Blog
- what Democrats are doing about the migrant problem to
- how to handle crumbling infrastructure or
- how to respond to Gaza and while we’re at it,
- let’s talk about disparity of wages in women’s professional sports and
- whether trans athlete should be allowed to compete as the gender they identify with, and yes that’s a trick question because what have you done for nonbinary athletes lately.
- Migrants bad
- Israel foreva!
- Take the bridges back from China
- Women play sports?
- Two genders
- Left: welcome, everyone!
- Right: shut it down!
- They can survive Texas heat.
- Deer don’t eat them.
- https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-draws-fire-remarks-medal-honor-recipients/story?id=112883414
- https://forward.com/fast-forward/618034/miriam-adelson-funding-trump-israel/
- https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/16/arts/television/late-night-trump-tic-tac.html
- https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2019/02/27/trumps-lawyer-no-basis-for-presidents-medical-deferment-from-vietnam/
- https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/18/424169549/trump-lashes-out-at-mccain-i-like-people-who-werent-captured
- https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/
The Mulch Pile
I take a walk most days.
Same route, about the same time.
Helps me get out of my own head, out of my own way.
It’s in the neighborhood, so not much changes.
Which is nice.
Still, sometimes the neighbors surprise me.
Few houses down, they delivered enough mulch to fill the driveway.
The couple that lives there is in their 70s, not terribly mobile.
I had questions.
But they were out there, most days, with a wheelbarrow, couple of shovels.
Moving that mulch, one small load at a time.
Took a few weeks, but they got it all.
From driveway to yard, one load at a time.
No hacks, no shortcuts.
They just didn’t quit.
We Are Family
When you’re here, you’re family.
That was Olive Garden’s slogan until 2012, when they decided that was too catchy and paid someone a lot of money to come up with this entry for the Advertising Hall of Fame.
Go Olive Garden.
America, we are getting dumber by the minute.
But the Garden had a point, one that corporations still cling to, and that’s the exploitation of familial nostalgia and trauma to convince us that we’re not a company, we’re a family.
Like the Bradys.
Or the Mansons.
The idea is to blur ever further that distinction between your working life and your home life in an effort to ensure fealty and stewardship of organizations where you can die at your desk and not be discovered for days.
In this age where loneliness is endemic and elder neglect is one of our national pastimes, dying at work feels like a family value.
If you’re the one trying to convince your employees you’re a family, knock it off. You’re manipulating people’s emotions to help your bottom line, and that’s gross.
And if you’re sitting at your cubicle sipping at your Stanley thinking about how much your co-workers are your family? For your own sake, go touch some grass. Find something outside of your job that gives you meaning.
Even if that something involves breadsticks.
Hates
“I am everything liberals hate.”
The distillation of the political divide continues, this time via a bumper sticker in the rear window of a pickup truck that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Stephen King novel.
I meant that ironically when I started writing this.
But he’s more right (pun intended) than wrong.
As a conservative, he’s going to be focused on what’s wrong.
Easier to hate than love.
Punch than embrace.
He assumes that the left is the same.
That they hate him for who he is.
Because the further left you go, the harder you have to work at it. As a liberal, you’re obliged to have positions on everything, from:
And if you’re on the right, all those are easy:
Missing from both?
Solutions.
Take migration, for example.
Neither is workable.
Talking points are never good policy.
Delayed
If today were a baseball game, there’d be a rain delay. A pause in the action until the weather clears up. But life isn’t baseball. We play, rain or shine, because if we don’t, we can’t keep the lights on. When all I want to do today is listen to the rain.
Trimming
There are bushes in the backyard. They were planted for two reasons:
And they’ve grown, remarkably well. Except as they’ve grown, they’ve not been maintained. Just left to their own devices like European kids.
The result has been uneven at best, and now to get the bushes under something like control means they’re going to need to be pruned back, and then as they grow, trimmed in a way that promotes uniform growth.
Bushes, gardens, relationships: they all need tending. Trimming. Left to their own devices, they all end up somewhere other than we thought they’d be.
Sometimes that works. Mostly, it leads to pruning.
Falling
Summer’s leaving, doing so, as it does every year, with the first hint that cooler weather is coming, a break in the unremitting heat to tell us that winter is on its way and soon we’ll miss days basting by the pool or the lake and wishing that the next summer would hurry up and get here, but for now I’m going to enjoy the cooling days and the later sunrises as this season bids farewell.
Possum Kingdom
Learned today that if you see a baby possum by itself, best to take it to a rescue organization, because it’s mom is gone.
Not dead, although that’s a possibility, but gone.
Because they can have 15 offspring at a time, and carry them on their backs, and if one falls off, she’s not stopping or coming back for it.
Don’t be that possum.
Hunched
Trust the hips.
Shakira wasn’t wrong: they don’t lie.
I don’t trust mine.
Means I hunch my shoulders when I’m doing kettlebell cleans.
Trying to chase the weight.
Leverage it into place.
If I just stand up straight instead?
The bell lands where it’s supposed to.
It’s weightless until it’s in the rack
Still.
I hunch.
Not trusting that I’ve done the work.
That I’m where I’m supposed to be in time.
In space.
In life.
Informed
Informed. I’d like to think that I am. But why? Is it to make better decisions? Learn something about myself or the world? Or is it so I can be part of The Discourse? Show others that I’m in touch?
Information isn’t knowledge, it’s just data. Data can become knowledge, if processed accordingly. But mostly, it’s just noise, meant to distract us from truth.
I pride myself on knowing things. It’s one of the ways I connect with the world. Show others that I, too, can be part of the conversation.
But as is most often the case, more information isn’t better. It’s just. More.
“We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.” ― Tom Waits
Pivots
There’s a process for anything worth doing well. Steps to take, points of performance, the occasional “hack” as you progress and learn ways around those first steps.
If I’m learning something new, I study those steps. Obsessively. Trying to map my way to success in an effort to get there faster.
And of course I learn the same thing every time: that there are no shortcuts, and sometimes the map gets confusing.
And the task gets frustrating for a while. But if I keep at it, I’ll find that key. The thing that unlocks the next level of performance.
It’s a pivot, a point at which the direct changes, dramatically, and opens new ways to approach the task at hand.
If I’m writing, it’s how I structure an article/story/essay. If I’m at work, it’s how I organize a particular process. If I’m lifting kettlebells, it’s something that at last makes sense and the lifts get simpler.
The pivot arrives when we’re ready for it, and if we rush to that point, we’ll miss its value. Lose out on that joy in the path it sends us down.
Excused
Boundaries. Good fences, good neighbors. Build a wall. Because we need limits. Perspective. Scope.
And protection. From the world. From our tribe. From ourselves.
I have a boundary around food, or quantities thereof. Eating my feelings makes for a less healthy me.
Weekly, then, the gate on that fence swings wide. Giving myself the grace to eat whatever I’d like. Makes me more mindful on those days.
The scale will reflect, but then, if I make that choice, and different choices the other days, the scale marches on in that downward direction.
Then there are days when grace and excuses conflate. Converge. Conflict. And they sound the same in my head.
Except that the excuse offers a way to stay where I am. Grace shows me the way forward.
Not out. Never out. I’m here, wherever this is, this space that is mine in the universe. It’s not a prison, and my choice that it’s not.
But a way to move this space along. To progress. To grow.
Simple
Kettlebell. Cannonball with a handle. I have the pandemic to thank for the growing collection in the garage. More than I need, and the epitome of “Simple, not easy.”
At least they can be. Like anything else, I can complicate them. Hardwired to think that more is better.
More is just…more. It’s impatience. Restlessness, born out of not knowing where I’m going. So I’ll never get there fast enough.
One exercise with the bells becomes two, then three, then more gear gets bought, added to the mix. And now it’s complicated. Still not easy.
But I’ve made it less simple, and the order of difficulty changes. Exponentially. And I give up. Frustrated with myself and the process. But mostly that first part.
If it’s worth doing, it’s not easy. And if I have any hope of getting “there,” it has to be simple. A movement. A sentence. An hour spent learning instead of just consuming.
Always simple. Never easy.
Emotional
At the 2024 Democratic National Convention, and a party working hard to make “not going back” the message, after the Obamas left the stage, it felt a lot like 2008.
But while Barack and Michelle stole the show, Gus Walz stole our hearts with a viral moment of him shouting at the stage, “That’s my dad!” as Tim Walz accepted the party’s vice presidential nomination.
Then the pundits started to weigh in.
Childless Cat Lady Ann Coulter called it weird in a now-deleted tweet she explained but didn’t apologize for.
And then there’s Jay Weber, an AM radio host in Wisconsin.
"Sorry, but this is embarrassing for both father and son," Weber wrote. "If the Walzs represent today's American man, this country is screwed; 'Meet my son, Gus. He's a blubbering bitch boy. His mother and I are very proud.'"
Weber — a radio host for 1130 WISN-AM whose show has featured prominent GOP politicians and operatives — deleted his post after facing online criticism.
"I didn't realize the kid was disabled, and have taken the post down," Weber wrote.
First off, didn’t realize AM radio still existed.
Secondly, what’s troubling about Weber’s response is that, to him, for a young man to have a public emotional response to his father makes him less of a man somehow.
Says more about Weber’s side of the aisle than it says about Weber himself.
Based on the Republican National Convention, there’s an acceptable scale for public male emotion, and it ranges from loathing to hatred.
That it’s OK to shout “That’s my President” with the kind of fervor reserved for North Korean dictators, but it’s not ok to be so overwhelmed with joy at the accomplishments of someone you love that you burst into tears.
The GOP stands for many things, all of them laid out in the 900+ page Project 2025, but mostly they stand for control.
Of our choices, of our bodies, of our…tears.
Greatness
Tim Walz spoke at the Democratic National Convention last night.
The New York Times called it the “biggest speech” of his career.
Except come November?
It’s forgotten.
No matter who wins the White House.
The speech I want to hear?
One that mattered to its audience?
Was when he first introduced himself as the faculty adviser of the newly formed Gay Straight Alliance at Mankato West High School.
In 1998.
Because Vice President Tim Walz has a nice ring to it as titles go.
But the one that meant the most to those kids?
Mister.
Coach.
No matter what happens in November and the years beyond when he hopefully serves as Vice President of the United States, I don’t think Tim Walz will point to that as an achievement.
What he’s done already?
That matters.
That’s big.
That’s greatness.
Framing
Here’s something I’d never hear myself say: I’ve been watching the Democratic National Convention.
Or at least clips from it on social media.
I don’t have the attention span to watch anything for that many hours in a row.
Unless it’s wrestling, and even then I’m taking full advantage of the technology to zip past Gunther’s mic work.
The split screen of the DNC with its GOP counterpart is staggering.
The Democrats have managed to turn the driest of all political processes into a barn burner of a party, while simultaneously selling out the same arena that hosted the RNC in Wisconsin, by being…optimistic.
While their counterparts are peddling their vision of a country and a world on the brink of disaster, the Democrats are opting to frame things otherwise.
Facts are what’s happening.
Truth is what you do with those facts.
Events make up my day.
How I respond to those events?
That’s how my day goes.
And given a choice, I’d rather have a day with Lil’ John as my soundtrack instead of the vocal stylings of Robert James Richie.
Here’s to an amazing day.
Or an awful one.
Your choice.
Meddling with honor
"But I really, I watched Sheldon sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That's the highest award you can get as a civilian. It's the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version, it's actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they're soldiers. They're either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets, or they're dead. She gets it and she's healthy, beautiful woman."
That’s the GOP candidate for president on the time he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Miriam Adelson for being a “committed doctor, philanthropist, and humanitarian” whose late husband donated $90 million to a PAC supporting Trump’s 2016 campaign, and is reportedly planning to spend even more supporting Trump during the 2024 election cycle.
When he’s not banging Tic Tac containers together like a dementia patient at the checkout counter of a Safeway to show us how inflation works, Trump has these moments when he shows us not just who he is, but the kind of America he wants for the rest of us.
He makes it easy to focus on his condescending view of service, how he faked injury to avoid the draft, how he denigrated McCain’s ordeal in Vietnam, and referred to those who gave their lives in Europe during the First World War as “losers”.
It’s all a distraction from what he and everyone like him really want: power at the expense of others. Because that, in Trumpland, for the authors of Project 2025, is a winner.
Someone who’s stood on someone else to raise themselves up. Who got to where they are by breaking down, not building up.
If that’s what winning looks like in Trump’s America, I’ll take the losers. Anytime.
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Sources
Day 1
Today’s the first day of the rest of your life.
Depending on the day, that feels hopeful.
Or fills me with existential dread.
Opting for the first this morning.
The focus?
Today.
Just today.
Because it’s not guaranteed.
Better now than never.
Day one.
One day.
Plan for a tomorrow.
Live like there isn’t one.
Lassoed
Working my way through Season 3 of Ted Lasso.
Somehow lost touch with it after Season 2.
No fault of the show’s, just it happens.
Special interests and the vagaries of entertainment choices coupled with the certainty that I know how all the stories will end all wrapped up in wishing I could write something half as good means I miss things.
Instead of sitting in the joy that something like this exists.
Which, given what life can be, I should spend more time surrounded by joy.
And Lasso is pure joy.
An earnest joy.
Unforced.
Consequently, lots of tears.
Happy ones, mostly.
Others less so.
Shows like this are what art can, and should, be.
Not all the time, not all our art, but art that shows us that most of us are, truly, good people.
People wanting that goodness in ourselves, and others, if we could just get out of our own way.
And even those characters cast as antagonists?
Even those have dimension, and depth.
A not-so-subtle reminder that we all do.
Psychopathy and hope
Spent the day finishing Killing Eve.
I am nothing if not current on my pop culture.
Not to give too much away, but it’s about an assassin working for an organization that calls itself “The 12,” who gets tracked down by am American working for MI5, the British equivalent of the FBI.
What makes the show unique is that both those characters are women, and it passes the Bechdel test.
Repeatedly, and forcefully.
As a Man Of A Certain Age accustomed to the privileges that entails, it’s both disconcerting and inspiring.
Disconcerting as anything is that shows you that the world might be better if it were different and how you might not fit quite in the same place you once did.
Inspiring for those same reasons.
And the belief that art can show the us the way toward that kind of reality.
One where strength is earned, not inherited.