Europe 25: Florence, Day 1

Our first full day in Florence was a full one, which is what you want when you have a limited amount of time in a place full of things to do and see.

Somewhere in the depths of my phone is an app that I did not ask for and only ever check when I’m traveling. The rest of the time it sits in a folder labeled “Useless Things” which gets bigger with every major OS update. Among other things, this app counts my steps. I have no idea how it does this nor do I care to find out. All I know is that when I go on these trips it will occasionally send me notifications such as “Your activity levels have changed!” to let me know that I’m getting up and about more than I usually do as an academic, and then when I come back it sends me the same message in reverse to let me know that I’m back to my normal life as an immovable object. I’m not sure this is helpful. But I did end up checking the step count periodically while we were away and this was the day that I exceeded 30,000 steps. That may be a record for me. It may not. I’d need to check more often and that would require effort. But it was a lot.

We were up pretty early because of the time shift and had breakfast in the apartment thanks to Stacey and JR’s generosity the night before. We discovered that our credit card company had rejected the payments we’d made on the tram ride from the airport – you just wave your phone at the little pad by the door and it pays for things, and this is how public transportation should work, I think – but we weren’t able to contact them about it. This is called "foreshadowing," kids, and it becomes relevant again in a few days. Eventually the credit card company decided that those charges were okay, though, and sent us a note that they’d finally approved it. This was good to hear.

Stacey and JR came by around 7:30am and we set off for the Uffizi, which was about a half hour walk away.

Along the way we passed this staircase, which is definitely in the running to be my next profile picture on social media.

If you want to get anywhere in the historic part of Florence you have to pass through the piazza where the Duomo is (and, for the record, I’m just going to keep calling it Florence rather than the proper Italian name Firenze because I’m an American and using Firenze just smacks of being That Guy a bit too much for me). It’s absolutely central to the historical heart of Florence and it’s on the way to pretty much everything you want to get to. It’s gorgeous, however, so we didn’t mind.

The marble in the Duomo and its associated buildings is actually green and white, not black and white though that’s hard to see from the photos. You see this combination all over Florence, and after a while it occurred to me that this is probably why the adjective “Florentine” in nearly every context related to food means “add spinach to it.” This might just be me, though.

Between the Duomo and the Uffizi is the Piazza della Signoria, a wide-open space full of statues. There’s a very tall modern one right in the middle, for example.

And off to one side is a full-scale copy of Michelangelo’s David, which they put there when they moved the original indoors a while back. You don’t realize how big that statue is until you see it in person. We did eventually go see the original too, and yes it is that big.

There’s also a long row of statues under the overhang of a building on one side that we were content to view from afar, though later we did come back to see the statue of Neptune just to the side of that.

The trick to the Uffizi, we were told, is to get there early because if you wait until later in the day it becomes a mob scene. We showed up pretty much as it opened and after waiting in line for a bit they let us in. We didn’t even try to stick together, as that way madness lies, but we did set up a meeting time and place and we ran into each other from time to time.

The thing I learned about Florence that was immediately obvious in the Uffizi is that while Rome is basically Classical, Florence is mostly medieval and Renaissance. You find all of those things in both cities, of course, but there is a distinct emphasis that differs between them. The other thing I learned is that there is a LOT of art in Florence. You could spend an entire day in the Uffizi and never see the half of it, in part because it's kind of a rabbit warren that unfolds in nonlinear space, and that’s just one museum. As it was, we had a couple of hours so we did the best we could.

There were a great number of paintings, many of which I liked for reasons of my own that probably wouldn’t pass muster with an art critic but then I am not an art critic so I’m good with that.

There were sculptures, some of which were classical.

Not all of these were classics in the way you’d think, but they were old nonetheless. There’s nothing quite like an art gallery to remind you that people have always been people and that modern notions of propriety are not all that applicable to past epochs.

Also, just a reminder that you are allowed to have some fun with this stuff.

This was one of my favorites because you so rarely find characters in medieval paintings speaking to each other using the equivalent of cartoon speech bubbles, and even more rarely do you find the words simply embossed into the gold.

We met up briefly in one of the corridors. It was a hot day – most of the time we were in Florence it got up to around 92F/33C, which is significantly cooler than it would be immediately after we left so our timing was relatively good that way. The climate isn’t changing, folks. The climate has changed. We’re just trying to figure out how to survive the new one, or at least those of us with more than seven working brain cells are trying. Many are not, however, and you can draw your own conclusions from there. The Uffizi is air conditioned, though, and sometimes you just have to stand on the grate and be glad for it.

The photo of all of us is just one photo. Every time I look at it I think it’s a composite with me just stuck onto the side of the original like some amateur Photoshop job, but no – that’s what it was.

There were a number of exhibits that I particularly enjoyed. There was a map room, for example – I love maps of any kind, for no particular reason other than they’re fun and that’s enough. That map covers the entire wall and is somewhere around 5 meters by 15.

There was a display of artist self-portraits that I thought was fascinating. There have always been selfies, after all. It’s just easier now. From top to bottom, these are Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun, Solomon Adler (who looks like he’s having a whale of a time, doesn’t he?) and Beatrice Ancillotti Goretti, and they’re here solely because I liked them. That’s all you need for art, I think.

There’s an entire room devoted to Botticelli, which makes a certain amount of sense when you think about it. The centerpiece, of course, is The Birth of Venus, which is a painting I show to my Western Civ classes when we get to the Renaissance. I took a lot of photos of a lot of paintings on the theory that they’d make good slides for that class, actually. This was just one. As with the statue of David, you don’t realize how big it is until you’re standing in front of it

Also, Botticelli definitely had a type that he liked.

We saw works from three of the four Ninja Turtles while we were at the Uffizi. There was artwork by Leonardo, for example.

And Rafael.

And Michelangelo.

I don’t remember any Donatello in the Uffizi, which is not to say that there weren’t pieces by him there – quite possibly even pieces that I saw and just didn’t remember. It’s a big place. We saw Donatello pieces in other places, though, so in the end we collected the whole set. Dude.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the Uffizi, oddly enough, is that it provides some really lovely views of Florence from the windows. Reality can be just as much art as paintings and sculptures, I think.

From the museum you can see the Ponte Vecchio, the oldest standing bridge over the Arno. It was built in the mid-1300s on the site of ancient bridges going back to the Roman Empire, and it is – according to a brief internet search I just did – the only bridge in Florence that survived World War II. On the street level it is full of shops and people, but above that is the Vasari Corridor, which the ruling Medici family built in the late 1500s and used to get from one side of the river to the other without being bothered by actual contact with the people they ruled. The Vasari Corridor has been closed for about eight years for renovations, and they just reopened it this past December. It runs for about a kilometer and it goes from the Uffizi over the Ponte Vecchio to the Palazzo Priti and the Boboli Gardens.

We had tickets for the Corridor – which are timed – so at the appointed hour we presented ourselves at one end and set off. Our guide was informative but completely without affect, which lent a certain comical tone to the whole thing that you'd understand completely if you've ever seen Eleanor Morton's videos on Instagram or TikTok, and they haven’t quite managed to put the art back up yet. But you do get some lovely views of the river and the Ponte Vecchio below you as you go.

About halfway through this – not on the bridge, of course, but somewhere in the Oltrarno neighborhood across the river from the Uffizi – you pass a little window on the left and you can look down to see the Church of Santa Felicita which has a private balcony, accessible only through the Corridor I think, where the Medicis could attend services.

We got to the end and found ourselves at the entrance to the Boboli Gardens and the exit to the Palazzo Priti, neither of which we were going to explore that day. You actually come out at a little grotto that is, well, not exactly my sort of thing, but it was interesting to look at in a train wreck sort of way.

In the little courtyard in front of the grotto was this statue, which in my head I call “Incel on a Turtle.” I suppose it has a more official name but I’m just going to stick with my name for it as it’s probably funnier.

By this time the day was well underway and the sun was beating down on us, so we found our way to a nearby piazza where we located a market that would sell us drinks and I got to introduce Stacey and JR to chinotto, my favorite Italian beverage. It’s a bitter-orange soda (also, though I’ve never seen it in person, a liqueur) and it’s hard to find in the US so I’m always happy to grab some when I see it.

At the end of the piazza was the Basilica di Santa Spirito, a 15th-century church that beckoned us in with promises of interesting sights and shelter from the sun. You’re not allowed to take photos of the church from inside, but you can point your camera at the open front door from outside and get a decent idea of what it looks like.

It’s got a lot of artwork and carvings inside, and for a couple of euros you can go into a side chapel and see a larger-than-life wooden crucifix hanging in the middle of the room that was made by a teenaged Michelangelo. It was a bit oddly shaped from that perspective but apparently if they’d have put it at the height that it was supposed to be the perspectives would have sorted themselves out. Also, if you go all the way through the church you will find a really peaceful little courtyard with a pond.

Plus you can make your way into what is, at least by comparison, the New Refectory where this is a lovely fresco by Bernadino Pocetti, painted in 1597. We liked how he found space for the cat as well.

We went back to the piazza and had lunch, surrounded by friends and spouses, out in the open air with good food and a drink in hand, and if there is a better way to do that I’m not sure what it is. Though it is a fact that Florentines do not use salt in their recipes for bread, which makes for very odd-tasting bread.

We explored the piazza a bit after that, stopping by a stall that sold copper art pieces that were far too heavy to consider bringing home but were interesting to see, and it was at that point that we noticed a commotion over by the fountain in the middle of the piazza. It was about midafternoon and apparently it was the last day of school in Florence, and there was a large group of teenagers celebrating that fact by invading the fountain, tossing each other in, splashing water on each other, and generally having a grand time, and all the old people like us just stood there and watched with vague smiles on our faces because we remember what that day felt like and that kind of joy is infectious.

We wandered back through the streets of Oltrarno and over to the Ponte Vecchio after that. They have these things called wine windows in Florence, and apparently if you go at the right time you can give people money through that window and they will hand you a glass of wine and I think this is something that we should have here in the US except that we cannot have nice things like that especially when it comes to alcohol so I suppose I’ll just have to go back to Italy someday as we never found one that was open when we happened by.

The Ponte Vecchio at ground level is a crowded street lined with jewelry shops and you kind of bump along from one to the other, stopping at the gap between buildings that you find in the center of the bridge to look out over the river with all the other tourists, and there is a certain camaraderie in that I suppose.

From there we walked back to Stacey and JR’s apartment, stopping briefly to grab some groceries at a small market where I found paprika potato chips and more chinotto, and generally just enjoying the sights as we walked by them. I will say that the Piazza del Limbo was notably dance-free, however.

We rested a bit with Stacey and JR and then walked back to our own apartment for siesta time. It is good to plan for that when you have these vacations, especially when you are no longer 25 years old.

Plus, we had to gear up for our Florentine Steak Experience.

Florentine steak is one of the signature dishes of Florence, and having now had this Experience I understand why. Stacey and JR met us at our front door and we walked into the historic town center to Fiaschetteria-Trattoria Mario, a lovely little place that unfortunately sits right next door to another restaurant that is TikTok Famous so there was a milling crowd of people much hipper and trendier than I am in the street outside but fortunately we weren’t going there.

Fiaschetteria-Trattoria Mario is the sort of place where you need to make reservations a week in advance, which Stacey and JR had thoughtfully done. It’s narrow and deep and when we got there for our appointed time there was a little sign that said their next opening was days away. They seated us at a small table near the front and a waiter came over to take our order. We told him Florentine steak, and he disappeared into the kitchen, which is only separated from the rest of the place by a glass panel.

There followed a resounding WHACK! and a couple of minutes later he reappeared at our table with about half a cow on a plate. Have you ever seen a tomahawk steak? It was kind of like that only bigger, and the waiter proudly announced that it weighed 2.1 kilograms, which is about 4.5 pounds in bald eagle units. We nodded, ordered a couple of cursory sides (small salads, wine/beer according to preference, and an order of fries – the trick to this is not to eat much else) and he disappeared.

Florentine steaks are simply prepared. They throw salt onto the frying surface and sear one side, and then repeat with the other. The outside gets caramelized and crunchy while the inside remains rare. I’m not much on rare steaks, but it was surprisingly good and, well, filling.

There’s always room for dessert though.

It was a meal that pretty much required a passegiata around the town and we joined the slow-moving crowds ebbing and flowing through the historic central district of Florence. We walked past San Lorenzo, which was marvelously lit up and surrounded by art. I’m going to do an entire separate post on art in the streets of Florence so I’ll pass over that lightly at the moment, but it was nice to see.

We passed by the Duomo, of course, which was surrounded by happy crowds. buskers, diners, and hucksters selling those pinwheel toys that fly up about twenty meters and then land on someone’s head.

We stumbled into the Mercato Centrale, which was mostly closed though the upstairs was open. That’s where the restaurants are, rather than the vendors. It was fun to wander around and see what they had, and there was a television on showing the French Open. Stacey and JR are both big tennis fans, and it is a sport that Kim enjoys as well. It’s not one I follow but when you are surrounded by fans it’s pretty easy to get interested in how it’s going, and we watched for a bit before heading off back into the night. We passed another wine door, also closed. Eventually we had walked enough to clear some room so we found a gelato shop and made our presence felt.

I always get lemon, because that is the king of gelato flavors. They only had it in a granita, though, and let me tell you it was just wonderful and surprisingly inexpensive. We stood there in the street with our various treats, watching the people go by. It was a lovely way to end a good day.

Europe 25: Getting to Florence

We weren’t going to travel this year.

We’ve been doing a lot of traveling in the last few years and enjoying it very much, thank you, but it’s been a busy few years in many ways and when we started the year our plans for the summer were to step back a bit and have a quiet couple of months and perhaps let people come to us. Also, to be honest, it’s been a rather horrifying time to be an American for the last few months so keeping things low key seemed prudent. We had some friends who wanted to plan a trip with us but we ended up working out a plan for something closer to hand (coming soon!), which we are looking forward to immensely. Plus, we do in fact have friends visiting us later this summer as well – Fran and her parents will be coming over from Belgium and it will be lovely to see them again.

It seemed pretty set.

But more and more friends kept insisting we should travel to Europe to see them, which is a very high-class problem to have when you get down to it, and eventually they wore us down. It seems strange to say all that in a world where such opportunities are a privilege after all, but once we made the first call the rest of it kind of slotted in. Maybe it’s a life-cycle thing – you reach a certain age and you have enough money saved up to do this sort of thing and you’re still pretty healthy so you figure maybe you should just go Do The Thing even if you have been doing the thing a lot recently because there will be a time in the not all that distant future when you won’t have much say in the matter.

Our friends Stacey and JR were in Florence – they’d rented an apartment in April and were staying through June – and said we should join them there. Our friends Joshua and Sarah were going to be in Portugal and offered to meet us there as well. And our Swedish friends pointed out that we owed them a visit, since the last time we were there was 2018 and they’d been here in 2022, and if we timed it right we could be there for Midsommar.

So in the end we went. And it was, with one notable exception on a Sunday morning in Florence, a lovely time. Yes, I will explain that in due time.

It is a good thing to travel, really, especially if you can get outside of the bubble of the tourist stuff and walk around a bit. It’s good to do the tourist stuff too, don’t get me wrong – and we did a fair amount of it, being tourists and all – but sometimes you just walk into the grocery store to pick up things for breakfast, or ride the trams and buses around town, or stop in at a little hole in the wall restaurant where you’re the only person who doesn’t speak the language and you eventually manage to order something that isn’t quite what you were expecting but is clearly what everyone else is expecting when they order that, and you get a small glimpse into another world.

Familiar and normal are different things.

Of course, deciding to go was, in some sense, the easy part. Because then you actually have to make it happen. This is where Kim comes in, because she is an excellent planner who actually enjoys the process while I tend to get overwhelmed by the whole ordeal and end up just staying home. Everyone involved in the planning for this trip uses spreadsheets, which is another thing that I find mystifying. One of my goals in life is to get to retirement without ever really having learned how to use MS Excel, and I’m nearly there. I was asked to contribute my ideas to these spreadsheets, which I dutifully did – I looked up what one does in Florence (a lot) and Porto (also a lot, but with port wine) and in Stockholm (many things as well, but since we’d be there with friends over a holiday I figured they’d have more ideas than I would) and I made a list and handed it to Kim and a surprising amount of it ended up in the final plans, probably because much of it overlapped with other lists of similar ideas.

We also had to figure out who was going, which got complicated quickly. Kim and I were definitely going. Oliver ended up staying home because he has other life events coming up shortly and he needed to focus on those. Lauren started her graduate program in May and therefore would be busy for much of our trip, but it turned out she could meet us in Sweden for that leg and then that turned into quite another adventure that is still ongoing but is really her story to tell. I’m looking forward to hearing all about it when she returns.

Part of the planning process is that you have to download a pile of apps onto your phone. Everything happens on your phone these days, which is a strange thing indeed. There are airline apps for tracking flights, getting boarding passes, and receiving a myriad of targeted ads begging you to join various travel clubs and acquire branded credit cards. There are city apps, designed to give you overviews of where you are traveling. There are apps that you can use to pay for things, apps that you can use to enquire about things, apps for public transportation systems, apps for restaurants, apps for translating things, apps to get eSims for your phone that will actually let you use your phone where you’re going, apps that let you book cars since taxis seem to be going away these days, apps that let you book hotels or apartments, apps that let you pay for parking and even apps for keeping track of all of your apps. It’s an app eat app world out there, folks. Setting that up took days.

For myself, I bought a new travel notebook since my old one is now full (again, an odd notion) and I like having something where I can actually write with a pen on paper. I wavered back and forth about whether I should bring my actual camera or just use my phone (there’s an app for that too) and in the end I left the camera at home. It’s heavy and it makes me instantly identifiable as a tourist, even more so than I already am, and I think it was the right call. I do wish I’d figured out the photo app on my phone a bit more than I did, but so it goes.

When all was said and done we were on eight different flights on anywhere from four to six airlines depending on how you count, each of which has its own app and its own rules, none of which give you much space for luggage unless you pay them handsomely for the privilege. We decided we’d just go with carryon for the trip – one backpack each for the overhead compartment and one bag to go under the seat – with a weight limit of 8 to 10kg each depending on the airline. Not bad for 21 days abroad. It just requires you to do laundry now and then.

It turns out that nobody ever checks the weight on carryon anymore. As long as your bag doesn’t look too big they just assume it’s fine and let you go, and once you’re within security nobody even pretends to care about it for connecting flights. I was within weight on every flight, but on the flight back Kim was a bit over on one bag and we weren’t bothered. I think the airlines have just figured out that it costs them more to police that than they’d be getting back in baggage fees so they just wave you through.

We left on a Wednesday morning, piling into my little car and driving down to O’Hare with Oliver, who switched into the driver’s seat and drove home while we navigated through security and out to the gate.

Our first flight took us to Toronto, and it was a pretty cheerful ride. There were a lot of kids on the flight, and at some point the whole plane sang happy birthday to a random passenger. Kim and I sat in different places, and in front of me there was a family that had three kids under six years old, all going to Rome and I wanted to give them suggestions but it seemed rude to butt into their conversation and I’d never been there with small children anyway so I just let it go. It was an uneventful flight as you’d want it to be and we ended up having a nice Indian dinner at the Toronto airport.

The flight out was delayed because of “groomers” – which is what they call the cleaning staff, I hope – and water issues, and this started a trend. We’d be on a total of four flights before we reached Florence, and all of the last three were delayed for one reason or another. Fortunately this meant we made them all. Three cheers for compensating errors, I say.

They never give you enough to drink on these flights, but that’s good practice for being in Europe where they never give you enough to drink there either. The two things that immediately mark me as an American on these trips are 1) I am resolutely monolingual, and 2) I cannot conceive of a beverage of less than 600ml (with free refills). This is not how they do things in the rest of the world.

I managed to get a bit of sleep on the flight, which I rarely ever do. There’s something about sitting in an upright position eight inches from the seat in front of you on a metal tube a mile in the air hurtling through the atmosphere with only the cold trackless waters of the North Atlantic below you that tends to make sleeping difficult, I find. Maybe it’s just me. But eventually we landed in Stockholm, and by that time it was Thursday.

It took us the better part of an hour to go through passport control and we were grateful for the fact that our next flight was delayed. It was a smaller plane but comfortable, and we were soon in Frankfurt. The flight from Frankfurt to Florence was an even smaller plane that was also delayed – just enough that we managed to make it – and at some point we found ourselves in the Florence airport.

Win.

Getting from there to our rented apartment was pretty straightforward, actually. We found the T2 tram into the city, figured out our stop, and then walked about two blocks to the front door. Then it got complicated.

To get from the street to the apartment required a nine-step instruction sheet that the host kindly sent to us. We pushed a button, which allowed us to open the front door. Once in the lobby we entered a code into a mailbox and another into a lockbox inside the mailbox to get our keys (fortunately we only had to do this step once). We then walked over to a tiny elevator that was about the same size but somewhat more powerful than the one we had in Budapest last year in that it could lift four people if you could all somehow squeeze in. We opened the outer door and then the inner doors, closed all the doors behind us, and then punched in our floor. There followed an almighty THUNK and the elevator would rise up to the fifth floor, whereupon we had to reverse the process to get out. The instructions were very clear on the fact that we had to close all of the doors behind us or the elevator would be stuck on our floor until someone came up and took care of that, and these instructions were reinforced by a sign on the inside of the fifth floor door. This sign only appeared on our floor. It’s the emojis at the end that really sold it. That and the fact that it was in English rather than Italian.

From the elevator you turned left and were immediately confronted by a locked door which could be opened by one of the identical keys that were in the lockbox, and then you were in a vestibule that was maybe a meter square and the door on the right opened with the other key. It takes a while to get used to how much more compact things are in Europe vs the American midwest, where we have nothing but space.

There weren’t many other visitors in the building that I could tell – most of the people there lived there – but there was an apartment on the first floor that was being rented by a group of young women who couldn’t figure out how to get in when they arrived a couple of days later and I got to use my Dad Skills to show them how to work the locks and the door (doors open inward in Europe – I have no idea why their fire codes allow that) and they were happy about that.

It was a very nice apartment, austere in the way that most of the apartments we’ve been to in Italy have been, with few soft surfaces, but comfortable. The only real trick to the place was that the shower was really, really small. It’s one of those glass box showers that are common in Europe, where two of the walls have sliding panels that meet in a corner, so you slide both of them back and get in and out that way except the whole thing was maybe 28” square and I’m a sedentary American which meant that squeezing through that opening was a bit of a trick and every time I would try to get something off the shower floor I’d back into the water knob and turn it off.

It felt good to wash off the travel grime though.

We let Stacey and JR know that we’d arrived and they walked over to greet us. It’s about a 15 minute walk from their apartment, and we got to know that route pretty well by the end. They brought a bag of groceries for breakfasts, which was a lovely thing and very much appreciated, and we made plans for the next day before they headed back home. It’s such a nice thing to have friends in a new place.

Our goal was to try to stay up until a reasonable hour so we could get past the jet lag as soon as possible, so we decided at that point to go out and find some dinner. It was a nice night with the sun rapidly setting, and it was good to explore the neighborhood a bit.

This store was on the corner of our block and I never did see it open. I just love the fact that it’s a menswear store.  Yes, that's a penguin on the logo.

We wandered around a bit as the sun went down, listening to the music in the air – somewhere nearby there was a concert happening and at one point we thought we’d try to find it but we decided against that and it turned out to be a good thing we did because eventually we learned that it was a lot further away than it sounded. After a while we found a little pizza place that had outdoor seating and we spent a happy hour or so eating good food and watching people walk or drive by. There were a lot of couples who seemed to be on dates.

We walked back to our building, followed the various entry procedures, and found our way to a very comfortable bed where we collapsed in two tired but happy heaps.

Welcome to Florence.

A Troubling Holiday

I have to confess that I’m not really feeling the Independence Day vibe this year.

It’s hard to celebrate your country while it is being systematically destroyed from within by Fascists masquerading as human beings while a third of the country hoots and hollers to cheer them on.

We have our own Gestapo that is kidnapping American citizens off the streets and shipping them to foreign prisons to be tortured without so much as an email sent to their families let alone anything approaching the due process of law that the Constitution demands. The Supreme Court is fine with this.

We have a brand new concentration camp in the swamps of Florida – Alligator Auschwitz – that has already flooded because it’s so shoddily designed but the cruelty is the point after all. One of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s closest advisors just publicly announced that this is a good thing because if they play their cards right there will be 65 million alligator meals soon. There aren’t 65 million immigrants in this country, legal or otherwise. There are, however, 65 million Hispanic/Latino Americans – a group that makes up nearly 20% of the actual citizens of this nation. This isn’t law enforcement. It’s ethnic cleansing.  I refer to Auschwitz for a damned good reason, in other words.

Right-wing extremists are now openly gunning down opposing political leaders, and the regime’s sum total reaction ranged from boredom to cheering them on.

Congress just passed the most destructive and immoral budget plan in this nation’s history, which is saying something. It will basically eliminate much of what passes for the American social safety net – Medicaid is entirely defunded, for example, as are SNAP benefits for hungry children and a host of similar things – in order to subsidize billionaires who apparently need more money and turn our homegrown Gestapo into the world's fifth largest military force, one that answers only to the extremists in power now and has already shown no interest in law, morality, or the Constitution. The fact that those who voted for this bill haven’t been vaporized by lightning bolts is a sign that this is a valid contestant to be the most conclusive proof of the absence of a loving god that has happened this year, and in a year that includes active and ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, the continuing atrocities perpetrated by Russia in Ukraine, random bombings of Iran, and the aforementioned ICE-Gestapo raids on innocent civilians, that’s quite an achievement.

Congress has basically abdicated its power to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump, and the Supreme Court has forcibly removed power from the nation’s judiciary in order to do the same. We are well on the path toward an American Reich – we swept past the beginnings of that a long time ago and are getting rather uncomfortably close to the end game, in fact.

The Founding Fathers understood that republics were doomed. They were better historians than most modern Americans. Republics, they said, require an educated and informed citizenry, leadership that sacrificed its petty private interests in order to pursue the greater public good, and a strong sense of virtue across the board. They understood that historically such conditions were rare and fleeting. They didn’t know when the republic would collapse into tyranny, but they know it would.

We know it now.

It is possible that we can get out of this, but it will neither be easy nor painless. There will be sacrifices. There will probably be casualties.

We were gone for much of June – blog posts to follow, of course – and I cannot tell you how tempting it was just to stay gone for a while until it the crisis had passed and the country could go back to not actively self-destructing. That might take years. But we’re back now, and this is my goddamned country and they can’t fucking have it.

Here I stand. I can do no other.