I’ve been aware of Salena Zito’s columns for a while now. The Pennsylvania-based writer, previously a nobody, rocketed to stardom after her work in 2016, where she essentially predicted Trump’s election, and came up with the “literally, not seriously / seriously, not literally” line that was quoted so often in the shellshocked days afterward.

I didn’t read many of them, though. I leave that to people like Roy, who carries the duty through life like Jesus’ cross. Someone has to do it; I’m glad it’s him.

Others have pointed out the gaping holes in her work – the jes’ folks sources, salt-of-the-earth Real Americans who turn out to be GOP county officials; the oddly well-constructed and perfect quotes that she just happens to overhear at gas station mini-marts; and so on.

The Detroit News has been carrying her work, and by Thursday, when she most often runs, my week has begun to slow down and I can savor every word. By the time I get to this kicker, the italic line at the end of most columns, I’m usually testy, and this doesn’t help:

Salena Zito is a CNN political analyst, and a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. She reaches the Everyman and Everywoman through shoe-leather journalism, traveling from Main Street to the beltway and all places in between.

OK, then.

I read the one that ran today. It’s about minor-league baseball, because of course it is: It’s the sport most beloved by Everyman and Everywoman. Zito wore some leather off her shoes and took herself out to the ballgame, where she wrote this memorable scene-setter:

Altoona, Pennsylvania — As the scent of fresh-cut grass delicately fills the air, so do the aromas of hot dogs and hamburgers coming from the grill on the lower deck. Just past right field, there is an amusement park where you can hear the slow clink, clink, clink of the roller coaster as the carriage climbs its ancient wood scaffoldings. The kitschy music found at any ballpark in America echoes throughout.

The pitcher has taken the mound; the catcher is crouched in position; and an eternity passes as glances and signs are exchanged. The pitcher winds up, stretching his left hand behind his back. The ball sails toward home at a smidge over 90 mph, and POP! It lands in the weathered glove of the catcher.

POP! The clichés have really loaded the bases here, haven’t they? The scent of fresh-cut grass, hot dogs and hamburgers. Oh, and you say there’s an amusement park nearby? And can’t forget the sound a pitch makes in the “weathered” glove of the catcher, which in my world is called a mitt, but OK whatever.

I used to tell writing students: Tell me what you see, but learn the difference between meaningless and meaningful detail. If you’re describing something we’ve all seen, strive to describe it in fresh vocabulary. The sights and sounds of the modest, minor-league ballpark are pretty familiar in Zito country; think of something to notice besides the way the grass and hot dogs smell.

But what do I know? Nobody’s asking to put me on CNN.

This passage, describing the people watching from outside the fence, just chapped my ass:

Today, despite the relentless sun and heat, locals steal a peek of the taxi team from the fences located hundreds of yards away, along the parking lots or near the amusement park.

They say they are here just to hear the crack of the bat, or to follow the signals, or to see the game they love, or maybe even to catch a ball knocked out of the park.

I’ll bet my next 50-percent-smaller paycheck that there is no way in goddamn hell she hoofed it out to the cheapest seats to talk to any of those people. True, “they say” is pretty ambiguous in that she doesn’t quote anyone directly, or use quote marks, but if a normal Altoonan said they were there to “hear the crack of a bat” (and aren’t they all aluminum these days?) or ** “see the game I love,” I don’t know Everyman and Everywoman the way Salena Zito does.

Finally, any column about minor-league ball in Pennsylvania that doesn’t shout out Jim Brockmire? I have no use for.

Then there’s Gary Abernathy, the other Luckiest Man in Journalism, whose podunk newspaper’s endorsement of Trump in 2016 won him a contributor’s seat in the Washington goddamn Post, tries his Everyman best to sneer at the Lincoln Project, and ends with this amazing paragraph:

Among Never Trumpers are consultants, officials and pundits who have long been at the center of the Republican world, respected by conservatives who shared their vision and worked to achieve their common goals. But many of them were always somewhat misled, mistaking respect for love. They tell themselves now that Trump has corrupted the GOP. In fact, the GOP has long been the party it is today, just waiting for Trump to come along. That’s the hardest truth of all for the Never Trumpers to accept.

Ooooo-kay then!

I’m out at the tail end of an amazingly stressful week. I’ll debrief you all on the election here – an 18-hour day for yours truly, but a rewarding one – after the weekend. In the meantime, I will ask you: Note that the Republicans are not hesitating to use an unmedicated manic-depressive as a weapon against Joe Biden.

It’s only August! I can’t wait for the October surprise.

** Smarter sports fans have informed me pros don’t use aluminum bats. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Peter Green, a founding member of Fleetwood Mac, died in recent days. If you’re only a casual music fan, and think Fleetwood Mac = “Rumours” + Stevie Nicks + the band where everyone slept with everyone else, I’m not surprised. I used to joke that you were not allowed onto the Ohio University campus unless you could demonstrate, on dorm move-in day, that you owned both “Rumours” and Aerosmith’s “Get Your Wings.” And there were a lot of us.

But before they were that band, they were the sort of band that demonstrates how easily so many English musicians understood American blues guitar, absorbed its lessons and mashed it up with their own influences to make something entirely new. (See also: Led Zeppelin.) Anyway, this is the song I always associate with Fleetwood Mac 1.0; it’s great.

Peter Green left the band when he was felled by mental illness. Schizophrenia, I believe, not helped by the hefty diet of psychedelics he consumed. I think there was also a period with one of the cultier religious cults of the time – the Children of God, I think. And then he disappeared, and recovered a little, and played here and there on this and that, and then he died. He was 73.

But get this:

He outlived the man who wrote his obit. This happens from time to time, because media outlets, newspapers in the main, write obituaries for prominent people before they die. Everyone knows this, or should, although when mistakes happen, when someone presses the Publish button accidentally, a few members of the readership always swoon in horror. How dare you, how morbid, etc. In truth, it’s something of an honor to have your obit written while you’re still walking around, because it means you matter enough that the New York Times, et al wants to do it right.

We had a project like this at the Dispatch; we were all given a few and told to work on them between other things. I can’t even remember who mine were, but I do remember we were told to do new interviews with the people, to not just rely on clips. We were even given a suggested opening gambit: “I’m reporting a comprehensive biographical story about you that you will never read.” Most people got it right away, and most everyone was cool about it. My friend Ted did Gen. Curtis LeMay, a son of Columbus. He was a blood ‘n’ guts general in World War II, Air Force chief of staff during Vietnam and George Wallace’s running mate in 1968. Ted played me the part of the interview where he asked him about one of his most famous statements, that if the enemy in southeast Asia didn’t stand down, we’d “bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age.” It was pretty amusing; he said he’d been quoted out of context. But of course.

Anyway, LeMay died in 1990, at 83. I’m sure the paper was able to rustle up a comprehensive, well-written obit p.d.q. Or maybe they relied on wire copy, because all ours were typed on IBM OCR copy paper, and who knows where that stuff ended up.

(I took a tour of the New York Times in the early ’80s, and they showed up the drawers where the prewritten obits were. They were not only written, the pages had been designed and pasted up, so that anyone who died on deadline would get their excellent obit in the paper in mere moments. They didn’t let us linger over them; the content was still considered private. But I saw Jimmy Carter’s on top of the stack. Jimmy Carter just celebrated his 74th wedding anniversary, bless him.)

So, what else? Another beastly hot weekend, or Sunday, at least. Low 90s, and fuck that shit. But on Friday we went swimming in the St. Clair River, and that was great. Now it’s Sunday evening, a short week ahead, and yay that.

Some bloggage:

Cintra Wilson on how the St. Louis McCloskeys besmirched Brooks Brothers in a way bankruptcy couldn’t. Sorry, but I still like their fitted white oxford-cloth shirts. Also, Hawaiian shirts and certain haircuts are ruined, the same way the toothbrush mustache was ruined by Adolf Hitler.

If anyone cares, I found Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ floor speech last week to be outstanding.

Here’s a weird story for you radio people, about a ghost station in Russia:

It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, “MDZhB”, that no-one has ever claimed to run. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues.

Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4625 kHz.

It’s so enigmatic, it’s as if it was designed with conspiracy theorists in mind. Today the station has an online following numbering in the tens of thousands, who know it affectionately as “the Buzzer”. It joins two similar mystery stations, “the Pip” and the “Squeaky Wheel”. As their fans readily admit themselves, they have absolutely no idea what they are listening to.

It might be a “dead hand” signal, which means “in the event Russia is hit by a nuclear attack, the drone will stop and automatically trigger a retaliation. No questions asked, just total nuclear obliteration on both sides.”

This is the tone. Alan says it’s begging to be sampled. I agree.

So, then, mini-break is getting close. I’ll try to update before I leave, but if I can’t? Top of the week to all of you.

Housekeeping note: Posting next week will be light, as I’ll be taking off on Wednesday to visit J.C. and Sammy in the U.P., where the cell coverage — with our carrier, anyway — is very very sketchy. As I recall, if you position your phone just so in a particular corner of the cottage, you can maybe conduct a short chat if you don’t mind getting your call dropped.

But that’s fine. I could use a little break. It’s very hot here.

Before I head out, though, I got a COVID test. Just to be sure. I went to the city of Detroit’s drive-through testing center, and besides the setting — the ruins of the state fairgrounds — it was an entirely pleasant experience. The whole thing ran like a Swiss watch.

It was sad to see the fairgrounds, though. I grew up in a state-fair town, and looked forward to it all summer, even as I knew that the arrival of the state fair meant summer was in its final stretch. But what a stretch — it was like the finale of a fireworks show, full of corn on the cob and Tom Thumb donuts and grandstand shows and barns full of blue-ribbon livestock and…so much more. Admittedly, the Michigan state fair was never a match for Ohio’s, but I was an adult by then. I took Kate a few times, and got to go through the Poultry, Rabbits and Pigeons building, among many others.

But the state subsidy was cut off during the financial crisis, and what remains of the state fair now meets in a horrible exurban convention center, while the O.G. fairgrounds slowly decay.

The test was…pretty much as expected. A swab goes a mile up your nose, and just at the point you’re knocking your shoes together and ready to scream, it comes out and you’re on your way. Hope to get the results before I roll north.

So I wish you a good weekend, and maybe you’ll be ready to read this: An oral-history retelling of the first Gathering of the Juggalos, 20 years ago this month. It was quite something, got the band banned from the Novi convention center, and sparked this recollection, among others:

We arrived that morning of the Gathering, our bus pulled in at like 7 or 8 in the morning. And we got down to the venue and the line was already 3.5 miles long. I thought we were going to get there and there would be 300 people, it was a pleasant surprise to see that I wasn’t the only one, and to see that wow, there’s people all over the world that are just like me. As different as we are, we have that common band, and it felt like a family.

It’s not like a family. It is a family. A dysfunctional one, but still.

I was going to mention a story about a staff uprising at the Detroit Institute of Arts, but sorry, this happened:

LONDON — The American ambassador to Britain, Robert Wood Johnson IV, told multiple colleagues in February 2018 that President Trump had asked him to see if the British government could help steer the world-famous and lucrative British Open golf tournament to the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland, according to three people with knowledge of the episode.

The ambassador’s deputy, Lewis A. Lukens, advised him not to do it, warning that it would be an unethical use of the presidency for private gain, these people said. But Mr. Johnson apparently felt pressured to try. A few weeks later, he raised the idea of Turnberry playing host to the Open with the secretary of state for Scotland, David Mundell.

In a brief interview last week, Mr. Mundell said it was “inappropriate” for him to discuss his dealings with Mr. Johnson and referred to a British government statement that said Mr. Johnson “made no request of Mr. Mundell regarding the British Open or any other sporting event.” The statement did not address whether the ambassador had broached the issue of Turnberry, which Mr. Trump bought in 2014, but none of the next four Opens are scheduled to be played there.

I…I…I…I’m speechless. But of course I’m also not speechless, because this is what we expect, right? This is the world we live in now.

Then there’s this guy:

Ohio’s top state lawmaker conspired to funnel tens of millions of dollars from the state’s electric utility to his political allies in order to consolidate power over the state legislature and shepherd through a $1.5 billion bailout for the utility’s nuclear power plants, federal prosecutors alleged on Tuesday.

The FBI arrested Ohio speaker Larry Householder, a Republican, and four alleged co-conspirators and leveled charges of racketeering and bribery related to the scheme. At a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, U.S. Attorney David DeVillers called it “likely the largest bribery [and] money laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio.”

At the center of the scheme was Householder, who prosecutors say used a nonprofit “dark money” group called Generation Now to funnel money from the utility, First Energy, into state-level political contests. Householder’s goals, DeVillers said, were to pass and preserve a contentious bill to bail out two FirstEnergy nuclear plants, and “to build a power base for Larry Householder.”

Does it ever stop with these guys? I think we all know the answer. Happy hump day. This is the country we live in.

Federal stormtroopers are in Portland rousting protesters. The president has a new pandemic strategy; he’s ignoring it. Not my problem, people! The other day I was riding down a residential street and saw a man outside, taking a smoke break. Above the waist: Oxford-blue shirt and tie. Below the waist: Some sort of shorts so flimsy they may have well been boxers. In one hand, a cigarette, in the other, his phone. His posture said: I am so sick of this shit.

So are we all, my friend. Someone messaged me the other day to tell me her boss had taken a shit during a Zoom call. Carried the laptop into the can with her and took care of business. No one said a word, because: The boss.

“Surely she thought she was on audio only?” I replied. “I mean, otherwise…” What conclusion could you draw from behavior like that? That she has dementia? My correspondent had no explanation. Needless to say, neither do I.

There’s a comet in the sky now, too, which would normally be something to marvel over, and it is, but on top of incompetent governments, played-out American workers and shitting-on-Zoom bosses, it feels like an omen. Like the star of Bethlehem, or the red comet in the Game of Thrones books that announces dragons are in the world again.

Today I spent an inordinate amount of time researching recipes for deep-fried tofu. Kate was coming for dinner, and I wanted to do a fake-chicken sandwich. It turned out OK. Concentrating on one stupid thing like a tofu marinade at least made a certain kind of sense.

So I took a bike ride. I looked at the water:

And I looked at the lighthouse, strictly ornamental:

I imagine there’s some sort of weather-recording equipment up there. All the charming details of seafaring – charts, maps, lighthouses – are now obsolete. GPS changed everything. On the other hand, maybe someday an electromagnetic pulse will take care of GPS, and we’ll be adding bulbs to that thing.

The weekend’s journalism was two versions of the same story, both about how fucked this stupid virus situation is. In the WashPost, and in the NYT. It’s the usual. In the Post:

The fumbling of the virus was not a fluke: The American coronavirus fiasco has exposed the country’s incoherent leadership, self-defeating political polarization, a lack of investment in public health, and persistent socioeconomic and racial inequities that have left millions of people vulnerable to disease and death.

And in the Times:

Over a critical period beginning in mid-April, President Trump and his team convinced themselves that the outbreak was fading, that they had given state governments all the resources they needed to contain its remaining “embers” and that it was time to ease up on the lockdown.

In doing so, he was ignoring warnings that the numbers would continue to drop only if social distancing was kept in place, rushing instead to restart the economy and tend to his battered re-election hopes.

Casting the decision in ideological terms, Mr. Meadows would tell people: “Only in Washington, D.C., do they think that they have the answer for all of America.”

This is the world we live in. Let’s take it on for another week.

I think I’ve mentioned 14,000 or 15,000 times that this historical era has me feeling glum. Also, the insomnia is back — I awake at 4:30 a.m. most mornings now, and that’s not good, but it boils down to 5-6 hours of sleep a night, and that seems to be…adequate. But lack of sleep + pandemic + everything else is not a mood elevator, so this afternoon I figured I’d do a bike ride, see if I couldn’t rinse some random shit out of my head.

I saw this house, which was cheering:

It’s an old firehouse. No. 38, the numbers over the garage doors say. Move a few steps down the street and you can see the tower for hanging and drying the hoses:

I’m 90 percent sure this is a private residence. The best thing about it, which you can better see from the Google Maps satellite view — which I won’t post, because privacy — is that it’s virtually isolated. There are two houses on one side, two across the street, but in the other direction? Maybe a quarter-mile between houses. This is the neighborhood where, according to local legend, the first crack houses in the country sprang up. That was followed by abandonment, blight, “urban renewal” in the form of arson, and then, as Carl Sandburg wrote: “I am the grass. Let me work.”

Honestly, the concessions to reality — that stout fence is there for a reason — could be tolerable for quiet nights punctuated only by predawn pheasant crowing, coyotes yipping and maybe some random gunfire from time to time. Grosse Pointe is only a few blocks away, so you don’t have a hike for groceries and sundries. You find places like this all over town. Which is why the newsletter I produce for Deadline has a standing head: This week in America’s most interesting city.

Then I pedaled home and, as I was putting the bike away, got an alert that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been hospitalized and felt like screaming again.

Today, in greater Lansing, a 77-year-old man confronted a 43-year-old man outside a Quality Dairy — your basic quickie-mart type place. The confrontation was over the latter’s failure to wear a mask; he was ejected from the QD over it, and he must have been testy about it, because he stabbed the old man. Then he fled. The cops caught up with him about 30 minutes later, and he got out of his car armed with a knife and a screwdriver. He advanced on the cop twice; she shot him the second time. He’s dead.

I’d love to see that guy’s internet history. This being the 21st century, there is available video of the stop, the confrontation and the guy going down.

I love summer, but not this one.

I met some friends for social-distance drinks on a patio Friday night, although “fled the house” might have better described my mood after a rocky week. I needed to go downtown to get my few belongings from our office there, as we’re giving up our lease; after three-plus months of WFH, we see no need to maintain it. I have mixed feelings. Commuting is a pain, but it gets you out of the house and forces you to engage with other human beings. Home is a nest that can easily become a fortress; many times I’ve been grateful for a random encounter on a bus, a sidewalk, a lunch spot that lights a creative spark.

But parking is expensive and it takes time, so.

Anyway, I stuffed my few personal items into a tote — the shawl I brought in case this summer’s a/c is anything like last summer’s, when it rarely rose above icebox level, a book, a water bottle — and we headed off for a patio. The police shot and killed a suspect Friday afternoon, and a demonstration had formed, this one fairly angry. We monitored it via Twitter through two rounds, told some stories, and left. I walked through the door a little after 8, and Alan told me Roger Stone had been granted clemency.

You know how it’s going to go from here on out, right? The corruption will get more and more brazen. If Trump wins, well then, there’s no governor on what can happen, none whatsoever. If he loses, the transition period will be nonstop crimes, the ramming through of pet legislation, all of it. I hope, when he leaves, someone goes through the White House silverware and artwork to make sure he hasn’t stashed any in his luggage.

Because that’s what we’re dealing with here.

Sometimes I feel like I’m on a hair trigger and go to MurderDeathKill twice a day.

I did fill out my absentee ballot for the August primary. It’s a whole lot of nothing — most seats were unopposed — but it felt like something.

Bloggage: In the summer I sometimes go swimming with my friend Bill, in the St. Clair River. He wrote a story about Great Lakes swimming yesterday.

And that’s it, I fear. Let’s see what fresh hell arrives in the next 48 hours.

Some of you have been commiserating with Jeff about the divided nature of his congregation. Getta loada these apples:

Both inside and outside St. Elizabeth Seton Catholic Church on Sunday, the statement “Black lives matter” was said with conviction and met with opposition.

Outside, it was written on signs and chanted through megaphones by members of the community protesting remarks made late last month by the Rev. Theodore Rothrock calling Black Lives Matter organizers “maggots and parasites.”

Those “Black lives matter!” chants were met with chants of “Go Father Ted!” from counter-protesters who oppose the suspension handed down to Rothrock and argue that he was speaking the truth.

This is in suburban Indianapolis, by the way. And it goes on:

Inside, during 9:30 a.m. Mass, “Black lives matter” was said just once by Bishop Timothy Doherty of the Diocese of Lafayette-in-Indiana at the end of his opening comments to the more than 150 people attending.

His words prompted one woman to shout “You’re a coward” in the bishop’s direction multiple times before she was escorted out. More than a dozen other people gathered their belongings and walked out of the church along with her.

Breaking my usual three-paragraph rule because man, what a story. My history with the church is checkered but mostly non-existent, but I never heard a priest call an abortion provider a maggot, at least not from the altar. To call a movement working for justice by names like this? Man, no wonder the pews are empty.

But that’s our country these days. Adult babies throwing tantrums over wearing masks. White supremacists on the march. Murder hornets and ranting priests. I will not make a “who had that on their 2020 bingo card” joke here, but it applies.

OK, then. Short shrift today. Apologies. It’s supposed to be 93 today, and just thinking about it makes me want to move to an island in Lake Superior.

I’m grateful for whoever in my network flagged this piece, about the poisonous legacy of Newt Gingrich. You want to know where civility ran off to? Newt was one of the biggest traffic directors sending it over the next hill:

Gingrich was my introduction to Orwellian newspeak. He had this tic of starting every other paragraph with “frankly” and then telling a lie; it was his poker tell. Falsehoods and hyperbole came as naturally to him as smirking. He freely trafficked in conspiracy theories. His PAC circulated a pamphlet for aspiring politicians who wished “to speak like Newt.” It advised them to repeat a long list of words to describe Democrats, including sick, pathetic, corrupt.

Like Trump, Gingrich was a thrice-married womanizer who’d somehow seduced the evangelicals. He too had a skyscraping ego, nursed grudges as if they were newborns, and lacked impulse control. In 1995, Bill Clinton made him sit in the back of Air Force One; he responded with a tantrum and shut down the government, prompting The New York Daily News to run a cartoon cover of him in a diaper under the headline “Cry Baby.”

Gingrich turned the politics of white racial grievance into an art form. They may have started with Nixon’s Southern Strategy, but Gingrich actually came from the South. He intuited the backlash to globalization, to affirmative action; the culture teemed with stories about white men under siege. (Including the Michael Douglas movie “Falling Down,” about a divorced, unemployed defense contractor’s descent into armed madness.) It wasn’t long before 1994 became known as “The Year of the Angry White Male.”

Mark Souder, my former rep-for-life-or-until-he-gets-tired-of-it in Indiana, was elected in the 1994 sweep and looked up to his leader, the Newt. He mainly had an easy time of it at election time, but once in the early 2000s he was challenged by a credible moderate Democrat, and a man without reproach, Dr. Tom Hayhurst. He was the medical partner of a close friend, and I knew him a little bit. He grew up middle class in Fort Wayne, served as a medic in Vietnam, specialized in pulmonology and was liked and respected by all who knew him. And he was handsome, the sort of man who ages like Robert Redford but without the plastic surgery, which is to say: Well. Once I was ending a lunch with my friend, his partner. He was dawdling about going back to the office, and said he had an appointment with a patient who’d asked to see someone else in the practice because she couldn’t get along with Hayhurst.

“She can’t get along with Dimples?” my friend moaned. “What’s she gonna think about me?” (And yes, Hayhurst had dimples.)

Anyway, faced with this paragon, Souder went low, with ads calling the doctor “rich” and out of touch with regular people, even though he had lifelong friends all over town, few of whom were in his income bracket. Souder won, of course, and went on to flame out in the single most embarrassing sex scandal I can recall that didn’t involve an actual crime, or diapers.

You can trace that back to Newt, I guess. What a piece of shit.

And with that, let’s all start Tuesday! The mood seems to be going around.

The other day I was scrolling Twitter and saw a video with many views and heart-eyes emojis after it, some funny guy doing his Karen act. He had the wig, the flat comfortable sandals and as he pulled on a pair of capri pants I realized, Um, wait, that’s me.

I wear capri pants in summer because my short-short days are long past, and I know the minimum inseam on any pair of shorts I might wear outside the house (9 inches). Even if you keep up the struggle, exercise, eat right, there comes a time when your thighs have given up, and you don’t show them to anyone other than close friends and the people you swim with, who are all old like you and have the bods to show for it.

One of the struggles I gave up this year was hair denial. I let the gray come in, and I’m very happy I did, as for once, the timing was perfect; my last haircut was two days before the salon shutdown. I got the last of the blonde highlights snipped off, and so spent the last three months not sweating my roots growing out. With a million new things to worry about in 2020, it was freeing to let that one go.

But now I’m about as Karen-y as Karens get, at least from the outside. Anyone looking at me would sum me up at a glance: Karen. Boomer. Enemy. And so on.

So now it’s the day before the holiday weekend starts, and I’m sitting inside because it is hot as hell outside and will be getting hotter for the foreseeable future. We’ve had a very angry few days here in Detroit. Two women got into a shouting match over a hip-check in the doorway of a Chipotle, and a gun was drawn, a truly insane confrontation. Was it captured on video? Do you even need to ask? And yes, one of the women involved was a Karen, as we understand the term these days: White, middle-aged, hair-trigger temper.

The night before, a cyclist shot a motorist dead on the street in front of the RenCen, probably the closest thing Detroit has to a Magnificent Mile district. It was a road-rage thing, we’re told. The motorist yelled at the cyclists, the cyclists yelled back, he stopped and got out of his vehicle with a knife in hand. One of the cyclists, a woman, was packing (legally) and fired one shot, enough to send him to Elysium. Must have been the surprise of his life.

It so happened I had to do the aggregation — short rewrite/summation, with link — of both of these stories, to Deadline. I posted them to Facebook, because that’s where we get our traffic.

So I’m circling back a few hours later, checking engagement, and start reading the comments. Are comments good for anything anymore? No. It’s all memes and the same catch phrases over and over. The preeners are the worst: Do better and Check your privilege and You spelled ‘racist’ wrong and Fixed it for ya and I guess someone here has work to do. I guess this is a byproduct of people being out of work or working from home where they can check social media all day. And of being angry, and of it being about 900 degrees outside, with cases spiking.

Anyway, I think I’ve had my fill for the day, and for the weekend. I’m taking my Karen-ass self out to walk the dog, if she’s up to a jaunt no longer than around the block. If I meet any black birdwatchers, I will not be calling the police. In fact, I may just leave my phone behind.

Bloggage:

Hank Stuever on the rise of Karens on your screen. Funny:

Now, with the cameras squarely and vigilantly in the hands of those who are sick of being hassled, the “Karens” show depressingly confirms some of our worst suspicions about people in general, wielding a similar power of stereotype. “Karens” triumphantly flips the “Cops” dynamic. The Karens of our world relied too long on the power of racism and intolerance, threatening to call the authorities on anyone who offended or unnerved them. Now Karen is the bad guy, getting the comeuppance she so richly deserves. (Whatcha gonna do, Karen? Whatcha gonna do when Instagram comes for you?)

I had more, but it’s stale by now. News gets stale in 10 minutes these days. Enjoy your holiday, and may the deity of your choice bless America.

Another exhausting week behind us, a semi-exhausting weekend ditto, and another exhausting week ahead. I’m planning to return to the office for one of my jobs, and maybe the other, but only one day a week, and only if it feels OK. As is happening elsewhere in this stupid-ass country, cases are on their way back up. One bar – one! – in East Lansing was the center of 80-some positive COVID tests. A student dive, of course, the sort of place where, if you’re close to my age, you might have attended a drink-and-drown night in the pre-Mothers Against Drunk Driving days.

The bar owner say They Did Everything Right – and you know it’s true, because they told Mitch Albom – but The Customers, They Just Wouldn’t Listen. OK, whatever. The horses are out of the barn now, anyway, and one galloped all the way to Grosse Pointe, where we had our own mini-spike in the young-adult crowd last week, culminating in 23 new cases confirmed on Friday. One of the bar patrons had his own rager the previous weekend, while symptomatic, and apparently infected a bunch of other people. Oy.

We ate dinner out Friday on a patio, but I’m wondering if even that is safe enough, in these conditions. Might be back to pizza and carryout and my own cooking for the foreseeable future. I did get an antibody test, as part of my blood-donation testing last week. Negative. Probably wouldn’t hurt to hit one of the drive-through test sites one of these days, too.

At least it’s summer, and it’s been pretty, so let’s do some pictures, eh?

Driving home from the market, I glanced right and saw this street:

The crop is a little unfair; there’s an abandoned house just out of frame to the left. What caught my eye was that massive willow tree, and the very saturated green-ness on an overcast morning. The remains of the sidewalk on the right side remind us that once upon a time, this was a residential city street and didn’t always look like rural Mississippi. There’s more housing just beyond the green, but needless to say, this isn’t the fancy neighborhood. Although I turned 90 degrees to the right and spotted this streetlight something-or-other:

Check out that brickwork. Once upon a time, we were a country that believed there was nothing wrong with making a public building beautiful, even a utility center. During the worst of the Detroit-is-crumbling era before the bankruptcy, a local TV reporter did a piece on streetlights, most of which were decades old and didn’t work. Some circuits were so old they had to be turned on manually, as in someone had to show up and throw the switch; this building looks from that era.

That was a weird time, especially in winter. Driving through some neighborhoods was like entering the haunted forest, it was so dark. Not anymore, though – new LED lights everywhere. When LED streetlights fail, they sometimes start strobing, I have since learned. People online call this their disco period. Very festive.

Saturday morning market:

#NoFilter. And mine, all mine. We put some of them on cake Saturday night and drank too much wine. Hey, it’s mojito season.

Finally, a Sunday bike ride before it got too hot:

A rod on every post at the fishing pier. This is my turnaround. Seeing the water always gives me a lift.

So, bloggage? Some.

Neil Steinberg offers some talking points on how to respond to your terrible friends and relatives asking about black crime in Chicago.

When Sherri floated the possibility that Trump might resign ahead of the election and cut a deal with Pence to pardon him, I thought, yeah interesting, and Alan said no way. Maybe not so no-way anymore. The president is losing, and it’s starting to dawn on him:

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale was blamed internally for the Tulsa rally failure. Some people complained about him trumpeting that 1 million people had requested tickets, a boast that fell flat when thousands of seats sat empty during Trump’s speech.

Parscale has been a target of some Trump allies who argue the campaign is lacking a coherent strategy and direction. But people close to the president insist that Parscale’s job is safe for now. Trump, who visited the campaign’s Arlington, Virginia headquarters a few months ago, has told people he came away impressed with the sophistication of the organization.

Oh, he was impressed? That changes everything.

Finally, a little good news for you boaters, out of Buenos Aires:

Days after Argentina canceled all international passenger flights to shield the country from the new coronavirus, Juan Manuel Ballestero began his journey home the only way possible: He stepped aboard his small sailboat for what turned out to be an 85-day odyssey across the Atlantic.

The 47-year-old sailor could have stayed put on the tiny Portuguese island of Porto Santo, to ride out the era of lockdowns and social distancing in a scenic place largely spared by the virus. But the idea of spending what he thought could be “the end of the world” away from his family, especially his father who was soon to turn 90, was unbearable.

So he said he loaded his 29-foot sailboat with canned tuna, fruit and rice and set sail in mid-March.

Twenty-nine feet isn’t much larger than ours. I can’t imagine doing this. But then, I’m not Juan Manuel Ballestero, brave mariner.

So come on then, week ahead.