2025-04
2025-04-01 Tuesday
Today was pretty intense at work. Debugging federated authentication with vendors? Not my favorite activity. I was hoping to knock off early and work on water rocket derby kits for the Cub Scouts but by the end of the day Cory Booker was breaking Strom Thurmond’s record in the Senate and that was good enough for me.
“My Beloved Monster” by Caleb Carr
I finished a book yesterday: My Beloved Monster by Caleb Carr. At times, I thought, “This is a book about an old man living with his cat,” but it was really a good story about a man’s life and a cat’s life and how, if you care to pay attention to another soul, you can connect. Ambassador Carr spends a lot of beautiful words on a relationship with someone who does not communicate with words.
As I was finishing the book, I made the mistake of checking Mr Carr’s Wikipedia page, which gave a spoiler of the date of Masha’s death, which isn’t too important, really. The book was published a month before Mr Carr’s own passing. He was a good companion, sharing the joy of his journey with Masha. As he finished her story, he noted that she was “already traveling.” I thought of our beloved Maggie, whom we saw off together at the end of 2023.
When the veterinarian makes a house call . . .
Love your sentient companions.
2025-04-09 Wednesday
I just finished “The Life of Fredrick Douglass” by David Walker. It was a Thank You gift for supporting KPFA, but due to trouble with their app I received three copies. I’ll have to donate.
“The Life of Frederick Douglass” by David Walker
Slavery is a hard topic and not one I think I’d want to endure through a prose novel. (We read “Beloved” in high school.) A graphic novel is a nice approach. What was new for me was some of the history. The first people brought over in 1619 weren’t slaves for life. To my understanding, slavery has a long history in civilization as a temporary status. In 1640 three indentured servants ran away from their masters in Virginia. They were captured and the white men had their servitude extended some years while the black guy, John Punch, got his servitude extended to life. 1662 is when Virginia declared that children of slaves would also be slaves.
Frederick Douglass’s story is of a happy childhood with Grandma, then being turned over to cruelty at the age of five, then of learning to read, fighting The Man, and escaping and devoting his life and talents to Emancipation. In the middle of the book he has his freedom, a job, a house in Massachusetts, a wife and a child. In the words of the book, “I knew not then that my freedom was incomplete. If asked at the time, I would have been incapable of expressing the lingering notion that clawed at my soul: as long as one was enslaved, all were enslaved.”
It is not enough for things to be good for the individual, unless things are also good for people generally.
2024-04-14 Monday
I still need to do the taxes. Pretty soon I’ll be at a decent break point at work. While babysitting batch jobs, I catch up on online reading. Darrell Owens is sharing good stuff:
The reason why men with degrees are disproportionately voting to the left globally isn’t due to the content of the education, but primarily the campus experience where you engage with women on a professional, social and personal scale.
[ . . . ]
The main reason the gender war stuff only spanned two years for me was because I made adult friendships. When I was 19 years old, I first discovered the then-new pro-housing movement, and my local organization was founded by a trans woman and a non-binary person about 10 or 15 years my senior. I didn’t even know what a non-binary person was, and I didn’t know any trans people at 19 year old. But because of my exposure to these awesome people — who tolerated and corrected me when I occasionally said ignorant stuff — the right-wing YouTube videos of “Trans people gone wild” never convinced me the way it has millions of Americans.
My work with local political groups exposed me to men of all types: seniors, wealthy men, poor men, fathers in their 30s and 40s, depressed men, gay men, happy men. And of course a lot of women of all ages, too. My friendship with these people, especially men at different stages in life that had already gone through what I was dealing with, taught me that this nihilistic, dating nonsense, gender wars was just a phase. It wasn’t even explicit speeches but just clear observation. The married men were generally nice people. The middle class men made money in realistic ways and they kept telling me to stay in college. The depressed and poor men were open about their issues to me in a way that made me comfortable. And having female friends, especially older ones, made it so that I didn’t just see the opposite sex as just for dating.
. . . having male friends in their 40s casually remark when I was slacking around in my early 20s to go finish my education helped me tremendously. To be friends with older men with the lifestyles and families I wanted had a much greater impact than curated social media feeds of influencers.
2025-04-16 Wednesday
“I mentally reprimanded my wife for disappearing to the candle aisle; it was impossible to keep track of two kids in this orgy of affordable consumerism.”
–Peter Stenson, “Bone Frag” The Sun Magazine, October 2024
2025-04-19 Saturday
The week has been difficult. It started with hard work, which really isn’t hard. On Wednesday I took the wife to a nice restaurant for her birthday. On Friday I watched the press conference with Senator Van Hollen. I can’t let Kilmar Abrego Garcia out of my heart. A father with a loving wife. A guy who works for his family. He’s anyone in America and he and others get snatched off the street by The Government and sent to a foreign Gulag.
I made the mistake of learning more about CECOT in El Salvador. There’s at least one awestruck influencer video on YouTube marveling at the Security Measures. Okay, sure. There’s also the understanding of 23.5 hours lock down, never going outside, bodies stacked 100 to a cell, zero contact with the outside world. And an admission that these inhumane conditions for “the worst of the worst” are applied to many innocent people because The Dictator gleefully brags that rounding up innocent people is just what you have to do to make the streets safe.
And the President of the United States, after “whoopsie” sending a guy here without due process and then digging in and insisting that Kilmar will just be deported again if he returns, and that he wants to treat US Citizens the same. The Constitution is Dead, in his eyes.
I debate whether CECOT is a concentration camp or a death camp. It is a one way trip off of this earth into a mass grave. They haven’t added the gas chambers and ovens yet. The conditions are more horrific than what I read from Alexander Solzhenitzyen and the fuck of it all is is that if you’re having to parse your national policies in comparison to the Soviet Union or the Third Reich, you’re already in deep shit.
I’m stressed out. I have friends who have pre-arranged their emigration strategy. The wife and I look at each other: we’ll stay and fight. I wish I was being hyperbolic and overreacting but it feels like the United States is Wile E Coyote having run over the cliff, pausing in mid-air, then daring to look down. It isn’t a Done Deal that we have lost our Democracy and I have some Faith that we’re going to Keep It Together but I am totally freaked out.
The photo of Senator Van Hollen and Mr Abrego Garcia was a relief. The man fled gang violence in El Salvador. A US Court found his fears to be credible and allowed him to stay. Then he’s dumped into the prison with all the evil gang members and all the officials involved are bending over themselves to deny any agency at all. The dots connected themselves for me to imagine that President Bukele felt embarrassed at the prospect of having to dig a body out of his mass grave to repatriate to America. A bad look. Fortunately, they had the good sense to keep the deportees separate and then send Mr Abrego Garcia to a less atrocious facility.
These are the standards of April, 2025. Which we would have found unconscionable in 2024. The Pendulum needs to swing. The current trajectory is hard towards a collective national tragedy.
Anyway. What I post to Social Media is Not The News. The World As We Experience It On the Ground is the reality we need to appreciate.
My America is the one where plastic dinosaurs frolic on public fountains.
2025-04-30 Wednesday
