Blow Ye Winds, Blow

Apparently our trip up north was very well timed, since we made it home on dry roads with only a minor blip in traffic near Madison. There’s always traffic around Madison. It was an easy drive.

This would not have been the case had we tried it today. Likely would not be the case tomorrow either.

Most of Wisconsin is shut down right now, and when Wisconsin shuts down because of a winter storm you know it’s bad. When they close the bars then shit has definitely gotten real.

The state Department of Transportation has this nice service where if you go to their website you can see a map of travel conditions. The entire northern half of the state is outlined in black and listed as “Stay the hell off the roads you simpletons! Your 4-wheel-drive Compensator will not help you!  We’re not sending people to rescue you! Maybe Tuesday we’ll send out retrieval parties! Morons.” I’m sure if they thought they could get away with it there would be skull-and-crossbones graphics as well, and possibly little hand emojis flipping you off for even thinking about driving, but they’re doing what they can to get the message across.

The interstate highway that we took to drive home on Friday was shut down in both directions at 11am today. The traffic camera images all looked like closeups of sheep.

Down here in Wisconsin’s banana belt it has rained incessantly since about mid-morning and you have to appreciate the fact that you don’t have to shovel rain. The winds are fierce, the ground is saturated, and the main storm has started to sag southward so our potential overnight snowfall has been raised from one to four inches (2.5-10cm) to eight to twelve inches (20-30cm). This will be on top of all the rain, which will have frozen into sheets of ice at some inconvenient point in order to provide just THAT MUCH MORE EXCITEMENT for tomorrow.

Tomorrow is not looking good for leaving the house is what I’m getting at here. All of the local school districts have already announced that they’re closed. As for Home Campus, we usually wait to make that call. Instructors can cancel their own classes without too much bother and staff can make the choice to stay home on their own, but to close the entire campus officially triggers a wave of bureaucracy that the people in charge try to avoid if at all possible. So we’ll see.

I don’t have any classes or student appointments tomorrow, but I do have to be part of two different candidate interviews for positions where we’re hiring and I’m not sure how much of that is actually going to happen. Perhaps there will be Zoom. I’m not the one making the decisions, so I’m sure I will be told at some point.

At the moment I’m just sitting in my little office, surrounded by books, listening to the rain lash against the windows. I got the grocery shopping done yesterday and none of today’s plans involved putting on shoes. There’s corned beef simmering on the stove, since Tuesday is St. Patrick’s Day and nobody has time to simmer corned beef on a workday. It smells good.

So we will hunker down and be glad for our snug oasis in the middle of the storm.

A Wild Trip Up North

I actually like the Minnesota Wild. They’re a good team, they have a snazzy logo, and Minnesota feels like it should have a professional ice hockey team in a way that Florida and Texas really shouldn’t. Plus at this point in American history I confess I have a deep fondness for anything connected to the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, as they have been at the forefront of resistance to the current tyranny and should be supported by all patriotic Americans for this. So I do like the Wild.

Just not as much as the Flyers.

A while ago Kim and I discovered that my hometown Philadelphia Flyers would be traveling to St. Paul for a game in March and we agreed that this would be a fun thing to go see. For me that probably would have been the end of it but Kim is a planner and actually makes things happen, and surprisingly quickly we had tickets and a hotel reservation.

And then we realized that by midwestern standards St. Paul is not all that far from the campus where I teach my remote class, so perhaps we could head there the following morning so I could teach it in person for the first time since I started doing this course in 2012. It would be nice to see the students, for one thing, and it would also be good to see all the people up there who make this class work – any remote class is a group effort, after all. Plus the Campus Director up there is a friend of ours and an old chemistry colleague of Kim’s from a previous institutional structure, so there was a lot to recommend this visit.

We therefore had Plans.

We drove up to St. Paul on Thursday – a relatively uneventful ride for the first part, though once we got past Eau Claire the snow closed in and the High Wind Warning became a genuine thing. It wasn’t much snow, to be honest – just enough that no windshield wiper setting was quite right – but the winds were fierce and remained so through much of the next day.

The Saint Paul Hotel is a much nicer place than I’m used to staying. It’s one of those big old-fashioned places with lobbies that were designed to convey more than simply utilitarian processing, and as someone used to staying in hotels that have numbers in their name it was a bit of a shift, though a pleasant one. They also have valet parking, which meant we just pulled up, handed the keys to a dapper man in black tails and a top hat who did, in fact, work for the hotel (we checked), and then didn’t have to think about it again until the next morning. This worked out very well since the arena where the game would be played was just a three-block walk away.

It was raining when we walked over, which was actually kind of nice. Rain melts ICE, after all, and we were not confronted by any jackbooted government thugs while we were in St. Paul. They haven’t left the city, despite the news reports – they’ve just decided that publicly executing American citizens was bad PR so they’re not as overt as they were a couple of months ago. Still no justice for the dead, of course, but one lives in hope and fury.

We got to the arena fairly early, bought one of the souvenir programs (“Only $5! Benefits youth hockey!” – how could we say no to that?) and found dinner at the first big concession stand that we came to. The arena has a row of Standing Room Only spaces just behind of the last row in the first tier of seats and these come with a little counter that you can lean on and was also absolutely perfect for resting trays of Buffalo Chicken Fries and cups of house cider upon, and we enjoyed a tasty if nutritionally void dinner.

From there we wandered counterclockwise around the concourse until we got to our designated spots on the Standing Room Only section further up the ice. For those who actually watch hockey, we were about level with the face-off dots on the Wild’s end of the ice, across from the team benches. We were a bit worried about the very tall people in front of us who did not sit down during the entire extended warm-up skate, but they did once the game started and we had a great view of the game during regulation time. It turned out that they were most of the neighborhood where Alex Bump grew up and they were here to cheer for him in his first professional trip to St. Paul as a hockey player, even if he was playing for the Flyers. They dutifully wore Flyers gear with his number on it, despite confessing to be Wild fans in general, and you have to appreciate that kind of support. I chatted a bit with the guys standing next to us at our counter, one of whom was also a university instructor so we had that in common.

There were a lot of Flyers fans in attendance, to judge from the jerseys and sweatshirts, and everyone seemed happy to be there. I like going to sporting events where everyone is clued into the fact that it’s a game and you’re there to have a good time. Three cheers to the Wild fans for being good about that.

It turned out to be a very entertaining game, even from a neutral perspective. The Flyers went up 1-0 toward the end of the first period, found themselves down 2-1 after the second period, and then tied it on a short-handed goal in the third.

The game went to overtime, which the NHL now does as a 3-on-3 five-minute sudden death period, and everyone stood up at that point so we couldn’t see anything. Fortunately there were two seats open a couple of rows down by that point, so Kim and I went there and stood by them, so we did get to see the end of the game. When overtime didn’t solve anything they went to a shootout, which the Flyers won 1-0, and it was a good night for the orange and black.

Every single goal of the game was scored on our end of the ice.

We walked back to the hotel, collapsed into heaps on the various chairs, and spent a lovely time not doing much of anything at all before calling it a night.

The next morning we got up way too early, retrieved the minivan from the top-hatted man (who was either still there or had somehow returned before we woke up), and headed off toward Far Away Campus. We made it there with plenty of time to spare despite a) the High Wind Warning still being a thing, which is an experience in a tall vehicle on a high bridge, let me tell you, b) somehow managing to get behind every sightseer in northern Wisconsin, which in mid-March is not that many people so this was something of an achievement, and at least one turkey delivery truck, and c) stopping for breakfast at one of the several million Kwik-Trip gas stations that permeate Wisconsin like pubs in Britain. IYKYK.

Kim found a table just outside the classroom so she could get some work done and I wandered into the room and met Simon, the guy who sets up all the Zoom stuff for the class, and we got things ready. My students filtered in – according to Abbey, the Campus Director, they were happy that I was coming up to see them, and we had a good time together. It was a pretty full house for being the Friday before their spring break, and there was even a former student from last year who sat in for a while. We covered WWII, one of the gateway drugs of history and always a popular subject despite the casualty figures. And then I wandered around the trying to catch up to other folks who I’ve worked with, eventually finding Sue and Angela but missing Sonya and Troy. It was good to see them!

I also bought a campus sweatshirt so I can actually represent when I’m teaching. I have a lot of Home Campus gear, but this is my first for this campus.

After that we went to lunch with Abbey at a very good Mexican restaurant, where we hung out for a pleasingly long while and had good food in the process. One of my students showed up with his parents and it was nice to meet them.

All in all, a good day.

The drive back was uneventful as you always hope they will be, and eventually we came home and were confronted by a deeply annoyed cat who was, nevertheless, not too proud to sit on my lap for a while.

News and Updates

1. There are times when you just have to wonder what sins have been committed to create the timeline we’re in, though it has to be said that many of them are not secret, or at least not anymore. We in the US are governed by a criminal syndicate protecting a ring of child rapists that is actively trying to burn the planet down in order to avoid accountability, loot the place bare, and die with more toys than the rest of us. That much is pretty clear, as is the ceaseless braying of their minions, cronies, lackeys, enablers, and slaves. But the vast majority of people in this world just want to get through their days with as little trouble and as much comfort as they can, preferably with something good to eat and a harmless way to amuse themselves for a while, and sometimes the gap between these two groups of people is just dizzying.

2. I think for today I am just going to focus on my little corner of the world, because you can’t live in the middle of the maelstrom 100% of the time without going mad. I’m sure I’ll get back to it soon. Fuck those bastards and everyone who supports them.

3. It’s the middle of the semester and everything is crashing down. Assignments are due, exams are scheduled, and students are nearly as bewildered and stressed as we are. I have far too many tasks to think about and not nearly enough focus to worry about them. It’s been a time.

4. Last week Kim and I went to the new Indian restaurant in town with our friend George and had an absolutely marvelous dinner. Every kind of restaurant has that one dish that you use to rate it, and for me with Indian restaurants it’s chicken biryani and it was really, really good. They’re a little slammed right now – I don’t think the owners anticipated the demand for Indian food here in Our Little Town, and to be honest neither did I – but definitely worth the wait. Plus we ran into several friends while we were there – Angelica stopped by our table, and we found Camrin and Jacob as well. A good time was definitely had.

5. Lauren came down to visit on Friday, mostly because she wanted to snag a suitcase for her upcoming trip to see Shai, and it was lovely to see her, as you would imagine. She invited Isabella and Lily as well and I made General Tso Chicken and we all sat at the table for a very long time just hanging out together. In a world full of troubles, it is a nice thing to have an evening full of good food and good company. And we had two in a row!

6. Oliver’s professor still hasn’t graded the project he turned in on January 9 and I kind of want to know how it turned out. I don’t know how professors do that. I get mad at myself if it takes me more than a week to grade an assignment.

7. I finally finished my second book of the year, a mark that I used to hit somewhere around January 10 over the past fifteen years or so, but these are not times conducive to doing much reading, at least not for me. It was a very good book, though, and I’ll post my review of it next January assuming we are all still here to post and read blogs. There have been times this week when I was genuinely not sure about that, given Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s illegal war of aggression in Iran – I find that teaching an entire course on the atomic bomb does give you a different perspective on international crises from most people – but who knows. Perhaps I’ll get to write that post after all. We’ll see.

8. Someone stole an hour of my life last night that I won’t get back until November. Daylight Savings Time is a conspiracy against all that is proper and just, and it needs to stop. Try explaining the concept to a cat.

9. I’m trying to find some projects to immerse myself in to keep the rest of the world at bay for a while, and the siren call of genealogy is getting louder. So far I’ve contented myself with trying to organize the stuff I already have in a way that I might actually be able to find specific things when I look for them, but I suspect that at some point I’ll go digging again. It’s an interesting hobby that harms nobody, with the possible exception of myself.

10. It was 70F (21C) today. This weekend it is going to snow. Welcome to March in Wisconsin.

Stories

One of the formative experiences of my life was watching some random news magazine television show back in the late 1980s.

I couldn’t tell you what the show was called, what network aired it, who hosted it, or even if it was actually aired in the 1980s. Maybe it was the early 90s. It was definitely pre-internet. It was a long time ago.

In this particular episode the host had gone out to the rural American west somewhere – one of those vast open landscapes where they don’t bother putting guardrails on the highways because what would you hit if you drove off the road? – to interview a reporter for a local newspaper. This is how long ago that was. There were still local newspapers.

The newspaper office was in a rundown little building on an empty street in town and it was piled with papers, typewriters, and the detritus of journalism before it went digital. There were probably half-empty cups of coffee sitting on desks as well. There would have to have been.

This local reporter had made a name for himself by writing human interest stories. Every week or month or however often the newspaper came out he had a story about somebody telling their tale, often just the most riveting thing you could ever read, and the host wanted to know how he found these people. Was there a trick to it?

The reporter just laughed. Everyone’s got a story, he said. You just have to ask them about it.

When the host seemed skeptical, the reporter walked over to one of the desks and picked up the local phone book. It was a fairly thin volume, as you’d expect from a place that looked like the whole population could fit into a minor league baseball stadium. This is another way you can tell how long ago this was, by the way. There were still paper phone books.

The reporter walked back to the host and told him to rip out a page at random, and when the host did that the reporter stuck it into the wall with a thumbtack and handed the host a dart. Throw it at the page, he said, and when the host did the reporter walked over to see whose name the dart had landed on.

They got into a car and drove out to that person’s home, a sun-bleached trailer on a dusty road under a sky that seemed to go on forever, and they knocked on the door. When someone answered, they introduced themselves as reporters and asked if they could talk for a while, just to see what their story was.

It was fascinating.

I don’t remember who lived in that trailer, or what they looked like, or even the story they told. But I do remember that it was the sort of story that you wouldn’t have imagined coming from someone living a quiet life on a dusty road under a sky that went on forever. Or maybe you would, if you knew someone like that.

And the lesson there, as the reporter had said, was that everyone’s got a story. You just have to ask them about it.

I write down a lot of stories here, because I have my own to tell. I am a historian, telling the stories of others for a living. I enjoy reading memoirs and blogs and the kind of social media posts that go on for multiple screens recounting some story or other – often trivial, sometimes outlandish, but never uninteresting. I love hearing other people tell their stories. I try to be a good listener when they do. Sometimes I succeed.

The world is not made of atoms and forces. It is made of stories, and if you ask people they will often tell you theirs.

On Finding Joy

In this darkening world it is no crime to hold onto what slivers of joy come our way.

It is easy to get lost in the headlines. The US has embarked on a war of aggression in violation of federal law, the US Constitution, the UN Charter, and the Olympic Truce. ICE thugs are still out there brutalizing people in the public streets, kidnapping and trafficking them to random nations. We are still governed by pedophiles, cosplayers, ghouls, and the suck-ups who defend them. AI slop is taking over and people are getting stupider in real time. Everything in the grocery store is smaller and costs more.

There is a very real sense that the people causing all of these headlines want you to get lost in them, though. They want you to despair. They want you to give in to fashionable nihilism and jaded dorm-lobby cynicism. It makes it easier for them when you do.

In such a world the act of finding joy is a subversive one.

There are good books to be read, strong black tea to drink, and conversations to be had with loved ones. The weather is slowly warming and soon we here in Baja Canada will be able to go outside without coats. There are cats. I will hold on to these things in defiance of an era that wants me to think of violence and cruelty and corruption.

It is entirely possible to grieve for the world and still take pleasure in what is in front of us.

There are many kinds of stories to be told, and each does not invalidate the others, no matter how it may seem when we are in the middle of them. I have no illusions about the current state of the world, but I will hold onto what joy comes my way as best I can.

The State of the Union

My fellow Americans, the State of the Union is not good.

Indeed, we are in an extraordinarily perilous time, one that the American republic may not survive. This union has endured through a great many challenges – through wars and pandemics, though economic collapse and through civil disorder – and through it all there has been one constant: the most dangerous enemies of the United States have never been external. They have always been among us.

This was true during the Civil War, this union’s gravest threat, when treasonous southern states nearly destroyed the country to further their empire of human slavery, and it is no less true today.

We today in the United States are ruled by a collection of neo-Nazi ghouls using a senile child rapist as a meat puppet in order to reduce the country to a dictatorship while a corrupt Republican Congress stands idly by and cheers, and the only things that are standing in their way are the fact that they are blisteringly incompetent, the fact that the federal judiciary is still doing the job it gets paid to do, and the fact that the mass of Americans refuse to allow it.

All of those ghouls are home-raised, and whatever the statistical anomalies might say the official record states that the child rapist won the 2024 election with the support of a plurality of those Americans who bothered to vote. The call is coming from inside the house, my fellow Americans.

Let the following be submitted to a candid world:

Under the US Constitution, only Congress has the authority to declare war or commit US military forces into battle, and yet today this rogue administration has launched a war against Iran, one that has already killed more than fifty schoolgirls at an elementary school. This war stands in violation of both the US Constitution and the UN Charter – to which the US and its partner in this travesty Israel are both signatories – and constitutes a war crime. In a just world the people responsible for it would have already been arrested and held without bond for trial. In this world, where those people have access to power and make further claims to unlimited power, this will take some time.

The unprovoked attack on Iran parallels the unprovoked attack on Venezuela of just a few weeks ago. Whether the regimes in those countries are good, evil, or indifferent – and it would be hard to generate much sympathy for either of them on their own terms – the fact remains that it is not the job of the US to use military force against them unless they represent a clear and active threat to the United States, and only after such force has been Constitutionally approved. Further, the long-term consequences of these assaults are not predictable and, historically, these wars have not ended well for anyone involved.

What they are, however, is a desperate attempt to distract the American people and the world from the rapidly expanding horror of the Epstein Files.

Let’s start with the fact that the regime of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump remains in violation of the federal law that requires them to have released all of the files by now. According to estimates from British intelligence the US Department of Justice has released barely 3% of the files and the screeching banshee who runs that department went before Congress, lied under oath about that, and then refused to speak with or even acknowledge the Epstein survivors who were there in the room with her. She carried in an binder detailing everything that members of Congress had accessed while the DOJ had permitted them to look at the files – a grievously illegal but not at all surprising authoritarian move – and her main response to being asked about the pedophiles in power was to shout about the stock market.

Again, they’ve released barely 3% of the files. Files with victims’ names out in the open and pedophiles’ names redacted just in case you can’t figure out who they’re working for and what they’re trying to do. 3%. The fact that the allegations and documentary evidence regarding the rape and murder of children contained in those files is horrifying and deserving of pitchforks and torches should give you pause because that 3% is what they thought they could get away with releasing. Imagine the nightmare fuel that is in the other 97% of these files.

I saw an Instagram reel recently from a guy named Nick J. Freitas who summed up the only possible reaction to that. “You know,” he said, “whenever somebody says that maybe it’s time to move on from the Epstein files I’m always like, ‘Great, I totally agree. I think we should have moved on to the public execution phase of this a long time ago. So what’s the hold up? Do we not have enough woodchippers? I’ll donate.’"

Put me down for a donation as well, and I’ll also happily kick in some time building bleachers for the American public to watch when it happens.

We know from these files that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is credibly accused of raping girls as young as 13 years old. We know his name appears in these files over 38,000 times – an order of magnitude more than anyone else’s other than Epstein himself. That’s almost 40 more times than Jesus appears in the Bible. It’s more than double the number of times than Harry Potter’s name appears in the entire seven-book series that’s named for him. Representative Jamie Raskin, who was able to view the unredacted files, searched for Trump’s name and got “more than a million” results. They’re Trump’s files more than they are Epstein’s.

You know who’s not in the Epstein files? Drag queens. Transgender people. Immigrants. Brown people. No, this is entirely about wealthy straight white men. Maybe the Republican Party needs to rethink its definition of a threat. Or maybe they already know and are okay with it. One or the other.

“The United States government is engaged in an active cover-up of the largest sex trafficking scandal and influence peddling scandal in the history of the United States, and Donald Trump is right at the center of it,” noted Representative Melanie Stansbury. The UN has noted that the crimes committed by Epstein and his crew are sufficiently vast that they fall under the heading of Crimes Against Humanity.

The cover up being conducted by the DOJ is open, blatant, unrepentant, and doomed to fail. At least nine other countries are investigating these files now, none of which are planning to hide the evidence they have. Britain’s Prince Andrew has already been arrested and will likely face serious legal consequences as a pedophile – the first senior royal to face serious legal charges since 1649, which didn’t end well for Charles I. Norway has arrested a former prime minister. Poland is well into its own investigation. It’s all going to come out, and when it does all hell will break loose. There will be blood.

Not enough popcorn in the world, really.

This is what they’re trying to distract you from with the attacks on Iran.

They’re also trying to distract you from the ongoing thuggery of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s private unaccountable army as ICE continues its reign of terror across the country. They have continued to execute people without consequence, they are stockpiling weapons as if they are preparing for war, and they are trying to build a network of concentration camps across the country to warehouse all of the people that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his neo-Nazi ghouls declare to be undesirable and if you think that’s going to stop with immigrants (documented or otherwise) then you clearly haven’t read a history book in your life.

Folks, immigrating to the US without documentation isn’t a crime. It’s a civil offense. It’s a misdemeanor, roughly on par with a parking ticket. You know what is a felony? Raping children. Consider that.

Every statistic that has come from people other than the thugs currently running amok in this country notes that the overwhelming majority of the people kidnapped by ICE have no criminal record and weren’t even considered threats by the regime that sent ICE after them. In point of fact, given the dregs of society that ICE is reduced to hiring since nobody with any moral fiber will work for them, statistically speaking if you kept all of the immigrants (documented or otherwise) and deported the ICE agents the crime rate in the US would decrease.

Meanwhile Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s tariffs were shot down by his own handpicked radical right Supreme Court, but not before upending world trade, spiking inflation, and alienating most of our trading partners. Now that the highest court in the land has told him to knock it off, his response has been to double down and try to weasel his way to do it again. Because your ability to afford food is not really his concern.

And with all of this – the illegal war, the pedophile protecting, the violent ICE thuggery, the continuing economic collapse of a country that had mostly recovered from the pandemic by the end of 2024 – the neo-Nazi ghouls running this shitshow know very well that they cannot win a free and fair election this coming November. That any such election will likely be such an overwhelming repudiation of their twisted agenda that they could not only be stymied from furthering it but also prosecuted for doing what they’ve already done.

Naturally their solution is to try to prevent any such election from happening.

They’ve introduced the SAVE Act, which would effectively disenfranchise anyone who has ever changed their name for any reason, such as most married women in the US. It would require burdensome and unconstitutional documentation for voters – you’d need a birth certificate and a passport, for example, and unless those are provided free of charge that would constitute a poll tax. And the administration is making those documents harder to get by ordering libraries not to provide pathways for them the way they’ve done in the US. The related MEGA Act – introduced by Wisconsin’s own Bryan Steil – is more or less the same disenfranchisement in a different package because the GOP is many things but imaginative isn’t one of them.

Meanwhile both the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation – two of the most right-wing organizations in the US – have publicly stated that voter fraud (and particularly the non-citizen voter fraud that the perpetrators of the SAVE and MEGA Acts are in theory so worried about) simply does not happen on any noticeable scale. The Heritage foundation examined US elections from 2003 to 2023 – over a billion separate votes – and discovered 24 instances of noncitizens voting, most of them by accident, for a fraud rater of 0.0000076%. The Cato Institute notes that Utah has 2.1 million registered voters and an investigation showed exactly one was a noncitizen and that person never cast a ballot. In Georgia there were 15 noncitizens loudly declared by the GOP to be registered in Macomb County, out of 724,000 voters, it turned out that three actually were citizens, four had already been removed from the rolls, and four more were already under investigation. This is a non-issue for anyone who actually has a clue.

It's about voter suppression, not election security. It’s just another form of gerrymandering – if they can choose who gets to vote, then they can determine the outcome of the election. A free and fair election with widespread voting from American citizens will be the death of MAGA and they know it.

The SAVE Act appears dead in the Senate at the time of this writing, and the MEGA Act hasn’t even passed the House. But news broke this week that figures in the administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump are circulating plans for an Executive Order that would allow Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to seize control of the November elections completely. The odds of that succeeding are low but not zero, and the mere fact that it is even being seriously planned is enough to justify prosecution and punishment.

This would amount to a coup, and since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has already gotten away with one coup attempt unpunished it is not farfetched to think he’d try for a second.

Steve Bannon – one of the ghouls leftover from the first administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump – has already floated the idea of using ICE to enforce who can and cannot vote in November. That ICE has no such authority is not apparently an issue for him. That conducting elections is, according to the US Constitution, the sole province of the states, doesn’t seem to be either.

As noted, the State of the Union is perilous and the survival of the American republic is not guaranteed. Nothing is. The Founders understood that republics were short lived, historically, that eventually they succumbed to authoritarianism, anarchy, or vice. They didn’t know how long their republic would last.

We, my fellow Americans, can make it last that much longer if we are vigilant, if we are active, and if we refuse to let this country be taken over by the sorts of people our ancestors shot in World War II.

This is our country.

The ghouls can’t have it.

Thank you, and good night.

An Evening of Music

We were supposed to go to a concert for Kim’s birthday, back in November, but the venue was a good drive away and we ended up with 14 inches (35cm) of snow that day so we hunkered down at home and were glad that they ended up rescheduling the show rather than just canceling it.

And last night was it.

The Movable Feast Tradition says that holidays happen when you have time for them, and if Kim’s birthday is going to be celebrated two months after the actual calendar date, well, that’s just how it works out isn’t it? There’s never a bad time for a celebration.

Although it has to be said that we are getting rather old to be out at concerts on a Wednesday night at venues that require a journey to get back home from, especially since work starts at the normal time no matter what. But sometimes you just have to throw caution to the wind, laugh in the face of danger, and drink caffeinated beverages after 4pm to ensure survival. It’s a dangerous job, and we get to do it.

We went up a bit early and had dinner at one of Kim’s favorite places – a restaurant that she introduced me to before we were even married – and then walked over to the venue. It’s a nice place to see a show if you don’t mind standing – there are a handful of chairs set up way off to house right, all clearly labeled “ADA Seating,” and another handful in a balcony way in the back, but the vast majority of people in attendance stood for the duration of the show.

On the down side, see above re: getting old. It’s hard on the feet after a while. On the plus side, it was pretty easy to get right up to the stage. We were one person back, maybe a yard or so from the stage, and the view was lovely.

Although when I am Grand Vizier of the Universe, one of my many Proclamations will be to impose height restrictions on people standing at the front of audiences. Dude, if you’re two meters tall go stand in the back and let the rest of us see. We did have to do a bit of jockeying to find our spot, but in the end it wasn’t that hard. We just shifted a bit to our left.

DakhaBrakha (the k’s are silent and you hit the h’s hard) consists of four musicians from Ukraine and they play what can perhaps best be described as Ukrainian folk music mixed with free-form jazz, house music, and forest sounds. At one point the singer headed off in a particularly growly direction and all I could think of was, “Hey – it’s Louie Armstrongsko!” It’s an interesting mix of styles, and they put on a really great show – nearly two hours of music without an intermission, and with some really fascinating background visuals as well.

Right before their encore song they auctioned off a piece of original art made by the singer with the proceeds going to benefit the Ukrainian fighters resisting the brutal Russian invasion that started four years ago almost exactly, and they raised a good amount of money. You have to love that. It became part of the show.

It was a long and tired drive home, but it was well worth it.

Happy birthday to Kim!

On the Recent Olympics

Well the Winter Olympics are over for another four years and now I have nothing to do but the work I should have been doing all along, so naturally I’m writing this blog post because surely there is something better I can be doing than my assigned tasks.

You’d think.

I always enjoy the Olympics. Yes, I know that the IOC is a cesspool of corruption that rivals Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s business empire. Yes, I know that these things rarely if ever benefit the places that put them on and in about eight years there will be sad little stories in the news featuring abandoned venues and tales of fiscal crisis. Yes, I know that the world did not stop revolving around its axis and the grotesque horror of modern American politics continued along its lethally immoral way unbothered by anything happening with the Olympics. I know all these things. But still.

You need a break sometimes. You need to focus on good things, and that’s what the athletes are for. These people trained for years to be there. Most of them will never win a medal and most of those people already know that going in but they’re there anyway because it’s enough to say that they were there. Many of them were competing in events that nobody had any idea whether or not they exist outside of an Olympics (skicross?) but which were fun to watch anyway and maybe they should be more well known.

Kim and I watched a fair bit of the Olympics this year, in this darkening world. It was a very nice way to try to stay sane in a climate that wants very much to prevent that.

We watched the figure skaters and marveled at the sheer grace and power of it all. You don’t realize how strong these people are until you see the close-up shots. We mostly saw the Americans because that’s what NBC shows to Americans, but I really loved how supportive most of the skaters were with each other – particularly, it has to be said, the American women. Alyssa Liu set a tone, after ditching the sport four years ago and then returning on her own terms to skate with joy for herself and her art, and watching her, Amber Glenn, and Isabeau Levito be there for each other – and in Glenn’s case, for at least one of the Japanese skaters as well, shooing away the press when that skater needed some time to herself – was a refreshing sight in a world consumed by meaningless rivalry.

The fact that a number of skaters managed to convince other skaters to be part of their their routines during the exhibition gala at the end was a lovely thing.

We watched the US women’s and men’s teams win hockey gold over Canada in overtime, in hard-fought games that could have easily (and in the men’s case probably should have) gone the other way but there is only one statistic that matters in the end and they came out on the plus side of it this time. I remember watching the Miracle on Ice in 1980 live, and while this wasn’t exactly the same it was nice to see. The fact that the women’s team declined Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s grudging invitation to visit was glorious, and I can only wish the men were similarly principled.

We watched a lot of the curling, and it was good to see the most sportsmanlike of games live up to its reputation, mostly, except for the Canadian men’s team, who were caught blatantly cheating, responded with obscenities when questioned, and somehow were not only not immediately disqualified, dunked in maple syrup, and sent home in disgrace but also were permitted to win gold in the end. That travesty did not take away from the larger fun of the sport, though.

We watched the speedskating, which always seems like it’s about three breaths away from catastrophe. We watched a pile of skiing events, including the skicross because it’s good goofy fun. We watched the bobsleds and the luge and the skeleton and wondered precisely how anyone would think that would be a good idea even if they were a lot of fun to watch.

We watched a lot of things.

It has to be said that the primary advantage the US has in these games, aside from enough national wealth to fund training for a lot of athletes and a population large enough to find fifty examples of pretty much anything you care to search for, is the simple fact that immigrants choose to come here. This is a valuable lesson that should be more loudly expressed and more eagerly taken to heart in this country.

But now it’s over, and we return to our regularly scheduled lives already in progress.

C’mon baby, put the rock in the house.

The Road Goes Ever On

I was one of those kids who took a deep dive into Middle Earth at an impressionable age and never quite resurfaced.

My introduction to that world came in early 1980 when some network decided to air the Rankin Bass version of The Lord of the Rings. I remember watching it and thinking that this was a great story but there had to be a better version of it out there than this.

Turns out there was, and I spent a good chunk of the next month reading the book, which the library was happy to lend me, and then much of the summer working as an assistant to my mother in the Montgomery County Courthouse fetching real estate records. She paid me $1/hour out of her own pocket and when I’d amassed enough funds I rode my bike up to the little bookstore in Suburban Square in Ardmore, just outside of Philadelphia, and bought the red-boxed single-volume edition and rode home with it bouncing around in the front basket. I read that annually for more than a decade after that. I can still write your name in Elvish script, which is not the most useful skill in the world but it’s mine and I enjoy it.

From there I read The Hobbit – the prequal to the main story, though Tolkien had to retcon the story to make it fit into the larger universe so there are a lot of differences between the first edition and the one that’s available now. Not all of the gaps got filled by the revisions, though, and one of my favorite facts about that process is that the canonical explanation for this is that Bilbo Baggins was just an unreliable narrator.

I also read The Silmarillion and enjoyed that immensely – it’s much more dense, but if you’re looking for the backstory of it all you will not be disappointed. There’s a reason I became a historian, after all.

I have reached the point in my life now where I am starting to deaccession things. I like stuff as much as the next person – ascetic I am not – but having been part of the process of clearing out my parents’ house I’m seeing the virtue of not leaving that task to my children whenever they need to think about such things.

One of the nicer consequences of this is that more and more of the gifts I receive for birthday or Christmas presents come in the form of experiences, of time spent with family, and that’s a lovely development.

For Christmas last year Lauren said she would get tickets for us to see a play up in Madison, and we went on Friday. I drove up after work and we made a grocery run (because as a parent that is one of the things I enjoy doing for my children) and had a lovely dinner together at a Thai place, and then we headed off to the theater.

The Hobbit: A Musical.

It has to be said that the musical part was pretty limited – most of it was a stage show, though there were some songs interspersed throughout. It was a fairly small but very talented ensemble cast who did a nice job of switching in and out of various roles, highlighted by some really clever costume changes. And they covered pretty much all of the main events of the book in a way that was fun for those of us who know the story and also worked pretty well for people new to it.

Honestly they did a better job with the story than Peter Jackson did.

We didn’t realize until a week or two before the show that it was a production aimed at children – the actors were adults, but a good chunk of the audience was too young to drive. They were captivated. And so were we.

Lauren and I had a lovely evening together.

Merry Christmas to me.

Staring Evil in the Face

We need to talk about the Epstein files.

Because holy fucking shit these things are grotesque.

One of the more interesting articles I read about them was written by a cop, someone who spent a good chunk of his career investigating the sexual abuse of children, and the whole point of this article was that we aren’t ready for these documents. He wasn’t trying to be condescending. His point was that the level of moral depravity and horror that is in these documents is deeply harmful to anyone who isn’t specifically trained to deal with it, and frankly it’s harmful to those people too. He wrote as a man who has stared true evil in the face and survived, barely, haunted and damaged but still mostly whole. For the rest of us, he had only warnings.

And the more that leaks out about the content of these files, the worse it gets.

I’m not going to get into the specifics of what I’ve read – I’ve only seen the public versions of things, and they’re horrifying even in their redacted and censored state. All I will say is that everyone mentioned in these files needs to be put in holding cells and thoroughly investigated and if they have actually committed the crimes against children that they are accused of committing then we as a nation need to think long and hard about whether the Eighth Amendment should be repealed because there needs to be some deeply cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on those fuckers.

All of them. No matter what their current job title may be.

I want every goddamned one of them dangled in a harness from a lamppost and then executed with a cheese grater, starting with their left big toe. I want those fuckers to suffer, immensely and without relief, for what they did to those children. I want a lot of things I won't get, but that doesn't stop me from wanting them.

We are not normalizing this shit. No way in hell. Not on my watch. Not in my country.

And here’s the kicker, folks.

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s administration was required by federal law to release ALL of those files back in December. By most accounts they haven’t released half. I’ve seen some estimates that take into account new analyses indicating that they’ve barely released 4%. If this is the stuff they thought they could get away with releasing, what the actual fuck is in the rest?

I’ve heard defenders of the indefensible claim that if we prosecuted everyone in the Epstein files the whole system would collapse, and you know? If the system depends on protecting child rapists, then the system should burn and take every one of those vermin with it.

It’s going to be a long few months, folks. This isn’t going away, and the reckless actions that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are going to take to distract from this will get ever more desperate, ever more violent, ever more authoritarian, and ever more criminal.

Watch your back.

Sportsball

We had a sport-filled weekend, and I have to confess it was good to take a bit of a break from the madness of the world.

The joy of sports is that they are utterly meaningless. It’s a game, and you can get caught up in what’s going on and cheer for one side or another – especially if it’s Your Team, or just a team you happen to like for whatever inscrutable reason one decides to like a team – and the action goes this way and that until the game is over and then you just move on with your life. Nothing of any significance has changed. The sun rises the next morning, the state of the republic remains whatever it was prior to the final score, and all that happened is that you got a couple of hours of entertainment out of it.

More things should be like that.

It’s still early in the semester and this spring I only have one class going (versus the five that I had last semester), so there’s not much grading to do. I got Monday’s class prepped first thing Saturday morning – none of the various Sportsball events I wanted to see had started when I came downstairs, so why not – and the weekend was mine.

First up: Premier League soccer.

I watched the Premier League for over a decade before deciding to settle on a team to cheer for, mostly because I like the logo and their coach at the time reminded me of Ser Davos from Game of Thrones. The Onion Knight is still coaching in the Premier League, though on his third or fourth team since leaving, but I still support Wolves whenever I get a chance to watch.

On the plus side, I have discovered that this gives me a surprising amount of credibility among soccer fans here. The conversation is always the same. We get to talking. We discover that we share a fondness for watching Premier League soccer (while I have no particular issue calling it football, I’m American enough to default to soccer). They ask me what team I support, fully expecting me to say one of the Big Names (Liverpool, Man City, Man United, Chelsea, or Tottenham) and when I come back with Wolves there is a little pause as they decide that maybe I’m not just some bandwagon casual. Not many Wolves fans here in the US, I suppose.

On the down side, Wolves have pretty much already been relegated this year – they have a grand total of one win since the season started in August – and it will be a lot harder to watch them next year. So I try to catch them when I can.

Yeah, they lost. But they played hard and that has to count for something. As a Philadelphia sports fan, that’s all I ask.

Next up: the Olympics.

I generally prefer the Winter Olympics to the Summer version. Yes, I enjoy watching the track and field events and the soccer games and some of the random Weird Sports that they insist on adding every four years, but there’s nothing to compete with a Sportsball Festival that includes hockey, luge, and curling. I’ll watch the figure skating because it’s fun to see what people can do and even the skiing is entertaining for a while, but give me the sliding sports, the hockey games, and the sheer absurdity of curling any day.

C’mon baby, put the rock in the house.

I saw a couple of the women’s hockey games – both Canada and the US beat a determined and hard-working Swiss team that held them pretty close for most of the two games – and I’m looking forward to more of that. The mixed doubles curling event has been fun to watch and since Oliver and Lauren were curlers for several years back in the day and I went to my share of bonspiels, I actually know what’s going on when I watch. And I saw some of the luge runs, because that’s just astonishing that people are allowed to do that unmedicated. Skeleton coming up!

Kim and I did watch large chunks of the figure skating, and it’s really amazing how much better the skaters are than they used to be.

And finally, here in the US it was Super Bowl Sunday, the biggest secular holiday on the American calendar after the Fourth of July and the only day of the year where Americans are legally obligated to have junk food for dinner.

On the one hand, most of the usual parts of this were kind of meh. My team was eliminated early in the playoffs so there wasn’t the Home Town Interest to keep me focused on the game, and to be honest I can’t remember a Super Bowl where the game was so much of an afterthought. There was almost no hype for it leading up to the game that I noticed, and there were times last week when it was actually hard to remember who was going to play. And then they got to the actual game and, yeah, suddenly that made sense. If I had just woken up from a coma and you told me this was a week three preseason game I would have believed you.

Both of those teams played like they knew the winner was going to have to go to the White House afterward.

Even the commercials were uninteresting this year. There was only one that I thought was even remotely funny, in a gross sort of way, and even the good people who make Doritos clearly thought there wasn’t any point in spending their money this year so that was disappointing. From what I could gather from the ads, the American economy is being held together by cryptocurrency, AI, and prescription drugs right now and this does not give me much hope for the future.

Two bubbles and a list of side effects do not a prosperous era make.

I have to admit that I enjoyed the halftime show. I wanted to see an accomplished American with strong artistic skills and a finger on the cultural pulse of the nation, so naturally I watched the Bad Bunny show.

No, I wasn’t going to spend my time watching the Right Wing Safe Space Consolation Halftime Show featuring a has-been lip-synching about having sex with children, which is apparently what conservatives consider a comforting these days. It seemed a bit too much on the nose here in the Age of Epstein if you ask me.

So Bad Bunny it was.

As JJ Watt said later, “Did I understand a word of it? No I did not. Was it a vibe? Yes it was.”

The songs were interesting. The staging was phenomenal. The message was inspirational. The impotent rage it inspired in Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves was deeply satisfying. Pedro Pascal was there in the background, which is always a good thing. And apparently Mr. Bunny ran more yards while carrying a football during that halftime show than the New England Patriots did during the actual game. Win all around, I say.

I also loved the fact that the plants were played by actual people in costumes. For everyone who played Tree #3 in their elementary school musical, this one’s for you.

And then we went back to the Olympics. 

A Wedding in February

One of the better things I’ve done in my life was to get ordained online because under the laws of the State of Wisconsin this means I’m legally allowed to officiate weddings.

A proper wedding is a time of joy. Two people declare their love for each other and set off for their future together, and while you don’t necessarily need to be married to do that it is a fact that rituals matter in life and it is a lovely thing to mark the occasion with a ceremony.

I got to officiate a wedding today.

I’ve known Camrin and Jacob since they were in grade school. Camrin, in fact, invited Oliver to her birthday party when they were both in kindergarten. We’re all adults now and I consider both of them to be friends, and when they asked me to be the officiant for their wedding, well, of course I said yes. It would be a pleasure and an honor.

I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

It was a short, simple ceremony with just family in attendance. They’re planning a larger Celebration of Marriage ceremony for later but this was an important date for them so they wanted to have the actual wedding today.

There is much good in this world, and sometimes we get to be part of it.

Congratulations to Camrin and Jacob! May you know joy and love together all your days.

News and Updates

1. I forget – was the release of the three million or so pages of the Epstein files (still only part of the whole and thus still not compliance with federal law) that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is a pedophile who would likely not last three hours in prison before the other inmates fed pieces of him into a shower drain supposed to distract us from the continuing Fascist occupation of Minneapolis by poorly trained jackbooted ICE thugs who have kidnapped and trafficked citizens and immigrants alike, tried to arrest cops for being Brown In Public, actually did arrest multiple journalists because apparently the First Amendment only counts if you’re supporting the government, and publicly executed two American citizens in the streets while being filmed and then tried to lie about it both times or was that the other way around? Are both of these things supposed to distract us from the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump still talks about invading a NATO ally even though he “negotiated” a deal to get us exactly what we already had in Greenland before he decided to do Putin’s dirty work? Is all of that meant to distract us from the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are openly calling for the federalization (read: “partisan control”) of American elections in direct violation of the US Constitution? It’s hard to keep track. Are we great yet?

2. The madness of these times is exhausting, but we press forward because there is no other option. Fuck those clowns. It’s my country. They can’t have it.

3. So … yes, but aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

4. One of the strangest disconnects in my life right now is the simple fact that we are all living in the Worst Timeline Ever while at the same time my personal world is actually going along pretty well. Yes, this creates an obligation to use that privilege in the service of creating a better timeline in general and I do my best to fulfill that. But on a day-in, day-out basis, things are going well in my little corner of the world.

5. The semester is going along pretty well so far, a week and a half into it. My Zoom class is asking questions and seems engaged with the material so far – they’ve already asked me a couple of questions that I couldn’t answer, which I regard as the hallmark of a good class. Most of my advisees are enrolled though there are a few stragglers who apparently enjoy filling out forms to try to do that sort of thing after the deadlines have passed. And I seem to have found myself on a hiring committee where the candidates are all pretty good so I think we’ll be okay there. So far, so good.

6. I’m still not managing to read much, even though the book I’m currently working through is really good. I get to it when I can focus.

7. In these parlous times you just have to do things that make you happy no matter how ridiculous they are, and that is why there is a 5lb block of Cooper Sharp cheese in the fridge in the basement now, waiting for me to take it to one of the local supermarkets to be sliced. I am a happy Philadelphian.

8. I am currently avoiding the OS updates that Apple is pushing out to both my phone and my computer because from what I can tell both of them are poorly designed interfaces full of useless AI and I’m waiting until a) they figure out how to make updating at least not a step backward and/or b) I have no choice because they break the older OS that I’m using enough that I can’t do anything anymore. I have already noticed that the login shortcuts for both devices only work sporadically these days. We’ll see how it goes.

9. It’s getting back to more normal winter temperatures here – yesterday we nearly hit the freezing point, and it’s nice to have temperatures with real square roots – which means that the snow and ice melts a bit during the sunshine and that’s lovely but it also means that the salt on the roads gets picked up by the now-liquid water and splashed about by every car on the road and now both of our cars are white. I’m trying to think of it as camouflage.

10. The other day Kim and I were driving through Our Little Town when we noticed that there was a turkey sitting on the streetlight. This seemed odd. We took photos. And then we noticed the second turkey on top of the building behind the streetlight. As Les Nessman once noted, “It’s almost as if the turkeys were … organized.”

A Selection of Memes on the Current Crisis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Dissent

Back in October, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, an executive order that basically overturned the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

Anyone who criticizes fascism suddenly became a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who criticizes the policies of the federal government in any way was likewise declared a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who criticizes “capitalism” – a term which I sincerely doubt Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump can actually define – was also a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who criticizes Christianity as defined not by churches or clergy or even individual believers but by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves, is also a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who isn’t a bootlicking toady for the current administration is now labeled a “domestic terrorist.”

This is an attempt to criminalize dissent.

The Founding Fathers understood that this was tyranny. They understood, as George Washington said, that “If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.”

Yeah, no.

I am a goddamned American patriot. I have devoted my life to the study of this country’s history and I literally have a PhD in the Founding Fathers to go with that. My family has been here for two hundred years. I have at least three ancestors who fought on the correct side of the Civil War, for the republic created by the Founding Fathers and against the treason of the slaveholding South. During World War II the United States of America gave medals to my ancestors for shooting Fascists and we called them The Greatest Generation. I will be damned if I will disgrace their memory by kowtowing to these fucking losers now. 

This country was built on dissent. This country was built by people who looked at the shit being thrown their way and told the people throwing it that they could go to hell. It’s an ongoing process and we have a long way to go before we reach our aspirations, but there is only one way to get there.

I dissent.

To Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slave, I dissent.

From your cruel and inhumane war on American cities, your rogue personal army, your executions in the street, your kidnapping and trafficking small children, and your tyranny, I dissent.

From your promotion and defense of bloodshed as long as the people you hate are the ones dying, I dissent.

From your equally cruel and inhumane war on the immigrants who are here making lives and communities, following the processes and still being kidnapped and trafficked to foreign countries for pretend offenses in direct violation of legally binding court orders, from your campaign of ethnic cleansing in a nation of immigrants, I dissent.

From your Fascist “show me your papers” policies, from your use of a small child as bait, from your lack of ethics, morality, humanity, and decency, from your violent authoritarianism and small-minded bigotry, I dissent.

From your reckless assaults on education, your totalitarian attempts to rewrite history to suit your ideological demands, your refusal to accept the absolute fact that this country has always been a multi-cultural, multi-lingual nation with great virtues and great flaws standing side by side, I dissent.

From your obvious white supremacy and white nationalism, your soul-destroying racism, your brutal ignorance of actual Americans and the people living here, I dissent.

From your assaults on democracy, from your overt attempts to rig elections, suppress votes, and overturn results that don’t support you, from your weaponizing voter rolls as a tool of authoritarian control, I dissent.

From your eviscerating the US Constitution and its system of checks and balances, its limits on executive authority, and its safeguards against tyranny, I dissent.

From your destruction of American standing in the world, your attacks on allies, your coddling dictators, your clear subservience to a foreign power, your destructive trade wars, your catastrophic abandonment of everything that has made the United States a reliable ally, your refusal to recognize the contributions of American allies and your callous and ignorant dismissal of their losses, I dissent.

From your cruelty to the poor, the outcast, and the powerless, I dissent.

From your blasphemous twisted version of Christianity, I dissent.

From your eagerness to see hungry people starve, sick people die, and poor people suffer, I dissent.

From your overt war on women, on women’s health care, on women’s political and economic rights, on everything that the majority of the population might do that marks them as separate from breeding stock, I dissent.

From your desperate protection of pedophiles, all the way up to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump himself, from your willingness to start wars and invade American cities to distract from the fact that you are now over a month late in releasing the Epstein files as required by federal law, from your lawless immorality, rampant perversion, and twisted sickness, I dissent.

From all of this and more, from the mere fact that you have installed yourselves into positions of power and are systematically destroying everything that better men and women than you have built over generations of sweat, blood, and effort, from everything that you are and everything that you represent, I dissent.

I am not alone.

We outnumber you.

We will not be intimidated.

We will be here when you are just a negative example in a textbook.

I dissent.

Christmas, Part 3 - Wisconsin

We had our last Christmas celebration on Sunday.

We’re a family that likes to stretch these things out, what can we say? I will admit that it was a bit more stretched than we’d planned since we were supposed to do this the previous Saturday, but the weather forecast looked snowy and Saturdays, it turns out, are not that great when you have multiple people who work as bartenders so it got pushed back a week.

Naturally it snowed Sunday too. But nobody was bartending, so we had that going for us.

We all met at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, with me and Kim coming up from Our Little Town while Lauren and Shai drove in from Main Campus University. Oliver was already off at school and rather too far away for a quick visit so he was unable to make the event, but we have reached the point where we just try for the maximum number who can. Rory and Amy and most of their group were there, as were Justin and Christine, and we had a lovely time.

There is a certain pattern that happens at these events. For the most part we cycle between hanging out, eating, and gifts, and as far as patterns go it’s a pretty tough one to beat though given the prevalence of snacks laid out – heavy on the home baked cookies but not limited to them, of course – the line between eating and any of the other activities can be pretty thin.

Good food in good company – that’s the secret to life.

So we hung out for a while.

Eventually it was dinner time, which is a fairly amorphous sort of thing with this group since it involves a constant swirl of people sitting, eating, leaving, and being replaced by others doing the same thing so specifying a precise beginning and ending point is probably more trouble than it would be worth. It starts with the Call For Borscht and spreads outward from there into a feast of Ukrainian food and if you left hungry well whose fault was that?

This was followed by the gifts given to those who were not playing the Dice Game, which is mostly the younger children and Uncle Randall these days. It was a joyous swirl of paper and things and a good time was had by all, even those who had remained at the table to fill in the edges a bit.

This was followed by further hanging about because we could.

And then it was time for the Dice Game. This started years ago as a way for the people in my generation on both sides of the family to cut down on the chaos of Christmas shopping and has since become something of a rite of passage. Only the younger kids do the regular gifts these days – when you’re old enough, you’ll play the Dice Game. And play it we did, with abandon.

You never really know what you’re going to end up with when you play the Dice Game and that’s most of the fun. Also, it’s nice when people like the stuff you brought. I was pretty happy that the gifts I brought got traded for a few times. After the dust settled I gave away both of the things I ended up with to people who wanted them more which at this point in my life is a good way to end the game really.

This was, of course, followed by more hanging out.

Though not too much more, since we had to get home. Lauren and Shai came back as well since she had an appointment the next day that was easier to get to from our house than from Main Campus University. The snow had mostly but not entirely ended for the drive home and while it was a sloppy drive (and Kim and I had to stop to get more washer fluid about halfway home) we all got back without changing the shape of anything on the road.

We ended up in the living room for a while, just sitting and talking and sampling the ginger and hops flavored mead that I had received for my birthday from a friend. It was very tasty, and a nice way to end a good day.