Oh, no. I haven’t written anything today. Or yesterday. I am sorry. But I was cooking for, and wrapping for, the birthday twins’ celebration, which was yesterday. We had dinner, cake, gifts, the first half of the Lions game. I didn’t sleep well, and today I’ve been dragging ass, as they say. But it was a good party.

The individual gifts aren’t as important as my one brainstorm for a family gift that all three of us November babies can enjoy (along with three friends): A two-hour cruise on the J.W. Wescott, i.e., the mail boat that services freight vessels on the Detroit River. It advertises itself as the only floating zip code in the country (48222), based on when it would deliver mail to ships on the Great Lakes for weeks at a time. Now that letters from home aren’t so important, they do package and food deliveries — yes, you can order a pizza or a shwarma to be delivered to, say, the MV Paul R. Tregurtha as it passes through town — as well as pilot changes, which is what I’d really like to see. They pull up next to a ship under way, match their speed, and send the new pilot up a rope ladder, and take on the guy coming off duty.

I think that’s also how they’d deliver a pizza, only with a basket or some sort of conveyance, now that I think about it.

It all sounds exciting, different, fun and very Detroit. I can’t wait. Now to herd all our cats aboard.

The Wescott website talks about how they got their start, ferrying letters to ships in a bucket tied to a rope, and it reminded me of the Columbus Dispatch bucket, the fifth-floor bucket the staff would drop to photographers coming back from breaking news, on deadline. They’d deposit their exposed film in the bucket, and by the time they got parked and back into the building, the film was being processed. Was it ever used by a particular photographer to purchase weed from his dealer down on the sidewalk? I’ll never tell.

(Yes.)

So that’s why I’m so tired and not particularly productive today. But tomorrow is another one, and it won’t involve cake and two bottles of wine. So let’s see how it goes.

Sad, sad news came at midafternoon on an otherwise perfect post-election Wednesday. I was going to spend today’s entry gloating, but then word came that Richard Battin, who hired me in Fort Wayne, has died. And so, once again, I find myself overtaken by events.

Grief, too. And recrimination, because I was going to stop in to see him the last time I was in Florida, and didn’t. Next time, I told myself. I am now the second person in my circle in recent days to learn the hard lesson that sometimes there isn’t a next time. But enough about me.

Richard was my first interview in Fort Wayne, which, like other Knight Ridder papers, had a particular style of vetting applicants: You did a round robin of virtually everyone in the newsroom who mattered, and you took tests. Apparently I did well on the tests, which was no biggie, but also was, kinda. It was basic Reporting 101: You’re working alone on a Sunday morning and hear over the police scanner that a plane has gone down at the airport. Who is your first call? Answer: A photographer. There was also some copy editing stuff that boiled down to having an eye for unusual spellings of notable names. Barbra, not Barbara, Streisand. Charles Addams, not Adams.

But after that, you were shipped around to this editor and that, and Richard was mainly my shepherd. You went to lunch, and then dinner. We ate at Hartley’s and Casa d’Angelo. I left knowing I’d get an offer, because my connection with Richard was almost a mind-meld: We got each other’s jokes and references, and had a similar outlook on the world. I also loved his stories about growing up in San Jose, and working for the storied Mercury-News before coming to Indiana to step on the management track. I remember he told me early on that he’d been drafted and refused induction. He didn’t go the conscientious objector route or hightail it to Canada, just flat-out said he wasn’t going. To be sure, he’d have made a terrible soldier. He was slight and not very tall, and while he could wield a wisecrack with lethality, probably would have had problems with a weapon. Lord knows he wouldn’t have thrived in prison. But in a stroke of almost unbelievable luck, his case landed before a San Francisco judge who hated the Vietnam war as much as he did, and gave him community service or something.

As a reporter, his skills were similar to mine: Not much for spending hours in dusty libraries doing research, but a nimble hand with a Page One bright. He showed me a picture once of the time he’d taken a turn on a saddle bronc at a rodeo, for a story, wearing borrowed chaps that said GARY down one leg. He said it was his alter ego.

He loved good writing, and was adept at it himself. He had a brief role in a community-theater production of “A Few Good Men,” playing the officer who gives the Tom Cruise character his mission, then disappears until curtain call. He would deliver his lines, then pop out for a drink at a nearby bar, still in his costume. People would clap him on the back, say “thanks for your service, colonel” and buy him a drink. He thought that was so funny he wrote a play about it, called “Feint of Heart.” He said it was about “love and language,” and contained several lines and speeches I recall from the newsroom.

It also had the story of how he met his wife, Adrienne. She was with another guy, a friend. He saw the two of them walking toward him one day and thought to himself, “What is she doing with him? She should be with me.” Soon, she was. His first wife wanted no children, and insisted he get a vasectomy. He reversed it when he married Adie, who gave birth to two daughters, and then got another, making him the second man I know who’d had two vasectomies. I always found this amusing, and he was always willing to talk about it.

What else? Even in a shitstorm of breaking news, he could keep his cool and often power through on jokes and coffee. On Fridays, during the last morning news meeting of the week, he’d print a little quiz, as a TGIF gesture. The only one I aced was about all the lyrics to “Ode to Billy Joe,” given on June 3, of course. He had a round scar on his jawline the size of a dime; it didn’t look like skilled work. He told me he’d hurt himself as a youngster but his parents couldn’t afford to take him to a doctor, so a local veterinarian did the work. I think about that when idiots discuss health-care policy.

One year, the phone company brought in new phone books for the newsroom, and a stack of the old ones piled up in a wheeled recycling bin where they sat for days and days. (The janitorial services in that building were basically non-existent.) One day Richard pulled one out and said, “I think I read there’s a trick to tearing a phone book in half. It’s not strength, it’s technique.” He figured it out, and tore one successfully. Then I, and a couple more people did, and then David Heath, a reporter notable for his red hair, tried. He couldn’t get it, and strained so hard his face nearly turned purple, an arresting sight under that hair. (He went on to great success as a journalist, so don’t feel bad that he couldn’t tear the Fort Wayne phone book in two.) My point is, that’s the kind of boss Richard was, serious when he needed to be but capable of being a great, merry prankster during down times.

People would be absolutely justified in asking anyone my age why they went into this field, currently stripped to its bones by rapacious vulture capitalists, tech bozos and other horrible people. The reason is, when it was good, it was very good – fun, but also serious, a real public service, from recipes to investigations of corrupt public servants. And one of the people who made it so was Richard.

I hope if there’s something after this, that I see him there.

I was at a political fundraiser Friday. Never mind who– Oh, let’s not be coy. It was for Jocelyn Benson, who’s running for governor as a Democrat. I wasn’t there because I am a huge fan, although I think she’ll be the nominee and as usual, the people on the other side are ghastly. I was there because the event was being held at a friend’s former house, and she wanted to see it, three years later. I donated to justify having a glass of wine and some little phyllo-wrapped cheese things.

The wild card in the 2026 Michigan gubernatorial race is Mike Duggan, outgoing mayor of Detroit, who’s running as an independent. He’s not just any third-party flake, and has a chance to spoil either party’s chances, depending on the nominees. Given that Duggan has been a lifelong Democrat, it could easily be the Dems. Given that he has coddled the Detroit billionaire class (en route, to be fair, to transforming at least part of the city), it could also be the Republicans.

I mentioned this to someone during the chitchat portion of the evening, and she confidently asserted that Benson has little to fear from Duggan. And she knows this how? “AI says so.”

Which is the long way around to saying that in a very short time, a shocking number of people I know have integrated ChatGPT into their lives. They ask it the current value of a particular classic car, the chances of rain a week from Tuesday, to tell them a joke. Condense this document I don’t want to read. Give me some questions to ask this person when I talk to them. And so on.

I know I, too, use AI; I’m not naïve. I use Google, which now gives you an AI summary of your results whether you ask for one or not. If they sound fishy, I double-check them. I should always double-check them, because I’ve gotten straight-up hogwash more than once.

The other day, while lifeguarding, I couldn’t get the pace clocks — the natatorium wall clock that counts seconds in big digits, so swimmers can time their 50s and 100s — working correctly. So I turned them off with a shrug, figuring every minute spent fiddling over it is time I wouldn’t have eyes on the water, and that’s more important. Someone piped up, “Ask AI! It’ll tell you!”

The ones that really floor me are those who use AI to essentially do their jobs for them. The product is obvious — bland, anodyne, with the weird absence-of-humanity feel to it, which are then sold to clients. Sooner or later, the client will figure out what they’re being served and think, logically, what do I need this clown for? Way to put yourself out of business.

Do any of you do this? Is it worth it?

I finally figured out the pace clock via the time-honored tradition of asking someone who had the job before me. It turns out you have to set one to Lead and the other to Follow, and they sync themselves and work just fine.

It was a good weekend. Not much bloggage, but here’s a gift link: How a bad man got a good paramedic fired because he didn’t like what she said about Charlie Kirk.

Have a good week, all.

It’s been my experience that one of the best experiences one can have with art is to find a great piece of it before you know too much about it. There’s so much commentary, especially about movies — review shows, reviews, talk shows with clips, internet content, all of it. Don’t get me started on interviews with actors, etc., where SPOILER ALERT appears literally one word before the spoiler.

So, with all that said, I won’t spoil anything, or tell you too much, or anything at all. Just go see “One Battle After Another” and thank me later.

That was the highlight of the weekend, which was, as usual, filled with chores and, this weekend, yet another summer weekend — temps in the 80s. It won’t last past Monday, and I guess I should be sad, but I’m ready for fall.

And with that, I’ve kind of emptied my already shallow bin. Let’s try for better later this week.

If you’ll allow me one more post about our Fort Wayne visit? Let me tell you what our walk-off gift was, courtesy of the Allen County Public Library’s world-class (and I do mean world-class) genealogy department:

The Homecoming organizers told us this was in the works, and said that if we wanted our personal family tree, to provide birth, death and cities for our parents and grandparents. I am one of those people mostly left cold by this stuff; at some point it started to strike me the way past-lives ninnies did, the ones who are always the reincarnation of Cleopatra or Henry VIII, never a guttersnipe in Victorian London or one of Cleopatra’s litter-carriers. But what the hell, why not, I thought, and coughed up the names and dates. And this is what I received in return:

Lordy. All that? Yes:

From the summation inside the front cover, this goes back five generations, to the great-greats. The last of the bunch was born in the 1830s, several in Germany or Switzerland. Some Civil War vets in there. One of my great-great grandfathers had charge of Abraham Lincoln’s bier as he lay in state in Indianapolis for 24 hours on his funerary trip back to Illinois. Another was, get this, a newspaperman.

I’m still working my way through this. Much of it is U.S. Census records, death certificates and the like, but for the first time, I’m starting to see the appeal of doing this research. I don’t carry but a few teaspoons of these old gents’ blood, but it’s fun to see what they did with the hands they were dealt, and how they were carried off. A few of cancer, stroke, some vague “illness” and the big cataclysm on my mother’s side, her father’s exit: “suicide by firearm.” I have a small medal that was his, awarded for bowling prowess:

He was a bank teller. I’m thinking I’ll have it made into a necklace.

If you want to dig up your roots, you won’t find a better place. The story was always that the only equal of Allen County’s collection was the Church of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, and the Library of Congress. I believe it.

So. Here’s a Sopranos joke, adapted for the times: An American walks into the Oval Office with a duck under his arm, and says, “This is the pig we elected.” The president says, “That’s not a pig, that’s a duck.” The American says, “I wasn’t talking to you.”

Doubt me? Don’t:

Over the summer, we learned (weirdly, via a social-media post by Jeanine Pirro) that Trump was planning to hang a row of paintings in the walkway adjacent to the Rose Garden, which connects the Executive Residence and the West Wing. …The portraits still haven’t been hung, but on September 21, White House photographers captured a new addition to the colonnade: a mock-up of a sign that reads “The Presidential Walk of Fame” in a large golden font.

Yep, that’s the pig we elected. Of the events of recent days, I have nothing to say that could be captured here. We elected a pig, and that’s that.

Happy Wednesday, eh.

We left Detroit for Fort Wayne sometime after 5 p.m. Tuesday, and after dealing with traffic and a gas stop, rolled into downtown around 8 p.m., well into full darkness. We were headed for the Bradley Hotel, new since we pulled up stakes in 2005. And even though it stands five floors and covers nearly a full block, Alan managed to miss the turn. (His navigator may have steered him wrong, but doesn’t remember.)

Around a couple of equally flummoxing blocks, we managed to find the valet lane and unload. “I don’t recognize the place,” Alan said. I pointed out Fort Wayne’s Famous Coney Island, cattycorner to the hotel. Didn’t help very much.

Which is to say that downtown has undergone a transformation, which this Homecoming event was intended to show off. The Fort Wayne Chamber invited about two dozen expats and partners, including our friends the Byrnes (former president of Parkview Hospital), Cosette Simon (first woman mayor, for 10 days, a long story), Zach Klein (co-founder of College Humor, Vimeo, Dwell, more), a former congresswoman, a sculptor, many others. And us. It was two days of showing off the city and hinting that investment in local startups would be welcome. Wining, dining, climbing on and off a bus and being encouraged to take a gift bag.

The short version of the itinerary: Touring the under-construction expansion of the Arts United Center, touring the Landing and Promenade Park, dinner at a fancy new restaurant, touring the fancy new restaurant owner’s even fancier new arts center, hearing his story (Sweetwater) followed by that of another local business success (Vera Bradley), meeting the mayor, touring the newly renovated G.E. plant (rechristened Electric Works in adaptive reuse), more business success stories, wrapping up with an evening at Parkview Field, the new(ish) downtown minor-league baseball stadium. The season’s over, but it’s enough of an event hub that we didn’t feel like we were in an empty space; there was a yoga class for roughly 100 taking place in left field.

The mood was friendly, which is to say, not really journalistic. I asked questions, but they were polite ones. Honestly, I wasn’t in a mood to challenge anyone over TIF funding. The results speak for themselves. When we left, downtown Fort Wayne was a wasteland. It isn’t anymore. There are hundreds of new apartments, people walking dogs everywhere, too many new restaurants to count. The out-migration has stopped, and young families are getting the message that it’s a place where housing is still cheap enough that you might be able to buy your own. The parks are beautiful. The rivers are finally getting the attention they deserve.

Does the city still have problems? Of course it does. But it also has an unmistakable shine. It doesn’t look like a place young people flee as soon as they collect their diploma.

Take Pearl Street. The whole time I lived there, it was known for a dirty bookstore, a strip club and gay cruising. A large industrial bakery covered several blocks. The fancy restaurant we ate at Tuesday night is on the ground floor of The Pearl, a new mixed-use building that faces it. Across the street is the Pearl Street Arts Center, both developed by the Sweetwater founder with some of the $1.5 billion he collected for selling a 75 percent stake in the company. He now owns the whole bakery building; the arts center is in part of it. They offer free or sliding-scale music lessons for every Fort Wayne Community Schools student who wants one. There are recording studios and performance spaces therein, all state-of-the-art.

We had coffee at the corner of Pearl and Harrison the first afternoon, and I flashed back to the last time I was in that particular doorway, sometime in the ’80s: There was a ferocious windstorm in progress, and the roof of a nearby building was coming apart in the gusts. A bunch of us had gone to lunch nearby, and the roofing material was flying through the air, some of it large enough to hurt a person. We crouched in that doorway, laughing, before running to a somewhat safer street to walk home on.

As I said, the city still has problems, and none are unique. Homelessness, racism, poverty the usual. But it’s a much nicer place to visit than it once was.

Of course, the graybeards at my old newspaper were opposed to all of this:

Should we give up on “downtown” as a concept whose time has come and gone, admit that trying to keep it on life support is a futile effort?

…As I write this, city officials are getting ready to celebrate the opening of a mixed-use facility they have engineered out of an abandoned General Electric facility downtown. I have been in and around that area for all my Fort Wayne time, and for the life of me I can’t see it succeeding. It’s a depressed area that will still look like a depressed area, so how often are people going to be thrilled about going there to shop or have a bite to eat?

The guy who wrote this was a near-agoraphobic, went to the same few restaurants year after year, and is dead now. Honestly, I don’t know how well Electric Works is really doing; it was beautiful, yes, but suspiciously depopulated when we visited. But I know what an abandoned factory looks like, living as I do in the world capital of them. And I salute the city for trying to turn this one around:

That same writer also disapproved of the new baseball stadium, because it replaced a “perfectly good one” out on charmless, ugly Coliseum Boulevard. The new one was built with TIF money, but it belongs to the city and is universally acknowledged to be the catalyst that started the turnaround.

Some people just don’t like change. I hope I’m never one of them.

Some more pix:

I ate breakfast every day at the place I used to take Kate after a library visit. Cindy’s Diner — the very best.

And now we’re back. What happened in our absence, other than the mad king’s ravings? FWIW, I don’t think the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk sent those texts. But that’s just me. And more will be revealed.

Having bitched my heart out about the punishing heat this summer, I owe a debt to the weather gods to salute the lovely days that have been with us since the last week in August. We can use some rain, but the nights are cool and the days are on the lower side of warm, and that’s a good thing. Most days, my hair looks the same at 3 p.m. as it did right after I blew it dry after my shower, which means my head isn’t schvitzing like a dockworker all the livelong day. So that’s good.

Right now, I’ve leaning against some pillows against the footboard of our bed, spread out an old down blanket, and Wendy is curled up at my feet, snoring a little, sometimes wagging her tail in a dream. The laundry’s done, the larder is full, I got in a little workout, I restocked at Costco. I’ll owe some money to the IRS in another week, but the wolf is far from the door. My local CVS has the new Covid vaccines, and I’ll get one soon. It’s a good day.

Wendy’s getting on in years — 13, as far as we know — and is showing it in ways large, small and sad. So I’m taking time to appreciate my little dog. We go on more, but shorter, walks. I changed her food from kibble to kibble-and-canned to be easier on her achy teeth. She’s still got that spark, but it’s more mellow, like the autumn sunshine. One reason we haven’t taken a big trip this year is Wendy. I don’t want to leave her with Kate (no fenced yard, cats) for three or four weeks anymore, and she’s so sensitive, that much time in a boarding kennel would kill her. But I don’t mind. She came with us to the U.P., and for our next trip — three nights in Fort Wayne next week — she’ll be fine with a babysitter.

Did I mention we are going to the Fort next week? We were invited — GOD KNOWS WHY — to one of those Chamber of Commerce “homecoming” events. Does your city do those? Detroit’s regional chamber did for a while. They invite notable expats back to town to see the shine they’ve put on it in the meantime. We’re staying at the Bradley, the boutique hotel built by the Vera Bradley people, and some friends will be in the group as well. The idea seems to be to invite potential investors (not our cohort) or opinion leaders (ditto) and spread the good word. Honestly, I have no idea why we’re included, but I’ll try to sparkle and not be too mean to the Republicans.

Speaking of which! What a last few days it’s been for the GOP, and once again, I’ve lost track of the current outrage. Is it Croaky going on the attack about vaccines? Or the Department of WAR-RAWR-WARRRRRR rebrand? There are days when I have to avert my gaze and just appreciate the weather for a moment. Although there are moments of grim, black humor, as here:

While the criticism of Kennedy slowly grows from different sides, I fear it’s too little, too late. Considerable damage has already been done to Americans’ trust in vaccines under false pretenses. A veterinarian recently told NBC News about people expressing their concerns to her about giving their pets vaccines out of fear that they will harm their pets, causing autism or other cognitive issues. When people are afraid of dog autism, it’s going to take a lot more than some harsh words at a little-watched Senate hearing to get us back on track.

Dog autism. Dogtism.

On Thursday, the day this little-watched hearing took place, I took some time to take myself out to lunch, and watched the live updates with analysis on the NYT site as I worked through my pizza and Diet Coke. Claim after claim by Croaky was batted down, and now I can’t find it on their website, although there are plenty of stories wrapping it up. What a psycho that guy turned out to be. Alan thinks he’ll be fired, but I’m putting my chips on the No Way square. Trump never admits a mistake, and he likes anyone who stands up to Elizabeth Warren. We’re stuck with him. As the Onion noted: Kennedy Curse Sure Taking its Sweet Time With RFK Jr.

And now I think I’ll take myself out in this lovely late-summer sun and maybe slowly amble my old dog around the block. The Lions play in half an hour. It’s a nice Sunday.

I said I’d be back Tuesday, and here it is, Tuesday. A woman of my word.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think President Shit-for-brains is dead. I think he’s an old, sick man, but he’s still exchanging oxygen. We’re stuck with him, at least for another day. The bells will ring around the world when he finally kicks the bucket, there will be dancing in the street and party snacks, but I doubt there will be much of a delay before we know, not with JD Vance circling like a vulture.

Sorry to start your Unofficial Fall with bad news, but there you are.

What a weekend. Very busy. I’m still not recovered, so I will leave you with this thin gruel, in the interest of getting something done.

At one point this weekend, I was way up in the sky:

I swear, I could see my house from the 69th floor of the RenCen.

I put this on my Insta stories earlier today, but what the heck, let’s put it here, too. Same person, same bar, different sign. 1974:

Friday:

Yes, it’s the dreaded vacation photo dump! If you haven’t figured it out, we were in the Upper Peninsula, nothing fancy, just a cabin at an old-fashioned waterfront resort. I have friends there, and a friend from Detroit was at the same resort the same week, so it was a very chill week of doing nothing much, drinking beer at lunch without guilt, napping after lunch ditto, sitting by the water in a chair thinking about nothing in particular, discussing current affairs with like-minded people, wondering if Dollar Island, which sits about a hundred yards offshore from where we were staying, would be a good place to wait out the zombie apocalypse. (It was for sale for $850K in 2019, the last listing I could find. Today, a faded For Sale by Owner is tacked to one of its buildings, and having learned they sustained a fire recently, I’d say that price is…ambitious.) The answer: Only until the ice comes in, at which point you better hope zombies can’t operate snowmobiles.

Funny to see this no-doubt-contemporary-but-looking-retro poster in a local bar, since this was our m.o. up here for many years:

Proof. One of the visiting tramps, in one of those years:

Here’s Alan in two of his happy places:

This garrulous pair of sandhill cranes could be heard every day. They hung out in the yard next door. The house was flying a Trump flag, so I hope their excrement was smelly and copious.

Much has changed since our last visit, even more since my first one. My friends sold their cottage (and that boat). But Mark, the surviving family member still lives there, in a different place, on the mainland. And he has a different boat, this lovely, triple-cockpit 1930 Dodge Watercar:

We went for a boat ride. Alan and I sat in the middle cockpit, along with Mark’s dog. Solo is an Anatolian shepherd / Great Pyrenees cross, which makes him both ideal for up-north living and very very big. One hundred forty pounds of big, in fact:

I couldn’t fit him in one photo while sitting next to him. He took up a lot of space:

After I left, Mark sent me a bunch of pictures of the old days. Here’s the last shot of a fall party, back in the day:

It was fun while it lasted. It still is. It’s just a different kind of fun.

A whirl of a week ahead. Expect light posting.

One of my lifeguard colleagues and I were shooting the bull one evening, and discovered we have one bedrock belief in common: The best temperature is shorts-and-sweatshirts, i.e., when it’s warm enough to wear shorts, but cool enough for a sweatshirt. Somewhere in the range from 65 to 72, say.

I’m in shorts-and-sweatshirts latitudes now. Heavenly.

Where, you ask? We had to cross a big bridge to get here:

There was fresh whitefish for dinner the first night:

The first day the weather was perfect:

The second day it was cool and breezy. So we went even farther north to look at the engineering structure that makes Great Lakes shipping possible:

Had a very mediocre lunch nearby. Atmosphere: 10-plus. Food: 4. Service: Also 4.

Finally, I want to buy this boat. I would not change the name:

That’s all for now. New comment thread!