Had to do a Costco run today. We were running low on paper towels, and needed trash bags, laundry detergent, that stuff I only want to buy twice a year. I had a little extra time, it was lunchtime, and I thought, by golly, I’m going to try one of those giant hot dogs this place is so famous for. I got the combo — hot dog plus drink — for $1.50 and sat down at a shared table to eat. The couple next to me had come in from Canada to shop, but were disappointed they couldn’t find Bugles. Yes, the horn-shaped snack food. Another couple sitting nearby suggested they try Aldi, just three miles away.

“But there’ll be a 25 percent tariff on those levied at the bridge, so I hope that doesn’t eat up the anticipated bulk savings,” I said, and we all shared a grim chuckle. This Costco is in red Macomb County, and the fact we could laugh about it struck me as a slim slice of dim sunshine in a dark time. Then I came home to learn the on-again, off-again tariffs are kinda off, then kinda on, and we’re supporting Ukraine militarily again? But the market is still down 600 points, just today. Capitalists these days must feel like a frat boy who brought a hot girl home from the bar at closing time, and learned too late that she was crazy as a shithouse rat, and also pregnant.

We tried to warn them! Now they’ve fucked around and are finding out. A friend was drinking on a bar patio last night — we’re deep in Fool’s Spring this week — and a Cybertruck pulled up to the stop sign at the corner. Everyone on the patio began yelling abuse at the driver. This is good news.

Oh well. Concentrate on the good! Kate’s house passed inspection with flying colors, and closing is set for the end of the month. Don’t tell her, but her father is giving her a [deleted] for a housewarming present. Me, I’m still thinking. The problem is complicated by her boyfriend’s two cats, so any decent furniture is probably not a good idea. I saw a few pieces of furniture at Costco, but the style now is this nubby upholstery that makes everything look like a giant scratching post. Think I’ll wait until she’s moved and see what gaps need to be filled.

Meanwhile, I tackled the taxes. What should have been a two-hour chore stretched out to the full day, because That Tax Program Everyone Uses was glitchy as hell. I laid down for a nap after four hours, and a potential solution came to me in a doze. Didn’t work, although now, even though I changed nothing, it claims our forms are error-free and ready to file. Then I wondered if the problem was Safari, the Mac browser I’ve been using forever. More and more sites are dropping subtle hints that they’re “optimized for Chrome,” and the thought of migrating all my bookmarks and passwords gives me a headache.

Finally, I assume you’ve been paying attention to the Mahmoud Khalil case. It makes me think of Larry Flynt, and why a bigshot Harvard lawyer like Alan Isaacman took his case to the Supreme Court. As Isaacman and Flynt both pointed out, when the government wants to crack down on free speech, they don’t go after the Girl Scouts first. They target the pornographers, people others are afraid to stand up for. And when they want to break all the laws around immigration, they go after a troublesome Palestinian activist. But they won’t stop there. And I think that’s evident.

Midweek is here. Hope no more glitches.

We didn’t see this in New Orleans, but I endorse it heartily:

Swastikar gets bombarded at Mardi Gras
byu/funksonme inPublicFreakout

I also find this account from inside one of the Swasticars amusing:

New Orleans is a blue city in a bloody-red state, but still: Resistance. And resistance that means more than wearing a pink suit and holding up a little paddle. I mean, we’ve seen what a piece of crap a Cybertruck is — one of those beads might have shattered the windshield.

And this, Reddit informs me, is now a regular event at the Easton Tesla dealership in Columbus:

I guess if we’re going to save what’s left of this country, we’ll have to do it ourselves. Surely we can’t rely on anyone in Washington to do it:

Republicans on Capitol Hill are shying away from criticizing Donald Trump’s policies over fears for their physical safety and that of their families, a Democratic member of Congress has said.

Eric Swalwell, a Democratic representative from California, said his Republican colleagues were “terrified” of crossing Trump not only because of the negative impact on their political careers, but also from anxiety that it might provoke physical threats that could cause personal upheaval and require them to hire round-the-clock security as protection.

…“It’s their personal safety that they’re afraid of, and they have spouses and family members saying, ‘Do not do this, it’s not worth it, it will change our lives forever. We will have to hire around-the-clock security.’ Life can be very uncomfortable for your children.

“That is real, because when [Elon] Musk [Trump’s most powerful ally] tweets at somebody, or Trump tweets at somebody, or calls somebody out, their lives are turned upside down.

“When he tweets at you, people make threats, and you have to take people at their word. And so that is a real thing that my colleagues struggle with.”

Here’s my advice: Don’t take them at their word. Assume the people who make these threats are what they seem to be: Cowards. Live your life in the open. If someone yells at you in a restaurant, yell back, or spill your ice water on their shoes, or just look bored and snap your fingers for security to throw them out. Don’t hire around-the-clock security. Be brave. Public service isn’t all receptions at the French embassy. There are women all over the world who open their inboxes every day and find death threats, rape threats, threats most congress members haven’t even considered. Teach your children what bravery looks like.

(Noted: This didn’t work out for Salman Rushdie, true. But most of these people are indeed cowards. The odds are in your favor.)

But if you can’t find the strength to do this, please dispense with the pink and the paddles and the other empty gestures, which sound like something you’d hear discussed in the background chatter in a Woody Allen movie party scene. It just doesn’t pack the punch you think it does. Boycott the speech. A pink pantsuit is not bravery.

And now we’re back home. The shiner has progressed from Mardi Gras magenta to southwestern-sunset shades of muted purple and yellow. Most of the swelling is gone, but the browbone is still a little tender. I forget what I look like, and every time I pass a mirror I start a little, but oh well.

And Kate found a house! A cute, very nicely remodeled bungalow on the east side of Detroit. Still has to pass inspection, but I’m thinking it’ll work out.

The week begins, and already my to-do list is a mile long. First: Lunch. Then a workout. Hope your goes well.

Honestly, it’s a miracle there aren’t more black eyes around this place, when you look at what the live oak roots do to sidewalks.

Cemeteries are closed for Mardi Gras weekend. Not sure why, but I bet influencers and other idiots are a big reason. Still, they’re beautiful even through the gates:

Little design details tell you where you are:

Now this is a church fundraiser:

Yesterday was kind of a mess. Strong thunderstorms were forecast, and the parades were first shortened, stripped of bands and double-decker floats. Then the bands and the floats were restored, but the routes kept short. There was no way we’d get a decent spot to watch Zulu, so we watched it on the hotel TV. Afterward, through a series of miscalculations, we ended up outside the Zulu HQ post-parade, where lots of participants were still wearing their blackface and looked like they hadn’t slept, or had a non-alcoholic drink, in 12-14 hours. We ended up wandering down Broad Street to a place called Crescent City Steaks. A conversation in the waiting area with a local indicated we found a non-touristy spot, although everyone was wearing sequins, silly hats, tulle or some other costume-y outfit. The food was 1960s-era steakhouse right down to the creamed spinach.

And now it’s Ash Wednesday, and we leave later today. We’ll be making a third try to visit NOMA and deal with whatever else the universe throws our way.

The shiner is very vivid. It looks mostly magenta today — Mardi Gras colors! It’s been a good trip.

Before we left for New Orleans, I told some people I work out with that I wasn’t going to do the thing everyone does at Mardi Gras, i.e. get wasted and stumble around town like a roaring idiot.

And I didn’t. We stopped into the Hermes Bar yesterday, aka the Antoine’s Annex. because I thought a snack would be nice before our late brunch reservation, and also I needed to use the bathroom, and it was one place that wasn’t blaring hip-hop at a bazillion decibels. I ordered a Bloody Mary, and struck up a conversation with a nice gentleman, a local. He was there with his gang of fiftysomething friends, also locals, because it’s what you do, and he was a great ambassador for his city, introducing us around as “my aunt and uncle, up from Dee-troit.” He told us they were leaving shortly, and we should claim their table, as we’d been standing at the bar.

They left, with many good wishes to have a good time and tell the folks back in Dee-troit how great the city was, and we took the table. We ordered truffle fries and what the hell, by now it was noon, let’s have the signature cocktail, a sazerac.

The sazerac made the world a little sparkly and magical, and we left after a while, buying and drinking a bottle of water to be responsible. Everyone is always telling us how important it is to stay hydrated. Wandered the Quarter, saw this, saw that. Got to our brunch, which featured bottomless mimosas, but all I did was sip, honest. We left after the crab cakes Benedict (me) and the chicken and waffles (Alan). I’d describe my state of inebriation as gently tipsy, like my mother when she’d tell what she considered to be a dirty joke. And we were wandering back home when I tripped over a pipe or some fucking thing sticking up from the tree cutout that I’d stepped into to avoid some other bad thing on the sidewalk, and I fell, hard, whacking my eye, but not, amazingly, breaking my glasses.

And now I have a shiner. A very big one, like Rocky when he’s moaning CUT ME to Burgess Meredith. And I will not have more than two drinks at a time until the day I die. As I told my friend when I said I wasn’t going to get drunk, moderation tends to impose itself when your hangovers progress from feeling blah to feeling nauseous to throwing up to requiring a good 48 hours to recover and now, apparently, to falling down and getting a black eye. I’ve always been clumsy; I don’t need this shit. Next time it’ll be a tooth, or my hip. This was last night:

It’s worse this morning. I’ll spare you.

But! It’s been a great trip so far, other than the injury. We arrived Saturday night and found, to our delight, that the Endymion parade was passing right in front of our hotel. Endymion is a so-called “super krewe,” and what that means is, the parade is insanely big and insanely long — band after band after band, float after float after float. So many throws. I got some beads, and we decided to go into the hotel and have a drink at the lobby bar, which we did. You had to have a wristband to even get into our hotel because of the crowds outside. The parade kept going by, and suddenly about 30 or 40 people from outside came rushing in, with the facial expressions that say “some shit is going down outside,” and not “we all need to use the bathroom.”

Alan immediately ducked down. I did not. And then I heard him call out, “Nancy! Only the white people are standing up!” Which is kind of our family joke about how black and white people process violence in our violent world, and so I ducked down, too. After a few minutes, the front desk clerk began checking wristbands and the crisis was over. Apparently there was a scuffle across the street, and one of the scufflers yelled, “I have a gun,” and that’s what started the panic. No gun was ever brandished, and the bartenders all thought Alan’s warning about not being the dumb white person who doesn’t have the sense to get down was very funny. There was a Scottish couple sitting next to us, and this was quite a welcome-to-America kind of initiation. “We’ve only been here an hour,” the man marveled in his thick accent. Well, now you know: Don’t stand up.

Anyway, Endymion:

In the Quarter, Louisiana National Guard and hard barriers everywhere:

This is what terrorism gets you: A police state.

Finally, my sazerac:

Today we have a quieter day planned — the New Orleans Museum of Art, etc. I will step very carefully, wherever I go.

One of the detriments to the internet is how much we assume facts not in evidence. You probably heard a child died of measles in Texas today. (Fact.) This child was unvaccinated. (Fact.) Beyond that, we don’t know much, and it will likely stay that way. We can speculate that the child’s parents were anti-vax nuts, but we can’t know that. But I predict that soon someone will sing out that the poor dead kid had a crazy mother who prayed to RFK Jr. every night, and that will become the story that gets passed around. It’s entirely possible the child’s family was poor, or ignorant, and maybe didn’t know there was a vaccination event taking place at the local health department. It’s useful to remember Sherri’s comment some days back, that the people who will suffer most under the new regime are the most powerless.

Our new HHS secretary is a liar and an exaggerator; he sticks to the 72-doses bullshit, which is simply untrue, among many other outright lies about vaccine safety. At the first cabinet meeting today, he downplayed the Texas outbreak as no biggie, just one of many that happen every year, ignoring the fact as recently as 2000, we considered measles on the brink of extinction.

It’s pretty clear now: We’re all going to be on our own for at least the next four years. Birds are dropping out of the sky from bird flu. There’s a new bleeding-from-the-eyeballs disease in Africa. Influenza A is ripping through my community, as is norovirus. I look forward to Croaky telling us to double up on the Vitamin D.

God, what a pig.

Speaking of pigs, I can’t even talk about Jeff Bezos right now.

I mentioned we have a mini-break coming, and as usual, I have a bunch of work to do before that. So I’m afraid this will be the last entry of the week, but! We’ll have some fun pix starting over the weekend, as the Derringers decamp for…New Orleans. And Mardi Gras.

Another weekend, another chamber of news horrors. The sister-in-law of a woman I work with received one of Elon’s justify-your-job emails. The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was fired, and replaced by a retiree who once told Trump he could whip ISIS in a week. fElon gets his stupid mug in the news more often than the boss, who every day looks more tired and orange.

Meanwhile, the town-hall pushback has begun.

I have very little news to report, other than this: Kate got outbid on a house she wanted, but! She won a spelling bee at a party on Sunday. I’m so proud. I texted her congratulations, and she said it was no biggie, that she’d won in the third round when she was the only one who could spell “preposterous.” I told her that was the advantage of being a reader in a generation raised with autocorrect and texting. I mean, I’m enough of a tightass on this subject that I winced when Prince did all that “2 U” and “4 U” shit in his song titles. I’m glad some of it got passed down to my offspring.

It reminded me of the time a News-Sentinel copy editor in Fort Wayne entered a spelling bee at Grabill Days or one of those olde tyme country fairs out in the region. Everyone was given an olde tyme slate and a piece of chalk, and the bee commenced. The pronouncer said, “diphtheria,” and every single person spelled it without the first H, except the editor. They bounced him. He protested. I can’t remember how it ended, whether anyone had thought to toss a dictionary into the judge’s kit or what, but I gather the organizers wanted Scott to vamoose and for the alternative-spelling olde tyme fun to continue. Chaos at Grabill Days! BURN DOWN THE SPELLING BEE.

Next we’ll do ophthalmologist and jodhpurs.

I used to have a great memory for phone numbers; I could recall numbers that friends had in 1969. No more. I can’t even remember area codes. I hope I retain my spelling prowess, however. Almost all of my spelling errors nowadays are due to autocorrect.

The last week of February is here, and I feel like a person climbing a mountain with spikes in my hands. We have a mini-break coming up at the end of the week, and it cannot get here soon enough.

My old neighbor in Fort Wayne — a saint, and Kate’s second mother — has a business cleaning offices and sometimes houses. Houses were more of a sideline, but once when we lived here she told me a terrible story about one. It was a nice house, in a good suburban subdivision, maybe set back a bit from its neighbors. On her way out, she complimented the owner on how nice it was.

“Yes,” the owner said. “I’m glad we were able to save it.”

The story unfolded like this: For three years or so, it had been occupied by two teenagers, who’d been abandoned by their parents. The mother left first, perhaps due to some sort of mental crisis, and then the father was offered a job in another state. The teens objected to being uprooted, so the father said, fine, you guys can stay here on your own. He said he’d send them money, and they were told to behave themselves.

In perhaps the least surprising news possible, they did not do this.

Soon the house became known as a teen party venue, and over the course of the next couple of years, the place was trashed. One detail I remember was about the night some kid brought over several gallon cans of paint, which were enthusiastically flung out the windows, lids off. Paint streamed down the sides of the house, and onto the roof and driveway. By the time the teens finished high school, the house was nearly unsalvageable.

I wondered at the time what it would be like to have both your parents abandon you, and at such a time of your life. I wondered what happened to those young people, how they grew up. I wonder where they are now. I wonder what the cops knew.

This week a far worse case of child abandonment was revealed here in Detroit. Three children — a boy, 15, and two girls, 12 and 13 — were found living on their own in a condo where garbage, mold and feces had piled up over the course of four years. This is in Pontiac. The neighbors were stunned. Everyone else was stunned, too, stunned and amazed that this could go on so long. The kids said food was left on the front porch, usually by delivery services. The mother lived nearby, with another child. That child’s father said he had no idea about the other three.

And how was this discovered? The landlord hadn’t been paid rent for a few months, and requested a welfare check.

There are a lot of unanswered questions. Today the county prosecutor filed first-degree child abuse charges. But it’s pretty clear that when we say sometimes children “fall through the cracks,” those aren’t cracks, they’re chasms.

More will be revealed.

How can anyone do this to children. I just don’t understand.

OK! Let’s move on. My friends whose house I’m staying in this week have the same coffeemaker we do. We have a different configuration — thermal carafe with no burner FTW — but we both have Moccamasters. These are pricey machines, but make excellent coffee. Alan has us on a strict maintenance schedule for ours. My friends do not. However, I am here and this is one of the week’s services I provide: Cleaning the Moccamaster. I just finished it, and I’ll explain the process to you, if you too have a teensy bit of OCD about getting stuff sparkling.

Here are the miracle solutions, purchased from Amazon. The gray box is for the innards, the blue for the pot itself:

They’re just powders, and speaking of OCD, I’d like to have a word with Urnex about why one box contains three packets of powder and the other four, because you use them together and that is annoying to always have to be ordering one or the other. But whatever. The gray descaler goes first. You dissolve it in water and let it run through. Here’s the Before picture:

Yuck, I know. I usually let the descaler run halfway through, turn the pot off and let it sit and do its work. Turn it back on after 10 minutes or so and run it all through. Then three water run-throughs, and you’re ready for the pot cleaner. This is where it gets sexy.

The pot cleaner is the same process — dissolve it in water and pour it through. You would not believe how much oil and gunk it takes off. This is the first pass through:

That looks like coffee, but it’s just gunk. Dump it out, and send three pots of plain water through, maybe tidy up with a paper towel here and there, and here is the After:

This may be one reason a skills assessment and interest inventory I took in high school said I should maybe run a commercial fishery. There’s just something about a project like this that is so much more satisfying than, say, writing.

The weekend is appearing on the horizon, and I’ll be going home to Wendy. You all have a good one, and if you like good coffee, enjoy a cup. I think I’ll have two.

Hi. Yesterday I interspersed work with parachute visits to right-wing media, where everyone was very happy that finally, finally, Americans would be given correct information about nutrition and how to live healthier lives.

Because everyone from your doctor to the FDA to Michelle Obama has been lying to you for all these years. What you need is to be gobbling steroids and 10,000 other dodgy supplements, and deep-frying your Thanksgiving turkey in beef tallow.

Which, p.s., costs $200 for enough to deep-fry a turkey. What the hell, Thanksgiving comes but once a year.

P.S. Tallow isn’t good for you.

I have mentioned before my bestie, and her brilliant son (and now daughter-in-law), both medical researchers. Her son has a grant application pending with the National Institutes of Health that will fund his work for the next few years. This news doesn’t bode well for him:

At the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s premier biomedical research agency, an estimated 1,200 employees — including promising young investigators slated for larger roles — have been dismissed.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two prestigious training programs were gutted: one that embeds recent public health graduates in local health departments and another to cultivate the next generation of Ph.D. laboratory scientists. But the agency’s Epidemic Intelligence Service — the “disease detectives” who track outbreaks around the world — has apparently been spared, perhaps because of an uproar among alumni after a majority of its members were told on Friday that they would be let go.

President Trump’s plan to shrink the size of the federal work force dealt blows to thousands of civil servants in the past few days. But the cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services — coming on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic, the worst public health crisis in a century — have been especially jarring. Experts say the firings threaten to leave the country exposed to further shortages of health workers, putting Americans at risk if another crisis erupts.

Both my friend’s son and his wife are the kind of BigBrains who can go anywhere, and maybe they will, soon enough. Remember when the U.S. benefited from brain drain from other countries? Now it’ll go the other way, unless your research is about What Big Pharma Doesn’t Want You to Know About Beef Tallow.

Meanwhile, here’s Michigan’s freshman senator, to whom I just wrote yet another letter:

Four hundred twenty-four comments. I didn’t read them all. But all the ones I read spoke for me, i.e. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT.

I had to go on Twitter for something Tuesday morning, and saw a post with the video of people evacuating the crashed plane in Toronto on Monday. Most of the comments expressed indignation that the flight attendant was telling people to put their phones away while they were being hustled out the emergency door. Unreal, how stupid we’ve become.

Finally, I am ashamed — ashamed — to be an American, reading this:

When President Trump took office in January, his plan for sweeping deportations faced a major challenge: what to do with migrants from countries like Afghanistan, Iran and China where the United States cannot easily send deportees, because the other nations will not accept migrants or for other reasons.

Last week, the new administration found a solution: Export them to a country willing to take them in.

On Wednesday, U.S. officials began flying hundreds of people, including people from Asian, Middle Eastern and African countries, to Panama, which is under intense pressure to appease Mr. Trump, who has threatened to take over the Panama Canal.

… Lawyers in Panama say it is illegal to detain people without a court order for more than 24 hours. Yet roughly 350 migrants deported by the United States on three military planes have been locked in a soaring, glass-paneled hotel, the Decapolis Hotel Panama in Panama City, for nearly a week, while officials ready a camp near the jungle.

Armed guards prevent any of the deportees from leaving the hotel. Several of them are children.

…In one window visible from a sidewalk below the hotel, a woman clawed at a latchless glass pane in an attempt to escape. When she noticed journalists below, she held up a piece of paper that read “Afghan.”

She made hand motions that indicated an airplane, then her head falling off. The message seemed to be clear: A flight home meant death.

Sorry for the longer-than-usual cut/paste, but that’s a gift article and no one else appears to be covering this. Children. CHILDREN, being relocated to a jungle migrant camp. Honestly, I want to puke. But mostly I want to beg forgiveness. If you voted for this, you’re a terrible person. That’s all there is to it.

I was looking back over the archives and realized that two years ago I was doing the same thing I’m doing now, i.e. dog- and house-sitting for some friends who live nearby. They’re in the Caribbean; we had about seven inches of snow in the last 24 hours. So they’re tanning, and I’m shoveling.

I am promised a very nice bottle of rum upon their return.

As often happens in an unfamiliar house, something comes up. So I text: Please tell me why I can’t run the kitchen faucet. It’s not cold enough to be frozen.

Reply: Ok. I have to order you some double A batteries bc they need to be replaced soon

“You can’t run the kitchen-sink faucet because the batteries are dead” is some real HAL 9000 shit, but this is why I’ve lived this long, I guess. Apparently the faucet has some sort of battery-supported touch mechanism that allows you to turn it on without the archaic 20th-century gesture of “reaching for the faucet,” I gather. I was wondering how I’d make coffee until I remembered I could use the pot-filler faucet over the stove. How well I remember our shared contractor, Sergei, saying mournfully as he installed it: “People want, but they do not use.” Well here I am, using it, Sergei! Take that!

Otherwise, I’m working, eating my way through an insanely large quantity of pasta e fagiole (pasta fazool to you non-Italians) and trying to keep the new dog from climbing onto my head at night. The diabetic schnauzer crossed the bridge a few weeks back, but now I’ve got Penny to deal with:

She likes to be close. It’s going to be very very cold in about 48 hours, so maybe I’ll need a dog on my head. I’ll certainly need a faucet that can drip all night to stave off freezing, so good thing I got those batteries.

In other news at this hour, too much has happened in the last 72 or so to even keep up. I see our new HHS secretary wants to get people off of SSRIs. Says they’re harder to kick than heroin. As someone who’s taken them a time or two, I disagree. Anyway, let’s say “you first” and make Croaky kick his fondness for anabolic steroids and other muscle-juicing drugs. Maybe Cheryl Hines can also swear off injecting botulism into her face, too.

Now I’m getting personal. Time to sign off and turn to the to-do list for the week ahead. Maybe make sure I have extra batteries.

I’ve mentioned one of my “retirement” gigs here. I am on the social-media team for a local nonprofit, which I won’t name because they didn’t ask to have an online loudmouth in the group. I respect that. It’s enjoyable work and pays enough to make it worth my time. It won’t last forever, anyway, and that’s fine.

But as such, I am more or less required to have a Facebook account. I can use the nonprofit’s login for every other major platform — Xitter, Threads, Instagram — but because the Facebook presence is a “business” page, I can only access it from my own personal account. And Facebook is the 900-pound gorilla, still, of social media, where the vast majority of users who pay attention to us dwell.

Many of the people I used to follow with pleasure are leaving Facebook these days. Who can blame them? Of all the tech bros, Mark Zuckerberg’s grovel to Trump has been the most cringey. And the platform has deteriorated, sharply, in recent years. Not as bad as Xitter’s Nazification, true, but it’s just hot garbage now, for the most part. I think I might have mentioned a month or so, I was served a post about Secretariat, the mid-’70s Triple Crown winner, probably because I once clicked on a video of him winning the 1973 Belmont. The post included an AI picture, ostensibly of that very horse, only the markings were wrong, the jockey’s silks were wrong and — this part was hilarious — he was running the wrong way on the track. Then yesterday I was served another one, an AI rewrite of a famous anecdote about the first time Ron Turcotte (his jockey) saw Secretariat as a two-year-old. The illustration, also AI, was a horse with palomino paint markings, as different from Secretariat as George Clooney is from Donald Trump; the prompt was probably something like “beautiful horse.”

Who needs this shit? Not me.

But. There are still pockets of the platform, nearly all local, that I need to access to keep up with things happening around here. This, too, is increasingly like watching a sluice of bullshit fly by, with an occasional well-wrapped sandwich coming through. My community’s newspaper is terrible and used as a cudgel by its wealthy owner, so I don’t subscribe. The bullshit posts — Did I just hear gunshots? (18 hours ago) Does anyone know if a particular store is open? (12 hours ago) I’m mad the garbage collectors left my can tipped over!!! (3 days ago) — sometimes have a worthwhile Marketplace item tucked in there, or, even more rarely, news of interest.

And also, Facebook is probably the only place where a fair number of people who read what I have to say disagree with me. In other words, it’s still a target-rich environment for needling assholes.

Lately I’ve been reading about how we can resist the current catastrophe. I’ve been through my back-turning phase, and it’s over; my new resolution is simply to stop 2 a.m. doomscrolling. But not paying attention is a sucker’s game, in the end. We must pay attention. We just have to. And my skill is that I’m a writer, and a fairly good one. While I know that the aforementioned assholes may not even follow me — I certainly unfollowed many of them years ago — I also know we have to feel less alone these days, that we have fellow travelers out in the ether.

I stepped away from Facebook around New Year’s Day. I still comment here and there, but I haven’t made a new post, in writing, since then. I have changed my “cover” photo twice, to images that make clear how I feel about All This Shit, and the reaction to it makes me wonder if dropping the platform entirely (which, again, I can’t do with this job) isn’t the wrong strategy. Meet people where they are, in other words, and for now they’re still on Facebook.

If you’ve read this far, I’d be interested in opinions.

Jesus, what a week, which is to say, another fucking week. Here’s a treat, though, speaking of keeping up the good fight: A hilarious piece by Roy Edroso on the new, Trumpified Kennedy Center. It made me laugh and I hope it does the same for you. Happy Valentine’s Day.