I'm in my fifties. I mix sound for a living, which means I've spent thirty years taking signals that were too hot and making them usable. You bring the gain down. You put a compressor across it so the loud parts stop tearing the top off the meter. You leave headroom. I can do that with anything that comes down a cable.

I have not figured out how to do it with this.

There are three compost heaps in the yard behind my house. One I'm filling, one is cooking, one is done and waiting. There's a thermometer in each — twenty-inch probes — and the middle one has been holding a hundred and fifty degrees for nine days. That's not me. That's bacteria. They got hot because I gave them the right ratio and turned them at the right time and then left them alone. A heap at a hundred and fifty degrees is anger somebody made useful. I check it every morning in the hat, and I resent it a little.

I pulled a turnip on the way in. Ate it standing up, dirt and all, because I'd forgotten lunch and it was there. That is the kind of thing I'm capable of. A turnip, standing in the yard, in jeans and a shirt I've had since the Clinton administration and a sun hat that is too big and that I am not going to discuss.

Here's what I'm angry about, since that's the column.

We are ruining the planet. Not the way it says on a tote bag — the way where you have the number. Around a million species are on their way out. That's the UN's own panel counting, not me. They're going because of decisions nobody made in a room; they just got made. Who are we to decide that? Who's we? I didn't get a ballot. Neither did the turnip.

And the data centers. Why do we need more fucking data centers? They took four point four percent of the country's electricity in 2023, and the government's own lab says seven to twelve percent by 2028, and every one of them needs water to stay cold, and they're going up so somebody can ask a machine what to have for dinner. I run a room for a living. I know what it costs to keep a rack cool. I have never once needed a building the size of an airport to hear what I was doing.

That's the anger. Now here's the confession. I don't know what to do with it. I know what to do with a signal that clips — you catch it before the converter, or it's gone, a flat top where the sound was. That's what this feels like. It comes in over the ceiling and the useful part is sheared off before I can get a hand on it. What's left is a koala in a hat eating a turnip.

The compost, at least, runs hot and makes something. I've been trying to learn from it. Right ratio. Turn it. Leave it alone. I haven't got the ratio yet.

I'll let you know.