A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
I am thinking these will be self-explanatory. Maybe changes in Indiana. So much money for providers and Hoosiers being kicked off Medicaid and SNAP.
There is voting at elections and then there is voting by moving one's feet - or in moving a country's gold. If the US isn't safe for the other country's gold, what is it for us?
Trump likes Putin. Putin is locked in a futile war with Ukraine. Is this why Trump has us in a futile war with Iran - Putin-envy?
I was kicked out of The Cup yesterday, banned from the place, by the owner who had his phone open and ready to the sheriff's website. His righteousness irritated me into a sentence I will not repeat here. Well, my sins and history are mine and I cannot be angry about that. What bothered me was that I am now out of the writing group. I sketched out my absence to one of the others. I expect never to hear from them again.
What puzzles me is how he came to jump on me. I do not recall seeing the fellow before. For a moment, I thought he might be someone I had forgotten. If I had seen him, this was our only time we spoke. Which leaves it possible that someone put him on me. Why anyone would do that makes no sense.
I napped and then fell back into my obsession with my research project. That had me running from 8 pm last night until 3 am.
When I woke around 7:30, I went back at it until after noon. I napped again. I decided it was time to update my record here. When I finish, back to the project.
For the life of me I cannot recall Tuesday.
Nothing new submitted, but there were rejections.
9/10: “After Making Landfall”
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9/8
Thank you for your submission to Chestnut Review. Although we must decline your submission this time, we appreciated the chance to consider it. Please do not interpret this as a judgment of your art as a whole. Individual tastes matter a great deal in decisions like these, and though we have to decline this round, we encourage you to keep writing and creating. The world needs it, and you.
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Excessive heat and an ear infection could be my excuses. They were real, debilitating, inhibiting a range of actions. I had an incident last Sunday that still bothers me where I almost fainted. It left me light-headed and shaken through Monday.
But the truth is, I got caught up in an obsession. I worked on my research project until I wanted to write nothing more. I blistered my eyes with articles and editing my own work. Why is it that creating footnotes and translating information is both more tiring and less than writing fiction? Fiction feels like painting with sweeping brush strokes and then filling them with details. Writing this article is more like taking tiles to make a mosaic - finding a piece and then aligning it to fit other pieces.
What I had at the end of the week were notes for a supervised release post and nothing more.
I do not seem to recall when the heat advisory started this week. Certainly on Wednesday, but maybe Tuesday.
When Tuesday came, I made enough progress that I decided to treat myself to (finally) seeing The Odyssey. Paying my light bill only strengthened my resolve to see the movie. Using someone else's air conditioning seemed like a very good idea.
Nolan wrote and directed a great movie. Not a perfect movie, though. The criticisms about Calypso are spot on - never have I seen Charlize Theron reduced to a cipher; worse, a sexless, charmless cipher. Yes, there is no sex as in the poem; also, there is not much of the erotic. Yes, Pattinson excels as the villain. What has gone unmentioned, or unseen by me, has been anything complimenting the scenes of Odysseus and Penelope. To them is one the scene of passion. Anne Hathaway is a Penelope that matches the wits of her Odysseus. For all of Elon Musk and the online wankers complaining of Lupita Nyong'o's casting, I have been unable to imagine another actress in the parts she plays. Yes, she has few lines as Helen, but what she does have is devasting. More importantly, as Helen, is her face. No, she has power in her roles that I cannot imagine another pulling off with words, let alone her silence. My biggest surprise was Matt Damon. In my memory are Kirk Douglas and Armand Assante, both more in my mind the adventuring, wily Odsysseus of my imagination. Damon portrays a king with responsibilities to his men; who uses his wits in service to his responsibilities rather than for mere glory. Lastly, the scenes with Circe and Osysseus understate their power and importance.
I suspect it will win Best Cinematography just for the madness of filming directly on Imax cameras. The only competition should be the next installment of Dune.
It should win Best Adapted Screenplay, depending again on the forthcoming Dune.
Nolan should get Best Director for holding its scope together. I prefer Olive Wilde for The Invite; she did more with less, but that will probably be why she will not be in the running. Denis Villeneuve will then be the one to watch for.
And it will be the Best Picture winner.
Wednesday, I made the writer's group. That went well. I think I also made a trip to Walmart.
Thursday back to research and putting together that manuscript and enduring the heat and humidity. I think I finished watching Graveyard on Netflix. It is a Turkish police show that has finished its second season. It is a sort of Turkish Law and Order: SVU. Although I think that lessens Graveyard. It has none of the righteous melodrama of SVU. The social critique of Graveyard actually hits harder by being less overt. A scene between two fathers with one talking about bringing up his son in a world with online hate towards women stays in my mind. Oddly, it also brought to mind The Closer/Major Crimes for all it lacks in the humor of those shows. It is also a workplace drama where private lives often intrude. Last, but not least, its production values and direction are better than what we get on our cop shows.
Friday was the group and shopping at Payless. Nothing much else was accomplished that day besides small work done on the project. I started the second season of Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen. This I finished on Saturday. I am not sure what Ritchie is doing with this; it feels different from what he has done before. He has not been one for paying attention to monsters.
Saturday, I indulged in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I have seen some headlines criticizing this season. I have not taken the time to listen to them. It seems to me the show has not the usual sanctimony of Star Trek. It also seems to be establishing the future in small ways. Not so much in terms of plot but in character. Back to the project, putting off a trip to Payless of milk and disilled water. The things I had not enough hands for on Friday.
Sunday was church. A wonderful time, a settling of the spirit. I had thought I had polished off one section only to realize as I was closing the door to leave that I had not. No, that came after church.
Today, it was up early, computer troubles, dealing with the ear infection, and finishing this post. I have a table to put together and a kitchen to clean. So this is the end of this report. What follows are the things collected during the past week that were supposed to have been published before today.
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My youngest nephew when we last spoke of the Democrats as socialists, and he was having no part of them. He, like his mother, is a Trumper. And now Trump is calling Democrats Communists. I wonder if that old world still holds many in its superstitious awe. Then I consider my youngest nephew. I wonder if he considers Trump's own warming to socialism.
Starting with Trump’s
surprise moves to take a “golden share” in U.S. Steel and then a 10
percent share in Intel more than a year ago, the administration is
approaching $30 billion in equity stakes, warrants or similar plans in
U.S. companies by most estimates, a fairly radical departure from
orthodoxy outside of times of financial crisis — like the massive
government bailouts of 2008-2009 — or world war.
That’s not counting some international arrangements, like the Trump administration’s Aug. 28 announcement that it would take a stake in the Venezuelan oil industry, which it said will be engineered by the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital.
Todd Tucker, the group’s director of industrial and trade policy, says that Trump’s
early move to demand some corporate governance power in U.S. Steel amid
its takeover by Nippon Steel – not an equity stake, but still a highly
unusual degree of influence in a company – was “pretty ingenious” and
mirrored concepts that had been debated in the early days of the Biden
administration, and in proposals from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Decades ago, a friend of mine who was a Marine captain often talked about the Turks and the Israeli armies as being on parity. He wondered what would be the outcome if they met. Too bad he died eleven years ago.
That the Middle East is hurtling towards a catastrophic Turkish-Israeli conflict
has been apparent for a while. Nothing is inevitable in history, but
the dynamic leading towards conflict has been gathering momentum at a
pace that is startling. Israel is clearly a shark that cannot stop
swimming, and the collapse of Iranian forward-positioned proxies is
setting the region up for the ultimate showdown between the only two
actors with hegemonic ambitions. ‘As Iran weakens, that vacuum will be
filled by the natural candidate with imperial ambitions in the Middle
East, and that is Turkey’, former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said recently. He isn’t the only one.
The sentiment now shapes Israeli strategic doctrines, from the
Netanyahu government to opposition leaders such as Naftali Bennett. In
sum, the potential for conflict remains, regardless of who is in power
in Israel. And Turkey isn’t the only actor with hegemonic aspirations in
the region.
Turkey is, however, the other remarkable actor in
this tango: the only power and former imperial entity in the entire
Eurasian landmass (with the exception of, possibly, China) that appears
to simultaneously possess a sense of a residual imperial greatness, a
vision of an overarching historical longue durée (unlike
contemporary Europeans) and a cold, calculated grand-strategy unimpeded
by democratic processes. Turkey isn’t affluent by most western measures,
and yet, for a country that was strategically isolated a decade ago,
Turkey has since positioned itself as the most influential actor in the
region.
***
A recent addition has further empowered the Turkish hand: an emerging
Saudi-Pakistani security relationship that potentially brings Pakistan’s
nuclear deterrence into the wider strategic matrix. From the American
strategic perspective (even without considering the steadily declining
support for Israel among both younger generations of Democrats and
Republicans), it is understandable why this coalition might appeal. The
Americans have been unable to extricate themselves from the region,
partly due to their internal strategic incoherence and an absurd
democratic system that alters US grand strategy every eight years or so.
A Saudi-Pakistani bloc under Ankara’s hegemony, on the other hand,
could contain both Russia and Iran in the region.
***
The United States will, of course, continue to be immensely powerful and
splendidly isolated in the Western hemisphere. But, inevitably,
American retrenchment, either due to imperial exhaustion, debt,
generational change or strategic defeat, will translate into a mad dash
for localised regional hegemony and space for imperial powers with
capacity and ambition. An Israeli attack on Turkey, or an all-out
Turkish-Israeli war over expansionism in Syria or Cyprus, therefore has
the potential to destroy NATO as we know it. But from a strictly
historical perspective, it will be a new hegemonic cycle in a region
that has seen many such cycles before, with an older imperial entity
returning to form.
Detached
from their ethnic and regional origins and attached to class-based
cultures, the British-American traditions Fischer identifies may endure,
as nonwhite immigrants and their descendants assimilate to multiple
melting pots along educational and occupational lines. Already in the
US, college-educated Hispanics tend to share the liberalism of other
college-educated Americans, reflecting the New England roots of today’s
academic culture, while working-class Hispanics are more socially
conservative, and many convert to evangelical Protestantism, with its
Scots-Irish influences.
Meanwhile,
the nativism of today’s “Heritage Americans” on the right is much more
inclusive than that of the Anglo-Protestant nativists of a century ago,
with Irish Americans and German Americans now considered “Heritage
Americans.”
I wonder if there is not a bit of the regionalism mentioned above in the regionalism of Soft Secession? (Sheila Kennedy).
Nearly two dozen Blue states have filed joint lawsuits to block Trump
administration vendettas. Blue state coalitions have sued the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FEMA over rules that tie
disaster and emergency relief money to voter citizenship checks and
local immigration enforcement, and they have mounted coordinated
responses to political assaults on state universities, non-profits, and
local municipal funds. Local and state jurisdictions in those states
have worked to strengthen local laws that limit ICE access to public
property and data.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Colorado Governor Jared Polis
launched a private initiative to encourage Blue state resource pooling–a
project in which states will share staff, legal expertise, and
operational strategies to protect state institutions and coordinate
contingency plans against federal pressure. The initiative is modeled on
previous reproductive rights compacts in which states shared and
stockpiled abortion medication.
The movement toward state-level action can also be seen as a response
to a longer-term fiscal reality: Donor states like California, New
York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts send far more money to Washington
than they get back. The Rockefeller Institute estimates that New York’s
net outflow in 2019 was $142 billion, and that California’s in 2021–22
was $83 billion. Meanwhile, states like Alabama, Mississippi, and West
Virginia are net recipients.
Midterms are but 9, 10 weeks away. Maybe we end this silly season of American politics, maybe we can restore American greatness, but I think rejoicing needs await January if the Democrats take enough seats they take over Congress.
The notion of Dresden as an “innocent” city, devoted strictly to culture
and the arts, whose factories manufactured mostly porcelain figurines
and dinnerware along with other luxury goods, such as cigarettes,
cameras, sewing machines, and bicycles, is a myth as well. Almost all of
these factories had been converted to support the war effort.
Cigarette-making machines were adapted to produce bullets. Companies
that made camera lenses focused on creating better, more accurate bomb
sights. Radio, bicycle, and sewing machine makers produced precision
machine tools key to war technology. Even a famous artist’s colony and
school in the northern part of the city had ceased making furniture and
crafts, instead building wooden tail assemblies for planes as metal
became scarce. The colony’s well-known Festival Hall had become an SS
barracks. By 1944, Dresden contained at least one hundred and
twenty-seven factories that manufactured war material, and most
Dresdeners were employed in war work or armaments factories.
My Own Life was published posthumously in 1777 along with his close friend Adam Smith’s Letter to Strahan, which,
with Hume’s blessing, completed the account of Hume’s final period of
illness, in a public letter addressed to Hume’s publisher, William
Strahan. Hume and Smith had been in close contact for over 25 years and,
because they lived in different cities, many of their letters have been
preserved. In January 1776, the famously rotund Hume informed Smith
that he had lost five stone, or 70 pounds. Hume’s doctor, Joseph Black,
told Smith that his patient suffered from night fevers, internal
bleeding and severe stomach problems. The evidence indicates, however,
that despite his failing health, Hume continued to host dinners and
visit friends. The Scottish playwright John Home commented that ‘[Hume]
talks of his illness, of his death, as matters of no moment… I never saw
him more cheerful, or in more perfect possession of all his faculties,
his memory, his understanding, his wit.’
In an interview with witnesses, officials claimed that Weaver was inside
a home, pointed a pink handgun at them and fired around six to 10 shots
inside the home. A video of the incident reportedly showed Weaver
holding the gun and firing multiple shots.
I start with the American winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: Sinclair Lewis (Minnesota), Thomas Stearns Eliot (Missouri), Ernst Hemingway (Illinois), Saul Bellow (Illinois), Toni Morrison (Ohio), and Bob Dylan (Minnesota).
But, as retired Princeton religion scholar Jeffrey Stout has observed,
all of the themes that preoccupied Nietzsche—including the death of God
and the slow absorption of the great into an undifferentiated herd—were
first concerns of the quintessential American democrat, Ralph Waldo
Emerson. No one was more attuned than Emerson to the ways in which a
mindless conformity can eat away at the soul and slowly erode the life
of a community. His many essays and lectures
were written not to promote an atomized individualism, as some critics
have claimed, but rather to call his readers to a fidelity to what he
saw as true, living religion that rose above the herd. In other words,
the problems identified by our emerging nihilist class of commentators
were not first discovered by anti-liberals like Nietzsche, but were well
known to committed democrats like Emerson.
But Emerson saw a way of overcoming all of
this from within a democratic frame. The “democracy” that stultified
common life was but a semblance of democracy, a corrupt mockery of the
real thing. The true democrat, for Emerson, was the man who followed the
truth where it led without regard for the demands put upon him by
society or by false authorities who wore, as one writer very much in the
Emersonian tradition put it, “the mantle of power but not of
knowledge.”
That writer, of course, is the late Mr.
Wendell Berry of Port Royal, Kentucky, son of John Marshall Berry and
Virginia Berry, who died earlier this week at age 92. These older
conventions of obituary writing, naming the deceased’s home place and
the names of his people, seem utterly nonnegotiable in any account of
Mr. Berry’s life.
Among the several things that helped turn my life around and gave me the means of putting together the shards of myself, it was Thoreau. The above essay ties Berry with Thoreau and that now makes sense to me and gives depth to Wendell Berry’s Nine Rulesby Ted Gioia.
Gioia's essay provoked this response from my friend KH:
It is an age of
specialization. I used to be able to work on my car, now I can’t. OTOH,
they’re much safer, fewer people are killed in them and they’re
spaceships compared with 25 years ago.
We used to think pagers were amazing. Now we have a computer in our hands.
I’m
concerned with Big Tech but that’s a failure of government to regulate.
Standard Oil and the railroads were once big tech. Then came TR.
If
you want to move to a farm in Kentucky and live off the land, you can
probably eschew all of this. The rest of us have to live in 2026.
The
Nobel Peace Prize winner and presidential hopeful, María Corina
Machado, may choose not to publicly criticise President Trump, whose
support she needs if she hopes to come to power. Others, though, have
been more forthcoming.
"You
chose to use the power of the United States not to liberate
Venezuelans, but to ally yourself with our oppressors," said Venezuelan
economist, Ricardo Hausmann, on social media, directing his comments at
the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
"You
opted to push through an asset seizure, an unconstitutional agreement
with an illegitimate and oppressive government, instead of using the
leadership of the United States to first restore constitutional order
and democracy," he said.
The lack of an imminent election in Venezuela – or, indeed, any clear plan towards one – strikes many opponents as a betrayal.
How Trump Uses Dormant Laws to Amass Power (The New Republic) both scares me and makes me pause at the efforts made by the Administration's lawyers to find obscure laws to bend to their purposes.
The
Trump administration’s enthusiasm for reviving moribund laws to
accomplish its policy goals should inspire Congress to consider
repealing or revising them. Trump and his allies have inflicted plenty
of harm by violating federal laws during his second term. Another
important problem is when he abuses and misuses existing laws. If
Congress is interested in restoring its own primacy in our constitutional order, it should reconsider its own past missteps, as well.
Both
of the court revivals illustrate the problem. While federal law
authorizes the use of prize courts, they have not meaningfully existed
since the Civil War. The Union Navy blockaded Southern ports throughout
the war and seized military and civilian vessels alike. Once captured,
the ships were typically brought to Union-held ports for disposal by
prize courts. In 1863, the Supreme Court rejected legal challenges to the Southern blockade and upheld President Abraham Lincoln’s authority to seize and sell ships and goods acquired from it.
As
Bloomberg noted when it reported on the prize courts’ revival earlier
this week, the courts fell into disuse after the Spanish-American War
ended in 1900 and were moribund after World War II. They reflect a
nineteenth-century understanding of naval warfare where both a nation’s
navy and private citizens acting as privateers could capture vessels on
the high seas. The changing nature of naval warfare helped render these
tactics obsolete: The average American boat owner these days would have
an easier time sailing to the moon than capturing an armed enemy
warship.
A Congressional Research Service report in 2024
noted that Congress abolished prize money for private citizens in 1899,
and any proceeds from prize court cases now go into the Treasury’s
general fund instead. The Trump administration’s plans, though still
vague, appear to be centered on creating a faster, easier legal pathway
to sell captured Iranian oil. This may be riskier for the administration
than it looks, since it will give federal courts an opportunity to
directly consider whether the ships and goods were lawfully seized. As
Lincoln’s own experience showed, such cases can allow judges to consider
legality of the war itself. The sixteenth president prevailed; the
forty-seventh might not.
We’ve been under no illusions. We recognized, from the start, that
America has changed. Early last year, I observed that the decades-long
process of steadily increasing integration between our economies was
over. Our government understood before many that America would transform
all of its commercial relationships, that it would put a series of
tariffs on its closest allies, and use economic integration as a weapon.
We recognize that sometimes its signature was written in pencil.
Like everyone else, I first met Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He was also the reason to watch Times Square, Congo and Earth Two. He almost salvaged The Three Musketeers. Here are the items I collected for this post from last week.
A legislature at war with education sends a signal to potential
employers that they will have trouble finding a skilled workforce.
Siphoning money from public schools that teach accurate science and
introduce children to the diversity they will encounter in the workforce
in order to fund religious academies is one bad sign; waging war
against once-storied public universities by insisting that vetted
scholarship is really “liberal indoctrination” ensures that
intellectually curious students will either depart Indiana upon
graduation or avoid the state entirely and enroll elsewhere.
A legislature that ignores both medical science and women’s rights by
banning abortion (and effectively criminalizing medical assistance for
emergency pregnancies) sends a message to doctors and women considering
employment in the state. In the wake of that travesty, even companies
that are already located here are finding it difficult to recruit
workers–male or female–from families still in their childbearing years.
Excuse the raw data dump. These are articles and cases that I have been reading lately for my research project on state constitutional law. I need to clear out my tabs!
I got a bit walking in, but missed the bus twice so gave up on a trip to Payless.
Worked on the research project.
Went to the convenience store in the afternoon and met a dog named Tex.
Got tired after eating a pizza from Domino's and slept from 6 to a little after 8 PM.
Wrote this post.
After Making Landfall rejected:
Thank you again for submitting your work to The Ex-Puritan.
As
editors, we’re forced to select an extremely small number of works from
the hundreds of great submissions we receive each quarter. Submissions
for this issue were once again excellent, and numerous. Although we have
to pass on your submission this time around, we’re truly grateful that
you thought to send it our way.
All the best in your future writing. Warm wishes and good luck!
Samuel, thank you for sending us your work. We appreciate the chance to read it, but it's not right for us at this time.
Keep writing. Keep reading. Keep being awesome. And best of luck placing this elsewhere.
We
kindly ask that you wait one month before submitting again, regardless
of which genre/category you submitted. Submissions that do not follow
this guideline will be replied to unread.
I meant to go to this morning's liturgy, only I woke feeling nauseous and then slept late. That is pretty much the story of this week.
Monday ended with a lot of pain, the surgery seems mostly past, but some side effects remain. I can walk a little faster, except for the limp on my right. Tuesday continued with the pain being apparent. Wednesday, I got out to the writer's group and Walmart; afterward all I wanted to do was sleep. Yesterday, I was up early and my back locked up.
All I have done is work on my research project. I did not have any energy for anything creative.
The PO visited yesterday. The new one and the old one. This is the second time they came as a pair. The old one id his usual glare and glower, stayed silent, and left the same old impression of someone needing antacids. Of course, they came when I had been trying to sleep and was neither awake or asleep. I do not understand being questioned about the monitoring software; it runs in the background and I ignore it. The new guy confused me when he asked about the upcoming polygraph; that is in January. Either he forgot that or just did not know. I feel that I let them down: there has never been any contact with minors, and this year since I rarely leave the apartment, I am not sure how it is expected for me to have some. He asked about an email to Paul S without knowing that I am free to contact felons, so long as we are not engaged in criminal activities. As usual, it was like a visit from aliens. It seems the government expects some sort of maniacal behavior breaking through rather than I am living the life I want to live. They have assumed much about me, have neither questioned their assumptions, and their assumptions are not relevant to how I live my life. The government thinks their court order must chafe me when it is irrelevant. I guess no one understands that the supervised order does not me restricts my life. Oh well, everybody needs to make a buck. It keeps people with no discernible job skills employed.
But getting my nap interrupted did annoy me.
More importantly, I received an email that I got an Honorable Mention in the William Faulkner Literary Competition for my short story, The First Day of Feeling Free! I cannot attend the award ceremony; I worry about my bowels between here and the convenience store, let alone a trip to Mississippi. It has been a good year for publishing my stuff.
And against that, rejections were received.
Thank you
for sending us "After Making Landfall" for consideration. We appreciate
the opportunity to read your work and regret that it does not fit the
needs of TriQuarterly. We wish you success in placing it for
publication.
The maker of any good con is that the thing offered sounds too good to be true. The same goes for judicial theories. Originalism sounds fair and reasonable until a closer look shows it is just another way for the United States Supreme Court to take rights away from Americans.
The idea that constitutional questions can—and should
be—answered via historical analysis is simple enough (and echoes the
conservative movement’s longstanding embrace of originalism).
According to this view, judges should not impose their own values on
the Constitution or decide cases according to their own moral or
political commitments. They should instead look backward: asking whether
a right or interpretation of a law is deeply rooted in the nation’s
historical practices, language, and traditions.
History, in other words, promises to do what judicial philosophy long has not: remove judgment from judging.
The term just finished
reminds us once again how central appeals to “history and tradition”
have become to the Roberts Court’s constitutional project. Rather than
promoting judicial restraint, however, key cases reveal how the “history
and tradition test” has been weaponized to enable one of the most
radical revisions to this nation’s constitutional order since the New
Deal. It has been used not only to overturn previous decisions and
precedent, but also to fundamentally shift the way the Court engages in
judicial review.
Take the Court’s Second Amendment decisions as an example. On June 25, 2026, the Court issued its opinion inWolford v. Lopez, striking down Hawaii’s restrictions on carrying firearms on private property that is open to the public.
Typically,
when considering the validity of the Hawaii law, the Court would ask a
familiar set of questions. For starters, does the state have a rational
basis for regulating the issue in question (the basic question in the
rational basis scrutiny test applied to all law)? Taking things a step
forward, the Court often then asks whether there is a fundamental right
at issue. And, if so, whether the law in question served a compelling
government interest (national security, for example) and whether the law
was narrowly tailored in service of that interest. This framework of
tests does not eliminate judicial judgment, but it does make that
judgment explicit. Courts weigh interests, assess evidence, and openly
confront competing constitutional values.
In Wolford,
however, the Court opted to adopt its new preferred methodology. Under
the historical methodology announced in the 2022 decision New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen,
Hawaii’s law stood or fell on an entirely different basis: whether the
state could identify sufficiently analogous restrictions from the
nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
To
put that in plain language: The question was not whether the law served
a compelling governmental (or public) interest. It was whether a
sufficiently similar law existed at some point during the nation’s
founding.
Let us see if I can get to the ones that interest me:
Tartuffe
By Jean-Baptiste Molière, adapted by Richard Wilbur
Directed by Karen Kessler and Kathy Logelin
February 12-13 and 17-20 at 7:30 p.m. | February 14 and 20-21 at 2:30 p.m. | Performing Arts Center - Proscenium Theatre
Sharp, witty, and bitingly relevant, Tartuffe is a masterclass in
comedic satire. When the wealthy Orgon falls under the spell of
Tartuffe—a sanctimonious fraud posing as a man of great piety—his entire
household is thrown into chaos.
As Tartuffe schemes to marry Orgon’s daughter, seduce his wife, and
seize control of the family fortune, the rest of the household races to
expose the truth. What follows is a fast-moving comedy of deception,
hypocrisy, and willful blindness. With razor-sharp language and enduring
insight, Tartuffe reveals the dangers of believing what we want to
believe—even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
TARTUFFE (WILBUR) is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Dramatists Play Service. www.concordtheatricals.com
Holmes is Where the Heart Is
By David Taylor Little
Directed by Veronica Santoyo
October 1-4 and 6-8 at 7:30 p.m. | October 3 at 2:30 p.m. | Arts and Journalism Building, Room 225
In postwar London, a sharp-witted private investigator finds herself
haunted by voices from her favorite Sherlock Holmes radio
broadcasts—clues that may be guiding her toward the truth… or pulling
her further from it. As she and her sister race to solve a high-stakes
mystery, they must navigate a world that doubts women detectives at
every turn. But when instinct, intellect, and imagination collide, the
line between inspiration and obsession begins to blur. Suspenseful,
witty, and full of intrigue, Holmes Is Where the Heart Is is a clever
homage to classic detective stories—reimagined through a fresh and
fiercely determined lens.
Fall Short Play Series The Fall Short Play Series features multiple short plays performed in repertory directed by junior-level students.
Apocalypse Road Trip By Wren Aubrey Latham
Directed by Mason Luellen October 20-25 at 7:30 p.m. | Art and Journalism Building, Room 225
When the world ends, Mitchy and Quinn hit the road in a battered
2011 Jeep Wrangler they call ‘The Big Lebowski.’ With humor, heart, and
plenty of detours, their journey through a ruined landscape becomes a
search for meaning, connection, and a reason to keep going—even at the
end of everything.
The Proposal
By Anton Chekhov, Julius West
Directed by Tyler Bennett
October 20-25 at 7:30 p.m. | Art and Journalism Building, Room 225
A marriage proposal goes wildly off the rails when a nervous young
farmer and his intended bride spiral into a series of ridiculous
arguments over land, pride, and family honor. Tempers flare, nerves
fray, and the engagement teeters—yet somehow, love (or stubbornness)
wins out. Fast, sharp, and delightfully absurd, The Proposal is a comic
classic about how romance and conflict often arrive hand in hand.
[I am back working through my pretrial detention journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. Consider this post as more of an aborted memoir. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. Continued from 6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 5 sch 8/15/2026]
The first woman I lived with was T2. We spent a year living together during which time the relationship became an engagement, soured, and came to an end. I went into a partnership of which she disapproved (and her disapproval was proven by 1997), and which became a major burden on us. I worked way too many hours computerizing the practice. Then she had the miscarriage.
We had announced our engagement and her pregnancy to my family at Thanksgiving. The miscarriage happened on Christmas Eve, My reaction rankled her. I thought it was a repeat of TJ's last miscarriage, that T2 did not come close to death I found a relief. She mourned the loss of the child. I thought it was another pain for me to endure. That I preferred her to the child was never well communicated by me.
As I wrote, the situation soured. We had a house we rented. We had a rather nasty fight one day. I moved upstairs as I did not trust her to pay the remainder of the lease. My paranoia reinforced my emotional barricades. We left the house on good terms, but not nearly as good as when we entered.
We would date for the remainder of her stay in Anderson. We did try for another pregnancy, but sex under pressure never promoted a good performance out of me. It was too much of what sex should never be - work. I dated Judy M for the first time during this period and the Rose of Spiceland, and I saw a bit of JH. She almost got a second marriage proposal from me during one night in Indianapolis. When she announced her leaving Anderson first, I kept my mouth shut.
I asked T2 for some help after my incarceration. She agreed and then stopped answering my calls. Here is one friend my legal troubles cost me.
I must mention Judy M. If for no other reason than a public apology. She has been in and out of my life since 1996. She was the other woman who proposed I marry her. She would get annoyed with me, then she would call me. I liked her company, but ti was another case where there was no approval of me by her children. Those two I never met until after I got married. I came close to calling her in 2009, I did not because I would have to admit my marriage was at an end. She sought happiness so desperately, sometimes inappropriately, that we did fit well together. I trusted her as much as I did JH. I hope she takes care of herself.
Did I mention the return of LAH? She haunted the fringes now. Sporadically a friend, but no longer a romantic interest.
Linda lasted the summer of 1995, but she cut deeply. Who would think such a short time would have such an impact? Older than I was, and with a broad, warm smile. I lost myself in that smile. How e met was unorthodox even by my standards.
I was working on Sunday evening at the office. Without any expectations of seeing another human being, I wore an old T-shirt and ratty jeans. I was in a foul mood when a friend called me. He was a bouncer at Elliott's (a nightclub/restaurant once located at the southwest corner of Main and 7th Streets in Anderson) and told me I needed to get down there to meet a woman. A drink sounded good, my curiosity was piqued. My mood did not improve when he introduced me to this short, very drunk brunette, wearing a blue dress. When she spoke she had an alto, not quite as husky as Marlene Dietrich's. She told me about her boyfriend dropping her and moving off to Illinois. She asked me if I liked sex, but using a more direct Anglo-Saxon word. The way she said it was too damn cute. My bad mood ended. I said I did and asked if she wanted to leave. No, she was with her cousin and could not leave. She kept on amusing me. Her question about sex was repeated a few more times. She used my full name, and I never thought Samuel sounded so good. I asked her to take a walk outside to get away from the club's noise. We went down to the Riverwalk, stopping at the pavillion below the jail. We kissed, we petted, and then I gave her a very good tongue lashing. My name came from her through gritted teeth asking me to stop. I did. We giggled a bit, she smoothed down her skirt, and as we walked back to Elliott's I put her blue thong in my pocket. I left her at the club with a kiss and a date for the following night. That began a beautiful summer.
Linda told me she wanted no seriousness. The boyfriend gone to Illinois had been all too serious a breakup. I had no problem with that. She was laughter and comfortablenmess after so much gloom and uncertainty. By the end of summer, I was head over heels with her. The way she called my name was musical and I wanted to keep hearing it. At the end of the summer, Linda told me she was moving to Illinois and marrying the former boyfriend.
Linda stuck me hard. It was a mystery I never solved why she went back to the old boyfriend. My bouncer friend told me it was about submission and cocaine. I had seen no sign of either.
Not since TJ had anyone's leaving left me with such a gaping hole. The
Rose of Spiceland and Judy M caught me on the rebound. T1 was still
around. More importantly, I had work and the need to make money.
[T1 is still around in a way. I saw her this Spring, not a word from her since then. I tried looking up Judy M when I was released from the halfway house. She had moved around and I have found no trace of her. The bouncer friend I found had died while I was gone, so Linda remains a mystery but her influence has faded to a wispy memory. Her most direct influence was that I no longer had any expectations of marriage, of settling down to a quiet normal life. That woman could be a hobby but that work was my real life. sch 8/15/2026.]
[I am back working through my pretrial detention journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. Consider this post as more of an aborted memoir. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. Continued from 6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 4 sch 8/14/2026]
Dawn disappeared on me almost 20 years ago because I foolishly said something about finally having sex with a girl from my high school. She got upset; saying something about competition. So much for saying a factual truth about how things had changed in my life. I thought she was funny, beautiful in a skinny brunette way, and eminently loveable. She was brightness to KA's dourness. Too bad my foot fits so well in my mouth. I learned later she married and had children and was quite happy with her life. Another exhibit of women doing better away from me. I applaud her success.
T2 came into my life in FEbruary of 1991. How did I first become aware of her? I cannto remember now. She was another lawyer in Anderson. I remember her telling me that she noticed me first. Our first date occurred at Anderson's Nile Restaurant. She wore a low-cut blouse with a red bra. When she leaned forward it was difficult to avoid noticing that particular combination.
We belonged to the same profession, she had ended a bad relationship, and I was becoming disillusioned with KA. At this time, I was seeing KA and two other women. One ended quickly, while the other continued a while longer. That relationship ended the night we pulled up at my apartment with this girlfriend's face in my lap and KA in my apartment. KA was supposed to be home with her children. (We only went out on the weekends when her ex-husband had visitation.) I displeased the date by taking her home instead of us confronting KA. No way I wanted my date put in that position. When I came to my apartment, KA and I had an argument over a letter from T2. I patched things rather than deal with her anger. Now, only T2 and KA remained. Then it was only T2. She stayed somewhere in my life until my incareration.
T2 equaled T1 in height. They met once at JH's house, specifically her kitchen. T1 and T2 squared off across from each other. There was a singular look on T1's face as she took in T2; a combination of amusement and curiosity and speculation. What we men generally describe as catty. T2 stood next to me which left me unable to see her face, but I felt her bristle a bit. JH stood between and away from them with her back to the sink, a bit drunk, and trying to be nonchalant with her amusement at my discomfort. I waited for all hell to break loose. Then the smell of marijuana wafted into the kitchen from JH's sister and friends in the living room. T2 suggested we depart. We said our goodbyes, Once in the car, she noted she had never been to any place where her boyfriend had slept with three of the four women there. I did not mention I once flirted with JH's sister. T2 never said anything specific about T1.
sch
[Continued in 6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 6. sch 8/14.]
[I am back working through my pretrial detention journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. Consider this post as more of an aborted memoir. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. Continued from 6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 3 sch 8/14/2026]
JH and I were involved sexually before I went off to law school, before TJ broke up with me, during my time in law school, and after her divorce. No details are needed by you. She even proposed to me. I sometimes wonder what have happened if I had taken her proposal seriously. Nowadays, she and another friend of mine have been deeply attached for over a decade. When she took up with him, we started talking; a a bit of pique and shard words. Neither speak to me any longer.
Cindy F. and Connie W. came into my life about the same time. I cannot remember who came first. I like to think it was Connie, who nicely sent me on my way as she went back to her ex-boyfriend. Both were blondes; Connie was kind with a broad smile as she orgasmed. Cindy was none of that.
Filled with divrocee's resentment, Cindy came riding hard and furious and left quickly, too. JH warned me against her; Cindy being a first cousin. She was the first anti-TJ.
I lost track of Connie until her murder. She came home from work to have her soon to be ex-husband shoot her as she walked to her house. There had been a protective order - so much for them. Then he killed himself. The deaths of many people might improve the world. Hers did not.
The friend now so attached to JH introduced me to KA. It was a wild time with threesomes and oral sex in cars being turn ons for her. On our first date, she told me she had had a husband and did not need another, nor did her children need another husband. I took this seriously, even if she quietly changed her mind about the husband bit. She is one of two women toward whom I have some resentment. Because I relied on her statement of what she wanted. She changed her mind by the end of our relationship. By then, she was telling friends of mine of her intent to marry me within the next six months. Too bad she had played the tight-mouthed, too jealous, humorless girlfriend for too long by this time. If she had come and made an outright offer, things could have been different for her. KA made another mistake by not involving her children in the marriage question. My mother did not marry again until all three of us children approved. I would not marry a woman who with children unless they approved of me. So, we did not marry. Not liking the feeling of chains, at one point I was dating three other women at the same time. Our ending was not pretty. She began acting more irrational than usual. She informed me that the wild sex was just to please me. If so, she had been a great actress, the enthusiasm in her eyes did not seem easily faked. This angered me as I had never asked anyone to do anything they did not want to do. We broke up.
Several years ago, KA turned up and asked me to get her divorced from her second husband. I did. She never finished paying her bill. Go figure that out. KA was the second anti-TJ in many ways. She has been one of three who might have actually helped my career.
sch
[Since writing this KA is one of two of my ex-girlfriends I would like to speak with. As time went by, questions grew and I would liek answers, but not enough to hunt her down.
JH died in 2015. I omitted one conversation with had in 2008 or 2009 and the one time I saw her about the same time. I failed to follow up with the phone conversation just as I failed to speak with her when I saw her. She died from cirrhosis of the liver. Her boyfriend did not tell me she was ill. I wish he had it would have motivated me to change the course of my life. Since her death, I have given up any thoughts of new romantic attachments. I am not convinced that anyone's attachment to me did them any good. More importantly, that I am not that good of a friend. JH was a far better friend to me than I was to her. The boyfriend has become a former friend of mine. I suppose he wants to avoid any possible taking up with my ex-wife. He once turned down T1's advances because she was an ex-girlfriend of mine. When he told me this, I emphasized ex-girlfriend, so perhaps ex-wives do not count or he is too ashamed to speak with me. What he does not understand is that his letting JH drink herself to death angers me.
Continued in 6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 5. sch 8/14.]
Another sign that procrastion remains; it is my oldest vice.
7/3:
Self-assurance or inner peace.
Steps to:
Think of yourself less often
Live according to values. Integrity plays a big role.
Get good at what matters to you.
[Ah, values. Nietzsche trashed Western values over a century ago. Nihilism rises out of their lack. Integrity dissipates when values are shown to be worthless. When society values hypocrisy, when society values the grifter and the performance over the substance, then integrity must be able to subsist in the desert. Nihilism leaves only destruction of one's self, of the world, as the only thing that matters. The only way I found to get out from under my nihilism was to have a complete breakdown, a return to the consolations of philosophy (starting with Aristotle and David Hume), reforging a will to live my life on my own terms, and ended with me entering the Eastern Orthodox Church. sch 8/15/26]
Live with integrity makes life better, not being ashamed.
[See Albert Camus's The Rebel. See Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. sch 8/15/26]
How to get out of your head -
grounding
form of attentiuon mindfulness - goal is to be present in the moment.
[I am back working through my pretrial detention journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. Consider this post as more of an aborted memoir. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. Continued from 6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 2 sch 8/14/2026]
I spent most of 1988 licking my wounds over T1. There was an encounter with Cindy—a wonderfully erotic and tender pair of encounters - but she would not go out with me again. There was a bit of shared history from college that she could not get over. She never knew that she had just to snap her fingers. Delicate, sweet Cindy married in 2008 or 2009. I wish her well.
And there was an encounter with Shelly about then. Questions raised since high school got an answer of sorts. Having dated what seemed like all my friends. I was curious about her charms. She proved TJ's theory that great sex requires love, passion. I would go so far as to say that good sex requires affection for one another. Never go to bed with a woman who does not laugh.
Then I spent a considerable time mooning over LAH again. She would invate and then push away when I got too close.
And then I met Paula of Bloomington while working for a bill collector. Her wit led me to ask her for a date. She possessed all the energy and loveliness of TJ. Sandy-haired and buxom. Wonderfully energetic in bed with a habit of scratching one's back. Her two children were her life. If I had the nerve then to become a stepfather; it would have been an interesting marriage. I lost track of Paula after 1998. She shared another quality with TJ: the world was with her in it. Perhaps my affection for Bloomington has a lot to do with Paula.
I think time has come Regina. Another on/off relationship with her for a few years. I lost track of her between 1993 and 2008. I saw her at the Madison County Government Center. She was even livelier than when we dated. Like T1, she was about 5'10”. Of women I should have married, she was number 3. Regina had the temper to keep me in line, the brains to keep me from getting bored, and a sex drive to keep us both busy. Unlike any other, the end of our relationship was not primarily because of my emotional disabilities. No, Regina felt her being African-American would cause me problems. Not that she ever asked me how I felt. She would tell my friend JH that I was the only white guy she would go out with. Regina never knew how much I loved her.
sch
[When I returned from prison, I found out Paula died in 2010. She had health problems when I knew her. Regina was the onlyex-girlfriend to write me in prison. Continued in 6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 4 sch 8/14/2026]
