All these years later, I can still hear the piano in my head, the simple melody, the music teacher at the keyboard leading us in song at Barrington Road Elementary:

In fourteen-hundred ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue
His ship was small, but he was brave
He dared the wind, he dared the waves

He kept on sailing toward the west
And never thought of taking rest
To our great land at last he came
And so we sing his famous name

I have the feeling there was a third verse; for the life of me I can’t remember a word of it. But the rest of it lingers, the way you can remember your phone number from when you were 8 years old, but not your husband’s phone number today. (Why memorize? I just touch his name on the screen.)

As most of you know, I’m a daughter of Columbus, Ohio. I’m also old, so it’s fair to say I received the Full Columbus, education-wise. My school was all-white, and even the city itself was hardly diverse in the way we think about it today. There were white people and black people, and a few Asians sprinkled in here and there. A few years ago I was paging through my yearbook and realized we had one or two Hispanic people – or LatinX, in the contemporary parlance – in my class, although I didn’t know them, and their roots in South America were so well camouflaged I only recognized them as brunette.

Native Americans? Get outta town. The closest anyone came to that was the random kid who’d say, “You know, my grandmother says our family has some Cherokee blood.” Years later, I would work with a card-carrying Nez Perce, transplanted from Montana to Indiana, who said he was always told the same thing. “Man, those Cherokees sure got around,” he said.

But in the mid-’60s, in the largest city named for him, it’s safe to say Christopher Columbus was not a controversial figure. There were statues of him everywhere. The biggest one was in front of City Hall, which Google Street View indicates was still there as of September 2019…

…but also random ones scattered here and there, mostly in parks.

We were not taught that Columbus was anything other than visionary and brave, the man who discovered America by refusing to believe maps that showed the world was flat. He’d watched ships leave the harbor, they told us, and kept watching until they couldn’t be seen anymore. They didn’t suddenly disappear; they gradually sank from sight, the masts the last visible detail. I’m not sure I believe that, thinking back. Could one man’s eyesight be good enough to watch a ship follow the curvature of the earth? I can see across Lake St. Clair, but only at the narrow part and even then it has to be a very clear day. Well, whatever. The point is, he had a Big Idea, and he found a patron, and the rest is literal history. The turning point of so many great forces. A collision, actually.

Later the story was filled in, not as much as you’d hope. No teacher in my education even connected Columbus with the Conquistadors, the indisputably bad guys who followed him. We learned that he didn’t actually discover America so much as some islands on western fringes of the Atlantic. Certainly by high school we were being briefed on what a disaster Columbus’ arrival was for North America’s native populations, but this was never explained as anything other than Sad and Regrettable, but also Inevitable, chalked up to viruses as much as human blood thirst. And so I drifted on a cloud of Columbus ignorance for many years.

(Lest you think there was something uniquely evil about this, a miseducation done to indoctrinate children, be advised that Kate learned about Henry Ford at about the same age and his anti-Semitism wasn’t part of the lesson, either.)

Here’s something else we were taught in fourth grade: That in 1992, Columbus would probably host the Olympic Games, that the 500-year celebration of his arrival would demand nothing less than this sort of worldwide celebration.

Well.

I left Columbus in 1984, when the quincentennial was still a few years off. There was a commission planning something, and as the date grew closer it became clear the Olympics were off the table – Barcelona got that burden – and more important, something else had changed. The rise of the American Indian Movement, and the attention paid to the royal screwing natives of all lands had gotten at the hands of the first explorers, everything from whooping cough to chattel slavery, made the old guy problematic.

Suddenly, other cities that had statues of Columbus were taking them down. These weren’t violent events for the most part, and rather than drop them into the nearest body of water, city managers called up their colleagues in Columbus: “Hey, want a free statue of your namesake? We’ll pay shipping!”

This was an early warning that 1992 wouldn’t be a lovefest, and it wasn’t. There were teach-ins and seminars and all sorts of consciousness-raising. The commemorations were a mix of solemnity and celebration. I think there was a new park or parks built, maybe some other stuff. I went to the National Society of Newspaper Columnists convention in Columbus that year. I think my paper was even flush enough to pay for a hotel, when I could have just crashed at my parents’ or sister’s place. One of the events was a Native American who did his own teach-in, and painted the explorer as an unrepentant rapist, slaver and shitty-ass navigator who basically ran aground in the Caribbean. He was very full of himself, and I poked at him during the Q&A, because he got on my nerves.

“Wasn’t the meeting of the old and new worlds inevitable?” I asked. “You act as though the guy who would have come the following year would have somehow been different.” He went off on a tangent about the Vikings, and I don’t remember how it went after that. I’m sure he thought of me as a disciple of Charles Krauthammer or something. Then the seminar ended and we were taken by bus to Select Sires in Plain City, to hear about artificial insemination in dairy cattle, which was actually interesting and of course, a giggle for a bunch of dirty-minded journalists.

Anyway. The biggest international event Columbus got that year was Ameriflora, an “international horticultural exhibition,” i.e., a flower show.

There was one other thing I want to mention: As part of the commemoration, and another stop on the columnists’ tour, we visited the Santa Maria Columbus, a replica of the explorer’s flagship. I can’t recall enough of the details – how faithful a replica it was of the actual ship, what the design was based on, etc. It looked boxy to me, like it was built more to accommodate tourists than cross the ocean blue. Three masts, 90 feet length overall. It looked like a movie set. I have no idea how it got to this city far from any coast; I suspect it was trucked in pieces and assembled at its mooring on the Scioto River, the city’s brown, slow-moving waterway.

But in its own way, it impressed me. Ninety feet sounds big until you think what it would be like to cross an ocean on it, and an ocean some believed drained into an abyss, at that. During hurricane season. And this was the biggest of the three in the expedition; the Nina and Pinta were even smaller.

I see Columbus more fully now, certainly. He was a man of his times, and the times were very different. But his ship was indeed small and he was brave to take command and sail off into the unknown. As the Mercury astronauts would later say about themselves, he was spam in a can.

A final note: Last summer I took a walking tour of downtown Detroit, led by a local historian, an African-American man, who briefed us on the slave-holding roots of the city’s founders. We made a brief stop at the bust of Columbus, which this week was removed to storage until the city can have a conversation about it, the mayor said.

The guide said he didn’t consider Columbus any kind of hero, but he respected his presence on the Randolph Street median, because it had been erected by the local Italian-American community, who were confident enough to insist on their own depictions of their own history. And we walked on.

You don’t know the half of it, I thought, and played the song in my head again.

I don’t want to oversell this storm that hit us, but I don’t want to undersell it, either. Our neighborhood was littered with enough fallen trees to build a couple of log cabins. Mostly silver maple, we noticed – a fast-growing tree people plant because they don’t want to wait too long for shade. Years later, another homeowner curses them forever when it comes in through the bay window.

Anyway, the chippers came through this morning to dispose of the piles in front of every other house. (We didn’t have any huge limbs down, but Alan took advantage of the chipping service to take some deadwood out of a dogwood and flowering something-or-other.) I’m hoping the extraordinary noise of recent days – generators and chain saws and chippers – is over for now. Our power returned almost 48 hours exactly after it went out.

We didn’t have any major damage, but we lost everything in the freezer and most of what was in the fridge. And about the only blessing besides not having a tree fall through a bedroom is, the cold front that caused all this brought along some delightfully cool summer weather. Perfect for a bike ride, some outdoor exercise, grocery shopping to restock the fridge, all that.

I’m having that weird time-collapse thing. Sometimes I go back through the archives and reflect on how events used to last a while, how things that happened on Monday could sometimes still be remembered on Thursday. Now it just blurs from one disaster to the next. What happened Saturday? Oh right – Cadet Bone Spurs gave the commencement address at West Point. We’ll all have our favorite moments from that, but maybe mine was when he shouted out his birthday the following day, paused for the applause he expected and heard…crickets. I’ve never seen another West Point commencement; it’s entirely possible that the soldiers are not expected to respond to cheap applause lines during the speech, but to clap at the end only, politely. But it was a nice moment.

Trump looked drugged to the gills. In his weekday newsletter, Roy Edroso’s been writing these brief Oval Office scenes and playlets, and having fun with the president and his “formula,” tweaked by his doctors and chief of staff to keep him engaged, voluble and under control. And there’s that guy on Twitter, the former contestant on “The Apprentice,” who’s been claiming for years that Trump snorts Adderall and other drugs for the same reason. But on days like Saturday you could really see it. He leaned on the podium like an old man on a four-footed cane, slurred simple words, mispronounced “Ulysses” and “MacArthur” and then there was the ramp incident.

The day after, hundreds of MAGA-heads joined in that stupid boat parade through Lake St. Clair to the RenCen. There was a land component, too. A friend lives close to the route, and hearing the honking, thought it must be a graduation parade, common this year with the lack of formal ceremonies. So she went outside to wave, and was appalled to see the TRUMP 2020 flags flying past her house. So she stood there, raised both middle fingers and made sure a few of them saw her doing so. The suburban vote.

Another friend said his buddy was on his boat when the flotilla went by. Why, he asked, do all those geezers blare “YMCA,” which they of all people are old enough to recall is a gay sex anthem? The answer, of course, is that they’ve ruined that, too.

They’ve ruined everything.

One reason I didn’t blog last night is, we were invited to Italian-style family dinner with friends, and what would you do? It was marinated pork chops and pasta puttanesca – worth breaking quarantine for. We talked about whether the Trumps have ever, EVER hosted a White House cultural event, the way the Obamas (and for that matter, even the Bushes) did. Which made me think of the wonderful East Room concerts, which made me think of this, which made me cry.

What a Monday. On to Tuesday, 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.

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.

Sorry about the midweek no-show. I find my energy, and mood, and energy, and sleep patterns…undulating this week. Time to go back on the bedtime marijuana, I fear.

In the meantime, there was another state capital demonstration in Lansing today. They string a big banner between the columns (you can see it here) that reads FREEEDOM. I assume the three Es are probably a reference to Mel Gibson’s big speech in “Braveheart,” because none of those people actually read books, I suspect. Everything is a pop-culture reference, and I’m missing out on pop culture, the older I get. Psst: I never saw “Braveheart.” A friend told me it was long as hell and “it takes Mel Gibson like 45 minutes to die,” and I noped out of that, oh yes I did.

But throw in video games and movies that I wouldn’t see at gunpoint, and half the time I feel just out of it. But at least I’ve read a few more books than these goobers. I listened to about five minutes of the speakers; one did a whole bit on the “admiralty flag” thing, which was a joke on “King of the Hill” years ago. Ai-yi-yi.

Meanwhile, one of these aforementioned goobers showed up with an axe. Not sure what it was about, but it was confiscated.

Oh, and look — he has a criminal record. What a nice man.

This is really getting to be an embarrassment. I’d say, “We’re not really like this,” but clearly, we are.

More bad news today: Our city pool won’t open on schedule, and probably won’t open at all. I was hoping they might have early-morning lap swimming at the very least, but it’s looking like no go. This sucks. I haven’t been in a pool since mid-March and god knows when I’ll be in one again.

At least it’ll be warm this weekend. Although rainy, too. Yesterday was sunny:

Hope yours is good.