Thanksgivings

My brother’s favorite way of dividing the world into two kinds of people is to point out that there are people who relax by doing something and there are people who relax by doing nothing. Me, personally, I’m a “doing nothing” sort of person – my idea of relaxation involves very little motion of any kind – but I am not the planning part of the family and Kim is very much a “doing something” person. I generally end up having fun at these somethings and being glad that I did them, it has to be said, though I often end up rather tired.

Such was our Thanksgiving break.

I don’t know if you noticed, but Thanksgiving was incredibly late this year. Most people down at Home Campus were ready for it to be about a week – maybe two – before it actually was, and that’s just the faculty and staff. Fortunately for me three of my five classes didn’t meet that week – I told my First Year Seminar students that they had to schedule an advising appointment to choose classes for next semester instead, and my Zoom class goes out not only to Far Northern Campus but also to anywhere up to half a dozen high schools in that area, all of whom are closed that entire week because it’s Deer Season (a capitalized event in Wisconsin) and it just wasn’t worth holding class for the two or three students who would show up. They’d probably just sit there and be unhappy because they hadn’t gotten their deer yet.

We had two Thanksgivings, because one was clearly not enough.

I’m okay with that, actually. Thanksgiving has become one of my favorite holidays over the years mostly because it is one of the very few holidays on the American calendar that does not ask for more. It simply asks us to be glad for what we already have. You don’t get gifts. You don’t get candy. There are no fireworks. You’re not expected to buy flowers. It’s just there to remind you that even with all of the problems in the world you probably still have things to be grateful for and you should acknowledge those things now and then.

This is why I have very little patience for the killjoys who insist that the holiday is somehow irrevocably tainted by its origins or the football games or whatever. I am well aware of such things. But you know. That’s not what I’m celebrating here.

Our first Thanksgiving this year was with Kim’s side of the family – our annual jaunt up to Rory and Amy’s house. We are responsible for many of the baked goods for this event – the year we had to stay home because we all had the flu was calamitous that way – so we spent that morning baking all sorts of things. Pumpkin pie. Apple cranberry pie. Buns. Biscuits. And, of course, pizzelles, which are my contribution to all of this. I’m not sure I’d be allowed in without them, and at this point I’m not going to test that theory. Plus they’re fun to make. I set up my pizzelle iron in front of the television and watch large men chase a small object for an hour or so while I make them, and then the whole house smells of anise. There are worse ways to spend an hour.

Kim, Oliver, and I piled into the car as soon as the last pie was out of the oven and headed on up to the festivities. Lauren and Max drove over separately, though there was some confusion as to when we should arrive so they got there well before we did. It is strange to know that your child can just get there on her own with her boyfriend – it feels like a whole new stage of people gathering from separate places, even if it isn’t all that different from us picking them up on the way. Not sure why.

The evening was the usual chaos of food and family, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. I usually end up sitting in the front room or the dining room and talking with whoever happens by, which this year was mostly either Grandpa or Amy’s dad, along with our subgroup. Sometimes I’d wander into the kitchen and talk with people there, which had the advantage of also allowing me to graze on the appetizers set out on the big kitchen island. It’s all good. I don’t seem to take many pictures at Thanksgiving for some reason – perhaps I’m just happy to be part of a holiday instead of trying to record it as I usually do with events – but I got a couple.

We got back fairly late, moved the leftover bits of the pies from the van to my car since there was no room in the fridge and at this point in the year the garage is essentially one big cold storage unit, and left them there until Sunday when we had Thanksgiving II: The Turkening.

We wanted to do a smaller Thanksgiving on our own to go with the big family feast, perhaps just as a way to have more leftovers, and Sunday was pretty much the only day that we had open for that. And for reasons that will be explained in a future post, it worked out well as far as getting together, as Lauren and Max had come by on Saturday. So Sunday it was.

Kim did most of the cooking for this one – turkey, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, “dad rice,” cranberry sauce, and Aunt Linda’s Baked Pineapple Dish without which no holiday is complete, which is a lot for five people but then the leftovers were the point after all. We’ve already put Thanksgiving III: Bride of Turkey on the menu for later this week. My role was mostly hauling the turkey up from the basement to be prepped for cooking and then getting the table extended and the dishes set. We always bring out our wedding china and the silverware I inherited from my parents for this sort of thing, as well as the silver-rimmed glasses that were my dad’s pride and joy, since you might as well use the stuff.

Also, now that it is December and past the official date of Thanksgiving I will acknowledge the existence of Christmas, so Oliver, Max, and I put up the one stand of blue Christmas lights that we always have across the front of the house, a task that was both easier (more hands, plus no giant bushes in the front to work around this year) and harder (15F without the wind chill) than usual, but now the lights are up and glowing peacefully.

We had a lovely meal.

Afterward we all ended up in the living room collectively working on an online geography quiz because that’s just how we roll. You get a blank map of Africa and have to name all of the countries (we got about 95% of them) and then Europe (100%), Asia (95% or so), Oceana (100% but there aren’t that many), South America (100%) and North America (which has a lot of countries if you include all the Caribbean islands and we would have gotten 100% if the quiz had accepted the answer we kept trying to give it until it decided we were wrong and then gave us that same answer). You have fun your way, we’ll have fun our way.

Thus was our Thanksgiving break bookended. Of course, that left the two days in between, and naturally both of those were filled with events as well.

Something, not nothing, after all.

Twenty-Nine

After twenty-nine years you get to know someone.

You know most of what they like and don’t like. Not all, but most. You know the sorts of things that interest them. You know whether they want you to join them in this or that activity or just want to hare off and do it on their own.

You’ve heard the old stories. A lot of them, anyway. There are always a few surprises, and people find new things to like or become interested in after all. But if someone hasn't told you a story in nearly three decades chances are they're either not going to tell you or they've just completely forgotten about it themselves.

But all that means is that you get to make new stories together.

It’s been twenty-nine years since that crisp autumn day when Kim and I got married, here in Our Little Town. We’ve shared a lot since then, raised a family, traveled, seen, done, done again. We’ve told each other a lot of stories and gotten to know each other pretty well.

And here we are, making new stories.

Happy Anniversary to us!

Further Adventures in Technology

I spent most of my Saturday morning grading essays for an online class I teach, because that’s the kind of wild man I am these days. It’s one of those classes where the only real contact I have with students is grading their essays – everything else is front-loaded into the class site and they proceed at their own pace through the class, turning in essays as they go.

I’m not sure how I became a tech guy as far as classes go. It seems to have just happened gradually over time. I am the proverbial frog boiling in a digital soup.

I’m not much of a technological person. Computers are just black boxes where the internet is stored as far as I know, and don’t even get me started on the mysteries of what most of the “apps” on my phone are doing there. As far as I can tell their main purpose is to extract my email and sell it to spammers, which they do quite well. I am still getting spam advertisements in Hungarian from this summer, for example, because I had to put one of these apps on my phone in order to ride the trams in Budapest. Every so often I will copy the text of one of them and paste it into Google Translate to see whether it is congratulating me on my recent purchase of a bridge over the Danube or something similar, but so far it’s mostly been increasingly desperate attempts to get me to renew my tram pass. And you know, next time I am in Budapest I definitely will! But not now.

Most of my current confusion regarding technology these days seems to center around the various security measures that devices are implementing in order to make sure that only Russian intelligence officers have access to my accounts because they’re probably better at remembering my passwords than I am, after all.

Why the Kremlin would want to follow me on Instagram is kind of an open question, particularly since I have never actually posted anything there, but I have faith that answers will appear in due time.

Both my desktop computer at home (yes, kids, I still have one of those, now get off my lawn) and my phone have biometric security systems in place. My computer came with a keyboard that has a button on it where you put your fingertip (you do get to choose which finger) and it reads your fingerprint and logs you in. My phone relies on its camera for that, scanning my face to determine if it’s really me or not.

I wasn’t all that thrilled about either of these things, but they seem to work most of the time and that’s fine. It is a nuisance having to pick up my phone and stare directly into it in order to log into anything rather than just leaving it on my desk and tapping out a password, but as problems go these days it’s relatively minor after all.

The thing that I don’t get is that every so often both of these devices require me to enter my password in order for these biometric security systems to keep working.

Why?

I’m not sure how a random selection of characters (including at least one capital letter, one number, one “special” character, one Marvel character, three characters from the last movie I saw prior to setting this password, and the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem) is more secure than my fingerprint or my face. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t I have to use the biometrics to keep the password working?

There are probably technical reasons why they make me do it this way and I am sure that if someone were to explain them to me I would stare blankly at them and eventually say “That’s nice” in a vague sort of way until they gave up, so I’ll probably just live with the mystery of it.

In the meantime, I kind of enjoy giving my computer the finger.

The Family Cookbook

Sometime around the turn of the millennium my mother decided that what this family really needed was a cookbook, a collection of recipes from all across the family, and that she was the person to make this happen.

It turned out she was right about that.

In that pre-social-media age she sent out emails and made phone calls and in the end she collected a fair number of recipes including more than a few from her own parents, who had recently passed away. That might have been part of it, now that I think of it – a desire to see those old favorites preserved and passed down. My mother was a storyteller and she put little introductions in front of most of the recipes sharing some of those stories and had a forward to talk about the project, and at some point we all got a small package with a 3-ring binder full of family favorites.

It proved to be very useful, in the end. Not only was it a nice way to honor the various family members who contributed, but we’ve been making things out of that cookbook for nearly a quarter century now.

Three cheers for Aunt Linda’s Baked Pineapple, without which no holiday meal is complete!

But that was a surprisingly long time ago, and some of the people who contributed to that cookbook are no longer here and some other people in the family who are routinely cooking meals for themselves and others these days weren’t even born yet, so last Christmas my cousin Chris and I decided that what this family really needed was a Revised & Expanded Second Edition of the family cookbook and that we were the people to make this happen.

We were right about that too. I tell you, this family has some pretty good fortune-telling skills. It’s a shame we don’t play the lottery more often.

Chris and I put out a call to all of the various branches of the family early this year – or at least as many as we could. There were some we inadvertently missed and not everyone was interested, but over the next few months recipes came pouring in from all over the US – we’re a pretty spread out bunch these days, especially when you expand out to include all of the various in-laws who have made our lives richer over the years.

We are legion.

Chris is a graphic designer by trade so he handled all of the layout and artwork for the book. I’m a word guy who actually enjoys copy-editing, so a fair amount of that ended up as mine, and I ended up in charge of soliciting and receiving recipes though in the end both of us did that anyway. Chris also understands how Google Docs work so all I had to do was send him everything I received and then log in and make edits.

I found a printer here in Our Little Town who would put it all together for a reasonable sum, and they did a very nice job of it. It’s nearly two hundred pages long, this revised edition, and nicely coil-bound. I gave them the pdf that Chris finalized and then picked up the completed cookbooks a couple of weeks ago.

The printers also advised me to get it copyrighted, to avoid some copyright troll with a bot scraping Google Docs and publishing it as their own. That process turned out to be fairly simple, so now all three of us – me, Chris, and my mom – are listed as the copyright holders for the book. Family can share it, of course. But no bots.

There are two post offices here in Our Little Town – a big one out in the mall sprawl land, and a much smaller one downtown that’s only open around lunchtime. Not many people even know it exists, which is why I went there to mail them all off. It’s much nicer when you’re not holding anyone up and you can stand there and have a conversation with the postal worker who’s cranking out the mailing labels, one at a time.

They started to land last week and so far people seem to like them. This makes me happy.

This is the picture Chris chose for the cover. That’s my grandmother – my mom’s mother – and my dad in the little yard behind my grandparents’ house. The white building in the background was an octagonal gazebo that my grandfather used as a tool shed. It’s Labor Day, 1967, and the family has gathered to celebrate and eat, there being precious little distance between those two activities as far as my family is concerned. I’m somewhere running around the yard, a toddler dressed in something adorable no doubt. Neither Chris nor any of our siblings have been born yet, but my second cousins are both there. I can tell that my dad made the hamburgers because he firmly believed that hamburgers should be roughly spherical objects and dismissed anything more disc-like as “hockey pucks.”

I’m older now than my grandmother was in that photo. So is Chris. Time flies.

I love that they look happy. I love that we can continue this tradition of sharing good food with good people.

News and Updates

1. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is wasting no time in assembling the Worst Cabinet Ever – a motley collection of suck-ups, Fascists, pedophiles, white supremacists, delusionals, and blistering incompetents chosen solely for their sycophantic loyalty and guaranteed to make any situation worse – and it’s going to be a very, very long four years for anyone with more than six working brain cells. But even in the midst of collapse, life goes on. And sometimes you just have to look away from the horror show and focus on other things.

2. We got to celebrate Lauren’s birthday last week – rather later than her actual birthday, but there is never a bad time for a birthday celebration, really. We had a lovely dinner and lively conversation and then stopped over at Max’s house to say hello to David S. Pumpkin, and there are good things in the world, yes there are.

3. I have spent most of this week grading exams and discussion posts because last week was kind of a lost cause for focusing on anything other than the current crisis and students really don’t need that kind of thing reflected in their exams. I’m almost done now – I just have to get my last batch of exams scanned and sent off to all of the various places that my US1 class beams out to. They did pretty well, and that’s always a nice thing to see.

4. Facebook has decided I’m boring and honestly kudos to them for figuring that out but I have to say that I don’t think I’m boring in precisely the way that Facebook seems to believe. For much of the last month it has been showing me vast amounts of content from a site called “Death Stairs,” which is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin – apparently there are people who go out and photograph unsafe staircases and post them online with descriptions ranging from prosaic (“You could fix this with a couple of two-by-fours and a good set of pliers, you know…”) to purple (“…and then the Angel of Death shown ‘round about me …”) and then other people comment underneath. These posts compete for space with various reels showing people doing household projects in new and presumably innovative ways, which is a genre that might as well be in Sanskrit for all I can make sense of it. I find it kind of compelling that I have so soundly defeated the algorithm’s attempts to understand anything at all about me. Some AI overlords these guys are.

5. Kim and I have been discussing getting a new TV for a while now, or rather Kim has been doing that and I’ve mostly been nodding approvingly since I don’t watch enough television to have it matter one way or the other and she might as well get one she likes. The one we have is getting antiquated – they do that faster than they used to do now that they’re essentially computers – and with the Grand Tariff And Trade War in the offing we figured it was a good time to take care of such a purchase. They’re even on sale at Costco now, right in time for the holidays, so we went down and picked the smallest one they had and it seemed like a good fit until I tried to get it into the van, which should have been my first warning. Fortunately, three-dimensional chess with objects being stuffed into vehicles is one of my hidden talents and we did get it home, where we discovered that we’d been Warehoused. Things don’t seem big in a warehouse. You think the thing you’re buying is a perfectly reasonable size. Then you get it home where the ceilings are a normal height and realize that no, whatever is the proper word for the size of this thing it isn’t “reasonable.” And then you feel really, really grateful that you didn’t succumb to temptation and get any of the larger sizes on offer. We haven’t had time to set it up so it’s just sitting in a box in our living room, slowly deforming the joists underneath and blocking the cat’s path up to the window. Perhaps we’ll get to it this weekend.

6. We’re also trying to get the new showerhead put in. The old one finally died of lime poisoning and old age so Kim found one she liked and put it mostly in before calling me up to finish the tall parts. This didn’t go well and a small plastic gasket – the sort of thing that probably cost them three cents to make – snapped in half. It turns out that this brand of shower heads doesn’t allow replacement parts to be sold by third parties such as your local hardware store. Also, their customer service center is only open during weekdays for forty-five minutes a day, and their website was designed by Neolithic goat herders who had heard of the idea of exchanging money for goods but wanted nothing to do with it. In the end I finally did speak with a customer representative who told me that the gasket was “not a replaceable part” so they were going to send me an entirely new showerhead. “You realize that this is not a sustainable business model,” I told her. “I know,” she said, “but it will be there in a few days.” It’s sitting in the dining room now, not all that far from the television, and someday we’ll get to that as well.

7. We are deep into this year’s rendition of Great British Bake Off and so far so good even if my personal favorite was just voted off. They’ve cut down the nonsense (so far no “tackos”) and focused more on actual baking, which is nice. And the contestants are the usual assortment of decent people who get along and try to help each other. It’s nice to know that such a place exists.

8. It may actually be autumn now, halfway through November. I finally started wearing long sleeve shirts anyway, though the rabbits are still outside since we have not really had any extended freezes that would force us to bring them in. Honestly if we’d covered the garden for those two nights in early October we’d probably still be harvesting tomatoes and peppers.

9. Over the last two weeks of my classes I have gotten to tell three of my all-time favorite history stories – all of which have, at one time or another, been featured here in this space – and they never get old.

A Note for the Future

In the end they didn’t even need to stage a coup. The voters of the United States simply handed power back to a twice-impeached convicted felon running on a platform of open fascism, a man who tried to overthrow the government and who hasn’t been able to form a coherent sentence since 2019. An adjudicated rapist, self-declared sexual predator, and serial adulterer who publicly lusted after his own daughter and buried his ex-wife on a golf course. On and on.

If this election proved anything it is that the American public would rather elect a fascist than a woman. That 71 million Americans do not regard committing rape as a disqualifier. That 71 million Americans would gladly trade the rights of their fellow citizens for the illusion of a future with cheaper eggs.

How cheaply my fellow Americans sell their rights and freedoms.

We had four years of conclusive evidence that the man was unfit for office, that he was a small, petty little grifter incapable of rising to any occasion larger than his own personal greed, and yet here we are.

You will notice that the American left (as much as the US has anything even remotely like a left) is not throwing a toddler-level tantrum over this – not claiming that it was somehow rigged, not threatening violence over the results, not filing dozens of frivolous lawsuits alleging hallucinatory conspiracy theories and fleecing donors to fund it all. Adults understand that sometimes things don’t go the way you want them to.

We just understand, in a way that the rest of the country hasn’t figured out quite yet, that this isn’t going to go well for anyone, not just us.

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is everything the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to prevent and everything the Greatest Generation went to Europe to fight, and yet in January he will be installed into power. He has no grasp of law, Constitutions, morals, or anything other than raw power and insatiable greed.

Look for reprisals against “the enemy within.” Look for pogroms against anyone not Just Like Him. Look for the darkness spreading out like a cancer from his supporters.

We’ve seen this movie. It didn’t end well in Germany in the 1930s and it won’t end well here.

So what do patriotic Americans do now?

We resist.

We stand for the things that make this country better, not worse.

We do whatever we have to do to keep fascism at bay.

And in the end we will see if the American republic still stands in January 2029 or not.

Here I stand. I can do no other.

An Election and a Warning

Sometime Tuesday night, probably around 9pm Eastern Time, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will declare victory in the presidential election.

He will do so in the same rambling, semi-coherent monotone he has used for the last few years as his mental condition has deteriorated into an angry and paranoid dementia, smug with the reassurance of a man who feels the world owes him whatever he wants whenever he wants and who has never once in his life faced any consequences for his actions.

He will do so regardless of the actual vote totals. He will likely do so more strenuously if the results show him losing, in fact. It’s not about reality. It’s about creating a pretext for action.

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has not been trying to win a majority of the votes, after all. He has tried twice before and been overwhelmingly rejected both times, though once – thanks to the partisan gerrymandering of the Electoral College – he slithered into power anyway. He knows he cannot win the majority of the votes of Americans. He will lose the popular vote by somewhere between two and eight million votes, just as he has always done. It’s been eight years with this sad clown. Nobody has changed their minds about him in his favor. He has made no effort to broaden his base of supporters or reach out beyond the hardcore MAGA cult. His entire campaign has instead been a setup, laying the groundwork for the next stage of the ongoing right-wing coup against the United States.

When Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump makes his declaration, the extremist right-wing machinery that surrounds him and props him up like the hollow man he is will shift into high gear and launch its all-out war on the electoral process. There will be lawsuits. There will be threats. There will be hoarsely shouted assertions that the only acceptable alternative is to install Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump into power because any result that doesn’t do that must by definition be fraudulent.

There will be blood.

Make no mistake, folks. The neofascist right has been gearing up for this moment for years, ever since they were forced to back down in January 2021. They recognize no laws but their own privilege. They recognize no morals but their own desires. They think they can shoot their way to power. It has happened before, after all, in other places and other times, and the United States is not immune to history. The FBI and US intelligence agencies have reported that the chatter in right-wing circles online almost exactly mirrors what it was in early January 2021 when the neofascists nearly overthrew the government and installed their dictator into office against the will of the American people. The leaders and masters of that insurrection have walked free so far, and an insurrection that goes unpunished is called a dress rehearsal.

They have the support of millions of GOP voters who think they’re not neofascists but are deluding themselves - a PRRI survey conducted in the last couple of weeks noted that 24% of Republican voters think Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump should seize power regardless of the actual outcome of the election. That’s what dictators do. That’s what Fascists do. That’s what 24% of Republicans think is appropriate in the United States.

One out of four, more or less.

The neofascists do not control the levers of power at the moment, however. They do not control the military. They do not control the security forces. And most Americans want to see this country continue the centuries-old tradition of the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next, a tradition that was brutally shattered in January 2021. The flip side of that PRRI poll, after all, is that three out of four Republicans – along with near unanimous majorities of Democrats and Independents – reject the idea that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump should seize power regardless of the election results, as all Americans should do. Unless all of that changes the neofascists cannot win, but they can do damage.

Americans must be prepared to face this onslaught and see it defeated. Americans must be prepared to block those who would destroy the republic and replace it with dictatorship.

Americans must be ready.

We will say to the neofascists, we outnumber you. We will say to them, we will see you fail. We will say to them, we will see you forgotten, your plans turned to dust, your names turned to ashes, your memory erased.

Watch your back, my fellow Americans. Tomorrow is not the end of this contest, but simply the beginning of the next phase.

Birthday Wishes

There aren’t many milestones in American culture once you get past the age of 21.

There’s a few, of course. You can rent a car at 25. You can also run for the House of Representatives. You have to be 30 to be a Senator, and 35 to be president, if that’s something you think is interesting. You start to qualify for senior discounts at 50, and sometime after 60 you get to retire though they keep pushing that date back and eventually it won’t happen at all so be quick about it.

But there’s a long gap after 21 and to be honest not many of those other things are all that exciting to most people. Either way there are no milestones associated with turning 22. It’s one of those years where it’s kind of more of the same only older.

Those birthdays are worth celebrating as well, though.

It is a lovely thing to have made it one more trip around the sun, a thing guaranteed to nobody so it should be celebrated when it happens after all. You learn new things, experience new things, and grow in new directions. Those trips have added up over the years, and it’s always a strange thought to realize this vibrant, interesting adult isn’t a child anymore because it all happened so quickly. From one year to the next it doesn’t seem like anything changes but then you look at the cumulative effect and suddenly things really are different and you’re not sure how .

That’s why I write things down.

We’re not going to see Lauren tonight – it’s Halloween on a big college campus and there are more than enough other things going on to keep her occupied – but we’ll get together next week to celebrate. Holidays happen when you have time, and the important thing is to celebrate them together. Eventually she will hare off into her own life far from here and these opportunities will grow few and far between so we’re going to enjoy them while we have them.

And we will celebrate, because Lauren is worth celebrating.

Happy birthday, Lauren.

I’m proud of you.

The Reviews are In!

You know what I think of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. I’ve made no secret of my contempt for him since he first metastasized across the American body politic in 2015. But what do the people who know him best think? The people who have worked in his administration? Who are members of his own party? Who support conservative causes in general? Perhaps even part of his family?

Let’s find out, shall we?

--

General James Mattis (USMC, ret), former Secretary of Defense

Trump's use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice. Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people - does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.

General John Kelly (USMC, ret), former Secretary of Homeland Security and former Chief of Staff

He certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure. He never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world, and by power I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted.

He’s certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values, the way we look at everything, to include family and government — he’s certainly the only president that I know of, certainly in my lifetime, that was like that.

A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.

General Mark Milley (US Army, ret), former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Trump is a wannabe dictator. We don't take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America - and we're willing to die to protect it.

A fascist to the core.

Fiona Hill, former advisor on Europe and Russia

He was extremely vulnerable to manipulation. And that became a problem for him as a president. And what I mean by that is, he had a very fragile ego, and he was very susceptible to flattery, as well as taking massive offense, as we all saw, to any kind of criticism.

Mark Esper, former Secretary of Defense

I do regard him as a threat to democracy, democracy as we know it, our institutions, our political culture, all those things that make America great and have defined us as, you know, the oldest democracy on this planet.

Trump is not fit for office because he puts himself first and I think anybody running for office should put the country first.

John Bolton, former National Security Advisor

In no arena of American affairs has the Trump aberration been more destructive than in national security. His short attention span (except on matters of personal advantage) renders coherent foreign policy almost unattainable.

Mike Pence, former Vice President

I believe anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.

It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year.

Alyssa Farah Griffin, former Communications Director

He is wholly unfit to be in office.

Rex Tillerson, former Secretary of State

There were multiple occasions where, in my view, the actions the president wanted to take were not consistent with our national security objectives. ... His understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of U.S. history was really limited.

Miles Taylor, former official in the Department of Homeland Security

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.

Dick Cheney, former vice president for George W. Bush

In our nation’s 246-year- history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power, after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big.

Representative John Boehner (R-OH), former Speaker of the House

Trump incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November. He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.

Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY)

The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), former Senate Majority Leader

Many politicians sometimes make overheated comments or use metaphors. ... That’s different from what we saw. This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.

Mick Mulvaney, former Chief of Staff

I am working hard to make sure that someone else is the nominee.

Anthony Scaramucci, former Director of Communication

Trump's going to make things rougher for people. He has already said he's going after his adversaries using the Department of Justice. When someone's telling you they're going to flex and be a dictator on day one and go after their adversaries, this is against the 200+ year experiment of America.

Open letter signed by 13 former Trump administration officials

Donald Trump's disdain for the American military and admiration for dictators like Hitler is rooted in his desire for absolute, unchecked power. This is a man who threw his own Vice President – Mike Pence – at a violent mob in a desperate bid to hold on to power. When Donald Trump says he wants to be a "dictator" on "day one" and deploy the military against American citizens he deems “the enemy from within" - he means it.

Open letter signed by 233 mental health professionals

Trump exhibits behavior that tracks with the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s (DSM V) diagnostic criteria for “narcissistic personality disorder,” “antisocial personality disorder,” and “paranoid personality disorder,” all made worse by his intense sadism, which is a symptom of malignant narcissism. This psychological type was first identified by German psychologist Erich Fromm to explain the psychology of history’s most “evil” dictators. … To make matters worse, Trump appears to be showing signs of cognitive decline that urgently cry out for a full neurological work-up, including an MRI and neuropsychological testing. These symptoms include: a dramatic decrease in verbal fluency, tangential thinking, diminished vocabulary, overuse of superlatives and filler words, perseveration, confabulation, phonemic paraphasia, semantic paraphasia, confusing people (not just names), as well as exhibiting deteriorating judgment, impulse control, and motor functioning (including a wide-based gait). We suspect the results of such an evaluation would be disqualifying.

Open letter signed by over 100 former national security officials (including ambassadors, admirals, generals, and civilian officials)

Mr. Trump threatens our democratic system; he has said so himself. He has called for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution. He said he wants to be a “dictator,” and his clarification that he would only be a dictator for a day is not reassuring. He has undermined faith in our elections by repeating lies, without evidence, of “millions” of fraudulent votes. He has shown no remorse for trying to overturn the 2020 election on January 6th, promises to pardon the convicted perpetrators, and has made clear he will not respect the results of the 2024 election should he lose again. That alone proves Mr. Trump is unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.

William T. Kelley, professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania

Donald Trump was the DUMBEST GODDAM student I EVER had.

The American Conservative Magazine

Trump has basically made himself into Putin’s prison bride.

Tara Setmayer, former Communications Director for Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)

He demonstrates daily how unfit he is to have the most powerful position in the world.

J. Michael Luttig, conservative former US Circuit Court of Appeals judge

Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. They would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020. I don't speak those words lightly. I would have never spoken those words ever in my life, except that that's what the former president and his allies are telling us

Mary Trump, niece and a trained mental health professional

I don’t care what his cult says. I know him personally. And here’s the truth: My uncle is the only person I know without one redeeming quality. Not a single one.

Doing My Bit

I have done my bit for democracy.

I have cast my ballot in this most critical of elections – the most recent of them, anyway. It is easy to get jaded by all of the “most critical elections” that we’ve been having recently, but the sad fact is that whenever an outright Fascist has a chance to win it really is critical that he be destroyed at the ballot box so that we don’t need to do that in the inevitable violence that will result if he wins. Fascists do not tolerate dissent well, and they like the Big Shiny of jackbooted thugs enforcing their whims. We’ve seen this movie before. It didn’t end well. It needs to be cut off before it starts.

Do not be jaded, because it really is that important. Do not be discouraged by the prophets of doom who see no hope, because while there is life there is hope and if they want me they can goddamn well take me themselves because I’m not turning myself in. Do not be misled by the propagandists who tell you that your vote doesn’t matter, because they wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop you from voting if that were true.

Do not go gently into the long dark night of Fascism, but rage against the dying of the light until the fading stops and the light returns.

I left work a bit early today, as it is a Friday and for long and frankly rather aggravating reasons that I will not go into here there are vanishingly few classes taught at Home Campus on Fridays and therefore equally few students who want to make appointments with their advisor on that day, and I headed over to City Hall. Here in Wisconsin we’ve been able to do early in-person voting since the beginning of the week and I have to say that this is an idea that has definitely found its audience.

I got there at 3:30 or so on a Friday afternoon, about an hour before the place closes, and there was quite a line in front of me. 

It took me over an hour to get to the voting machine.

It has to be said that the line moved pretty briskly. It wasn’t stagnant – it was just that long. If nothing else, this gives me some hope for the survival of American democracy.

They’ve redone the process since the last election where I voted early. You used to get a big paper ballot and you’d fill in the bubbles by hand with a marker and then you’d fold it three or four times to get it into the envelope and turn it back in to the clerk. Now you get a thin blank ballot – maybe 4 inches by 11 inches or so – and you take it to a touchscreen computer. You feed it into the slot, then vote on the computer and when you’re done it gives you a chance to say “Yes, that’s what I wanted to do” or “No, let me change that one” and then when you say you’re done it prints out the ballot with your choices on it. You fold that in half, stick it in the envelope, and then give it to the volunteers at the next table. You have to sign it in front of them, but then you can go.

They did give me the traditional sticker, which I appreciated.

We are facing a future where an outright Fascist, a 34-time convicted felon facing more than four dozen other criminal indictments, a self-declared sexual predator, a coddler of dictators and spiraling dementia patient whose previous term in office was marked by blistering incompetence, overt bigotry (not surprising, given the endorsements he received from every major neo-Nazi and white supremacist group in America), a response to a global pandemic so deliberately botched that peer-reviewed scientific papers attribute the unnecessary deaths of over a quarter million Americans directly to his leadership, a recession that started even before that, an unprecedented two impeachments, and a treasonous insurrection, somehow has an even money chance to be reinstalled into power.

This cannot happen if the American republic is to survive.

I have done my bit.

If you value the republic, you will do the same.

A Wedding Up North

Many years ago, somewhat on a whim, I signed up to be an ordained minister in the Church of the Latter Day Dude. It’s based on the old movie The Big Lebowski and its basic theology is “don’t be a jerk.” I can go with that. I think more people should subscribe to it, actually. It would make the world a better place.

Not long after that a friend found out about this when she was planning her wedding and asked me if I would officiate, so I double checked with the local County Clerk about that and we determined that since the LDD Church was not a registered 501c3 nonprofit it didn’t qualify under Wisconsin law but that I could just as easily sign up for the Universal Life Church – whose basic theology is much the same and which is a 501c3 – and do it that way, so I did. I officiated her wedding and another a few years later.

This past weekend I got to do my third.

I’ve known Sherry since we were both shelving books at the library here in Our Little Town way back at the turn of the millennium and we’ve been friends ever since. When she brought Evelyn over for dinner a couple of summers ago we could tell there was something special there and it is nice to be right about the good things.

The wedding was up in northern Wisconsin, so on Friday Kim and I drove up to our friend Joe’s house, not that far away. It is good to see friends when you can, especially if they’re more or less on the way and are happy to let us stay with them and fill us up with good food. We had a lovely time hanging out with Joe and Lisa and the various dogs, and Kim got a chance to wander around in the woods which doesn’t happen very often here in Our Little Town, particularly with me around, so it worked out very well.

Saturday afternoon we continued our way north to Hayward, where the wedding would be – an outdoor sculpture garden next to the local library. Most of the guests were either librarians or people associated with librarians so it all fit together nicely. It was brisk and a bit rainy for the rehearsal but we managed to get all of the blocking down – who enters when from where, what do they do when they get there, what music plays when, that sort of thing. Sometimes it helps having spent three or four decades backstage. Kim and I checked into our AirB&B afterward and then went back into town for the after-rehearsal party at a nice little winery there.

We had the early part of Sunday to ourselves and spent a fair bit of it talking with our AirB&B hosts, who seemed like nice people. We found a wooded trail to walk for a while, had lunch at a local diner, and then wandered around downtown Hayward taking in the place a bit. It’s an entertaining place to visit.

And then the time for the wedding was at hand.

I like weddings. They’re generally happy affairs, and it’s a lovely thing to see two people who love each other enough to want to spend the rest of their lives together. Sherry, Evelyn and I had worked out the basic structure of the service beforehand and I spent much of the last couple of weeks working on the details.

It went very well.

It was a bright and sunny day, rather warm for northern Wisconsin in late October but pretty much exactly the sort of day you’d design for an outdoor wedding if you had the chance. All of the various parties made it up to their positions without mishap. I got through my homily (“Abide with each other”) and did not lose the rings. They wrote their own vows and did them well. They kissed. And then there they were – legally wedded, ready for a life together. There is good in this world, and when you get a chance to be a part of it you should take it.

Kim and I couldn’t really stay afterward – it’s a long ride from Hayward back to Our Little Town and Monday was a workday – but it was worth the drive.

Congratulations to Sherry and Evelyn! I wish you a lifetime of love and happiness.

News and Updates

1. Another year of Why Can’t Us? being answered by “because you lost to the other team,” in this case the NY Mets, a team that never has to win another game again as far as I am concerned. Alas, my poor Phillies – a fantastic season cut too short, and now we are left with the dire prospect of either the Mets, the Yankees, the Dodgers or the Cleveland Team becoming World Series Champions. It is a good thing I don’t follow baseball anywhere near much as I once did or this would be depressing.

2. I just want to point out the fact that for about a quarter of an hour during the season opener last week the Philadelphia Flyers power play – a facet of their game that ranked dead last in the NHL last season and likely cost them the playoff spot that they were shockingly in a position to achieve with fewer than ten games left in the season – was scoring at a 100% rate. This is a mathematical fact and I am going to treasure it even as things regress to the mean once again because why not.

3. Also, the Premier League is back in full swing and has been for a while and my Wolves are looking like prime relegation fodder this year, which is sad because I have no idea if I will be able to watch them once that happens. Everything is so balkanized now – even the NHL is spread across multiple networks, each of which requires its own subscription, so half the time I couldn’t watch the Flyers even if I wanted to and thus I feel less guilty about not doing so. I forget which comedian said it, but someday soon they will start to bundle all the subscriptions into One Big Subscription and then sell it to you as “cable television.”

4. I have mowed the lawn one last time and put the mower away for the season. It’s not supposed to get over 82F (28C) again this year, though it would not surprise me at all if it did. Folks, the climate isn’t changing – the climate has changed. We’re just trying to figure out where it’s going next, is all. If you don’t believe me, consider that Asheville NC, a city in the mountains of western North Carolina 300 miles from salt water – was just wiped out by a hurricane. On balance, mowing the lawn is not that much of an issue, really.

5. Ancestry says I’m back up to 76% Italian in my heritage, which is fascinating since my dad’s side of the family was Very Much Not Italian so I’m not entirely sure where the other 26% comes from. In the decade or so since my mother convinced me to do this my heritage has never been calculated at less than 55-60% Italian and I have to wonder just how strong those genes really are.

6. We have reached the part of the school year where my office is jam-packed with students and every single one of them is bringing a new and exciting disease with them like an offering. Some of them are pretty exotic – did you know people still get whooping cough? this is what happens when antivaxxers are allowed to walk the streets unsupervised – and others are just the standard run of the mill colds, flus, and general cruds. Pretty soon I will have collected the whole set and can trade them in for valuable prizes to be named later.

7. I have two long term projects that are coming to an end soon and I’m not sure how that will feel. I suppose I will find out.

8. It is a sad thing when beloved authors reach a point where they no longer feel the need to listen to editors. I’m just about finished a 900pp book that really could have been a 300pp book without losing anything of any real significance and it’s just a good thing that this particular author is a talented enough writer that you don’t feel too bad about the extra pages, though a competent editor would have taken a hacksaw to that manuscript and made it a much better story.

9. One of the local service organizations had its annual Giant Used Book Sale this weekend and we went because we like to do that sort of thing and it’s a good organization to support. We even found a few books to take home with us, thus beginning the replenishment project after the recent deaccessioning. Wheels in wheels.

10. We have hit our first frost here in Baja Canada, a month after we should have. We were pulling jalepeños out of the garden as recently as this weekend. Strange times indeed.

A Few Thoughts on the State of the Election Campaign

1. We’re coming to the end of the election season and the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump remains a viable candidate is a damning indictment of American patriotism, morality, and intelligence. He’s not even bothering to hide the fact that he has gone Full On Fascist these days. Not that he could stop himself if he tried – the man is a walking 25th Amendment dementia case who hasn’t been able to form a coherent sentence since 2018 and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the White House even as a tourist. But Fascists gonna Fascist, I guess, and he does seem to be drawing such volk to him like flies on dogshit. If you vote for this guy, guess what that makes you? Go on, guess! You are the company you choose. You can’t claim ignorance this time. You know what he’s planning. You know what he will do. He’s told you, loudly, at every available opportunity. Even through the haze of his senility the crystal-clear lodestar of his ideology remains. Either you stand with those who fought WWII to destroy this sort of thing or you stand with the people they fought. And yes, I mean that in every historical sense. If Trump and his supporters don’t want me to call them Fascists they should stop doing what the Fascists did.

2. I don’t know if you caught the recent statement by General Mark Milley (US Army, Ret.), the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – i.e. the highest ranking military officer this country has – but as you would expect from a soldier he minces no words in describing Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.” And yet Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s cult following is stronger than ever, which tells you all you need to know about who they are.

3. On that note, just this past weekend Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump called for using the military to round up his political opponents and anyone he decides is “radical,” which effectively means anyone who dares to disagree with Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump by contradicting his policies, being the wrong sexual orientation, having non-white skin, belonging to a union, or exercising the rights of American citizens in any way that doesn’t contribute to the fawning adoration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, and if you want to know how dictatorships start this is a good place to start looking.

4. You could also look at his repeated descriptions of immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the nation or his descriptions of his political enemies as “vermin” who need to be eradicated, both of which are direct quotes from Adolf Hitler and thus we come full circle to point number 1 above.

5. FEMA announced this week that thanks to the batshit insane conspiracy theories thrown around by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his loyal minions they have had to suspend hurricane aid efforts in western North Carolina because aid workers are being threatened with violence. Sometimes you feel tempted to step back and admire the aggressively stupid asshattery of the American right as a platonic ideal of evil that really shouldn’t have been achievable in this fallen material world, and then reality sets in and you say to yourself “What the FUCK is WRONG with these people?” instead. There is either no possible answer to that question or there is an answer that will take the rest of your life to list in all of its details and either way we are so, so screwed as a country.

6. Watch what Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s campaign is doing, here in the closing stages of the election. They’re only very occasionally sending him to swing states where the vote will be close. He’s too much of a coward and a dementia patient to accept a second debate with Kamala Harris, even on Fox where she has offered to meet him. He’s not doing interviews. Honestly his campaign is not really sending him anywhere much at all – a few highly scripted rallies to rile up his cult members here and there, but his disappearance from the campaign trail at this late hour is unprecedented for a modern election. He’s not trying to win votes. He and his campaign know very well that he cannot win any sort of free and fair election. The Republican candidate for president has won the popular vote only once since 1989 – a record of futility unmatched in American history by any major party – and this year will be no different. He will lose the popular vote by somewhere between two and eight million votes just as he has done twice before – it’s been eight years, nobody’s changed their mind about this neo-Fascist toddler. Instead what you’re seeing is a concentrated effort by his minions to suppress votes and sow chaos and disorder so he can claim the election isn’t valid and seize power some other way – either through GOP control of the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court or through a repeat of the Trump Insurrection of 2021. We stand on a precipice, folks. It’s a long way down.

7. If you’re planning to vote for a third-party candidate this year because your precious “principles” won’t allow you to take the better of the two candidates on offer, just know that you are part of the problem and you will not be forgiven for your smug refusal to notice the world beyond your own fingertips. Moral purity is a luxury enjoyed by people with no responsibilities and no concern for the consequences of their actions. Politics isn’t about purity. It’s not about finding a perfect unicorn candidate. It’s about finding the candidate who will get you further along the path you want to go than the other candidate will. There is only one candidate in this election who is normal – who has pluses and minuses and will leave this nation intact when she is done with it, and there is another who represents everything the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to prevent and the Greatest Generation went to Europe to fight. A vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for the second one, and you either know that or you don’t.

8. The fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has successfully pushed most of his many indictments and prosecutions beyond the election and hasn’t already been jailed for his crimes (some of which the United States has, in the past, executed people for) is a travesty of justice that will haunt the United States for however long it has left.

9. If you’re not making backup plans for when Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump seizes power, you’re kidding yourself. There will be blood. He’s promised that. His cult is eager for it. Fascists do not take kindly to dissent or opposition and those of us who have been banging this gong since 2015 are probably on a list somewhere already. Make your plans now.

10. By my count I have received 17 glossy campaign flyers in the mail frantically attempting to distance Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump from Project 2025, the blueprint for Fascism that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s supporters and former administration staff put together for the initial blitzkrieg against the United States should he be installed into power next year. You can understand why they are trying to distance Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump from a document that mentions him by name over 300 times and which contains policy measures he repeats at nearly every public appearance, I suppose, since Project 2025 is the pure distilled essence of authoritarian dictatorship and is desperately unpopular even among self-declared conservatives. It calls for destroying the merit-based civil service that has defined the federal government since the 19th century and replacing it with a force of toadies, lickspittles, fanatics, and slaves loyal only to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. It calls for expanding the power of the presidency until it is unchecked and uncontrollable. It calls for the elimination of the Department of Education, NOAA (the agency that provides weather forecasting) and FEMA. It calls for a concentrated surge of bigotry and hatred against anyone who isn’t straight, white, or male. It calls for a national ban on abortion, contraception, and anything that might give women the idea that they and not some old white men in a far-off capital actually control their bodies. It will end Social Security, overtime pay, and the Affordable Care Act which tens of millions of Americans rely on for their care. It will get rid of the FDIC and remove regulations on banks so that they can go bankrupt with ease just as they did in the 1920s and take your money with them. It effectively makes the United States the personal property of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his servants, and if that doesn’t kindle you to incandescent rage you really need to re-examine your life choices.

Testing

I had to get my sleep tested this week because apparently I’ve been doing it incorrectly.

You would think that after nearly six decades of practicing I would have it pretty much down by now but you would be wrong.

If you’ve never done this, it’s one of those minor yet uncomfortable things that happen as you age your way through the process of medical care and it requires you to navigate the Byzantine complexity of the American healthcare system which is designed to protect the wealth of its corporate shareholders rather than anyone’s actual health. Getting useful medical results out of it is an unintended though occasionally helpful byproduct of its profiteering, but FREEDUM and this is why we can’t have nice things in the US.

Sometime over the summer I went in to see my regular doctor, which is a statement that puts me in a distinct minority in this country (see above, re: FREEDUM) so I’m grateful that I at least have this privilege. It has come in handy at times.

This is the third regular doctor I have had in the last few years as the ones I pick have a distinct tendency to retire no matter how old they are. I don’t think this is because of me since I don’t see them that often, but I cannot rule it out. The hospital where they work then asks me to pick a new one and I have no idea on what basis I would make that choice so I just take whoever has the next available appointment and since this usually gives me six to eight months to get used to the idea of seeing someone else it has worked pretty well so far. This particular new guy seems like he knows what he’s doing even if he’s not the most sociable person I’ve ever met. I’ve seen him twice now – once for the “Hi, I’m your new patient, please renew all my prescriptions” meeting that you have to have every time you switch doctors and once for this – and we have yet to have a conversation that isn’t directly connected to medicine or contains a sentence longer than seven words. But so far, so good.

He gave me the required referral for the doctor who would actually do anything connected to sleeping, and that sat on my desk for a couple of months while Life Happened. Eventually I made an appointment with the Sleep Doctor – either they’re not terribly busy or I got very lucky because that only required a wait measured in weeks rather than months – and I went to meet her and fill out more paperwork repeating all of the things that are already on file (medications, allergies, history) and then discuss the new things.

After the examination she said (in a much more professional and polite way, but this is effectively the gist of it) that I am old and fat and yeah these things will happen under those conditions so we’ll do the sleep test to get it confirmed in a way the insurance company that actually determines your medical care will accept and then figure out what to do from there.

This required me to respond to multiple texts from an equipment company confirming that I did actually want them to send me equipment. Of course I don’t read (let alone respond to) texts from numbers I don’t recognize so this took several tries before it worked out, but last week an envelope with equipment in it appeared on my front doorstep along with dire warnings that this test had to be started THAT NIGHT and the equipment returned within 48 hours or there would be CONSEQUENCES.

It would probably go on my Permanent Record.

None of that happened as far as I know. I don’t have access to my Permanent Record so that’s still an open question. But the rest of it? Not so much.

I put the equipment aside on the first day because I had a lot of grading to do and the math just didn’t work out – you have to commit to a certain amount of sleep time for this and that just wasn’t going to happen. But the next night seemed more doable.

For equipment that came in an envelope there certainly was a lot of it.

The main bit was an electronic recording unit about three inches square and maybe half an inch thick. It came with a two-inch wide elastic band that I was supposed to strap around my chest and then snap the recorder to it so that it sat right on my breastbone. It had a full complement of BlinkenLights and made me feel like Ultraman.

There was a cable that screwed into it that went to a sensor that clamped onto one of my fingers like it was trying to feed off of it and a tube that screwed into the unit somewhere else that I was supposed to loop over my ears and then shove up my nose except that my ears really don’t accommodate such things well so I had to just tighten it around my head and hope for the best.

It didn’t work the first night – the BlinkenLights swirled red at me the next morning – so I had to do it again the next night and that seemed to take.

I have no idea what it was actually measuring as I got basically no sleep either of those nights. I find anything on my face to be deeply uncomfortable and every time I tried to move all the various cables and cords would tangle together into a knot. So as far as I know this test will result in my immediate hospitalization and they will put me on a diet consisting of nothing but Ambien and vodka just to keep me unconscious for a while.

It's been 22 years since the last time I graduated from an educational institution. I thought I was done failing tests.

That Point in the Semester

We’ve reached that point of the semester where all you can do is try to keep up.

The first two or three weeks of the semester are hellaciously busy for advisors. Students are coming in to get their classes straightened out – adding things, dropping things, trying to decide whether to do either of those things. They need to make sure their financial aid is straightened out, which has been a nightmare the last couple of years with all the changes made to the FAFSA and the deliberate underfunding of grant aid by state governments. They need to make sure their bill is paid. They need to know how to pay these bills, a Byzantine process with more options than are probably healthy. They need to get the hang of being in college in general, which is not as straightforward as people think. College is an artificial environment and it’s hard to explain if you haven’t been through it. There are a lot of unwritten rules and cultural assumptions and part of being an advisor is helping students navigate through that. It hits hard in the first couple of weeks.

Things calm down for advisors a bit after that, but for faculty that’s when it all starts to ramp up. You’re through the introductory material by then and heading into the heart of the syllabus where things get more complicated and more challenging for both students and professors. Assignments are coming in that need to be graded and if you are basing your assignments on when they naturally fall in the sequence of the material covered (as opposed to, say, trying to spread them out across the calendar to ease your workload) you may find yourself giving exams in every single class you teach in the same week. That’s just how it works out. Have fun grading it all at once. Meanwhile the administration is peppering you with requests for progress reports, alerts, and other such bureaucracy designed to increase student retention so the advisors can reach out to the students who need help and you know that this is important but it is another task on an already large and growing pile.

Then advising gets busy again. Students have a few grades back to them and they’re panicking about some of their classes – sometimes justifiably so – and you have to figure out whether to encourage them to persevere (“This is salvageable if you can do X, Y, and Z”) or cut their losses (“We have a form for just this situation”). You also have to reassure them that this is normal, that setbacks happen, that they can certainly move forward from here, and if they do find themselves in a worst-case scenario where everything collapses around them anyway that college is not a one-and-done experience and they can always come back. There’s a reason we have forms for those situations, after all. There’s also a reason that GPAs tend to rise over time – not because anyone gets smarter, but because students figure out how the place works.

It's a back and forth pendulum of frantic activity.

And if your job entails both advising and faculty duties, well, the busy never ends. It just switches from one to the other depending on what you want to focus on today.

The students are in the same boat, by the way, which is why in my First Year Seminar classes I always schedule the mental health and wellness unit for mid-October. This is about the point in the semester when we start losing people.

Somewhere in there one must eat, sleep, and occasionally do something that isn’t related to any of this because if you don’t take breaks now and then you will eventually stop functioning at all. Fitting these things in can be a puzzle.

We press on.

News and Updates

1. We now return to our regularly scheduled blogging, already in progress.

2. I’m never sure who is going to read about someone else’s travels and mostly I write those posts so I can remember the stories later, but I am grateful to those who took the time to read and travel along with me that way.

3. So, did I miss anything? Any extended barbarism and outright war crimes in the Middle East? Further evidence that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is unfit to walk the streets unsupervised, let alone run for public office? That his supporters and minions are an existential threat to the survival of the American republic? Catastrophic evidence of global climate change that fools will explain away as coincidence even as they bury the dead amid the rubble? Anything? Hello? Is this thing on? I don’t think this thing is on.

4. We’re deep into the semester down at Home Campus and once again I have signed on for 130% of a job so I’m mostly just trying to beat back the nearest alligators and hoping the swamp drains of its own accord. Half the people in my office are new this year so I have become the Answer Guy, which is odd considering how recently I was still the Question Guy. On top of my advising job I’m teaching five classes on three different campuses. Fortunately I’ve made it past the madness of the first few weeks, so that’s a good sign.

5. We now have a soccer team at Home Campus and it’s going about as well as you’d expect for a team that didn’t exist three months ago. They’re learning – the back line isn’t bad though they’re constantly under siege and the goalie is saving them as best he can, but they need to work on their link-up play and getting to the middle third in possession. But they knew this would happen and they’re mostly using this season as a scrimmage to get ready for next year when they will have had more time to gel as a team. I’ve seen parts of a couple of games so far and they’re out there working hard, and as a Philadelphia sports fan that’s pretty much all I ask of a team.

6. About half the team is in my Western Civ class this semester. I’m not sure what a grounding in the transition from medieval to early modern Europe is doing for their game, but perhaps when we get to Machiavelli it will be more useful.

7. The jalapeños in the garden are growing well and I’ve already made two batches of candied jalapeños and one of jalapeño jelly with another batch of jelly that I should make soon. So much to do.

8. I have two long term projects that are rapidly coming to their respective conclusions and that will be a good thing when it happens.

9. Lauren’s trip with Arden went pretty well by all accounts. They spent a week in Guatemala, of all places, and there were many stories to share – some of which, as a parent, I was glad to hear after they were safely over, but that is part of the adventure I suppose. I picked them up at the airport at around 12:30am one Saturday night and got the full Volcano Hike story as well. It is good to have these adventures when you are young and strong, and I’m glad they were able and interested in having them.

10. I wrote out a To Do list a couple of weeks ago and it was depressingly long but I have been chipping away at it and it would be a lot shorter now if I hadn’t been adding more things at the bottom the whole time. But that’s the nature of things these days.

11. Did you know that the Post Office now has D&D-themed stamps? They’re actually really nice, even for those of us who have somehow not gotten into the game despite being exactly the target market for it. And yes, I know, every time I mention a) the Post Office, b) cash purchases, or c) physical media of any kind someone will pop up immediately to condescend at me about how I could possibly still be using any of those things when there are so many shiny digital versions of each of them to choose from, but I like them and will continue to do so. I have my reasons. And they’re really nice stamps.

12. On that note, I somehow managed to get handed half a dozen Bicentennial quarters in a five-day period a couple of weeks ago, which I thought was pretty cool. Add a wheat cent to that haul and it was a good time to be a coin collector.  There are times when the fact that my dad is no longer here to share the news of the day is more deflating than usual, though.

Europe 2024 - From Dublin to Chicago

We didn’t have to be at the airport until early afternoon that day, which meant that we had the entire morning to do things and also that we needed to figure out what to do with our bags if we didn’t want to cart them around Dublin with us while doing so. We didn’t have a lot of bags – we’d done this trip with carry-on luggage, after all – but even that is more than you want to haul around for longer than you have to.

When we asked the staff the night before they were adamant that they could not possibly let us stash our bags behind the front desk, which was confusing since they’d let us do that when we arrived. We’d gotten there a couple of hours before check-in and they were happy to let us keep the bags back there while we foraged for snacks. So there was a bit of a puzzle to work out.

Fortunately Kim asked again that morning and the new person said of course we could do that!

It turns out that there are two entirely separate staffs there – one for the student housing part of it and one for the summer rentals part of it and even though they sit at the same front desk and rent out the same rooms they don’t talk to each other much and they have different policies. The student housing people are much friendlier.

So we dropped off our bags and decided that the best thing we could do on a Saturday morning was to tour a whiskey distillery that included samples, because nothing says “vacation” like drinking whiskey at 11am. Fortunately there was a distillery in the neighborhood, a short walk away, and we got there just about as it was opening.

The Teeling Distillery opened in 2015 and was the first new whiskey distillery in Dublin in over 125 years. Most of the big distillers – Jameson, Powers, and so on – moved out of the city a while ago, and it took a while for pioneers to resettle the place with new distilleries. There are a few more there now. But this one was right in the neighborhood.

We got there before the tours started so they directed us to their café which featured a wide variety of whiskey-related food and drinks including a fascinating joint venture with the Keogh’s potato chip people to produce a Smoked Barbecue and Irish Whiskey flavor chip. It has the Teeling logo right on the bag. They weren’t bad, actually.

When the tour starts you don’t just launch into the tour itself. They let you into a little area where you can look at some displays and get some of the history that way, and there were a few others with us – mostly Americans (including people from Wisconsin and Philadelphia) but also various sorts of Europeans. Eventually we were called to order by Gary, who introduced himself as a “genuine hung-over Irishman.” He had us introduce ourselves and told us that he planned to move to Broomall (a suburb of Philadelphia) with his girlfriend in the next few months and then launched into his presentation.

Where the Irish Whiskey Museum tour was a fairly broad history of both whiskey and Ireland that sought to put it all into context, the Teeling tour was just what it said it was – a walk through an actual working distillery where we could see how the stuff was made. It’s fascinating. Gary took us into the business end of the distillery where he told us about the process – malting, triple-distilling, and so on – and let us wander around a bit to get a closer look at the equipment.

He then ushered us into a darker room where he told us about the aging process – how they age the whiskey only in specific sorts of barrels and how it gets darker and more flavorful over time – before opening up another door to the tasting area.

Our tour came with two drinks – a straight sample of the Teeling Small Batch variety, which I was pleased to discover on sale here in Our Little Town after I got back, and a cocktail which rivals the Aperol Spritz for the title of Summeriest Drink Ever. They were both very good, and they had the cocktail recipe written out for you right on the bar if you wanted to photograph it.

Afterward they let us wander around a bit. On the side wall there was space for people to write their names, so we did that. And then we headed over to the gift shop though we didn’t buy anything, mostly because we didn’t want to lug it home. Fear not – I am now the proud owner of a bottle of Teeling Small Batch Whiskey, purchased upon my return, and as the days get darker and the weather slowly cools I look forward to enjoying it, probably after rather than before any grading I need to do.

We walked back to the apartment lobby to collect our bags and head to the airport, which we decided to do by taxi rather than bus this time. We sat there in the lobby trying to figure out how to do this until the desk person called us over and pointed to a button that they just have sitting on the counter. Apparently so many people call for cabs from this place that the local cab company installed a hot line and all you have to do is push the button and wait about four minutes and a cab will appear as if by magic.

We got to the airport in plenty of time which was good because for the second airport running we found ourselves in a place where the baggage handling system had broken down.

It has to be said that the folks in Dublin were a lot more organized about this situation than those in Naples. Instead of having to fight our way through a madding crowd to get to an immovable line in front of a desk, we were directed to the end of a miles-long line that looped up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal and just follow along. The line moved briskly and people were pretty generous about letting those with impending flights cut in front. We weren’t particularly worried since we had plenty of time and weren’t checking bags anyway and we soon found ourselves in the actual terminal where we were given directions to security.

Security also moved quickly, surprisingly enough, and suddenly we were on the other side with time to spare.

Our first order of business was lunch, since it was about that time. This was a bit of a struggle since everyone at the airport had the same idea at the same time, but we are Resourceful Travelers and Not To Be Put Off though in the end I got rather turned around by the computerized menu screen where I went and ended up with rather more than I could eat but better that than too little, I suppose.

Also, there was shopping.

All European airports double as malls. Up to 15% of the total GDP of every EU and Schengen Area member comes from people buying things at airports, and we did our bit. Kim found someone to sell her the Jo Malone fragrance she’d been looking for, and Oliver and I continued our Boots reconnaissance and found snacks and beverages for the flight.

Eventually we had to get to our gate, and here we experienced firsthand the wonder that friends of ours had told us about: if you are flying from Dublin to the US, you can – and indeed, must, as I didn’t see any way to avoid doing so – go through US Customs in Dublin.

I KNOW!

This turns what is normally a 90-minute process in Chicago at the end of a trans-Atlantic flight when you are tired and cranky and just want to go home into a 20-minute process at the beginning of the flight when you still have the spoons to be polite and humane to the people checking you through. And when you arrive in Chicago you are treated as a domestic flight! It was just glorious.

The flight was long and uneventful, as you want flights to be. It felt like it took forever, even though it was as comfortable as that sort of thing gets. I read the book that I’d borrowed on my phone and started another. The clouds drifted by. Darkness took me and I strayed away through thought and time. Stars wheeled overhead and every day was as long as a life age of the earth. And then we arrived, safe and sound in Chicago.

Lauren picked us up and took us back to Our Little Town, though with a slight detour that just meant we had more time to talk together and that was a lovely thing. We got home and I immediately unpacked my carryon to give to her so she could take it with her on the trip that she and her friend Arden were planning for later that week, and we hung out a bit before she had to go.

It is good to travel, to see new places and friends, to be a bit uncomfortable in the service of greater experiences.

It is good to arrive home, to the familiar and the comfortable.

It will be good to travel again.