High pink clouds at dawn as I step out my backdoor and wait for my coffee water to boil. When the pot sings I will come in and have a cup. For years I drank drip, but switched to instant because it tastes less bitter to me, and I don't have to mess with grounds. I think I'm the only person I know who likes instant.

It's Monday and I feel like a threshold was finally cleared when we took down the Christmas tree yesterday. Now we can truly get on with the business of living in 2014, rather than in the mythical-magical dimensions of time. I like much of the fuzzy and irrational logic of Christmas, such as playing with shiny stars on tree tops, studying table-top figurines of ancient desert dwellers drifting on camel back through my living room, and--for a day or two--hearing the words sung over and over that I heard when I was a little boy growing up in the cold, snow country of eastern Washington. My parents stopped wishing to be merry one cold winter when I was young and moved to warm California instead.

Yesterday's walk on the beach was pretty miraculous in its own right. The air temperature in the early afternoon must have hit 80. People were lying on warm sand atop their beach towels and lathering their bare skin in protective creams. These past couple of California winters have been overly agreeable. I sense something wrong. It feels like something somewhere else in this world, or in an outer world place like the sun, is broken.

Maybe we have all lived on the earth with too much pleasure, when the generations of people before us lived a slower, less complicated life that was not so reliant on machinery and technology. When extra warm days like that of yesterday show up, I can only wonder why. But I forget that the warmth is confined to California. Much of the country suffers through a frozen hell.

In the afternoon yesterday I switched on the TV for a few minutes and watched part of a football game. I think it was San Francisco and Green Bay. I guess I'm not much of a fan, even if it is the local team playing. I fell asleep almost immediately as long beams of warm sunlight were shining on me through one of the skylights. I have watched a few pro games over the years and played the game a lot when in high school. It just seems crazy in a Christmassy illogical sort of way for people to sit out in the cold and watch these behemoths banging against each other for hours; then get in their cars and become wrapped up in a massive traffic jam while all their trumped up anger and excitement still rages inside of them.

Besides that, the football itself is actually of a peculiarly dysfunctional design. A ball, by definition, is supposed to be round. Certainly it should not be pointed on two ends, unless the designer intended to make it difficult to hold on to or throw, in which case he might have added a couple of more points to it, so that it is shaped rather like a Christmas tree star, in which case the object of moving it back and forth across a long icy field in the middle of the winter would make it even more absurd.

When I go outside in the cold it is normal for me to keep moving, rather than just stand still for long periods of time the way football players do. When it is time for them to start moving, most of them cannot see the actual football, so I assume they begin their movement when they see others moving. Then they don't go very far, but pile on top of each other in massive contortions of disarray, with arms and legs sticking out of the pile in all directions. Why do they get paid so handsomely when there is very little commendable greatness in this completely chaotic and destructive behavior?

And whoever heard of gaining six points for doing something? In a normal, sane world, you get one point for doing something. To me, this is just one more strong indicator of how mad and goofy this game of football really is. Just the fact that these high-energy wild people play inside of tiny white lines that they can't step outside of, while other people running around watching everything they do and judging whether they have conformed with some set of rules, makes no sense to me. They should be turned loose in the wild and open spaces, free to tumble up in piles on each other and chase the living daylights out of the pigskin object--no matter what its shape--until they are just plain tired or too badly bruised to continue, rather than being stopped by something so unnatural and arbitrary as a clock?

I don't know. Civilization has a long ways to go before it becomes civilized. We will probably never lick the global warming problem.