I have put off this post too long.
Thursday was so long ago, I am not sure what I did other than work and come home and a trip to the convenience store. Oh, yeah, I had my third appointment with the chiropractor.
When I came home Friday, it had been 5 hours since I had left work. In that time, I got my hair cut, got my rent money, got the CD's of my x-rays for the chiropractor, did group therapy, did a little grocery shopping, and then paid my rent. I slept away most of what remained of Monday.
Yesterday, I stayed here and worked on Dad's stuff - other than a trip down to the convenience store.
Today was like yesterday. I had to stop several times because my neck was getting too stiff. There is no more I will try doing now. The dishes are done. The email inbox overflows. If I get enough energy, I will walk down to the convenience store. I was there first thing this morning; which was about 12 hours ago.
Notes taken the past few days follow.
Not the kind of place one expects this kind of news: Pendleton police shoot, kill man who was walking on I-69.
Indiana State Police said that upon arrival the man pulled a knife from his jacket pocket while advancing toward officers. Officers “attempted to de-escalate the situation” by telling the man to drop the knife, which ISP said he did not do.
A responding officer then reportedly used a stun gun on the man, ISP said, but was unsuccessful. This eventually resulted in a Pendleton officer drawing their gun and firing approximately one shot, striking the man.
A friend emailed me about the Washington, DC earlier today, she wondered if there was a conspiracy. Being one of my conservative friends, I did not send her Trump Gutted Key Aviation Safety Committee Before D.C. Plane Crash. I read the Trumpster is already blaming everyone else for this crash, even without knowing its cause.
Last night, I got interested in livestock. Watching the Korean show Kingdom got me curious if they had any livestock breeds. They do - beef and cat and pigs, but all that led me to Livestock of the World, and chickens.
I have had The AI War Is Coming (The Bulwark) on hold for the whole of this week. My enthusiasm for the wider world has taken not the backseat, but the rumble seat.
There are a bunch of different plot lines here, but they’re really all about the same story: China’s bid to become the Pacific hegemon.
And this is a surprise?
Timothy Noah's The Worst Take of All: Democrats Should Write Off the Working Class (The New Republic) should be read by every Democrat, and every American concerned about government. He is right - the idea of writing off the working class is a BAD IDEA. Indiana has one of the lowest ratio of college-educated to non-college-educated people. I do not want to see my state written off by the Democrats. Moreover, the ideas contained in Mr. Noah's article seem to me the kind that need to be made for two reasons: 1) they will benefit people and the country; and 2) they will change the national discourse.
The Monthly’s proposals to win back the working class follow the economic populism that Chait disdains. Philip Longman proposes that the federal government mandate that all employer-sponsored health plans follow Medicare pricing for hospitals, doctors, and drugs. Good idea! Bill Scher proposes that employers be required to use E-Verify to confirm that all their employees are legally documented. I’m less keen on that one because it’s been tried and failed, but it may be worth discussing as part of a broader and more humane immigration bill, which is what Scher has in mind. Audrey Stienon proposes that states penalize health care companies that engage in anticompetitive behavior. Sure, why not. Paul Glastris, the magazine’s editor in chief, proposes education vouchers not for schools but for private tutors. Sign me up!
Redman’s idea is for Democrats to publicize more aggressively the Inflation Reduction Act, whose grants flow disproportionately to red states. This is something I’ve suggested as well, but right now is an especially opportune moment because Trump is trying to defund the IRA, and also the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. That is so obviously idiotic that the Trump White House later clarified that it only meant those parts of these laws that fund the “Green New Deal,” an entirely separate set of proposals never enacted into law. What the White House meant, apparently, was that it didn’t want to fund the climate-related provisions of the IRA. But that’s pretty idiotic too, because that funding also flows disproportionately to red states. Democrats should work overtime right now putting Republican legislators on the record about whether they support cutting off economic development funds to their own Republican districts.
Other things learned recently:
How an In Memoriam Snub Led to a Stella Stevens Documentary with Quentin Tarantino
Mick Jagger shares tribute to Marianne Faithfull: “She was so much part of my life for so long”
Veterans say USPS backups are causing medication delays | What's the Deal?
The Best Fried Chicken In Indiana Is Hiding Inside This Hole-In-The-Wall Restaurant
Think you need a fancy restaurant for incredible fried chicken?
Think again—Wagner’s Village Inn in Oldenburg, Indiana, is a hidden gem serving some of the best fried chicken you’ll ever eat!
Jay County residents urged to not shoot at or chase drones - yeah, the Dark Overlords are coming for Jay County, Indiana.
Orca Literary Journal is going under: A Bang and Not a Whimper.
The decision was prompted by a variety of developments among the editorial staff. Life changes mostly, as in growing families and growing older, and those factors have significantly decreased the amount of time we can devote to the journal. And it isn’t always easy to face a mountain of submissions every day for that long without a little burnout.
We had a couple of non-negotiable guidelines when we started—to be professional and, simultaneously, devoted to the art of writing. It was always our priority to champion what we believed was the best writing, regardless of whether it conformed to current trends or politics, and we think we’ve been successful at that. We have always tried to be responsible and accountable to our submitters, readers, and to the writing community at large.
We hope to go out with a bang and not a whimper. We will publish two more issues in June. One will be our annual literary-speculative issue, and we’ll also release a final literary issue. Submissions for both issues are open.
I feel certain that I do not know much about art, reading this blog should prove that statement, but I do like Emily Farranto's writing as much as her pictures: February 1, 2025.
Spank the Carp has a new issue.
Feeling brain rot? Read All in the mind? The surprising truth about brain rot and double-check your feelings.
“When the Lancet commission on self-harm does an evidence review, when the National Academy of Sciences in the US does an evidence review, when academic researchers do their meta scientific research, these things don’t come out in line with this tech panic,” he says. “That’s because this tech panic is not based on evidence. It’s based on vibes.”
Why is history important? I have said for decades it helps counter the BS put out by politicians. David Motadel's Are we at a turning point in world history? is the kind of history more people should read -t explains how history explains itself. That the problems politicians would like us to think about are not really the historical causes of those problems. If what the politician's problems are not the cause of our problems, then their solutions are not meant to fix what ails us.
Today, world leaders are right to warn that we are facing such a historical inflection point, a global crisis. Yet, to fully understand it, to resolve it, we must not ignore its deeper structural causes, which often reach back to the end of the cold war and beyond. Among them are the resurgence of nationalism, cultural nativism and revanchism, now shaping political cultures around the world; unchecked neoliberal excess and exploitation, creating unsustainable inequalities; and the erosion of a rules-based international order, undermined by both liberal and illiberal powers over the last decades – all fueling wars and dividing societies.
7 Smart and Hilarious Books that Brilliantly Satirize Race - too old, too white, too Midwestern to know much, but coming from a world that is so very much monochrome, it is worth seeing what we are doing to one another.
Another more interested in keeping us all human, The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates review – a politically-charged meditation on the power of stories.
Humanity is weird, varied, messy; anyone trying to keep it simple, in my opinion, means people no good. Eliminating our shared complexity leads to another Auschwitz.
Another world far from my own experiences I found in The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride review – brilliantly rule-breaking fiction. Screwed-up people are all of us.
Okay, even cannibals have feelings. The Lamb by Lucy Rose review – cannibalism comes to Cumbria.
Is Bob Dylan infectious? Don’t look back: after decades of apathy, A Complete Unknown has turned me into a Dylan nut (The Guardian). The biggest disappointment of the year is not having seen this movie.
I think Neko Case is a gem; here she is interviewed about her memoir: ‘Women’s rage is real. Mostly we turn it on ourselves’: Neko Case on songwriting, survival – and her mother’s faked death .
Yet hers is not a misery memoir: Case tells these stories with honesty, heart and deadpan humour. “When you tell people how poor you were when you were growing up, they are like: ‘Oh, that’s so sad’ – but it was actually pretty funny,” she says.
Indiana makes the front page of The Guardian: Jump rope pro saves neighbor and dog from ice pond – with jump rope. We do thing s like that.
The Fuzztones, I know and and sometimes listen to, but The Fuzztones vs the World review – veteran garage revivalists keep on rocking does not get a good review.
But Marianne Faithful does get a good send-off in From Godard to Coppola, Van Sant to Anger, Marianne Faithfull was a dazzling magnet for film-makers. YouTube has a clip of "The Girl on a Motorcycle", and it was a revelation for me who knew Faithful from Rolling Stones stories and her album "Broken English".
Perhaps Faithfull is a figure from music and pop culture from the lost swinging age rather than cinema, but without the movies she would not have been so potent.
I do not know about the efficacy of the group therapy for another reason: I am not sure that I have not already been on the path the counselor sets out in his short lectures. Burnt out, depressed, I turned away from what I knew. It did take prison for me to recover myself. I keep working on that project, which why I read pieces like Origen, Self-Knowledge, and Self-Care - (Public Orthodoxy). Not that I claim to be the most pious of Orthodox Christians, but it keeps me forgetting there is a way of living that can cope with the muck and grime of existence.
The self-knowledge at the second level, however, is much more complicated. Here, the soul must, by examining her properties (whether she is material or not, simple or complex, bound to one body or capable of moving to another, whether her virtue is substantial or accidental, etc.), ascend to the one who created her in his own image. This, of course, is not fully possible for humans, but that does not absolve them from the obligation to dedicate themselves to it. A person must turn inward to recognize their resemblance to God and learn how to eradicate in them that which is not like God. And similarity to God implies that we desire what is in accordance with God’s will, which is the salvation of the entire creation, not just of the improved individuals who are preoccupied only with themselves.
Thus, messages like “Work on yourself” and “Take care of yourself,” which we today often read as “Don’t concern yourself with others and rely only on yourself,” should actually be understood as a call to live responsibly, and the messages “Know yourself” and “Accept yourself” should point to the path to such a life. It is not just about self-optimization that will make us the best version of ourselves, as man is not a program that can be “upgraded” to a better version. From Origen we can also learn that Christian self-care cannot be reduced to contemporary principles of a “healthy lifestyle” that are limited to organic food, physical activity, psychotherapy, regular sleep, and relaxation (all of which are good but not sufficient). Rather, it must entail a deep engagement with the truth about God, the world, and man, as well as with one’s conscience, soul, and virtue. It is inconceivable without nurturing a relationship with God and with others. Christian self-knowledge is not just the awareness of trauma, mistakes, and sins, but carries with it the knowledge of the quality of the soul’s being and her origin, therefore hope and a call for active conversion with the indispensable synergy of God.
I feel like I am procrastinating by reading the short story Heat Signature by Idra Novey (The London Magazine), but I am not sure what it is I am putting off: finishing off this post properly, my own fiction, or the research needing done for Dad's case. Great story; it left me feeling I am far too stiff in how I write.
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