69 – Julie Fredrickson

I am in the middle of the Utah desert returning from a site visit to Valar Atomics. If you have the means to tour a nuclear facility I highly recommend it. It is so choice. That’s Ferris Bueller for the Zoomers.

I’ll use another choice line from the John Hughes classic to illustrate how gratifying it has been to drive a remote Utah town for a chance to see our investment in action.

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

We hadn’t planned to drive down to the Ward 250 facility after Abundance Institute’s Operation Gigawatt. Life is busy, it’s a holiday weekend, I’m flying out to part unknown from Montana in two days.

But what’s another three hours on the open road when there is one of America’s sustainable energy labs and a tour from your favorite engineers on offer? Yes they are all working this weekend. They have a deadline for July 4th that’s pretty important. It’s crazy that this wasn’t in my itinerary in the first place if I’m honest. What a way to kickstart the summer.

Getting up close to “our” reactor is a privilege I never conceived of experiencing. I’ve been lucky enough to invest in some very cool things over the years, but to actually place a bet on a serious industrial effort and have my choice end up at the forefront of a major national push for nuclear energy? Not a thing I saw coming.

So in the hustle of the moment, I am glad to slow down and admire that it is actually possible to do things. That’s a very nice day to have. Yes that’s a Day 69 joke.

I’ll treasure this moment forever. Even if we fail, at least we tried. And who wouldn’t want to put yourself on the line and try when it’s something that matters this much? So we speed up to slow down and see. Because it’s true if you don’t you might just miss it. So yeah it was a nice day.

Memes are the folklore of the digital era They lack narrative arcs in and of themselves, but their accretive nature means they contain in-jokes and stories for the communities that build them. And sometimes their simplicity is the key.

I find myself talking quite a bit about memes, virality, shitposters and internet culture a lot here in my daily writing experiment. So it’s not surprising that on day 69 of writing all I can think of is … nice. It’s big accomplishment to do anything 69 days in a row. It’s definitely nice.

Know your meme has a pretty extensive history of 69ing in general but it’s the additional layer of responding “nice” to the number divorced of any context that I particularly like. Any time a the number 69 is posted online virtually any comments section will have at least one lone “nice” to illicit (hehehe wrong elicit but it’s nice).

I learned today that one of the earliest mass documentation of using “nice” to respond to 69 was a Tweet from President Obama encouraging confirmation of Merrick Garland as a Supreme Court Justice as 69% of Americans favored it. The internet went nuts.

Because coincidence, symbols and personal meaning collide, I enjoy that on my 69th day Merrick Garland got confirmed for the attorney general gig instead. You can read meaning into anything on the internet. Nice right?