Ending The Week, Pysch Evaluation, and Good News

 The week ended with me feeling like I had taken a good beating.

I forgot to call and make sure the payment for the monitoring went through. Here is the status of the phone: I cannot open the radio, text messages, contacts, return the last call by tapping the screen or change the phone from vibrate to ring. Oh, yeah, I do not know if I can answer the phone.

Having found the location of this new counselor was the Delaware County courthouse, I left work at 11 AM. Probably left a mess for me to clean on Monday. The appointment was at 1 pm, but the knee seems to be healing, and I felt no desire to test it by walking the whole way there. Instead, I caught the #17 bus on Memorial at 11:30. On the way there, I picked up lunch (a shredded beef burrito at La Glorieta on Batavia. This I ate at the picnic table at the courthouse. I have to admit the rice and the beans did not impress at all; the burrito was smaller than what I get a Chavas. I would get the burrito instead of the platter.

The courthouse has free wifi, so I brought along the laptop. This helped me get through some of the emails. From the email, I picked on two articles; both of which I finished reading this morning.

The Libertarian Party Crackup: Here’s why Donald Trump—hardly a libertarian—is speaking at their national convention from The Bulwark. I have voted for Libertarian candidates, I once knew a person who had a position with the Indiana party, but I grew dissatisfied with them as I got older. (I would liek to point out that the Libertarians have consistently run well enough in Indiana that they do not need to find for ballot access, and Anderson has had a Libertarian mayoral candidate for as long as I can recall; which seems appropriate for my old hometown.) Their economics does not recognize that it enables entrenched wealth and not the free market it stated as its goal. Then there is too much of Ayn Rand worship in its members. I prefer thinking of myself as a libertarian in a Lockean sense. The article points out what else is going wrong the Libertarians.

ALL THIS THRASHING FOR RELEVANCE amid internal chaos helps to explain the Libertarian party’s embrace of bizarre strategies: Its leadership is desperate, out of ideas, and willing to try anything. That’s how the caucus of principle and radicalism has come to court the likes of cracked Democrat-turned-independent RFK Jr. and former Republican president Trump.

In this, the party’s current leadership shows that it is  willing to abandon libertarian principles built in the party’s platform—and to do so for the sake of visibility and influence. They’re not minor principles, either, but core principles, such as those expressed in the party’s positions on free trade and migration (“Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders”), industrial policy (“We oppose all forms of government subsidies and bailouts to business, labor, or any other special interest”), and justice (“We support the abolition of qualified immunity”). What would DJT or RFK Jr. have to say to a gathering of libertarians on those topics?

But in truth, the Mises Caucus abandoning principles for optics is nothing new. At the 2022 convention, Justin Amash (the first Libertarian congressman in the party’s history) read a string of quotations at odds with Mises Caucus orthodoxy as part of his speech: “Libertarianism is not anarchism, nor has it anything whatsoever to do with anarchism,” he said, and “Libertarianism’s thinking is cosmopolitan and ecumenical.”

In response to a chorus of boos, Amash revealed that every quotation he had just read came from Ludwig von Mises himself (although Amash replaced the word “liberalism” in the original quotations with “libertarianism”). If the Mises Caucus rejects the words and ideas of its namesake, what parts of the libertarian tradition do they support?

They are now just as principled as the “conservatives” driving the Republican Party towards MAGA-land. 

Far from American politics is ‘Not well received’ at Harvard, these two writers maintain the rage from The Brisbane Times. Or maybe not all that far. The headline caught my eye, Then I started wondering about the Writers on Writers series.

One of the many pleasures of the Writers on Writers series is the fascinating variety of responses to the brief, which invites a distinguished Australian author to reflect on a fellow writer who has intrigued and inspired them. The effect of personalising this engagement is thrilling: each book is an idiosyncratic distillation of the literary concerns and qualities of both writers; and serves as a lively, accessible introduction to their work.

True to this alchemy, in this latest book of the series Tony Birch brings his own experience and preoccupations to his discussion of Kim Scott. There are also many common threads, one of which is the insistent interrogation of the idea of Australia.

***

Launched in 2017 as a collaboration between Black Inc., the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne, the Writers on Writers series initially envisaged six books. Birch’s essay on Scott is the 13th. It is a timely and welcome addition to the list.

I know the limits of my reading, but I do not know of a similar series here in the United States. If anyone knows of a similar American program, do let me know in the comments.

This particular volume interests me because of the following; anyone who reads me knows of my interest in history:

So author and subject are well-matched: Birch a historian turned fiction writer; Scott a novelist engrossed by history. This makes Birch particularly sensitive to the complexities and nuances of Scott’s reworking of the novel form to contest received national truths.

He makes this clear in his introduction: “I was attracted to Kim Scott’s writing not only for its rich approach to storytelling, but also for the way he understood the power of the colonial archive. … He also realised that if he were to extract a counter-narrative from the archive, to force it to confess truths camouflaged by bureaucratic language, he could use fiction to great effect.”

Maybe there is a lesson for American writers?

(While making the above entry from my Clippings app, I noticed I forgot to note ‘I can say things other people are afraid to’: Margaret Atwood on censorship, literary feuds and Trump from The Guardian. Ms. Atwood is as fun and thought-provoking as ever.)

It was good that I brought the laptop. By 1 PM I had completely forgotten the names of the person I was meeting. I wandered the second floor looking for a Suite 200 without success, No one knew of a Suite 200. I then went back down to boot up and reclaim the person's name. I noticed this time the agency she was with. This time I found my destination, as well as finding out she had put the wrong suite number in her email. I mentioned this to her when we met. She was offhand about the error. When I found this agency had been around for over a year, I really had to wonder about her ignorance and her flippancy. It did nothing to allay my prejudice that these federal contractors are here for the money I can bring to them, not to provide professional services. The interview started 15 minutes late.

I left almost two hours later, having missed the 2:30 bus by a half hour. We did the paperwork first. Then we did the evaluation. Family history came first, which has me thinking that the counseling will want to reunite me with my younger sister. There were mentions of trauma - the parents' divorce, the death of my step-father, TJ's miscarriage. The intake person wanted to include RE's trying to kill me twice as trauma, and I said it did not feel like that trauma but just one of those things. She got some of the background on my crimes - including me explaining about the plan to use my arrest as the reason for suicide. Then we got onto my romantic history. There was a bit of confusion about chronology, but that might be because she entered her notes directly into the computer. There were too many names between 1996 and 2004; she kept having to be reminded that they came before my marriage to A. Later, I remembered that I left out R and Karen, Stephanie W, and Shelly. I thought there were other topics she wanted to cover when she told me time was up. I got a card and an appointment to start group therapy. Which, I think, means this was not an evaluation to see if I needed treatment, and has left me wondering what did get evaluated? I am left with only one conclusion: this is your tax dollars at work.

When I get the info from my current counselor, I will send it along to them. Want to bet that leads to them deciding they do not need your tax dollars in their bank account.

I know my prejudices are here on full display, but no one has yet shown me they are unfounded. This supervised release program seems ill-conceived, ill-tailored for anything other than satisfying political prejudices, and that my own would have faltered except for my own efforts to find a goal in life. Nothing I saw in the documents seems to be about what kind of life are going to lead now that your goals of death have not been met in a timely fashion? I did not ask this question, maybe I should have instead of succumbing to my cynicism. Could be there will be a chance for this in the future. I suspect the reply will be that reunifying one with friends and family, making sure you recognize the nature of one's crimes, and teaching us how to have normal relations with the opposite sex (yes, I saw a clause about that) they will find as the same as my finding the good life to live. Which compared to Aristotle, Schopenhauer, and the Desert Fathers feels like very thin gruel. That I think there are ghosts of too many women in my head and heart to want to add to the collection makes working on improving relationships irrelevant. (My living in Muncie also contributes to my keeping sane relations with women - Anderson women are just a bit wilder than over here.)

I went outside and made a call. See, when I was looking for the intake person's number I noticed a call from the night before. I called back and found it was CC who called me. She was not happy I had not called her, said she had been trying to call me and was worried about me. I told her why I had not called, and that I had been worried about her. I continued the conversation for a bit outside. Then I decided I might as well walk up and catch the number 12 bus. I made the connection, even though I had to run for it and that taxed my COPD-riddled lungs.

From there I went to Payless, got a few items, and then came home. I bought only enough that carrying them from the bus station to home would not be burdensome. I fixed dinner, and after eating I tried to read and found I could not keep my eyes open. I was in bed at 6:30 pm.

I woke around 1:30 AM. I decided to stay up, which got my dishes washed, some of the trash taken out, and I finished the short story I started the other day. It is a fun little alt-history thing; it is satisfactory. I did make a short trip down to the Village Pantry for Lucky Strikes. When I stopped around 5:30 to take a nap I had also fixed up the slow-cooker.

I got moving again around 8:30. The rest of the trash was taken out, dirty clothes were organized, and making some notes for this blog. I had a bowl of my pork stew, listened to the news on NPR, and caught the 10:15 bus over to Ball State. Three hours later, I have gotten this far.

Now to take care of some other business.

sch