Birthday Wishes

Some years have more in them than others.

There are years that go by with barely a ripple, one foot in front of the other, taking care of business as things come up. They have their ups and downs, their good times and bad, and when you get to the end of them you're older but not much different. These kinds of years aren't bad, really, especially as you get older and learn to appreciate the wisdom of stillness and comfort. But they don't really teach you much.

Other years, though, you learn. Oh, my, do you learn.

Lauren has had one of the other years, and she's learned and grown in ways that haven't really become obvious yet but which I'm very much looking forward to finding out.

She graduated from college and started a Master's Degree program.

She traveled. She started the year in Manhattan, Madrid, and Malta. She's been all over the US. And this summer, largely on her own, she literally went around the world – a season's worth of backpacking, adventuring, and hostels. At some point very soon I hope to put some of those stories here, at least the stories that came to me and that she, as the owner of the stories, allows me to tell.

She's seen things and done things, learned things and taught things. It's been quite a year.

And through it all she remains Lauren, and that is a lovely thing to be.

Happy birthday, Lauren.

I'm proud of you.

News and Updates

1. We’re at that point in the semester where the best you can hope for is not to fall too far behind, which leaves little time left over for things like blogging, reading, resting, or pretty much anything that isn’t work. Good thing I have no life/work balance! This too shall pass, eventually, but from now to December is going to be a mighty slog.

2. This is especially so given the issues that seem to be cropping up on campus a lot more than I have ever seen in the 36 years I have taught at the university level. Not sure if it’s the lingering effects of the pandemic, the general collapse of American culture as a whole, or just a fetid miasma in the air fevering up people’s brains, but we have definitely entered into the “interesting times” part of the proverb. Which means, of course, that it is no longer really much of a refuge from the general madness of 2025 America, and after a while that wears on a body.

3. I did manage to take some time off on Wednesday and have lunch with Lauren, which I don’t get to do much these days. We’re working on some blog posts together that I hope to have posted sometime soon, but mostly it was just lovely to spend time with her. And Oliver seems to be doing pretty well in graduate school as well, and we’re hoping to see him again over Thanksgiving. I’m not really adjusting well to this latest and probably final round of being empty nesters, I have to say, but I’ll get there. I’ve done it before. I know how it works. It’s nice to keep up with them both, though, and even better when we get a chance to share a meal. Lauren chose a pho place not far from campus, and it was really good.

4. We’re still planning for the holidays as if they’re going to happen this year because what else can you do? It’s good to spend time with loved ones, after all.

5. I don’t write much about the many and varied crimes of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves anymore as it just gets overwhelming and every time I think that this crew of cannibals has hit rock bottom they break out the shovels and begin to dig. We have an unaccountable private army invading peaceful cities and disappearing people off the streets, the US military is being misused to execute people on the high seas without trial or even charges in violation of both US and international law and its leadership now regards the Secretary of Defense as a strutting halfwit (not without justification), we just slammed the door on trade negotiations with the people right across our longest border because the Pedo-In-Chief can’t handle being criticized by the ghost of Ronald Reagan, Congress has been shuttered by a lickspittle toady who knows full well that as soon as it goes back into session there will be a vote to release the Epstein files and all hell will break loose, the federal government has been shut down for weeks while Democrats remain in Washington ready to work and Republicans hide in their basements too scared even to hold town hall meetings with constituents let alone negotiate with their opponents, and half the White House was just vandalized out of existence ostensibly to build a tasteless gilded ballroom at a time when nobody can afford food, rent, car payments, or medicine, which feels very “French Revolution” to me. I strongly suspect that things are going to come to a head very soon – perhaps even this year – and that this will be far more interesting than I think most people would like but we’re in this mess now and the only way out is through.

6. Buckle up, folks. We could end up miles from here.

7. On the plus side, the weather has finally started to feel like autumn again, to the point where it has been worthwhile for me to break out long-sleeved shirts for the first time since March. Pretty soon it will be time to bring in the rabbits for the winter.

8. We now have a new microwave oven to replace the one that died an ignominious death a couple of weeks ago. It’s deeper and about half as tall as the previous one, and most of the buttons are actually hidden behind the door so you don’t see them until you open it up. Kim is the hunter/gatherer of the family and she had a good time picking it out. She asked me if there were any qualities I wanted in a new microwave and I had two: it had to warm up my food, and someone else had to install it. Both of these conditions were met, so we’re doing good. It’s nice to have a light over the stove again, too.

9. I’m still on Facebook because I have a lot of friends scattered around at vast distances from where I live and that’s mostly where I can see them these days. I’ve managed to clamp down on at least a good chunk of the nonsense that the Zuckerbot throws at his clients, though I have noticed that a) I’m getting a lot more right-wing nonsense breaking through the shield walls recently, and 2) I’m also getting a lot of posts foisted off on me that feature scantily clad, heavy-set hairy men. I don’t think these are connected, but for all I know they might be. I understand where the right-wing nonsense is coming from since the Zuckerbot is a well-known purveyor of such drivel, but the dad-bod beefcake pages are a mystery to me. I’ve known I was straight since I was five so I cannot imagine how I’d have done anything to persuade the algorithm that I’d be interested in them, so they’re not getting any clicks out of this. I suppose they’ll fade away eventually and then I’ll be besieged by the next unpleasant scam that comes barrelling down the interweebs at me because that’s how social media works in this Age of Enshittification, but so it goes. I’ve carved out my little niche on that site and it will take more than this to drive me away from the community I have built there. It does make the experience less than it should be, though.

10. My favorite hot sauce is back in stock and I have ordered a year’s supply of it, because you have to have your small victories in a world such as this.

No Kings

There are no kings in the US.

We currently have a senile ruler who thinks he is one but that’s not the same thing. Nor does the fact that he has an entire political party willing to abandon every moral and political principle it might once have claimed to have in order to coddle our ruler’s illusions change the basic fact on the ground.

There are no kings in the US.

The problem, of course, is that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has been behaving as if he were a king for the last nine months, with the full support of a corrupt and authoritarian Republican Party, and at current rate he will destroy the American republic by the end of the year if he is not blocked from this extremist course of action. This assumes he hasn't succeeded already, of course.

You know the Founding Fathers would have had this resolved by sundown on January 7, 2021, and we’d all have been spared a great deal of trouble if they had, but times apparently have changed.

So we march.

Today was the second No Kings Day march held nationwide this year, and by all accounts it seems to have been bigger than the last one. American patriots marched in cities and towns all across the country – there were nearly a hundred marches just in Wisconsin – and the news cycle and social media are currently dominated by images and reports of American citizens peacefully and proudly working to take their country back from those who claim to be our absolute masters.

This has our Pedo-In-Chief and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves panicked, yes it does. All week long they’ve been trying to discredit this mass movement of Americans, calling marchers terrorists, criminals, and paid actors, because they know that their power is hollow, that it rests on the illusion of popularity and inevitability, and that millions of American patriots taking to the streets to demonstrate their rejection of this regime makes that illusion vanish. And once it vanishes, so do they.

The criminal regime of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has done immense damage to this country and its institutions, its people, its standing in the world, and its economy, and even those who once supported it are slowly turning on him now that the full extent of its crimes are becoming clearer. The regime knows this. They know that the economy is crashing – they’ve ordered the federal government not to report on it anymore to try to hide it, but that tactic hasn’t worked and they’re staring a full-blown economic meltdown in the eye. They know that the Epstein Files haven’t disappeared from the public mind despite illegal military action abroad and at home to try to distract people, and that once the GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is forced to do his job and swear in the new representative from Arizona (whose victory has been officially certified by that state) the votes will be there to release them. They know that the shutdown of the federal government is entirely on them and the public understand that. They know that Americans reject the use of military forces taking over peaceful cities, that calling peaceful cities “war ravaged” doesn’t make them so, and that whatever Americans think of immigration the idea of having masked thugs kidnapping people off the streets and disappearing them into secret prisons is immoral and disgusting. They know their agenda is on fire and disappearing before their eyes.

They know that presidents get impeached, but kings get beheaded.

But there is nothing more dangerous than a cornered rat, and the fact that they know these things and are still determined to ram their agenda down the throat of an unwilling American public lets you know that they will burn the place down and piss on the ashes before they admit their crimes.

So we march.

We march in the name of the American republic. We march in the name of our children’s futures in a nation run by the people, for the people, and where the people includes all of the people not just wealthy straight white men.

We marched today, here in Our Little Town, because if I am ever fortunate enough to have grandchildren and they ever ask me what I did when the republic was on the line, I damn well plan to have something concrete to tell them and this is a good start.

No kings in America.

Not now.

Not ever.

A Day to Keep Track Of

Some days are just hard to follow.

Kim and I drove up to northern Wisconsin on Friday, up to Kim’s old stomping grounds in Rusk County. It’s not a bad drive, if a bit of a hike from Our Little Town – it’s a straight shot up the interstate until you get almost to Eau Claire and then you take the smaller roads until you get to Ladysmith and the hotel is right there on the left right by a whole lot of things that weren’t there the last time Kim was there but that was a number of years and one rather destructive tornado ago so you have to expect that things will change.

We met up with her parents and Rory and Amy at the hotel and had a nice dinner at the old pizza place that they used to frequent back when they lived up this way. You can’t really go wrong with pizza.

Saturday was the memorial service for Kim’s cousin Matt, who died in a car accident almost a year ago now. It’s been a time since then and a lot of things had to get resolved before they could set up the service but things have calmed down a lot in the last year. His wife is being taken care of properly now, and the kids are living with Matt’s sister Darcy and they seemed happy when we went there later in the day.

It took us a while to find the church where the service was held, which was pretty impressive given that Cornell is a fairly small place. But eventually everyone gathered and the service was lovely in the sort of emotionally draining way that anything done for someone who died fairly young tends to be. Some of the people who knew him best got up and spoke, and they made it through pretty well all things considered. It’s not an easy thing to do.

Afterward there was a lunch served in the church basement because that’s how these things work and you can never go wrong with a church basement lunch. From there family members were invited back to Darcy’s, though not right away as things had to get taken care of first.

Kim and I took the time to drive out to see one of the places where she’d lived and then drove back to Ladysmith so I could find some wifi signals because there was another event going on that day.

One of several, in fact, though these two were the only ones we tried to attend.

My friend Nadja was getting married Saturday, and while the actual ceremony was planned to be fairly small she did offer to livestream it for people who lived at a distance and as luck would have it the ceremony started sufficiently after the service and lunch ended that it very nearly worked.

I pulled it up on my phone as we got back into Ladysmith and watched as the preparations got made. There was a lot of the sort of thing that you get with large Zoom meetings with people who aren’t used to Zoom meetings – requests to mute microphones and so on – and then the ceremony started and it was really quite a beautiful thing. You could see the lake in the background, and Nadja’s niece read a couple of poems, and all was going well until the Zoom meeting cut out because technology is what doesn’t quite work. When it works all the time it’s an appliance. So I’m assuming that they did in fact get married in the end, and I wish them all joy and happiness. It was a very nice way to offset the somber beginning of the day, because you have to love the joy of a wedding and the ridiculousness of technology. Life is messy and lovely and that’s just fine. I was glad to have been able to see even a part of it.

And then we went to Darcy’s and hung out with a whole lot of people who are related to me who I don’t often get to see, and we had a good time there too because in the end there is nothing to do with a life but celebrate it, even as you mourn its passing.

It was a kind of a whiplash day that way, but a good one. 

A Peek Above the Ramparts

It’s been hellaciously busy around here of late, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any less busy anytime soon. I’ve spent the week grading discussion posts, prepping lectures, meeting students, and preparing the talk I’m supposed to give twice in the next ten days, and this weekend I still have two sets of exams to grade on top of, you know, grocery shopping, general home maintenance (always a struggle for me since I hate it with a passion), and the usual static of life.

So it was a bit dismaying to raise my head above the ramparts and discover that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are still there, poisoning the land with their presence and reminding us all that there are more bodies than souls in this world.

It’s been a time, has it not.

Let’s see here, what have some of the highlights been of late?

1. The Pedo-in-Chief and his personal bartender Pete Kegstand gave a speech before the assembled leadership of the United States armed forces who had been ordered to attend from across the world, in person, which smelled a lot like a decapitation strike except that this crew of cannibals couldn’t decapitate a dandelion without somehow embedding the clippers into their scrotums. Imagine if you will several hundred hardened and disciplined men and women whose entire careers have been built on not taking bullshit from idiots being lectured to about “warrior ethos” and the necessity of committing war crimes by an increasingly senile draft dodger and a reservist. Apparently the performance bombed so badly that some parts of the military are now calling them Fat Man and Little Boy, and as someone who teaches an entire course on the atomic bomb I approve of that message.

2. It’s almost refreshing that Trump labeled his political opponents “the enemy within” – a direct quote from Adolf Hitler – and vowed to use military force against us.  At least they’re no longer even pretending to be anything other than Nazis. My ancestors were given medals during WWII for shooting people like that, and I will be damned if I will disgrace their memory by bowing down before such people now. Fuck them sideways with a Buick.

3. Remember when Kamela Harris told us that if Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump were elected he’d send the army after his opponents and all the right-wing keyboard warriors spent weeks clutching their pearls and fainting because how dare she accuse him of such a thing? Good times, man. The longer this administration goes on, the more she was right about pretty much everything.

4. This week Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s personal Gestapo force used helicopters to assault … [checks notes] … an apartment building in Chicago. They zip-tied naked children, separated them from their families, and shoved them into vans because when your commander in chief is prominently mentioned in the compendium of sex crimes that is the Epstein Files I suppose you’d naturally feel naked children are fair game. But there will be a reckoning for this abomination, oh my brothers in Christ yes there will. When the new Nuremberg Trials come around, they will be brutal.

5. ICE is also tear-gassing first-responders in Broadview, outside of Chicago, because being a caricature of human evil is hard work and you have to keep finding new angles to impress the boss.

6. Speaking of the Epstein Files, we now have all of the signatures in Congress to force their release to the public except that the Republicans are so deathly afraid of being outed as pedophiles that they’re refusing to call the House of Representatives into session in order to prevent newly elected Arizona Representative Adelita Grijalva from being sworn in so she can cast that deciding vote. And until the Republican leadership does that, Congress cannot do anything about the current government shutdown. They’d rather protect pedophiles than get the government going again, and if that doesn’t tell you who the modern GOP is then nothing will.

7. Oh, yes, there’s a government shutdown. Perhaps you’ve heard? The Republican President, the Republican Senate, and the Republican House can’t figure out how to keep the federal government open so naturally they’re blaming … Democrats? Really? Apparently their strategy is to keep accusing Democrats of wanting to give undocumented immigrants free healthcare until someone, somewhere, believes it, except that this is MURCA and we all know that nobody is getting free health care except Congress so whatever it is that they’re smoking I hope they brought enough to share. So I suppose we’re stuck here with no functioning government until the Republicans’ collective psychotic break from reality comes to an end, which may be quite a while since they’ve been heading down this path since 1992.

8. Do you really want to know why there’s a shutdown? Because the Republicans have conclusively demonstrated that they cannot be trusted, that’s why. It’s also why this will take a very long time to end.

9. The First Circuit Court of Appeals tore the regime a new 100pp-long asshole over its transparently racist and flagrantly unconstitutional attempt to revoke birthright citizenship by fiat. “The analysis that follows is necessarily lengthy,” the Court wrote, “as we must address the parties’ numerous arguments in each of the cases involved. But the length of our analysis should not be mistaken for a sign that the fundamental question that these cases raise about the scope of birthright citizenship is a difficult one. It is not, which may explain why it has been more than a century since a branch of our government has made as concerted an effort as the Executive Branch now makes to deny Americans their birthright.” This sounds very restrained, but if you know how judicial opinions are usually written you will understand that this judge is practically screaming here and is about one step away from ordering everyone connected with bringing this shoddy and ill-considered case to go to prison for wasting his time.

10. And the tariffs are starting to kick in, even as Tariff McTariffson keeps adding more, retreating from previously declared positions, and then pirouetting into new and ever more insane variations of the same thing. Inflation is skyrocketing, food prices are becoming untenable, and in response Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has simply ordered the government not to report bad news since that’s always worked for North Korea.

I’m sure there’s more. You can’t go more than half an hour without some violently illegal act or gut-wrenching scandal coming out of this rogue regime, the sort of thing that in normal times would result in resignations, jail sentences, impeachments, exiles, and public shaming, and this was just a list I put together in ten minutes on a Saturday night when I was trying to avoid grading. These are horrifying times to be an American, when our own government is actively working to destroy everything that makes this country worthy of respect and admiration. The regime will lose in the end, but the damage in the meantime will be severe.

Be safe out there, my fellow Americans, but not too safe. There is work to do.