A theme I experienced yesterday is the human need to make.
Justo reached into his pocket and gave me a bracelet. Orange and black, woven tight from plastic bags — the ones the men inside Alligator Alcatraz repurposed with their own tired hands, because human beings will make something out of nothing if you give them nothing long enough. They make them for each other. They make them because making something is the one thing a cage cannot take from you.
You can read about Justo Betancourt, and how our government forced suffering upon him and continues to force suffering on our “unwanted” people. The barbarity and cruelty is sadly familiar to any American who is paying attention. We each resist in our own ways. We each must maintain our own sanity.
Sam Hamper has a very nice video about how he likes to sketch things, not in order to produce content, but just because the process of paying attention is gratifying in itself. You don’t take a walk to achieve something: you take a walk because it is something you need to do. Similarly, spending time observing things is something you need to do to feel whole and human. He notes that attention is rated as a most valuable “commodity” these days, and that you don’t have to sketch to focus on the moment: but sketching is what works for him.
I likened his sketching to taking notes at a meeting. I don’t usually take notes. Most meetings I tend to be checked out. When I do take notes, they are rarely useful beyond the moment, but the habit helps me focus my attention on what is happening. Some meetings I care about.
There’s a larger thing afoot with AI. I find it to be one of several handy tools in my day job: how do I correctly iterate through a dictionary list in this context? Other folks use AI to do the job of junior engineers. That sounds powerful but lonely. I believe that if you’re going to mentor something to do the work, empowering a human to grow is amazingly gratifying. I doubt work styles like mine are going to be replaced overnight, if ever, but … as a 50 year old tech worker, I have lately taken an interest in hand tools.
Watch Rex Krueger explain how to plane a board flat. You could run that board though a pair of machines or a table saw lickety split. But there’s something enjoyable about the process. Maybe. But you have to get the right tools and you have to make them sharp. What I did manage last night was to practice sawing into the end of a few boards at an angle. I am a couple of chisels away from attempting a dovetail joint. For practice. To see if I like the process.
Surprisingly not as scary as vi. I doubt the rest will come too easily.
I have a modest collection of power tools, but the hand tool thing feels “Unixy” to me: a collection of small tools that aren’t without a learning curve, but with a little practice you can get up to speed and enjoy the work of building useful things.
Tonight is the last night for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I’ll watch it tomorrow on Paramount+. I canceled my annual subscription, which would have renewed in early June.
I never used to be a late night TV watcher. It is a nice format, though. Especially when the news has become such a grind. A friendly face samples the day’s crimes, chews a few bites into a bolus of rage, breaded in wry humor with a tangy glaze of hopeful frustration, and pops it down my exhausted, slack-jawed maw. Between All the Star Treks and Stephen Colbert, the Paramount+ subscription made sense for me. But I have watched All the Star Treks and tomorrow I will have watched All the Colberts.
Thank you for the past decades of entertainment, Stephen Colbert! I am going to miss you!
Here’s my gripe with how the show has been distributed. I’m not staying up late to watch. I’m not sure I can even get CBS on my antenna. I know we do get NBC because I “stay up late” to watch Saturday Night Live during the national broadcast at 8:30 pm Pacific. If late shows did that … I mean it is pre-recorded anyway … maybe just post the episode to the paid streaming service at air time?
… I wait until the next day. But why, as a paying customer of Paramount+, can I watch clips of the show on YouTube for free tens of hours before I can watch the show on Paramount+? Why the delay? Why? And what I would really really have enjoyed, since the show on Paramount+ has no commercials, why not let me hear the band play through the breaks? I assume that was a hassle with potential royalties if they played covers. “Move On Up” …
On Monday, they did at last let the band play on, by posting a full, un-cut episode, which you can watch for free … on YouTube. The band improvised and jammed and it was wonderful:
The Little Chinese Everywhere lady who makes video blogs about traveling around the overland silk road had to evacuate Iran when the Americans started bombing there. She just posted a video from Baghdad.
She asked her local friend of a friend guide how things were going. He said the economy is about the same as 15 years ago, but they are much safer now. You can see that it’s not prosperous. In Baghdad itself, there are apartment buildings that are empty since the war. The guy explained that there are absent landlords who haven’t been looking after things. You can see the bullet holes still in the facades. On the street, all the prices are cheap.
The locals are extremely friendly. All the street food vendors didn’t want to charge their international guests. It reminded me of Jordan. When I traveled to Jordan 25 years ago, the locals were extremely friendly. They would see me in the streets and call out “helloooo! Welcome in Jordan!” But what is different in this video is that all the kids would call out to the Chinese lady “nihao” “nihao” “nihao” and I found myself wondering if they would be quite as friendly to an American anymore. Probably. It is in the nature of people to welcome guests.
I was glad that she encountered guys who had been to China. In one market stall were folks who imported goods. In a restaurant she encountered a group of guys who had been to China to study civil engineering. I found myself grateful that there is a world power that is welcoming people from around the world and helping them to build up their own countries.
When this post is published, I am fifty years old.
Go me!
Thanks, Mom!
This website is about thirty years old.
Go World Wide Web!
Thanks, Sir Tim Berners-Lee!
I have spent just over half my years in California versus Illinois. It is where we raise our kids, and where we own our home. Chicago and the Midwest will always hold a special place in my heart, but I have become one of those sunshine people who are just an earthquake away from sliding into the ocean.
Go Bears!
Thanks, California!
Our marriage, like our older kid and our mortgage, not to mention our cats, and my current job tenure, are all just over a decade old. (And the younger kid is closing in!)
I recently heard it said that your first decade is the happiest. But my forties have been really great as well. What makes a good childhood — being surrounded by loving people who support your growth — can really come back to you when you work to be a good spouse, a good parent, a good friend and a good citizen.
Along the Leestown Road, near an old whitewashed springhouse made useless by a water-district pipeline, I stopped to eat lunch. Downstream from the spring where butter once got cooled, under peeling sycamores, the clear rill washed around clumps of new watercress. I pulled makings for a sandwich from my haversack: Muenster cheese, a collop of hard salami, sourdough bread, horseradish. I cut a sprig of watercress and laid it on, then ate slowly, letting the gurgle in the water and the guttural trilling of red-winged blackbirds do the talking. A noisy, whizzing gnat that couldn’t decide whether to eat on my sandwich or my ear joined me.
Had I gone looking for some particular place rather than any place, I’d never have found this spring under the sycamores. Since leaving home, I felt for the first time at rest. Sitting full in the moment, I practiced on the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention. It’s a contention of Heat Moon’s — believing as he does any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he’s going to get — that a man becomes his attentions. His observations and his curiosity, they make and remake him.
