June 2026: Vistas
Photo of Beer Can Beach by NMW, edited with Gemini.
Well, we all shine on, like the moon, and the stars, and the sun.
One of the things I love about watching sports is that there’s always a chance you get to witness something special happen: A comeback for the ages, an improbable win, a heartbreaking loss, or the most [enter sports achievement here] ever! There’s a bit of an endorphin bump when it’s your favorite team or player pulling off the incredible feat, but seeing the Knicks win the NBA Championship after a five-decade dry spell was cool. More on that later. There were other noteworthy sports moments that happened this month. There was also Father’s Day, and a dirty reflecting pool.
Dia del Padre
Several friends and a couple of family members have warned me about the turn my relationship will take with my daughter as she enters her teenage years. I don’t think it’ll be as bad as some of them had it when their girls were that age, but I’ve caught some of her attitude. The change is sudden, as a lot of these things are with kids. They move through their growing phases overnight. You wake up with a little gremlin stinking up your spot.
Even with that, being a dad is a blessing. My dad wasn’t around in my life and most of my siblings’ lives much. Some of us had a little more time with him when we were kids than the others, but none of us had him around during our formative years. I don’t count annual summer visits as “being around” for your kids. God rest his soul, my dad died believing that he did the best thing for his kids by leaving us with our moms or grandparent. He has four wives and kids with every one of them (and a kid out of wedlock while he was married to my mom). Terrible dad and husband, but a decent human being. Kind of an odd dichotomy. On Father’s Day, I miss him. Despite his shortcomings as a dad, we had a good relationship. I feel the sadness that sits in your heart when a loved one passes away, and I also feel the sadness for a man who missed out on so much of his children’s lives and their love. I also am happy I got to know him at all.
I realize that I bagged on both of my parents in consecutive blogs. I’m grateful they loved me because I could have appreciated what they brought to my life back then more than I did. They did their best, and I survived!
Jack Torrance School of Beauty. The Shining (1980).
Copa Mundial
Soccer football has captured the attention of casual and hardcore fans from Australia to Alaska (the long way around) this month as the World Cup got underway on June 11th. Admittedly, I’m a soccer casual. I watch as much as I can every four years during this tournament, and I may catch some Premier League and Champions League matches in the years between the Cup.
It has been fun to see the U.S. Men’s team be as competitive as they have been the last couple of weeks. They still have a long way to go before they can compete with the world’s elite national clubs in the final round, like the U.S. Women’s team has been for decades, but they have had a nice showing this Word Cup so far. As of writing this blog, they are set to face Bosnia-Herzegovina on June 30, and they have a good chance of advancing just in time to celebrate the 4th of July.
Grant Thomas, Yahoo Sports (2026).
Independence Day
The 250th birthday of the United States is shaping up to be a politically charged bummer. El Presidente—mired in a bad economy he made worse by a war he started that he can’t get out of and tariffs he implemented that backfired— is locked in as not only the worst U.S. president in the country’s brief history and also as one of the worst people to exist in Earth’s history. He is going to fumble the ball at the goal line with this year’s 4th of July celebration because his platform is division. We can only hope that the pendulum has swung so far in the direction of hate, greed, and lies that our next iteration of president is nowhere near this ugly and terrible. It’s a low bar that can’t go lower, right?
Even still, despite the general sense of social unease these days, I recall all of my travels around this country, from within my great state of California, up and down the West Coast, Southwest, Midwest, the South, and the East Coast, I remember all of the friendly people with a variety of faces and stories that I’ve encountered, and I hold onto hope that the loudest people we hear echoing in their chambers of hate are the woefully ignorant minority. I believe that the majority of us just want to enjoy our lives and are willing to help our neighbors when they need it. This is not just the core nature of a “real American”, but it is our true nature as humans. We want to enjoy each other. We want to laugh and love. We crave authentic connection and desire to create the kind of memories that make our heart’s smile when we return to them in our thoughts and dreams. This is us. This is who we are.
Everything that goes against this is manufactured to do just that. Divide. It is designed to pit us against each other and make us believe that individually we are more important than others. Pay attention and use your God-given brains to see and understand that we are being pulled apart by a few powerful people who are desperate to hang onto their earthly glory at our expense.
When I celebrate the 4th of July, it’s not to honor President Cheeto. He doesn’t stand for anything but himself, and he is truly the living representation of everything that is detestable about human beings. That is who the rest of the world thinks Americans are. Is that who you are? It’s sure as hell not who I am.
California
Which brings me to my final point. We’re currently wrapping up a family road trip from our humble abode in California’s Inland Empire up the coast to Santa Cruz and back. It’s around 700 miles total, and there are several hundred miles of northern California coast that we will have left unvisited, for now. Haters of my home state (often the same people who voted for the Orange Turd) love to throw shade at the high cost of living, the crime, the traffic, the homelessness, which are definitely issues, especially in the metropolitan areas of the state’s most well-known cities: L.A., San Diego, and San Francisco. However, while those cities hold most of the state’s population, California is 163, 696 square miles and only 892 of those square miles are occupied by those three cities haters love to hate. Do you know what the rest of California holds?
Let’s start with the state’s nine national parks (more than any other state in the U.S.), which include Yosemite, Death Valley, Joshua Tree, Kings Canyon, Channel Islands, Pinnacles, Lassen Volcanic, Redwood, and Sequioa National Parks. Notice that these parks cover several different types of climates and geography. The land here is as diverse as the people, is as diverse as the food, is as diverse of the lifestyles and the fun that you will find here. On our way up to Santa Cruz, we drove through Santa Barbara (probably the most beautiful city in the state). We drove by dozens of farms and vineyards, some of them right up against the Pacific Ocean. We drove through the Los Padres National Forest. We have seen a lot, and it’s only a slice of California.
I have had the good fortune of visiting just about every region in the state, with exception to the northeast corner, and I’ve lived in several different areas of California, so I consider myself an expert on how rad California is. A lot of lifelong Californians haven’t even sniffed the amount of travel miles within their home state that I’ve logged because there is just so much to see. Most people think of Hollywood when they think of California, or they think everyone lives near the beach and surfs, brah. Yeah, California definitely has those types of people, and it has gangsters and tech billionaires (sometimes the same person). It has cowboys and Natives and farmers and blue collar families and white collar workers and you effing name it.
If it cost the same to live here as it does to live in Iowa, no one would live in Iowa. Shoutout to the lovely people who call the Hawkeye State home. I have nothing against you. You were just the first state I thought of when I thought of least desirable places to live in the United States, but I know Alabama was just one more thought away from being named in my example.
Haters, keep hating the Golden State. It might just prevent people like you from moving here, but you are welcome to visit, as long as you leave.
I don’t want to leave you on downer. You’ve stuck through this blog until now, so let me say that I will apply what I’ve said about California to the rest of the United States (including Iowa). We have such a beautifully diverse country in pretty much every sense of the word “diverse”, and we often stand united, not usually when it matters the most, but we have before and we still can. The beauty of this country is in its tapestry of histories and lives; it’s the stories of our greatest heroes, the larger-than-life kind and the everyday kind. It is the sense of pride that we have in the concept on which our nation was built and the dichotomy that the idea of living a free life as you see fit has always been met with weirdos who want to tell you how you should live. I guess that’s something buried in the subconscious of a nation that was built on genocide and slavery.
It has been a struggle as a society, but through that struggle we have had some incredible moments that have made me proud to be an American. This is what I think of when I hear our National Anthem and see Old Glory, and this is what I celebrate every 4th of July.
SNS 102
“Bricks in the Wall”
