Smock Blogs

If you read one story about the war in Gaza, make this one from the Atavist about Layan Albaz, a teenager who lost her friends, her family, and her legs to Israeli airstrikes, and her struggle to be fitted with prosthetics in the United States.

It’s a long read, and not light.

Lots to unpack, but as someone who’s worked in conflict zones in the name of doing good, this was…poignant.

We made a plan for the next day to accompany Layan to physical therapy. But when we arrived at the Assafs’ house in the morning, a crisis was unfolding. In an effort to plan ahead, Steve Sosebee had asked if a HEAL volunteer rather than Dina could take Layan to a medical appointment scheduled for a few days later. Layan was furious, and she refused to come downstairs. “Am I a product to be rented out to these people?” Layan screamed as Dina, remaining calm, stood in the kitchen filling a pink Stanley cup with water. “It’s my therapy. I don’t want strangers there.”

The conflict highlighted an uncomfortable reality that often comes with being a charity recipient. NGOs like HEAL rely on networks of volunteers and donors, people so eager to help a child who got out of Gaza that they’ll sometimes greet them at the airport with posters and balloons; they invite them to dinner, family events, theme parks. This in turn requires the kids to play a role: to smile, pose for photos, show gratitude.

Layan didn’t like strangers looking at her amputated legs. She didn’t want their pity. And she certainly wasn’t interested in having to glimpse their happy lives, untouched by war and loss.

Someone a lot smarter than me on these things has taught me this: "Help that doesn’t help isn’t help."

It’s many things: altruism, pity, a stab at empathy.

But it’s not help.

Help asks, “How can I support you?”

Instead, much of what we do to help others is more about helping ourselves to feel better about things that are too big for us to do anything about on our own.

So we turn to acts of charity to assuage our conscience in the name of doing good, when the only good we’re doing is for ourselves.

There’s a picture of me, my sister, and my mom on top of one of the World Trade Center towers. I think I’m maybe 8. I keep thinking I should digitize that, so I’ll have the record long after my memory lets it go.

I think about that every year. About how much those people, that city, and the world has changed since then.

We plant the flag on that day, telling each other to “never forget,” without filling in reasons why.

And 9/11 still gets used as a touchstone for our lesser angels, to excuse our bigotry, biases, and bullying.

Because the decades that followed were ones best forgotten, from the violation of American privacy up through the violation of human rights for anyone not quite American enough for our tastes.

Those are the things I wish we wouldn’t forget, because they’re the egregious behavior of a neo-colonial exceptionalism that uses freedom and capitalism to explain away its excesses.

That whatever was done in the name of that awful September day was acceptable, because look what was done to us, how terrible that was.

Trauma informs but should never excuse. It’s a reason, not a justification. And waving that flag of national trauma, as the US does well and often, only leads to more of the same. That we should not forget. Ever.

Ants.

They’re amazing until they’re not.

The not usually happening when they’ve breached the perimeter and discovered that you’re less than careful with how you store your bulk sugar.

Or when they’ve been industrious to the point where they’ve gone condo in your yard and you can’t go out there until you do something about it.

You can’t kick ants, is what I’m saying.

Poison them, drown them, smash them.

Kick them?

Doesn’t work.

Same for habits, the ones I’d like to change.

They got here the same way the anthills did: bit by bit, barely noticeable at first.

And while it’s fairly easy to deal with ants, less so with habits, because I can’t kick those either.

Dismantling their structure, bit by bit, building other bulwarks into my life.

Something about the Indigo Girls always spoke to me. Raised as I was in a cult-adjacent church (adjacent because we never went full robes and compound, but otherwise, cult), I don’t think I registered their significance to pop culture, that Ray and Saliers lived a lifestyle that the version of the Bible I was taught took exception to.

Looking back a few years after they first made it into the regular listening rotation, with the advantage of growth and time, I realized those things, but by then it didn’t matter to me as much. More of “Oh…right. Yeah, I guess that’s why my dad never bought us tickets to Lilith Fair.”

Their music has remained as part of the soundtrack of my life, their lyrics periodically peaking up above the waves, and reminding me that words matter, and words set to music can mean so much.

“Closer to Fine” came out in 1989, when I was in high school. I can’t tell you when I first heard it, because I doubt I heard it then. I was still pushing the boundaries of my parents musical tolerance by listening to a lot of Petra at that point, which should tell you more than you need to know about how I was raised.

Still, the chorus resonated from the first time I heard it.

And I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
There's more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
(The less I seek my source)
Closer I am to fine, yeah
Closer I am to fine, yeah

Having more than one answer was revelatory for someone raised to believe that there was only one answer and that was Jesus. Realizing that gray areas were ok and most of life was in the gray anyway so might as well get used to it was a necessary if sometimes painful realization at that point in my life.

Especially the line about seeking the source for some definitive, because looking back into my past usually ends up pointing me in all the wrong directions. Learning that how you were brought up means you’ll never truly grow up was a bitter pill to swallow.

But I gulped it down. More than once, because it’s a process. A journey. A work.

I’m not fine. I never will be. But I’m closer today than I was yesterday. And that’s enough.

They want to destroy safe spaces.

Replace them with fortresses, ruled by fear.

Fear of violence.

Of the outside.

Fearful of the other.

In their world, safety comes at a cost.

One they’ll happily invoice.

Freedom isn’t free.

But who sets the price?

When whitetail deer get spooked, they run.

Because when you’re a deer, options are zero.

No fight or flight.

Just. Flight.

And their tails go up to let other deer know.

It’s called “flagging”.

Helps their young to keep track of them, too.

Thing is, deer get spooked by a lot.

Even the deer that live around here.

They’re basically tame.

No predators, no hunting.

They do cull the herd periodically using nets.

NextDoor goes off on that.

My favorite post compared it to the Holocaust.

When I’m anxious, I go full white tail.

Just ready to bolt.

Raise the flag, I’m done.

Except I’ve got options.

Before I run, ask myself what I’m running from.

Sometimes I still need to go.

Mostly, though, it’s just the brain, firing off in all direction because it doesn’t know how to process some emotion that got too big for it to handle.

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.

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.

“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:

1. what Democrats are doing about the migrant problem to
2. how to handle crumbling infrastructure or
3. how to respond to Gaza and while we’re at it,
4. let’s talk about disparity of wages in women’s professional sports and
5. 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.

And if you’re on the right, all those are easy:

1. Migrants bad
2. Israel foreva!
3. Take the bridges back from China
4. Women play sports?
5. Two genders

Missing from both?

Solutions.

Take migration, for example.

• Left: welcome, everyone!
• Right: shut it down!

Neither is workable.

Talking points are never good policy.

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.

There are bushes in the backyard. They were planted for two reasons:

1. They can survive Texas heat.
2. Deer don’t eat them.

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.

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.

We’re always going somewhere.

We miss being anywhere.

And end up nowhere.

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.

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. 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

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.

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.

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.

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.