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Three anecdotes of The Childe, from yesterday

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.

Dragging myself ... forward.

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?

New truths, fuel for future models

In this age of AI generative content in now all (?) of the mediums, it seems like one of the only things there will be to do in a knowledge economy is write hard truths not yet entered into the models. Hard science that validates models and predictions and personal experiences and feelings in circumstances not yet validated and simulated by the models one has access to.

And that will also be the thing people will continue to be punished for, perhaps more so.

Or, you know, AI could liberate us, UBI could be come a reality, we’ll fully transition and it’ll all be net-zero carbon energy driven adaptation as we watch the temperature arc downward over the next century, building/awaiting our utopia.

I pay for Apple News+ partly because the ad experience is better than the open web. If it weren’t for that, I’d prefer Apple just be a payments middleman negotiating micropayments on the open web. It could be a better walled garden—give me Books features like highlights and notes!

A sigh of relief. I think I have a backlog of something on the order of 15,000 suspended sighs of relief—that is, breaths held—but I let that one rip. And gulped in a new one for the Supreme Court appeal to come.

Snow day

He whose face shall not be posted surveying the National Mall from the bottom of the sledding track on the Senate side.

(Apparently, later, actual Nazis came out. Pretty much since this dude was born, I’ve not gone out to document the actual self-described fascists who come to town, but there have been many. :/ )

Taken from Capitol Hill, a small child’s back is to the viewer, a man with a snowboard is walking towards us up a slight hill, and the Washington monument is visible in the distance. Everything is covered in snow.

Remembering, and onward

Aaron Swartz, ¡Presente!

A day late, but not forgotten. Far too late, but let me remember James Dolan in this breath too. I corresponded with Aaron briefly, in headier days. I worked alongside James for one evening in DC.

I can’t say I knew them but I saw and understood some of what they were doing and it’s worth.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of Dean Allen’s death.

I benefit today, with gratitude, from things all three built.

State of the World 2024: Ritual and Solidarity

The 25th annual State of the World thread on The Well has commenced. This is one of my favorite rituals. It can get a little hard on the “catastrophizing,” a little digressive, and it isn’t necessarily the most inclusive… it is what it is, and that is part of what makes it interesting. Not necessarily the be-all end-all on the “state of the world,” just this particular group’s (whoever that happens to be at a given time) sense, as much as they can write it out, as much as you or I might chime in, at that moment.

Much of the opening salvo relates to me, as I imagine it does any who have the privilege or wherewithal to look beyond the trenches they’re fighting in day to day.

I appreciate this especially, so far, from JD Work:

I will note that in any of the serious crisis contingencies that I have been involved in overseas, where everything is coming apart at once, those that made it through all shared common characteristic. ... It was those folks who could rely on their communities, and the networks of relationships they had built and nurtured over time, that endured. Even in the worst times.

Fairytale of Gaza

Sky News had a split screen for the funeral of Shane MacGowan and the United Nations Security Council meeting on the UAE resolution for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict. Sadly, unsurprisingly, we expect the United States to veto this call.

Perhaps these were seen as equal events (make no mistake, I am interested in both) because they’re things one might expect Bono to show up to? (Guess which one he [was actually reported to be]* at!)

The sorrow of Dubliners belting out “Fairytale of New York,” around the funeral procession is nothing compared to the cries of civilians in Gaza as thousands upon thousands of their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters are slain and hundreds of thousands are displaced by an occupying force’s collective punishment and overwrought rage.

Maybe it is a split screen because the United Nations being crippled by the United States again is, this time, a funeral for Gaza.

* It seems to be that ultimately Bono could not attend the funeral, despite Sky's earlier reporting at the Church. A recording of his reading was played amongst appearances from Johnny Depp and Nick Cave and bandmates. ...And after Sky stopped the split screen—in favor of MacGowan's service—I recreated it by putting up BBC World News and Al Jazeera on my laptop while keeping Sky on the TV.

Christmas is the only time my wife lets me pipe jazz over the household Sonos without objection. I make a playlist and sneak in some things that aren’t on swinging Xmas streams—sometimes tracks that aren’t at all seasonal.

Or I let SomaFM do it for me—they love to play.

Adjourned to the porch.

I said “it’s gonna freeze tonight, going to take the hose off, back in a minute.” The hint to the contrary was the whiskey in hand.

My son meets his mortality in a storybook

Tonight we read Dragons Love Tacos 2: The Sequel at bedtime. There’s a point early in the book when a time machine is introduced. You, the reader, are informed that you can go back to when you were a baby or into the future when you’re an old man.

I paused and said to my son, “Someday you will be an old man, isn’t that silly?” Or something like that.

He froze. Then he cautiously said “But I won’t die, will I?” I quickly said, “I don’t think you need to worry about that right now, let’s continue the story…”

He interjected with a cry, “And you won’t need me anymore!" He sobbed.

I think in that moment he realized he might be old and alone, and yes, he might die. And worse, I think he even steered his 4-year-old brain away from the idea that I will die. I hugged him and I said, “I will always need you. I will always love you. You are safe.”

He kept sobbing, I kept holding him and trying to whisper reassurances and we recovered soon and finished the book with laughs.

I wussed out, I think smartly, on dealing with it any more heads-on tonight. I might not be able to punt much longer. He has a hell of a memory and a lock on things that perturb him. I will hear about his or my death from him again soon.

The Hell I do not believe in is real

Children carrying other wounded children.

I’m already incensed, horrified, disgusted at the latest failures of humanity that have produced so many dead children, among so many other dead.

But my pacifist tendencies (the word “tendency” is doing a lot of the work, but it does have a breaking point) are tested at the murder and torture of children (as well as state violence pointed right at me—see, I’m ultimately not a pacifist).

Any response to such to do it ten or one hundred times more is a million times worse.

The Hell I do not believe in for an afterlife is visited upon these children now.

The spookiest thing about my son’s Halloween costume—a monster truck—is the carbon footprint of both the imagined thing, and the construction of the costume itself (so much plastic—but we are re-using a cousin’s costume, so there’s that).

It is, literally, an electric powered thing with a battery pack to light-up the headlights and simulate engine revving noises.

We’ll have fun tonight tearing up and down the sidewalks tongiht during this seemingly (and increasingly) rare reprieve where the weather is appropriately seasonal.

Happy Halloween and welcome to Samhain!

Maybe someday I will again travel solo (and not for work). As it stands, it’s before dawn in Seattle. I am “awake” with my very East Coast time-zoned toddler watching the nth episode of Super Kitties. This has been true for a while already this morning. And sure, I’m still grateful if bleary-eyed.

I believe in truth and reconciliation, full accountability of each and every one of those with power or who exercise violence, and in a zero state solution.

Maybe someday we’ll learn.

On what little patch of Earth will be left that we hope to sustain.