of an unhinged minority decide how all of us live, and sometimes die. So we will collectively continue to stick our heads in the sand and stockpile assault guns, high capacity magazines, and thoughts and prayers for other people’s kids. We are fucking morons.

Depending on the order in which you read, this the first or the last of an unending Marvel-like sequence of spring break posts. So steel yourself for the journey or be thankful you’re at the end. Vicky and Brett and the kids spent a few days in Austin in the very thick of SWSX country – at the Austin Motel (with their famous accidental giant dick and balls sign) in the heart of SoCo. I never got my schedule coordinated with Jo’s properly so I missed out on most of that but I did walk up with Ouiser one afternoon and we spent a couple of entertaining hours with them at the outdoor patio of Gueros Taco Bar. Here are a couple of photos of Ouiser on the way there and back. The Pride+ flag is courtesy of the Austin Motel.

Ouiser was so tired that evening from walking and from the cumulative non-stop celebration of spring break that she literally tumbled on to my lap and feel into a deep deep sleep.

Speaking of deep sleep, our esteemed Fuckernor Abbott followed up his pervious abortion banning greatness with a precious act against families of trans children. Some weekend during spring break (I have clearly lost track), Vivian joined her friend and her friend’s dad to protest the exec order at the State Capitol.

A journalist from a much admired local publication of the highest standards got a great photo of Vivian’s friend’s dad and outed him as a member of the dreaded Pro-Trans Kids Mafia, y’all. It turns out yet again that when they need it, the conservatives crave a spot of big government. And no, all you CRT hating parents, you don’t know what is better for your kids. Let’s have the Fuckernor decide.

Segueing violently, I have two lovely pictures of Evan. He is changing so quickly, I’d like to put them down somewhere, even if right after the photo of the dreaded Pro-Trans Kids Mafia. And that’s all for now, folks.

Brett, Vicky, and their kids came down for spring break. We spent a couple of days in idlic Wimberley on the banks of the Blanco. I wonder if the owners of this property would be willing to switch for five acres of prime hilltop with a home that needs love and care. I can’t see why not.

We chatted, cooked, drank, sat in the hot tub, went strolling and stand up paddling, and had a good time. By the last day, the kids were almost communicating with each other too. Vivian and Lily are friends, but getting any other combination to chat isn’t easy – I’ve included a photo of Evan and Anna sitting down for dinner….

We somehow missed Anna in both the group selfies, but I promise she was there the whole time.

Nicolle and Michelle celebrated getting hitched 20 years ago – back when it was illegal for two women to marry each other in Texas. Their marriage has exemplified courage, conviction, love, and family. We had a rollicking great time around a giant bonfire meeting people we met 20 years ago and making new friends. Uncle Tom, Aunt Anna, Kim, and Wayde came down from Nebraska. Unfortunately the only photographic proof I have of the entire weekend’s activities is a slightly blurry picture of Ouiser schmoozing her way up on to the couch and resting her head on Uncle Tom’s lap. But it’s a keeper.

Congratulations, Nicolle and Michelle. Your love for each other, and for doing the right thing is a beacon of light.

Vivian and I made the most of our time in San Francisco. We visited with FT and Kochhi and their families. We fleetingly thought of going to museums and visiting a couple of colleges but neither of those happened. We went to Monterey and walked along the beach, and drove to Healdsburg for a glass of Pinot and dinner. We walked from the Tenderloin up Nob Hill, through China Town, along Columbus Avenue to Washington Square and then carried on to Fisherman’s Wharf. We chatted, chilled, read, (I worked), and relaxed. We got boba tea at By Me Boba, fucking amazing crab at R & G lounge, and freshly made onigiri at Onigilly. We met one Uber driver who essentially told us the entire contents of his master’s thesis, and met another one who is a retired female police officer from Nepal. We meant to not do much and we did that admirably. As my friend George would say, Mission Accomplished.