There are two kinds of sellers at Eastern Market, most Saturdays: Growers and wholesalers. The first group grows their own produce, the second buys in bulk at the produce terminal, packages it separately and sells at a pretty good, better-than-grocery-store price. There’s no deception here, unless a customer is dumb enough to believe Michigan has a citrus crop.

Sometimes I stop at a particular wholesaler early, because he sells limes three for a dollar and we’re into lime cocktail season. This week I had to wait while the seller, clearly exasperated, searched his phone for CashApp, so a buyer could pay him $12. And call me boomer as much as you like, but this is ridiculous.

The guy I buy eggs from says this happens all the time and increases every year, because young people are abandoning cash. What’s more, older people like me seem to think it’s perfectly fine to pay for $7 worth of eggs with a $100 bill. Which is also ridiculous, unless you’re at a meat counter buying prime rib. I was reading a Facebook group for residents of my city, and there was an indignant business owner complaining that the city hadn’t enabled a parking app for its meters, and “no one carries change anymore, especially young people.” That may well be true; the manager of the waterpark I worked at two years ago noted it was taking longer every year to close out the registers in the snack bar, because younger people were simply bedeviled by quarters and dimes, and strained to count them.

I use an app to park in Detroit, because the kiosks that take cash are often inoperable, enforcement is robust, tickets are expensive and I’m nearly always staying at least an hour, which makes the transaction fee negligible. Plus, the cost to park is, for a major city, miniscule — a dollar an hour.

But in Grosse Pointe? To pop in and out of the dry cleaner? I keep an Altoids tin in my dashboard cubbyhole, filled with change. I put in a dime, get 12 minutes and leave with six still available for the next lucky parker. If I use the app, they’ll tack on a 40-cent transaction fee. The hell with that.

Add this to the list of Shit I Thought I’d Never See: That cash would become a problem.

So! The heat wave has arrived where I am. Two hours until noon, and it’s already 86. Yesterday it started cool enough that I could wear long pants, and by 1 p.m. it was oppressive. The next three days will be worse. But this is the climate we have chosen, so.

There is good bloggage, too:

Thanks to Nancy Friedman for posting, in the last thread, this Jon Carroll column, “13 Things You Should Know About My Mother,” published on M-Day 2005. (If you get a register-to-read pop-up, just reload a time or two.) Things I learned:

1 She was adopted into a wealthy family in Grosse Pointe, Mich. Her father was a politician.

2 She left Grosse Pointe to go to Vassar. When she graduated, she was supposed to return home and marry one of 200 eligible rich boys. Instead, she went to Hartford, Conn., and got a secretarial job in an insurance company.

…4 She met my father, who was poor, Irish and Roman Catholic. She married him. She was disinherited.

She never saw her father again. Well, that is a very Old Grosse Pointe thing to do to a daughter, if I do say so. Also:

8 When I was 8, she was waiting for a bus when an ash from a cigarette dropped on her pretty summer frock, and the frock erupted in flames. A passing motorist took her to the hospital. The scars on her legs took 25 years to heal.

This is the second woman I’ve heard of, suffering such a mishap. (The writer Eve Babitz was the other.) Jon’s mother’s would have happened in the 1950s, but Babitz’ was in 1997, when I like to think consumer-protection laws had largely shielded American skirt-wearers from clothing that could burst into flames. (I imagine the Trump administration is working hard to roll back these regulations, don’t you?) Maybe Babitz, famous hippie eccentric, was wearing a thrifted or imported-from-a-country-where-they-don’t-believe-in-that skirt. Whatever, a good summation on a mother’s life.

From national treasure Eli Saslow, a deep read on the spring 2025 measles outbreak in Texas. Saslow is able to get into anyone’s confidence, and portrays these…what’s the word? antivax idiots, yes. These antivax idiots come across sympathetically, but my heart was left as cold as stone. Here’s the local chiropractor, who does a lot of non-chiropractic health care in West Texas:

Most of what he remembered about measles came from an old “Brady Bunch” episode, where the children celebrated staying home from school and played board games. “If you have to get sick, sure can’t beat the measles,” one of the children said. …“I feel like I’ve been lied to,” Kiley told his wife as his fever rose to 104 degrees.

“Lied to” by a sitcom, check. More:

For more than a decade, Kiley and Carrollyn had debated whether to vaccinate their children. Each time, they decided against it. … In recent years, as many as 15 percent of families in West Texas school districts had applied for “conscientious exemptions” from the M.M.R. vaccine. What Carrollyn feared more than measles was the remote possibility that her children might experience an adverse reaction to the shots. Two of her younger siblings had been vaccinated and had then suffered from high fevers that led to febrile seizures — scary convulsions that lasted several minutes but didn’t cause permanent damage.

“My children won’t see this disease in their lifetimes,” she always concluded. “The vaccine would probably be fine, but why take an unnecessary risk?”

The takeaway from the story is, lots and lots and lots of people not only got measles, but not the Brady Bunch board-games variety. This was a severe outbreak, with high fevers, intestinal distress and more. All four of the chiropractor’s children had to be hospitalized. Bobby Kennedy should be horsewhipped.

Finally, if you have an HBO account, I highly recommend “Surviving Ohio State,” a documentary (a film, not a series, thank God) on the sexually abusive sports doctor there, Richard Strauss. It’s a familiar story, similar to the same narrative with Dr. Robert Anderson at U-M — rumors for years, student athletes complaining of fondling during exams, an actual penetrated-while-drugged rape, etc. — but no one did anything, not one thing, about it. No, wait, there was one coach who tried to get OSU to take action. A woman, of course, coach to both the men’s and women’s fencing teams. One of the villains of the piece is none other than U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. It’s good.

The Iraq Iran bombing I don’t have the capacity to discuss right now. But you all feel free.

OK, then. On to confront the heat and figure out a plan for the day. I’ll probably work, because why the hell not.

On Mondays I “sleep late,” which is to say, I don’t set the alarm and wake up whenever. On Monday I woke at 6, tried to read for a while and drifted back to sleep, and learned my subconscious still has some tricks up her sleeve, i.e., a brand-new anxiety dream:

I’d invited two people to come to dinner, and had shopped and prepped food for all of us. They arrived, and before I could even shut the door, more people were standing on the front step, and apparently I’d invited them, too. This went on and on, and the house filled up with people expecting a meal. I never got around to serving anything, because issues kept arising in the party crowd — someone needed this moved from the second floor to the first, etc. It seemed to never end until I finally woke up, feeling very befuddled.

If only I’d invited Jesus. I understand he has a hack for feeding a multitude.

I’m well-acquainted with anxiety dreams, and have been working on them for some time. They started with the classic Test Dream (I’m seated for the final, and realize I’ve never attended this class). After my formal schooling ended, it became the Deadline Dream (an editor is expecting something, and I’ve done no reporting). My Feet Are Mired in Mud, self-explanatory in the central imagery. And so on. Now it’s the Dinner Party Dream.

Sigh. Very Monday, that one.

Jason T. posted this piece from the Bulwark on his socials, and I think it’s worth a read. Excerpt:

Biden’s biggest failure was that his theory of America was wrong.

He could have governed as a radical intent on destroying the populist project. This would have meant aggressively pursuing criminal charges against Trump and his confederates. It would have meant forgoing normal legislation in order to pursue broad, systemic change. Such a course would have been risky and — probably — unpopular.

Instead, Biden governed like a normal president in a normal moment. He pursued mostly popular, mostly incremental reforms. He forged bipartisan majorities. He passed a lot of legislation, most of it focused on concrete items to improve the lives of American citizens even—especially—in red states.

Biden’s belief was that the Trump moment was an aberration and that America could return to its liberal equilibrium if he governed normally and gave the Republican party space to heal itself and turn away from its authoritarian project.

Biden’s theory of the case was shredded by events.

Like many of you, I’ve been marinating in takes about Biden since That Book dropped. (May I say here that I have never been so happy to be quit of cable news as I have been this week, as I understand CNN has been shameless in flogging their star anchor’s work product.) And I share the frustration many of you have, that the coverage of a dying man who is no longer president has not even been matched at all by coverage of a senile man who is president. But at the same time, I don’t think we can ignore that covering for the president’s infirmity has gotten us here, where Democrats who haven’t even filed to run for office, any office, will be asked to somehow defend the work of people they don’t know, in events they had no control over. And no one is saying the obvious: Even a frail, doddering president with a competent staff is preferable to the one we have now, although you can argue that the original sin was for Biden to run in the first place. (See quoted paragraph, above.)

But Jason added something else that needs to be said. The Bulwark is a Substack vertical run by never-Trumpers who have moved incrementally to the left, or not moved at all, and now find themselves with more Democratic friends than Republican. He commented:

The reason people don’t like The Bulwark, of course, is that many of the people who contribute to it also built the current media and political climate which now afflicts the U.S. — they were part of various far-right think-tanks and publications and TV networks. We didn’t get to this dark reality in a vacuum; people like Bill Kristol and Mona Charen dragged the U.S. into this dark reality.

Exactly. Those of us who remember Mona Charen when she was shaking her finger at women who had sex outside of marriage still remember those columns, and ditto Kristol. I mean, I’m glad they’re resisting the current catastrophe, but if it ever ends, I don’t see themselves on our side. And we need to work this all the way out.

Of course, we can’t not blame Fox News. A nice takedown of our U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, here:

“Think about it: Omar wears a hijab,” said Pirro in 2019, referring to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota). “Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?” That remark drew condemnation from her own network.

After Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), for instance, expressed concerns that she might fall victim to a “political” prosecution after participating in a February “Know Your Rights” webinar for immigrants, Pirro attacked. “No, honey,” she said on the March 3 edition of “The Five.” “What it is, is it’s a prosecution based on — I think it’s 8 USC 119 — for obstruction of justice.” On the April 10 edition of “The Five,” she blamed Democrats for “keeping the illegals in the shadows and keeping the illegals illegal.” That was more charitable than the evaluation she articulated just over a week earlier, when she said of Democrats, “It’s a party that’s filled with hate.”

The punchline comes later, but it’s always satisfying to see Janine Winebox cut down to size.

But let’s end on a higher plane. Some of your Fort Wayne people might remember Zach Klein, who first crossed my radar when he won the Sterling Sentinel scholarship offered by my employer. He went to Wake Forest, and we later met up when he determined that he and I were the only two people in Fort Wayne with a blog. He later founded College Humor with his college roommates, sold it and has since gone on to more startups, including the one our own Deborah participated in, something about cabin-building.

Anyway. As I recall, Zach wrote about the subject of this very nice column, or at least the precipitating event, in his scholarship essay. It’s about the night his brother fell head-first out of a pickup that Zach was driving, as well as what came after:

When word got out that Noel was in a coma, our community showed up. There was a chapel in the hospital, and we held vigils for him. Mostly we sat silently with heads bowed, but occasionally someone would offer something up to the room. That’s when I heard the Serenity Prayer for the first time.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

I felt some relief, both an acknowledgment of my guilt and a merciful release from my community for whatever role I played. As a naive teenager who had little experience with the bigger world, it was an extraordinary glimpse into the human experience filled with error and pain, as well as a process—one that we have always needed and will always need—to forgive ourselves.

This prayer was different from the ones I had said over and over before. It was a tool, a reminder to help us frame burdens in a way that makes them easier to bear.

Noel’s brain swelling eventually reduced, and he emerged from his coma. He lived, but his life has never gotten easier. And I never returned to church or prayed again, either—yet I often think about the grace of the Serenity Prayer.

Anyway, I think you’ll like it, religious or not.

Time for me to get a move on.

Yard notes, for you gardeners: Our back yard, having been thoroughly ruined by some previous owner, has been a work in progress since we moved in, and I think we’ve brought it back about as far as we can, short of tearing down and rebuilding the garage where it should be, at the end of the driveway. (The owner moved it 90 degrees to gain a parking pad for their RV, we were told.) Along the way, Alan planted a climbing hydrangea along the back fence, where it dwelt in deep shade. Year after year, it would cover a smallish patch of the fence and do little more. A couple years back, Alan dug it up and replanted it against the side of the house, where it gets afternoon sun.

The motto for climbing hydrangea and other perennials, we’ve learned, is “first it sleeps, then it creeps, then it leaps.” The decade or so against the fence were its sleeping years. The first year on the house, creeping. But I’d say the Era of Leaping has fully arrived:

Not bad, little dude. Still to be revealed: The autumn-blooming clematis Alan put in this year to replace the honeysuckle that threw in the towel over the winter. Stay tuned.

How was everyone’s weekend? Mine? Can’t complain. Did some things, went out to a fancy dinner (32nd anniversary, Barda for you locals), stayed in with burgers the next night. A typical weekend, during which it was clear that Friday’s summery temperatures would give way to far springier ones, and they did. It was the benign touch of the storm system that devastated those to our south, and we’ll see what comes of that. The new FEMA director is being pretty open about the fact he doesn’t have a plan for hurricane season (which starts June 1) or anything else:

He also seemed to express surprise at the vast range of FEMA’s responsibilities, raising concerns among career officials about his ability to run the nation’s disaster-management agency. Richardson, who leads FEMA in an acting capacity, took over the complex agency last week.

“I feel a little bit like Bubba from ‘Forrest Gump,’ ” Richardson said, according to the video. “We’ve got hurricanes, we’ve got fires, we’ve got mudslides, we’ve got flash floods, we’ve got tornadoes, we’ve got droughts, we’ve got heat waves and now we’ve got volcanoes to worry about.”

Buck up, Dave. How hard can it be?

Then we had the Mexican yacht drifting into the Brooklyn Bridge. A car bomb at a fertility clinic. (He was opposed to “bringing people into the world against their will,” allegedly.) So many strange things happening, and it all feels very September 10, 2001 in the U.S. these days. Maybe it’s me. Happy week ahead, and the start of summer.

I was doing a practice lesson as part of this WSI class I don’t want to take but that’s a long story. The task was to teach the three kicks for treading water, and as I and my faux-students treaded away, I started telling a story that was so buried in my memory I don’t think I’d thought of it more than once since it happened. But unbidden, it surfaced and demanded to be told:

A bunch of us were at my friends’ cottage in the Upper Peninsula, and we were behaving like typical teenagers, which is to say, like idiots. We’d taken their boat out into the “big lake,” i.e., far from the channels of the Les Cheneaux Islands, well into Lake Huron, where the rollers are. We were doing something they called submarining, i.e. putting a bunch of people on the bow and gradually increasing the speed until the bow started going down, sending up an amusing spray and…I’m not sure how it was supposed to end, because we hit one of those rollers funny and a guy on the bow slipped off into the water.

This is northern Lake Huron, and as I recall it was June, late in the day, almost twilight. Lake Huron never really gets warm, and in June it is still quite cold. The kid was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and probably shoes of some sort. Did I mention we were all drinking? We were all drinking.

The guys who were leading this excursion, to their everlasting credit, did exactly what you should do in that situation. Neil immediately fixed on the guy in the water, pointing to his position. Paul scrambled for the swim ladder in the storage space. And Mark, at the wheel, put us in an immediate turn and roared back to the guy, expertly steering close without running him over, then decelerating, and we floated right up to him. Swim ladder was hooked on the side, and many arms reached down to help him climb back into the boat.

His first words, through his chattering teeth: “I’m sorry I dropped the schnapps.” Ha ha! Such a card! We’re having an adventure! We bundled him in what blankets were aboard, put him in the warmest spot (directly behind the front bench) and headed for home.

“And now we’ve been treading for about as long as that guy had to tread, in all his clothes, in very cold water,” I told my faux-students. “And that is why learning to tread water can save your life.” And honestly, it wasn’t until Wednesday evening, 50 years after the fact, that I realized how close we’d come to a fatal drowning incident, i.e., extremely. He could have easily gone straight to the bottom. I think your memory keeps that stuff buried for a good reason.

The three kicks for treading are scissors, breaststroke and rotary, i.e. eggbeater. Rotary is best. Also: Don’t do stupid boat tricks ever, but especially not there, especially not when the sun is going down. On the other hand, that kind of stupid fucking-around in boats often produces people who know how to drive boats. (Neil, Mark and Paul had done their share of stupid boat tricks before this.) My riding instructor grew up playing a game she and her siblings called Knock ‘Em Off, in which one person climbed on their horse, bareback and with no bridle, and the others tried to do anything short of touching the horse to get the mounted one to fall off. Flap a shirt in its face, run around yelling and waving arms, whatever. And that’s how my teacher learned to stick tight as a tick when a horse was misbehaving. I’m not sure that these stories have a point, but if they do, it’s that if you behave like this, don’t tell your mother.

You guys were discussing this piece in the comments, but if you don’t read the comments, Monica Hesse wrote an excellent column about the Diddy/Sean Combs trial, and here’s a gift link to read it.

Before I leave, three photos of our back yard.

March 26:

April 18:

This morning:

Happy weekend, all. Enjoy spring.

Today I came downstairs dressed for my Mothers Day brunch date with Kate, and told Alan it was such a thrill to go someplace where I wasn’t wearing workout clothes or a swimsuit. I had on the excellent red lipstick she gave me for Christmas, a black jumpsuit and full eye makeup. Such a crazy getup in this dressed-down world.

It was an excellent brunch — mushroom flatbread for me, fish and chips for her — and a spicy margarita. And it would have been perfect, but just before I left, I learned that the motherfucking president of this stupid fucking country plans to accept the gift of a Qatari 747, and has greased the skids with his stupid motherfucking toadies who have all signed off on it, and I’m sorry, but it pissed me off. Excuse my language.

I will say it now: I cannot wait for this asshole to die. His casket will float to the surface of whatever golf course his wife decides to bury him in, the ground will be so soaked with urine. And then we can drag it into the street to be set on fire before shooting what’s left of him into deepest space with a warning note in all the languages of the world and some digital space language we can invent, that whoever finds it should do the same, and then whatever asteroid it lands on should be targeted by a nuke and blasted into so many shards that not one shred of his DNA should remain.

Not that I am terribly angry. If I were, I’d suggest we do the same to his entire issue, including FSWOUS, Melania.

How in the world is this OK. HOW? The limits on presidential gifts aren’t that high. I know others have ignored them in the past — Ronald Reagan alone collected enough expensive horses to hold his own rodeo — but they never belonged to him, and when he died, the survivors went to retirement arrangements, as far as I can tell. But even a blooded horse is not a half-billion-dollar jet, no doubt equipped with state-of-the-art listening devices, all for a man who’s spent the last week gibbering nonsense about dolls and pencils as he gilds the White House like a fucking casino and you can tell I’m upset because I’m writing run-on sentences.

Grr.

How about some pretty-pretty pictures. I almost did a Saturday Morning Market, but I was too busy juggling eggs and bedding plants.

Now get to work, plants. It’s almost mojito season, and I’m looking forward to some shishito peppers on the grill:

Have a good week. Don’t fly in or out of Newark, or maybe anywhere, huh?

I told you I’m taking this swim-instructor course? So last night the woman teaching it called me over to explain butterfly stroke to a bunch of level 3 kids, which is to say, 8 years old and younger. I bent over at the waist, held my arms out and said, “Your hands should enter the water at 11 and 1,” among other things. And then I thought: Noooo, not an analog clock reference!

If you have young people in your life, be advised: They don’t understand analog clocks until they get older, some as old as fourth grade. I first learned this lifeguarding in 2023, when I was the only one who wore a watch and my colleagues, deprived of their phones, were always asking me the time. “Ten ’til one,” I might say, to a blank stare. “Twelve-fifty?” I’d say, and they’d nod. “Quarter after” meant nothing. You had to say “two fifteen.”

The wonders of technology. So I told the kids, instead, to start the stroke with their arms close to their head, like so. It’s humbling, when the world moves on without your permission.

Welcome to the end of the work week, a very long one for me. How to cheer myself up? Hate-reading another Tim Goeglein adjective party about a notable Lutheran church in Fort Wayne!

Zion Lutheran is indeed a lovely church. I don’t know what it did to deserve this, however:

As you drive down Creighton, Zion’s beautiful and lithe central spire rises like a phoenix as if welcoming an old friend.

I have found that steeple most inspiring on semi-foggy, semi-misty Hoosier Sunday mornings when the spire seems to lift itself heavenward as if peeking out of a cloudburst.

Zion’s sheer dimensions are awe-inspiring, and you can clearly see its unique cuneiform shape from the top of the Lincoln Tower when glancing southeast: 124 feet in length with its landmark transepts jutting out 80 feet.

Tim struggles with basic vocabulary. “Lithe,” for instance, means “slim and flexible,” which would seem to be the last thing you’d want in a church steeple. As for “slim,” aren’t all spires? Here’s the church in question:

Looks pretty standard churchy to me. But never mind that. The rest of that sentence is a disaster. For the thousandth time to the hundredth writer, a phoenix is a mythical bird that rises from the ashes of its own pyre (depending on the version of the myth) in rebirth, not to “welcome an old friend.” And again, flames are exactly what you don’t want near a historic church; ask the folks in Paris about that. Anyway, a building that’s been there for more than a century cannot be said to rise, even in a metaphorical sense. Let’s count the various mangled metaphors here, and on second thought, let’s not. As Alex said when I sent him this earlier this week, “Tim’s a late starter, having been a plagiarist until now.”

Indeed. Also, what is a cuneiform shape, in a building? One of you architects tell me.

We’ve had a lovely stretch of warm weather — high 70s on Thursday — and that has officially launched this tardy spring. I’m looking out the back windows at blooming trees and hostas in overdrive. The birds are already chattering when I leave for the pool or gym in the early dark. My plan to throttle down my paid work in favor of having more time to enjoy my dwindling number of springs and summers could be going better, but oh well.

Some miscellany ahead.

I don’t like to make too much out of women’s appearance, but mercy, has anyone seen Sarah Palin recently? What a tragedy, and I’m not talking about natural aging, but what plastic surgery has done to someone who was once strikingly pretty…

…and now looks like this:

She was a silly woman, wrong about everything, but she had the gift of a pleasant appearance. Looking at the 2024 version, I see evidence of chin, cheeks and lip work. The sunglasses are hiding her eyes, but likely there’d be something else going on there. And what on earth is a serious person (see above; she’s not) doing with a cartilage piercing that deep in their ear? You’re 61, not 17. Shudder. But this is what MAGA beauty standards can do, even to beauties, and say what you want about her, but Palin had that, at least. For a more standard-pretty girl like Kristi Noem, it just spells disaster:

Note: Eyebrows drawn with a Sharpie, those ridiculous false lashes (WHY?), and enough foundation to make her uneven complexion look even worse. Again, let’s compare and contrast. 2011:

And 2025:

Which one looks like the human being, which the fembot? Her eyes are disappearing into caves lined with kohl, and good lord, that hair. Nothing wrong with it, except that it’s the same hair every woman who passes through Trumpworld ends up with, the . High-maintenance bed hair, the tonsorial equivalent of a flag pin and MAGA hat.

OK, enough snarking for one day. The announced retirement of Dick Durbin prompted Neil Steinberg to unearth a few columns the senator appeared in. This passage, from 2006, was striking:

Had breakfast the other morning with Sen. Dick Durbin and Dan Seals, the young Democrat who just might unseat Mark Kirk in the 10th Congressional District next week. We were discussing that age-old question of whether the current election really is the most mean-spirited in history or only feels that way. Conversation naturally moved to George Allen, the Virginia senator who, having pretty much dug his own political grave with his mouth, is desperately lashing out at his opponent, Jim Webb, by pointing shrilly to salty lines culled from Webb’s war novels as if they were evidence of perversion. Durbin used a phrase I hadn’t heard before.

“George Allen is a spit tobacco senator,” he said. “One of four in the Senate.” Meaning that he dips and chews tobacco, a vile habit better left in the barn. But Allen doesn’t leave it in the barn. Durbin entertainingly described a flight down to Guantanamo he and Allen shared on a military airplane, and the cringing revulsion the clean-cut, dignified and ramrod straight military hosts extended toward Allen, a drooling nicotine addict dribbling brown saliva into a plastic cup. That’s a grosser image than anything in Webb’s novels.

Ewww. Happy weekend, all.

God, what a week. I guess we could sit down and talk about…so much. So, so much. But I’m tired, and today I’m taking the easy way out. I mean, it’s Friday. We’re still allowed to enjoy Fridays, right? So here, below, is the flash-fiction story I wrote in my friend Jimmy’s monthly Sunday-afternoon writing class a couple weeks back. If you remember the last one, here are the rules: You draw a face-down index card from each of four piles — a place, an animal, and I forget what the others are. Then you take about an hour to write anything you want incorporating the four words. Mine, this month, were Mumbai, monkey, yacht, zucchini. I’m not sure whether I like this one; I certainly took the easy way out with the ending, but the clock was ticking and I’d written myself into a corner.

What I find most interesting about writing fiction, more or less from scratch, is how it’s kinda like psychoanalysis, in that it often sinks a probe into your unconscious and pulls out something you might or might not want to see. Which is to say, I don’t think it’s an accident that I’d just concluded lifeguard training and my first image is a distressed swimmer.

So, no title, just stream-of-consciousness. Happy Friday, happy weekend and happy birthday, J.C. Burns, without whom this blog wouldn’t exist.

The helmsman spotted the swimmer first, far offshore and with no obvious signs of wreckage nearby. He sounded an alarm and immediately swung the wheel, putting the boat into a wide U-turn.

On the afterdeck, four women watched the champagne bucket rattle and slide a few inches before a crew member standing nearby stopped its progress and resettled it on a towel he produced from somewhere on his person. A graceful move to shame the smoothest magician, but at these prices what else do you expect.

“What’s going on?” the oldest one said, confused to be experiencing something she hadn’t pre-approved. “The captain assured me it was a straight shot to the next island.”

A mate, maybe the second or third or who knows, the twelfth, whatever, one of those guys with braid on his epaulets, materialized at her elbow, another magician move. It occurred to me I was drunk.

“We’ve spotted a man in distress,” the mate crooned in a British accent. “It’s maritime law and custom that we assist.”

“I suppose so,” the crone said. She supposed it was OK we wouldn’t let a man drown, as long as she wasn’t delayed arriving at whatever shopping destination we were visiting next. Crew members dropped a dinghy into the water and its little outboard coughed to life. We gathered at the rail to watch the rescue, the crewman throwing a line to the swimmer and pulling him aboard the dinghy.

Just a few minutes later, he was deposited on the afterdeck, shirtless in a pair of ratty-looking shorts. He shivered in wracking waves as more crew wrapped him in blankets and the first mate, who was the medical officer, tried to ask what had happened.

“Where did you come from?” the mate asked the man.

“M–m-m-m-m-m,” he said.

“Captain, I believe he’s trying to say ‘Mumbai,’” the old woman said, smiling. Her drinking companions, daughters or granddaughters – they had the same nose – snickered a little.

“Or maybe it’s ‘monkey,’” one offered, getting into the spirit. Ten minutes ago, they were four women on a chartered yacht. Now they had a story to tell back home, at the club.

The mate paid them no attention. He’d opened his bag and was taking out a blood pressure cuff. “Bring water,” he told another crew member. “And tell the galley we need a pot of hot tea, a.s.a.p.”

“What happened to your boat?” the mate asked as he wrapped the cuff around an arm as skinny as a zucchini. “Were you fishing? Did anyone else go in the water?” The swimmer still couldn’t answer, and seemed almost ready to fall asleep, his head lolling. How long had he been fighting to stay afloat?

I figured the best thing for me to do was keep my mouth shut, although I opened it wide enough to pour in a few swallows of Red Stripe. Unlimited alcohol was included in this charter and I meant to get my money’s worth.

The crew arrived with the water, and the mate gently propped the man up and got him to sip a little. The tea came in a Thermos, and he did the same. In a few more minutes, the man seemed to be more alert, and focused on the semicircle of people standing around him. What a sight we must have been, an assortment of clean-cut crew in crisp polo shirts, the mate in his gold braid, four women with matching noses – and it was only then it occurred to me they all had the same plastic surgeon, like the Jacksons – and me, with my three-day beard and flip-flops and Red Stripe. Hey, I’m no tech tycoon. I only had a share of this charter.

“M-m-m-my boat,” he finally was able to get out. “There was a whale. A few of them. Orcas!” He seemed to be coming back to himself.

“They…they…attacked my boat,” he gasped. “Capsized it. Like a toy in a bathtub.” We gaped in astonishment, and then, from below, came the sound of a muffled but significant collision. We all looked up, first at one another, and then, just off the starboard beam, at the black and white form surfacing, its blowhole exhaling a fine mist, and just before it dove again, it rolled to the side and showed the line of its mouth. I swear it was smiling.

Happy Liberation Day, fellow Americans. Elon Musk spent more than $20 million for his candidate to lose a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, and all he got was this stupid hat:

On, Wisconsin!

So that was nice to wake up to today, as was the lack of physical misery. I finally got around to getting my second shingles vaccine Monday, and it kicked my ass hard. (Keep in mind this description comes from a total wimp where physical discomfort is concerned, which doesn’t bode well for a cheery old age.) It was roughly 24 hours of low-fever no-fun, and as I lay in bed, whimpering, I wondered what it would be like if I was a Wisconsin voter in the election-security era Republicans want to return to — i.e. only in-person voting, only on Election Day. I might have chosen to sleep through the day. Or what if the weather had been like it is today, a driving, cold rain that’s threatening to flood roads and make even a quick scuttle to the garage miserable? Ditto. This is but one reason I’ve come to loathe Republicans.

But we have at least some limited good news to enjoy today – the narrowing of the margins in the Florida races, the blowout in Wisconsin. Maybe it’ll light a little flame in the national party. Maybe they’ll decide it’s better to fight than to roll over and play dead. We can hope, anyway.

So, Wednesday. The rain pushed me to look at Saturday’s march weather, and it’s not good, but I don’t want to be dissuaded. Somehow, walking in a cold rain means more than coming out on a perfect spring day. And as we say at this latitude, there’s no bad weather, just the wrong clothing.

As I’m still a little tapped, here’s some bloggage to consider:

Another banger by Roy, this one on JD Vance, as he considers what, exactly, about Vance attracted Trump’s eye:

I know Tubby likes to have stone bastards around him, but he also likes to keep people close that he can smack around. Fortunately for him, some of his freakshow inner circle can fulfill both functions — like I’ve said, this is the last respectable job any of them will ever have, and they know it. And he’s also got a couple of fuckfaces he can definitely treat like shit whenever he wants: one’s “Little Marco” Rubio and the other is Vance. Trump sends them out specifically to step on their own dicks, which they always do, and he not only gets the pure joy of that spectacle but also a chance to send the world a message: That he’s the kind of guy that can and will do that to people, so everybody better watch out. He can’t really do that to Miller or Musk, but he sure as hell can do it to these clowns whenever he likes.

Exactly right. The Greenland trip was a fiasco, concluding with VP ChubbyCheeks essentially threatening military action to a (for now) ally, while standing on its soil, the sort of diplomatic…you can’t even call it a “misstep” or “faux pas,” it’s such a dick move. Tubby isn’t going to live forever, and none of these guys have what it takes to keep the movement together. Vance will end up going back to blood, I suspect — drinking from a shoulder-supported jug with “XXX” on the front and yelling at his TV.

I can hear sounds from the back yard even through this downpour, and sure enough, it’s what I’m calling the motorcycle gang — the flocks of starlings, grackles and red-winged blackbirds that come through every spring. The latter are notorious for defending their nests, to the point that some local parks have to restrict movement near where they’ve chosen to do so. It’s pretty funny; every year some runner or child gets dive-bombed, leading to an outcry on social media, where stupid causes go to nest. I just watched one perambulate through the yard, making his shrieky call and flexing his epaulets with every one. Must be mating season.

OK, then. Enjoy the day, no matter what it’s doing outdoors, and remember: Wisconsin is lighting our path.

I’m thinking of going to a Hands Off demonstration this coming weekend — there are several in the metro area. But I need some ideas for a sign. Bottom line: I want it to be mean, because fuck those guys. So far I’ve got:

HEY ELON
YOUR SON
is NOT a
HUMAN SHIELD

Too obscure?

Or

ELON MUSK:
GENEROUS WITH HIS SEMEN
STINGY WITH YOUR MONEY

Too wordy.

Or

VANCE & TRUMP:
FATMAN & ROBIN

This only works if you know the Burt Ward Robin.

Something along those lines. If you have any brainstorms, drop ’em in the comments.

An amusing story in the WashPost today (gift link) about the disappearance of the Oval Office ivy.:

The ivy sat atop the fireplace mantel for most of the past 50 years, providing a backdrop for meetings with countless leaders and foreign dignitaries at the White House. It has filtered the air breathed by Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Whitney Houston.

Cuttings were given to exiting staff members, to propagate their own plants. “Countless” people have Oval Office ivy descendants in their own offices and homes now. A sharp-eyed trustee of his own ivy plant noticed something different on the mantel now:

In its place, conspicuously, are seven gleaming decorative objects, seemingly made of gold. A Maryland writer named Jamie Kirkpatrick noticed them earlier this month, around the time of the contentious Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, when the mantel was visible in nearly every photograph of Trump and Vice President JD Vance arguing with Zelensky.

What were those? Kirkpatrick wondered. Golf trophies?

No. And they’re not trash, but they are golden objects for a president who loves golden objects:

They’re artifacts from the White House’s own collection. The central gilded bronze basket, called a compotier, was made in France around 1815 and gifted to the Nixon administration in 1973. To its left and right are a pair of urns from the Monroe Plateau, a set of gilded tableware acquired by President James Monroe in 1817, shortly after the British burned the White House. The outer two sets are from a collection acquired during the Eisenhower administration that are usually displayed in the Vermeil Room, which is named after its contents. (Vermeil is gilded silver.)

Click through for some shots of the ivy before and after the gold-plated president sent it back to the greenhouse. God, what a jerk.

Another gift link, to a story in the NYT, about a woman who rode her “medical freedom” to an early grave:

In 2007, more than 1,440,000 Americans were diagnosed with cancer. Dawn Kali was one of them. Then in her mid-30s and raising three kids, Ms. Kali’s natural warmth and openness made her a popular waitress at the raw-food restaurant where she worked in San Francisco. When her doctor told her she had Stage 1 breast cancer, the fact that survival rates for her cancer type were in excess of 90 percent (and rising) did little to soften the emotional blow. Ms. Kali knew what cancer entailed: a barrage of medical treatments that seemed to sap people of their quality of life. And then they’d die anyway. “That’s not going to be me,” she swore.

Nope! Instead, Kali fell in with a quack:

She discovered “The pH Miracle,” a 2002 book written by a charming self-proclaimed naturopath named Robert Oldham Young. Mr. Young asserted that deacidifying the body through diet, exercise and his pH Miracle-branded pills and creams could cure virtually any sickness. Cancer, Mr. Young taught, was merely a symptom of an acidic internal environment. His credibility was bolstered by his appearances on national talk shows that featured him as a diet guru.

Ms. Kali adopted Young’s “alkalarian” program: an all-liquid, low-acid diet of vegetable smoothies supplemented by Mr. Young’s proprietary pHour Salts, purified water drops and green powders. Soon she was drinking a gallon of juice each day. Now, she controlled her treatment. The prescribed combination of a strict diet, meditation and exercise left her feeling empowered.

It also left her cancer free to spread. You can guess how her story ends. I will say that Kali did finally wise up, but too late. The story is about much more than Dawn Kali, and I’ll bet you can guess whose name pops up.

OK, then. A nice weekend. Kate closed on her house! She moves soon.

We celebrated with champagne, and took some of it at the kitschy basement bar, likely to be a rehearsal space:

I did my friend Jimmy’s fun-fiction class again. The class is in Hamtramck. Followed this deep thinker through a few stop signs:

Sigh. As my friend Deb texted me last week, just once I want to wake up, look at my phone and not say, “Jesus Fucking Christ.” Let’s all have a good week, eh?

I’m sorry, I can’t stop laughing at this:

President Trump is demanding that Colorado take down its “purposefully distorted” painting of him hanging in the State Capitol.

“Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol put up by the Governor, along with all other Presidents, was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before,” Trump said in a post Sunday on Truth Social. “The artist also did President Obama, and he looks wonderful, but the one [of] me is truly the worst. She must have lost her talent as she got older.”

…“I am speaking …to the Radical Left Governor, Jared Polis, who is extremely weak on Crime, in particular with respect to Tren de Aragua, which practically took over Aurora (Don’t worry, we saved it!), to take it down,” Trump said. “Jared should be ashamed of himself.”

The portrait:

Now this is Monday content I can get behind. The president, who considers himself a next-level handsome specimen of mature masculinity, with a year-round tan due to his many masculine outdoor pursuits, and he leans forward like he does because he’s making a masculine point, dammit, not because he wears lifts in his shoes — doesn’t like his portrait, which makes him look like a chubby-cheeked demon. And Barack Obama looks wonderful! HOW DARE THEY?

A few more fat portraits, a few more Tesla demonstrations, and we might have the beginnings of a foothold. As Democrats, with very few exceptions, are proving themselves worthless in this struggle, then we’ll just have to keep on strugglin’ on our own.

A busy weekend. The Derringers took a proactive stance toward dealing with our anger by? Taking a gun class, the one Michigan requires before you can get your CPL, or concealed pistol license. I have no intention of packing, I hasten to add. But it was interesting to see the law detailed (such as it was, kinda — more on that in a couple sentences). And the course included an hour of range time, so I got to see what all the excitement is about, and honestly, I don’t get it. The vibe on pistol ranges is so unpleasant to me, the bro-y bullshit of it all. The guy shooting next to me was wearing earmuffs emblazoned FJB, and in case you were too stupid to get it, LET’S GO BRANDON as well. For a rank novice, I shot pretty well.

The teacher was a piece of work. He chuckled through the entire 8-hour class, and swore like the Marine he once was. Having worked in newsrooms, nothing about the language offended me, and maybe when you’re teaching in a super-macho gun store, you think no one will be bothered by the ass-rape jokes you make after every! Single! Mention! of Jail! But I know a few gay people who are arming themselves for the unpleasantness they have every reason to believe is coming, and some of them certainly would be. But we graduated, and got our certificates, and now I have to consider whether it’s worth $100 to be legal, so to speak. I just don’t see the point. I don’t live in the world gun-toters do, with their constant vigilance against the violence they are sure is stalking them, personally, every minute of the day.

I used to work with a man — Leo Morris, for those of you who remember him — whose brother, a Texas resident, was radicalized by the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre of 1991. He started packing, and swiftly got to the point he “felt naked” without his holster and sidearm. He was always trying to get Leo to do the same, taking him shooting when they got together, etc. I lost touch with Leo in his later years, but a few things he wrote made me think that maybe his brother’s paranoia had taken hold in Leo. (He began using the phrase “constitutional carry,” for instance.) But one thing gun school did for me is make me realize: There is virtually nothing I could shoot someone over. A physical attack with serious intent to kill or maim me or my family is the only thing I can think of, and that would require so much advance planning — I’d have to have the gun, the gun would have to be loaded, I’d have to be able to get to it, etc. — that it strikes me as intensely impractical. So I guess I’ll just have to trust that a lifetime of prudent behavior will save me from losing my life to gun violence, as it does millions and millions of Americans.

The guy teaching the class, the chuckling Leatherneck, sketched out so many scenarios where violence is right there waiting to strike you down that I had to think: What a way to live. He was carrying, I am not kidding, THREE weapons — two on each hip and one down the back of his pants. Talk about paranoia. And he was responsible, if you take him at his word. He doesn’t carry when he’s going to be drinking, he said. He practices often. And so on. But if you’re armed, then it almost requires you to be hyper-vigilant at all times, and that? Is exhausting. I have enough shit to worry about.

I keep thinking about the FJB-earmuffs guy. Alan, who shoots skeet, reported that there was a chronic ammunition shortage during the Obama administration, due to persistent rumors that the president was coming for the guns AND the ammo. He did neither, but we’re not talking about the smartest, savviest, best-informed people, either. And neither did Biden, but oh my those Macomb County Republicans aren’t going to let that stop them from putting him on their stupid gun earmuffs. The way people talk on social media when, for instance, someone’s TV gets stolen or car is broken into, makes me think they…don’t think. You can’t shoot someone over a TV, or your car stereo, or any other property crime. People imagine they’d be able to drop to the floor, find a cover position, calmly draw their weapon and return fire with deadly accuracy? In a movie theater. In a grocery store. In any mass-panic situation. You are not John Wick, and John Wick doesn’t exist. And even if you did act within the law — the guy was coming through your window, knife in his teeth, etc. — imagine the aftermath. The cops. The cleanup. Having to walk past the spot where you shot and killed a man, every day. You’d have to move! I would, anyway. Totally not worth it to me. I’d just run out the back door.

OK, I’ve gone on enough, and it’s time to finish editing this video. The week ahead promises temperatures in the 40s, ugh. Might as well do some spring cleaning and file the taxes. Later.