This is not our house. This house is two blocks away, however. We had a storm last night, a big one. So we have no electricity and no Internet and this is being voice dictated to my phone, uploaded via cell towers.

A substantial crew was trying to cut this monster apart, and a substantial line of neighbors was watching them do so. Some had brought picnics. They said no one was hurt, which is good.

I will leave you to the weekend and I hope you all enjoy it. We will see what the country looks like on Sunday. I hope I have electricity by then.

I got some texts today from our webmaster J.C., now back home in Atlanta:

We applied for mail-in (absentee) ballots that could be dropped off before 7 pm at a few places around the county. And then we filled them out and dropped them off down at the Auburn Ave Research Library. Then drove back via our polling place and this other mutant multi-precinct polling place set up at a restaurant/bar (!?) at the SE corner of Piedmont Park, called ‘Park Tavern.’ The lines circled the buildings multiple times and were not moving and people looked miserable. In an hour or two we’re supposed to get some residual tropical storm Cristobal rain. Reports are Fulton County voting machines are broken down in huge numbers. Total total clusterfuck.

It goes without saying that it is absolutely positively inexcusable for this to be happening in the United States, let alone in a thriving city. The photos from the Journal-Constitution are the Wisconsin primary with T-shirts instead of parkas. The copy says “elected officials (are trading) blame” for this fiasco. The governor and secretary of state are both Republicans, and I don’t know enough about the forces at play here to blame them specifically, but every single part of this was predictable. And probably avoidable, as long as one upholds certain values. Voting is important, and should be made as easy as possible for the widest range of qualified citizens.

I’m volunteering to be trained as a poll worker here in November, barring a disaster. Planning to vote absentee, myself. But it’s going to be a struggle for every vote, I am sure. I have to do something, and this is something.

Meanwhile, I see Rod Dreher and other panty-wetters are drenching their drawers over “defund the police.” As I remarked on another page, it’s amazing what you can learn when you dare to read a news story to the fourth paragraph and even beyond. I think John Scalzi gets it right here:

“Don’t make cops the people who have to handle every damn thing because we’ve defunded social programs and the experts who would do a better job with those issues and also don’t have guns to shoot people, let’s fund those programs with some of the money that we’ve given to the cops because we made them do all that stuff,” which as I understand it is closer to the generally accepted understanding of what “Defund the Police” means.

Yes, exactly.

And while we’re at it, re-collect all that military surplus gear we’ve been bestowing on them all these years, that they often don’t know how to use in the first place. My quiet little suburb of 15,000 souls, give or take a few hundred, has an armored troop carrier. Why? Because the chief filled out a form and asked for it. It might be useful in an active-shooter situation, he says when asked about it. Mainly now it’s driven to block parties for kids to climb in and out of. Beat that crap into plowshares, now.

OK, you can see I’m testy, which I tend to get when the temperature creeps close to 90 degrees, as it is now. But storms are expected, followed by another lovely weekend ahead. I’m down. Happy midweek, all.

Big fan of community colleges here. Big, big fan. They offer a reasonably priced alternative to the traditional four-year experience, and they’re useful for so many — for the first-generation higher-ed student, for the tech-certification student, for the budget-conscious student and probably a few I’m forgetting. When Bernie and his fellow travelers talk about “free college,” this is what they are talking about, or should be. Not four years at Oberlin, but two years of post-secondary at a local, public community college. It’s good for everyone, and by everyone I mean from students up through society at large.

This is another reason I find the private-sector poaching of community-college students so disgraceful. There is zero reason an 18-year-old should be taking on a better-car-size debt to get a “degree” in dental hygiene. Walking to my car after work one day, I passed a young woman in a cap and gown, making a phone call outside a downtown Detroit theater. On the marquee was a congratulatory message to the graduates of some “institute” that advertises on local TV, touting their night and online classes and flexible hours, ideal for working parents, etc. I wanted to ask her how much debt she’d taken on for her certificate. I wanted to tell her she could have saved money by getting all that stuff from her local CC. But why spoil a cap-and-gown occasion by spraying bummer juice all over it? Really.

And that’s why it was so disappointing to see that one of these public CCs, Wichita State University-Tech, invited Ivanka Trump to be their commencement speaker. The date was surely booked months ago. I’m not sure when the “virtual” speech the White House released over the weekend was recorded, but if it wasn’t “five minutes after she agreed to the date,” it’s yet another astonishing failure and misreading of the public mood by Team Trump and most especially, Team Ivanka.

From the beginning, the First Daughter’s presence in the White House has chapped my ass. Never mind that she was there in the first place; let’s just talk about her utter, utter cluelessness in how she’s…what’s the phrase we use today? “Built her brand,” yes. As the administration lurches from one disaster to the next, Ivanka soldiers on with her pretty-princess photo ops and video drops that get worse with every passing day, suggesting she is learning nothing, nothing at all, from her time in the West Wing.

It’s possible, in weak moments, to see Ivanka as yet another victim of her parents’ horrible raising, of her neglectful father and gold-digging mother. (One of the many things I learned about Ivana Sr. is that she’s been married four times, only her second lasting longer than two years.) From them, she obviously learned that a woman’s worth is always founded upon her physical attractiveness, and that attractiveness must always be sold with a smile. At a time when women so often complain about being told by men to “smile more,” it seems weird to tell Ivanka to smile less, but there you are — another norm smashed by the Trump family.

But then I think, if you start handing out those passes, when does it stop? The first daughter will be 39 on her next birthday. She’s a mother herself. What is she teaching her own daughter, whether overtly or by example? At what point do you hold people accountable for their actions?

Ivanka, we learned last week, was the one who thought up the photo op in front of the church, that the Bible her father held up like an auctioneer was carried in her Max Mara purse. And Ivanka delivered that clueless, tone-deaf, utterly ridiculous “commencement address” without an obvious gun to her head. She didn’t seem strung out on veterinary-grade Xanax like her stepmother did, moving woodenly through her own horrible photo ops last week. No, she sold that thing, with her head-swiveling and eyelash-batting and vocal inflections straight from the Madonna Institute of Trying to Sound Vaguely English or at Least Not From Michigan.

And now the graduates of WSU-Tech will have the dubious distinction of not only being deprived of their own cap-and-gown graduation, but of being forever associated with that ghastly display, although to their credit they also got it cancelled. A community college should invite someone who knows community colleges, preferably a speaker who’s attended one, but at least one who gets what’s involved in a CC education. Not a graduate of a private high school followed by a grease-slicked slide through an Ivy, who then delivers a line written by whatever GOP ladder-climbing intern came up with it: “Your journey to this day did not come without challenges, sacrifices, determination, grit, sweat, and likely even a few tears, but you persevered.”

It’s funny. Commencement addresses are generally accompanied by an honorary degree, a harmless bit of theater that suffices for a bigger honorarium. I wonder what was planned for Ivanka, pre-pandemic? An honorary tech certificate in welding or drone technology? Or maybe dental hygiene, to honor her shiny veneers. Who knows?

I think it was Rick Wilson who wrote the book “Everything Trump Touches Dies,” which has become a hashtag: #ETTD. It’s too bad this has been passed on to his children, but at some point it’s up to them to say, “Stop touching me, dad.” (And I don’t mean that in a sexual sense, and please let’s not go there in the comments.) It’s hard to break from one’s family, but sometimes it has to be done.

I have one bit of bloggage today, this Chicago Sun-Times piece on one of the young men arrested for rioting in that city. Among the million possible jokes you could make about it: Beavis & Butthead grow up, etc. But I see it as yet another version of Ivanka, just way more downmarket.

Now to clean the bathroom for the later arrival of J.C. and Sammy! A socially distanced cocktail hour is called for, for sure.

The governor opened the pools, but it’s looking as though our own won’t be opening. Although who knows, maybe it will. The problem will be finding lifeguards at this late date, but again – no one knows anything. The summer will be long and hot because it always is, but it’ll also be uncharted territory due to…well, you know. Everything. Murder hornets. Whatever.

We got a tip this week that arrestees after one of the demonstrations — and there have been demos nightly, all week — were taken to Little Caesars Arena for processing. I typed up a brief story, and added a paragraph at the end about the symbolism of nonviolent protesters (these were curfew violators) being taken to a sports stadium, invoking Augusto Pinochet and his use of the national stadium as a prison camp. I thought it was at least worthy of a mention, but my editor cut it. Honestly, I had to laugh; I don’t generally get too attached to my work for Deadline. But today, the arena’s social-media staff posted this, and the comments are…not good:

And now, dunno about you, but at week’s end, I am whipped. There’s this, though, which I leave you with in hopes it will break over the weekend and at least offer some comic relief:

The gay internet is exploding over #LindseyGraham today.
An Army of gay escorts are claiming, Lindsay has used their services for years and are trying to figure out how to get around the NDA he has them all sign.
It is rumored that DC male escorts now Senator Graham as "Lady G"

— Tom D'Angora (@TomDangora) June 5, 2020

If you like, you can read my story about how the dailies are killing it with live-streaming of the protests.

Have a great weekend, all.

What a sour mood I find myself in on this…Tuesday. Too much work to do, and the temperature is spiking at close to 90, even as we speak. I was going to take a bike ride, but decided to have a Campari spritz instead.

Don’t feel much better. But it would probably be worse if it made the world better, right?

Anyway, I feel like I’m forgetting the lesson I learned in newspapers, i.e., never say it can’t get any worse, because it always can, and does. After the weekend, I could hardly believe Trump could go lower, but what am I saying? The bottom of the barrel can always be scraped a little more. Monday’s disgusting display, followed by this:

My Admin has done more for the Black Community than any President since Abraham Lincoln. Passed Opportunity Zones with @SenatorTimScott, guaranteed funding for HBCU’s, School Choice, passed Criminal Justice Reform, lowest Black unemployment, poverty, and crime rates in history…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 2, 2020

And I’m sure more is to come. Five more months of more. Maybe four more years after that.

But Monday. Watching Ivanka in her stilettos and fucking million-dollar purse – what do you need to buy between the White House and the church behind it that you needed to tote that little accessory along, hon? The press secretary in her toy-soldier outfit. And of course the president, who handles a Bible like he’s never seen one before. And the fellow travelers in the churches. Every one, every single one… I’m out of words, at least polite ones. Or even stern ones.

And then, this. Before my eyes resolved what I was looking at, I thought these were ants or something, being gassed by an exterminator. But no: American citizens.

And every time some shithead like Jimmy Lileks wrings hands over buildings, or windows, or whatever, I just want to scream.

So I need to stay off certain parts of the internet for a bit. Do my work and let the rest go by.

You lovely people, on the other hand, are great. So carry on.

What a terrible weekend. Demonstrations both nights (good thing), followed by the window-smashing and general mayhem (bad thing). The curfew went into effect an hour ago, and the police started firing tear gas and moving the crowd back shortly thereafter. I expect the window-breaking and so forth will start any time now.

It’s getting worse by the night. The first, the police seemed fairly tolerant; Kate walked in the first demonstration, which was peaceful. The organizers wished everyone a good night, and many people went home. But many didn’t, or maybe more showed up, but whatever happened, the window-breaking started at nightfall.

That was the night similar action took place in Fort Wayne and cities all over the country: Peaceful start, violent finish.

The outside-agitators line is being sold, and if the details are true, it holds up — most of those arrested were not Detroiters, and from the photography, most weren’t black, and in a city that’s more than 80 percent black, well, it stands out.

Saturday was uglier, and the same pattern: Peaceful protest, ugly end.

The Freep noted as much:

Following a script seemingly set the day before, protests in downtown Detroit and in many cities nationwide began Saturday afternoon with crowds of peaceful marchers voicing chants about racial justice.

But after dark, those crowds were less peaceful. In Detroit, Friday night’s protest had become tense and led to arrests, and it even involved a fatal shooting, although that was later determined to be unrelated to the protesting.

Saturday night was worse. Participants threw rocks and fireworks at police, refusing to disperse until hundreds of officers converged to use tear gas and make dozens of arrests, according to reporters at the scene.

Saturday was the night they pepper-sprayed reporters, too.

Again, this is a majority-black city, with a majority-black police force. They’re not perfect, but they haven’t had a major brutality case in years. This isn’t Minneapolis. But some people just want to fuck shit up. And the police are getting surlier as this drags on. I hope things calm down, but I don’t know that they will. Lots of people with time on their hands (unemployment), lots of people with energy to spend (confinement), lots of people just mad at everything (Trump). It’s a bad combination.

How were things where you were?

With the sun rising at 6 a.m. and warm-enough mornings finally here (you can say that again; 30 degrees of difference in about three days), I’ve been taking some early-morning bike rides again. Get my sweat over with first, shower and face the day – it works for me.

Sunrise is a nice time of day to be out, even when you miss it by, oh, 20 minutes or so:

And then I headed inland. Good shadows on a day like…whatever day that was. Tuesday, I think:

In between, I passed a woman on a street corner, that goes around one of the two nearby hospitals. She was kneeling on the sidewalk, hands clasped in what looked like fervent prayer, face upturned toward the building, eyes closed. A relative or loved one inside on a ventilator? Just a generic prayer for the “health care heroes,” as the local yard signs say? Dunno. The weirdest detail: A toy-sized dog, fluffy, sat patiently behind her. (I think she was kneeling on its leash.) Looked like a papillon, very well-groomed.

I’d have taken a picture of that, but it was a private moment. Don’t be an asshole. The world has enough of them.

As I write this, the breaking news – and there’s been so much of it this week – is the president’s executive order on social media:

“We’re here today to defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers,” Trump said before signing the document.

While Trump has threatened such action for years, his signing of the order Thursday was precipitated by a decision by Twitter earlier in the week to mark two of his erroneous tweets with fact-checking labels. The small move set off a firestorm of tweets by the president threatening social media companies with regulations and other punishments.

I’m not sure why, but I started thinking about this one guy, who was included in the Bridge project on the political division of the state when I was there. He was an affluent gent in his 50s who retired early by being a lifelong cheapskate and loved the president with his whole heart. After the election, he joined Twitter. No profile, no bio, no cutesy name. He follows one, just one, account: @RealDonaldTrump. I believe at the time he said he wanted to read the president unfiltered. (Like you have to be on Twitter for that.) I wonder what Twitter is like when that’s how you’ve crafted your experience, eh?

As I recall, he was stupefied – unbelieving – that anyone could not see the Greatness that had been unleashed upon our land by Trump. And yet, sitting there reading the president, oh the things he must be learning. And now this.

November. November, November, November. It’s my birthday month. I’d gladly give up five months of my life and the whole summer and fall ahead to get this shit over with, now.

Then my editor calls and tells me he was driving downtown, just to check on our deserted office, when he saw a goose family crossing the street. Geese are unusual downtown, but the river was only a couple blocks away, and that’s probably where they were headed. Another motorist stopped, and the guy got up, rushed the flock, scooped up two goslings and put them in his shirt before getting in his car to drive away. That story wrecked me for the rest of the day. WHO DOES THAT? I’m still bothered by it.

So let’s part on a more humorous note with… this. As usual, the best stuff is in the briefs at the bottom. Especially the item about Mnuchin.

Reading all of your reminiscences about apartment life tickled something in my memory. This blog has been around so long I expect I’ve told all my stories. (God knows I’m not collecting any new ones.) But yeah, we talked about bad neighbors once before, in 2011. I don’t know if I ever told the story about how Jeff Borden drove out one tenant in the four-flat we all lived in, thereby transforming it from 3 cool tenants + 1 pair of tightasses into an entirely cool building.

The tightasses were a couple, as young as we were but born 70 years old, apparently. They hated loud music, but had a yappy dog they’d leave in the back yard while they ran Saturday-morning errands. They had the nerve – the nerve! – to pound a broomstick on the ceiling if Jeff and his girlfriend made too much noise in bed. They were awful. So Jeff started a campaign of psychological torture to persuade them they really needed to get a new apartment. He cut up a hot dog and buried the pieces, shallowly, in her flower garden; the dog did the rest. He had a mark on his stereo of the maximum volume they’d tolerate, and would crank it up. As soon as the door downstairs would open and the angry footsteps start up the stairs, he’d drop it down to the mark. There’d be a pause, and the footsteps would retreat. He’d wait 10 minutes, then do it again.

There were other techniques, but I’ve forgotten them; maybe Jeff will remember.

I, too, am probably too cantankerous to live in an apartment anymore. Many days I wish my current neighbors could only be seen with binoculars, but they’re nice people and I tolerate dual Albums of the Summer blasting on the Bluetooth speakers (neighbors to the north and west), not to mention the Maximum Volume Lawn Service on the east. Our house faces south. So far the street hasn’t offended.

That said, I expect we’re headed for condo/apartment life eventually, although I’m hoping for a ranch house on a slab.

A long weekend, sorely needed. Saturday was warm and cloudy, Sunday hot, Monday ditto, and tomorrow, more of the same. I’m happy that it’s warm, but I resent that we were denied spring, going immediately from early April to July. That also said, we may have to turn the A/C on tomorrow. Work + computers = a need for temperature regulation. And it’ll be cooler later in the week. Knowing the way things have gone for us lately, the A/C will refuse to start and hello, get out the credit card for yet another major system repair.

Journalists swarmed over northern Michigan this weekend, as it was the first weekend the region was “opened up,” as we say now. And what happened? Two idiots who were symptomatic traveled in from out of state to visit family. They tested positive, and now six people are in lockdown. Idiots. This stay-home stuff is going to continue because of people like this.

Meanwhile, Kate the vegetarian is away from the house for dinner and I’m making a MemDay splurge: A USDA Prime New York strip steak, brought to medium-rare in the sous vide and seared on the grill. I bought it, plus two pounds of ground chuck yesterday, with plans to turn the ground into Sam Sifton’s Middle School Tacos, so Alan can pick at the leftovers for a couple days. Total bill? Forty-seven dollars. For three pounds of beef! Soon we will all be vegetarians.

Now, to figure out the sides. A good week ahead, everyone.

There are times when the pizza dough you put together for dinner simply fails. It sits there like a lump in a warm oven, not doing anything, and suddenly it’s 6 p.m. and it’s time for Plan B, which is Indian takeout.

Our TrumpBux arrived this week, so why not a $35 splurge on Indian! STIMULATION, baby!

God, what a week. You’ve probably heard that an entire city – Midland – was inundated this week. This, on top of everything else. I’ve only been to Midland briefly. But man, they didn’t deserve to have two privately owned, oft-cited, badly maintained dams collapse on top of them, for sure. I recall reporting over the years that pointed out there are literally dozens of dams in precarious condition scattered around the state, and it’s only a matter of time before more give way. We used to be a wealthy state; we aren’t anymore.

The photos from the scene are bizarre. When the dams gave way, the lakes they were there to create drained, too. So once-lakefront properties now overlook a mudflat hells cape with a few boats foundering on the bottom like dinosaurs in quicksand. And downstream properties are…not so much lakefront, but lake.

Man, I hate flooding. Fort Wayne taught me that. It’s like having a toilet overflow all over and through your house. Hardly anything survives a flood. And as I’ve said before here, it’s one thing to have your wedding album burn up in a fire, but it’s another thing entirely to find it at the bottom of a sodden pile of garbage, stinking like a sewer. Flooding is worse. There’s more trash to take out, for starters, and it all smells terrible.

So. As we lurch into the unofficial Beginning of Summer, I’m just…not feeling it. All those weeks penned in, a seemingly endless string of 42-degree days, and right now I have my windows open, but nothing feels the way it should. No swimming — pools are closed. All the summer festivals, cancelled. No vacation planned. The one thing I have to look forward to is a friend’s wedding, in October. Unless that venue, too, cannot get started back up again, in which case he’s going to Vegas and who knows, we might go, too.

Hate to leave with that bummer, but there you are. Don’t let it bring you down, though — here’s to a good long weekend, and a better-than-expected summer, just the same.

The police arrested a “Detroit man,” a white real-estate agent living downtown, for what they called credible threats against the governor, attorney general, mayor and Rashida Tlaib. His Facebook page is public, and still is, and it’s interesting to see the outlines of his obvious-but-not-too-obvious mental illness – paranoia, threats, conspiracies, etc. It reminded me of something that’s interested me for a while, i.e., how mental illness is shaped by the times.

In fact, I think we’ve talked about this here before, how once, people claimed demons visited them in their sleep, usually having sex with them. Today, they’re more likely to claim aliens did it. A transparently obvious memory of, or reaction to, sex abuse of some kind gets wrapped in the trappings of the time.

We’ve also talked here about Edward Bodkin, the Huntington castrator (Google it). I still remember the debriefing from a colleague who’d just hung up the phone from interviewing the editor of Ball Club magazine. He was trying to get an idea why men would go to a grimy house in rural Indiana and willingly let someone cut off their testicles (free of charge, but you had to agree that the procedure be videotaped). The editor explained that some might have been transsexuals (we didn’t use terms like transgender then) who couldn’t afford sex-change surgery (we didn’t say gender-reassignment or gender-conforming then), and figured getting rid of part of the offensive anatomy was good enough.

But then he went off down a rabbit hole about the whole cult of body modification. These are people who simply don’t think the body they’re in is the one they’re supposed to be in. They’re not trans, just…unsatisfied. If there were a spectrum, at the mild end might be tattooing, with extreme plastic surgery closer to the middle, and at the other, people who use shotguns or saws or other implements to do enough damage to a limb that a doctor might have to just amputate what’s left. Because in their minds, they are amputees.

(You might put fitness freaks somewhere on that continuum. Rare is the person who is 100 percent pleased with every pore on their face, but I also think there’s a reason so much fitness activity is dressed up in the virtuous clothing of better health. Certainly it is better to be active than sedentary. But if you’re spending hours and hours a week in search of a different pair of arms, maybe you belong on that scale, too.)

Hoarding – was that a thing before the last 20-30 years? We’ve called people pack rats forever, but there’s something about the great, post-1980 age of Getting and Spending that seems to fold into hoarding rather neatly. Animal hoarding, ditto.

And so now we’re in an age when people in the highest offices in the land freely talk bullshit about American carnage and Qanon and pedophiles in pizza joints, and suddenly we have all these very suggestible, mentally fragile people making threats against the political enemies of those who, just to use one example, imply that a U.S. senator is a pedophile, and, well, you see what happens.

(The president’s eldest son, I have zero problems diagnosing from this distance, has extreme daddy issues and, I am sorry to say, these tactics won’t work to make daddy finally love him.)

Back to the guy who was threatening the Michigan politicians. If he hadn’t included the mayor, I’d think he also has…problems with women, shall we say. Actually, I will say it: He has problems with women. The other day I was emailing about this with a former colleague, who didn’t think the complaints about Gretchen Whitmer are motivated by sexism. I said, what are we to think when the expressions of those complaints are so often made with gendered insults? TYRANT BITCH, etc. Hmm? No answer.

Of course, part of the problem is, there are far fewer gendered insults for men. “Prick,” maybe. But even “asshole” doesn’t work; we all have them, after all.

OK, then. How was everyone’s weekend? We had one perfect day and one rainy day. Rode my bike on both. The Spotify mix tossed up “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar,” which is always amusing, and I regret to say that was the high point of Sunday’s ride, because then it started to rain and the now-predictable right-side lower-back pain came in right behind it. Saturday’s was better; I went with a friend and when it was over, got a couple of tall boys from a nearby likka sto’ and that was the cool down. We sat at opposite ends of a bench and talked about different types of feta cheese.

And Friday was our 27th anniversary. There was cake, there were flowers, there was a mushroom risotto. It was all quite nice.

And now the week ahead awaits. Let it be peaceful and healthy for all, but if Barack Obama’s gentle reproof in his virtual commencement address makes a particular skull explode, yeah well shit happens.