This is the first 50f morning for me this year that sustained long enough for me to be awake, not have immediate intervening responsibilities, such that I can meet it on the stoop with coffee in hand.
If I controlled the global thermostat every morning should be 50f, but… never mind seasons—2 decades of notable climate shifts means there will be many fewer of these in my life at this latitude than I’d have assumed. Except maybe if the AMOC collapses, I gather? Not hoping for that.
I’m not really making an effort at being a news blogger. I have little to add of any unique value. I do not want to sound self-important. If there’s anything to when I do comment on the larger world I do not control or have particular expertise in, it is to assert as much agency as I think we all might have due to any way we might relate to the world, to care about things and to ask for justice.
So, if you know me, you already knew I wasn’t going to be surprised nor accept the justification behind this happening: Israel strikes aid convoy organized by U.S. humanitarian group, killing 5 .
But there is a little more: I knew ANERA people. The people I know and knew are no longer with the organization and generally were not in the field in the occupied territories. I know this is an organization meaningfully contributing to establishing some kind of well being for civilians without being attached to ideology.
The IDF’s actions are reprehensible and evidence of their institutional incapacity to act proportionately or in good faith and only give fuel to their self-stated ostensible intended opponents.
I slowly became good at a sort of GTD style of managing my email inbox. Not quite Inbox Zero, but a healthy total count can be managed on a hand or two. Not as good with browser tabs. Painfully declaring tab bankruptcy today. All those novel links, essays, news articles… ‘til we meet again.
Assateague National Seashore
The Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts can suck it. The vertical playground at Swampoodle is one of The Childe’s favorite places to play.
It is near several places we make regular errand runs to and, in addition to climbing fun, it provides him a vantage point to observe the train traffic coming in and out of Union Station (The Childe is a trainspotter, although he does not yet know this term).
Like many park areas with something interesting for different groups, it is a small oasis in the city. We need more such things for all of us. (We also need the city to keep the drinking fountains in clean, working order in all the parks. I did just put in a 3-1-1 request with regards to Swampoodle’s drinking fountain.)
This says nothing about me (except to significantly explain my stint of SAHD duty in the latter case), but I am proud to know people directly involved in each of these efforts:
I don’t have to let go of my broader and deeper political critiques to appreciate some of this progress.
This’ll do.
A lot of security in my neighborhood (or the adjacent one, anyway), including out of town police known for instigating violence with demonstrators, to protect a war criminal running out on a international warrant for his arrest.
I still cannot claim genuine and deep sports-ball fandom, but today was a day where I was glad to have a couple of sports to distract me for most of the day.
On very light reflection, I see the age-old (can it even be) irony in that I traded hating the decisions of couple of egocentric competitive madmen on the national and world stage for getting entertainment out of a particular one in a fast car and another couple-three that were on bikes.
Here we go… hold on tight!
Me: I don’t like this timeline man. Not a new thought, but I tried to make peace with it and find sources of optimism or outcomes to hope for and angle towards and fuck fuck fuck.
Friend: Yup. 110%.
Caught up with the most recent episode of Maron’s podcast & enjoyed the bit in his usual rambling opening where he called out Trump on not citing his sources, being a coward for not giving credit to Hitler.
This feels like design for sacrifice zones… I’m not sure I believe that, but I hate the ideas that both people may need things like this and that whatever capital went into this has been dwarfed just by the fight to keep burning fossil fuels, never mind the wealth extracted and costs externalized on our lives by the continued burning.
A good trick is not being too high on being present, when one is lucky enough to experience that, to not capitalize on what you might notice.
I don’t think I’ve learned that trick yet.
This morning The Childe held me to account on things I had promised to repair and he reminded me of a litany of things in the backlog that were not yet, or successfully, repaired.
He was sad and frustrated (I hadn’t yet fixed the loose, frayed thread from a not that made up a stuffed sea turtles nostril). I’ve done that now.
He wasn’t yet jaded by any of my missed deliveries. There was new hope in the form of more requests: could I cut the tag from yet another stuffy when he got home from school? Yes. (As he reenlists or gets new stuffys he’s be interested in stripping them of their tags of late.)
But then there was the toy police car, whose wheel had come off its axle (and since also lost its flashers). It was disappeared, I had hoped he had forgotten.
Then there is the blue plastic old American-style toy steam engine (if it were real, it might’ve burned wood rather than coal). Could I make another (6th or 7th) attempt to glue the cow-catcher back on? Could we try another glue? I don’t know.
There’s a helicopter which has lost a rotor blade (multiple glueings for it failed too) and a another half-dozen items that may or may not be stowed in corners by my desk or a drawer in the kitchen with some hope of resurrection or disappeared.
It is time for a reckoning, not so much with The Childe, but with myself in communicating to him the outputs of the functions of time and use: the consequences of quality of material and construction and of consideration during play, and the natural or designed end to all things. The impact of which is only mitigated by our choices, expectations, and our gratitude when noticing all we are getting what we wanted or maybe more … yeah … this isn’t all going to fly with a kindergartener. I barely have learned them truly, maybe.
I received gratitude in the form of a hug (and a kiss! on my arm!) when I affirmed his new and refreshed requests that had the most immediate of deadlines (today).
I want a good rock and roll radio station (or whatever is closest to that these days, I’m pretty ecumenical myself—just not looking for top 40 pop) that has news on the hour. I’m not sure this exists. (If it does, I’d love to hear about it and stream it.)
I have a memory of WETA FM (serving the Washington, DC area) playing classical (it still does) and having NPR news at the top of the hour. I’m not certain that is still their format. I’m looking for structure of that impression, though, with musical taste more like WEXT (out of New York’s Capital Region and also a public radio station, but with no news programming).
If I won the lottery, I’d go after a radio station license (FM, LPFM, hell AM) just to achieve this. (And I think I’d enjoy finding some real DJs—no alorithms—to blow my mind and widen others' minds too.) I’d definitely add some jazz too, if it were “my” station.
I haven’t been to a punk show in a while, let alone one at 9:30 in the morning. It was of course, all ages—and my Childe’s school Spring Pre-K/Kindergarten concert.
We (the United States) have a war culture. We’ve been at war, one way or another, at substantial expense, my entire life, and longer, and most of the time, really. That, and my being politically aware and anti-war on most fronts (with a couple of exceptions that have their own equivocation) for 25 years (ugh), means this resonates with me: “War Culture Hates the Ethical Passion of the Young." Also, I used to work for IPA.
This still feels like equivocation. In other words: too little. Certainly far too late for tens of thousands of dead innocent civilians, and what infrastructure there was to support the social and physical fabric of a society. (Israel is attacking clean water!)
Not sure this stops, or rights, a genocide. Those are the table stakes now.
Not enough, Joe.
I continue to abhor military violence.
I can still understand how, by the rules the United States and Israel play by, Iran’s direct attack is entirely “fair.” With state violence, “fair” only illustrates how fucking insane the game is. Each side and their powerful are responsible for their own actions, but those who write the rules and effectively own the board or who have weighted the dice have more overall responsibility.
I think it is stupid, as are nearly all of the previous events that are justified by the previous event, and so on, and generally, previous military violence in human history. I leave some room for truly having to stop overwhelming occupation and attempts at it, but not uncritically, and not without a jaundiced eye to opportunities missed before and during such stages of conflict.
These cruxes in conflict remind me that it often seems nearly all those with the power of militaries at their hand do not care about human life, no matter the rhetoric of defense. If it seems that they genuinely do to some degree, it is too easy to find their parochial limits. These petty constraints resulting in classes of those worthwhile and those not are an ironic product of playing god.
Speaking of gods, the cynicism of these wars vociferously supported by the arch-conservatives of some of our world’s major religions belies their supposed faith in the expectation to be judged and have their swords beat into plowshares.
We do not need anyone’s god to do that, if we wanted.
This fatalism is not faith, it is the worst cynicism.
I do want more aggressive antitrust action from the Department of Justice, including in the industry’s Apple is in, and possibly against Apple itself with well-crafted, technical and market literate arguments, if applicable… but calling Apple a monopoly still seems like a stretch. This DoJ action seems like a technically illiterate attack on on the reasons I choose to use an iPhone.
In the Natural History Museum we made a pitstop at the rest room for my sake. Someone was using an air blower to dry their hands as we entered. The Childe hates these. The sound is overwhelming for him.
He clamped his hands over his ears and said, “Daddy, don’t use that!” I replied that I would not if I had paper towels to dry my hands, reinforcing that I also had to wash my hands after using the bathroom, just as he does.
Standing at the urinal he disappeared from my peripheral vision and my general sense of immediacy. “Childe, where are you!?”
“Getting paper towels! Here, I got you some!”
I finish. Zip up. Turn around—and he is right there, proffering a long tail of toilet paper he had ripped out of the stall down the way. There are no paper towels.
I use the toilet paper, daintily, after the lightest touch of water at the sink.
Leaving the Natural History Museum and walking on the Mall, enjoying a breezy 70 degrees and a warm sun in that so-called “extra” hour thanks to the recent Daylight Saving Time change. The Childe was on my shoulders. Soon games of “Steal Dad’s Hat” and “Daddy Robot Driver” were to break out.
Before that, there was a moment of introspection for us both as we surveyed the lengthening shadows from the Castle in front of over to the berm of the hill where the Washington Monument is launched.
The Childe said, “Daddy, you look like a statue.” He was speaking of the shadow we cast. And I can’t really put more into it or explain it more, but I found something touching in the implication for the Childe made by the shadow of his father being something as set in stone as a statue.
Driving home from the Mall, we passed by a church. Well, we pass many, but this one is bright white with more of a dome—slightly more peculiar in its shape than the other dozen churches of brick, rectangles with steeples.
The Childe asked “What is that building, daddy?”
We haven’t had the “god” or religion conversation yet, despite my upbringing and my mother’s attempt to infuse hints of Christ into my son’s life.
I said “It’s a church,” and hoping not to have to explain it more.
The most memorable thing the concept of God ever managed to do for me as a child was create a massive terror of my almost certain doom that I’m still trying to shake off.
The Childe, without more of an explanation, attempted to fill in the blanks. “Oh, so you mean, is it is a place where people who do not have a home have to go to?” I know I and his mother have explained to him that some of the people around us are unhoused. This breaks my heart - unhoused people, especially children — and that my kid is grappling with that being a thing and what happens to them.
“No, that’s not it. There are groups of people who believe in certain stories and some of them get together in buildings that like that.” (The group of people I was apart of did not have a building like that.)
The Childe thought for a moment, and said, “Oh, do you mean like the Polar Express?”
The kid believes in Santa still, so that’d be an appropriate analogy too, but he picked-up on my skepticism of other peoples beliefs so he plugged in a story he both knows and knows is make believe (but represents something “real.") Exactly, Childe. Like the Polar Express.
I’ve been knocked on my ass a bit this week, and it’d probably be better for my mental and physical health to not consume SOTU coverage, but, bless the anti-genocide demonstrators who seemed to force a motorcade detour on the way to the Capitol tonight. It barely counts as close, but this is the closest I’ve seen since demonstrators disrupted George W. Bush’s inaugural motorcade … a quarter century ago?
[Before we put these questions to a sperm whale unit, we’d have to think hard about whether we’d act on the answers. Kristin Andrews told me a heartbreaking story about a chimpanzee named Bruno who was taught sign language at the University of Oklahoma. Bruno was encouraged to build his whole life around the practice of asking humans for things. But after a few years, the scientists’ grant ran out and he was transferred to a different facility. When one of the lab’s scientists visited him there, he was distressed to see that Bruno seemed upset. He kept signing Key and Out. The scientist had taught the chimpanzee to communicate, but even in the face of a clear request, the scientist couldn’t help him. “If these whales start saying Go away; make the ships leave, what will we do?” Andrews said. And how will it reflect on us as a society if we ignore them?](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/02/talking-whales-project-ceti/677549/?gift=S4EwRLGNogt2Kqjs1lNdf1C5Zvy59Sc8vQ93xrMMh-I))
I assume the writers of Extrapolations were up on this whale research a couple of years back.
I was short with my father on the phone today. I couldn’t take his fatalist “it will get worse,” (and he’s a Trump voter) point of view. It may seem ironic to some who know me, because I also can say “It will get worse” — before it gets better. I think I am still not fatalistic, but my hoarder, prepper, some-kind-of-Republican father, who doesn’t even think Trump will fix things, is. It enrages me.
Then, I learn about five-year-olds telling aide workers they’d rather die and aide workers having to invent abbreviations like WCNSF (wounded child, no surviving family), and active duty USAF airman Aaron Bushnell self-immolating outside the Israeli embassy, and general awareness of so much more horror in the world, in this country, in this city and just local dysfunction making itself manifest as personal injustices and barriers and becoming whatever excuses… and it overwhelms me. (I didn’t even get to crimes of ecocide and climate inaction.)
So I’m heartbroken, hoping, crushed, dragging myself forward, just trying to be a present father for my own pre-k son, saving my rage and despair for private moments.
Who are we?