We were headed to Columbus for Nall Family Christmas, driving through rural Ohio, when I missed an exit. It was one of those where the next exit is something like 15 miles down the road, so I said screw it and let Siri or whoever recalculate the route. It wouldn’t have paid to double back.

The new route took us through the back roads of western Ohio. It’s been a while since I did that; probably since we lived in Fort Wayne, and I would travel U.S. 33 from northeast Indiana to Columbus, through all the small towns along the way — Neptune, Willshire, Rockford, et al. It’s all four-lane now, but wasn’t back then; I knew every place it was safe to pass, when it paid to wait until the next four-lane stretch. One time I raced a particularly jerkoffish trucker through Willshire, him on the main road, me on a residential side street that ran parallel. And beat him back to the main drag! Because there’s nothing worse than sucking semi tail pipe if you don’t have to.

God, that drive sucked so bad. What I remember about the course of 20 years, though, was how the little farm towns never improved. They got shabbier by the year, the signs to the food co-op fading, the dairy freezes marking time with their seasonal openings and closings. About the only institutions that seemed to have staying power were the bars, but even they didn’t age well.

Year after year, the young people decamped for Columbus or Toledo or Fort Wayne. Because that’s where the jobs are. Not in…Pleasant Mills, Ind.

I guess this is the America that some think can be made Great again — the farms rescued from corporate owners and restored to ma and pa; the giant dairy processor that’s driving prices into the basement dematerialized somehow. And who knows what else. The kids come home and sell farm implements instead of motorcycles downstate? Hard to say. It was depressing.

I’m a city person, and I can’t ever see not being one. And now — puts finger to earpiece — I hear we’ve taken out a major Iranian military leader, just in time for the 2020 campaign! Yay! A distracting war!!!

An airstrike near the Baghdad airport has killed Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani and another senior Iranian-linked figure in Baghdad, Iraqi state television reported Thursday.

No one immediately asserted responsibility for the strike, which Iraqi television said also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iraqi militia commander. But the death of Iran’s most revered military leader appeared likely to send tensions soaring between the United States and Iran.

Also, this:

A book that pushes the conspiracy theory Qanon climbed within the top 75 of all books sold on Amazon in recent days, pushed by Amazon’s algorithmically generated recommendations page.

“QAnon: An Invitation to the Great Awakening,” which has no stated author, ranked at No. 56 at press time, was featured in the algorithmically generated “Hot new releases” section on Amazon’s books landing page. The book claims without evidence a variety of outlandish claims including that prominent Democrats murder and eat children and that the U.S. government created both AIDS and the movie Monsters Inc.

God, this stupid country.

Well, here it is, January 2, and the new year already is off to a pretty bad start. Full speed ahead!

Some years back, I wrote a column for Grosse Pointe Today about a developing murder case here in town. The basics: A beloved G.P. woman was found dead, strangled, in the back seat of her Mercedes SUV, which had been dumped in an alley on the east side of Detroit.

Now. Those of you who are journalists, or even fond of crime fiction, already suspect who the killer was. My friend Dustin was my student at the time, contributing to GPToday, and it was him that I contacted to write up a few paragraphs for the site, because I was doing something else and he had already been a staffer for a daily newspaper for some time. He said, “I’m putting on my coat, but you know who likely did this, right? Her husband.”

I agreed wholeheartedly. It looked like a botched body dump that was supposed to look like a carjacking, if you can ignore two big problems: Carjackers use a weapon or maybe simple brute force to get you out of your car. Which they then drive away, that being the point of the carjacking. It takes long long minutes to strangle a healthy person to death, at least three or even longer if you want to be sure. That’s a long goddamn time to spend killing someone whose Mercedes you’re not going to take.

But this being Grosse Pointe, with its pathological fear of Detroit, the hysteria began on Facebook almost immediately.

When are these ANIMALS going to be kept OUT of our communities was only the least of it. It started nuts and built over the course of two days and was well into a third, posts with hundreds of comments about the need for gates, for structural impediments to streets, for more police and, of course, for everybody to carry at least one gun. You know the drill. The crime was discovered on a Wednesday and the hysteria built until Friday, when in the late afternoon the police announced that the victim’s husband was a person of interest in the crime.

The sound of a social-media thread of morons ceasing to talk should make a sound. Like when tires screech into a sliding stop, or a whole flock of quarreling starlings suddenly goes silent.

Me, I wrote a column. I compared the events of the previous few days to “The Enormous Radio,” John Cheever’s fantastic short story which you should read if you haven’t already. (You can get the gist from Wikipedia.) It’s about a woman who discovers her living-room radio is picking up conversations from the other apartments in her building. Within a few days, she learns terrible things about her neighbors and the sorts of things they say in the privacy of their own living rooms.

I concentrated on just this case, but it applies to pretty much everything now. Facebook is just another enormous radio, revealing the bigotries and ignorance of people we thought we knew. I just scrolled through the comments on the Deadline Detroit Facebook page and reflected, for the millionth time, that if regular people got the sort of hate mail journalists get almost every day, most people would walk around in a state of near-nervous collapse, every single day.

No, I don’t have to read it all. But I need to at least keep up with it as part of my job. So I do.

All of which brings me to this story, from Axios, not a favorite news source but whatever, analyzing the “insane” news cycles of 2019. As per Axios, it’s not much of a story, and it contains bullet points for no apparent reason other than they like bullet points, but this right here seemed to be the heart of it:

Why it matters: The chart, based on search trends compiled by Google News Lab, highlights how short the public’s attention span was as the media darted from one big thing to another.

In the era of President Trump and social media, surges of Google interest in the biggest events of the year only lasted about a week before the public’s attention was drawn elsewhere.

Some issues, such as the 2020 election and the Mexico-U.S. border, drew more steady attention — but fewer of the dramatic spikes of interest that other topics had.

There’s a chart in the story that’s pretty interesting, too, tracking outrage after outrage through the year.

I’m considering my one-word new year’s resolution in these final days, and considering Disengage. For a journalist, it feels like a betrayal. You have to stay engaged! You have to keep up! But I am honestly exhausted with keeping up. I don’t want to know anything about Baby Yoda. I don’t subscribe to Disney+, I left all things Star Wars behind in, what? Nineteen-eighty-something? Is there a filter I can install, an app of some sort, that will tell me what I want to know, and what I need to know, and maybe surprise me with some things I didn’t know I wanted to know but am now glad I know, without including Baby Yoda? And all the social-media bullshit that goes with it?

I don’t think there is. If so, I would have known about it by now. Because you know, I keep up. I would never have turned off the enormous radio.

I hope your Christmas was everything you asked for. We had a nice time. Watched some movies, opened lots of presents, ate our weight in carbs. I got two cookbooks — Alison Roman’s “Nothing Fancy,” and Mark Bittman’s “Dinner for Everyone.” Both look wonderful. I find myself drooling over the photos of garlicky greens. I hope that means I’m on the road back to dietary temperance.

However, for now, it’s time to walk Wendy. A great weekend to all.

One of my birthday gifts was a mandoline slicer, so I can make perfect Potatoes Anna and apple tarts and the like. I christened mine in the traditional way — with blood. I was slicing peppers for some grilled sausages when I gouged a chunk out of my thumb Friday evening.

I’m fine now. It stings a little to hit the space bar, but at least I got the bleeding stopped. Direct pressure isn’t as effective on a flesh gouge as it would be on a simple slice. I feared I wouldn’t be able to swim tomorrow, as the mere touch of water on it had me howling yesterday, but thanks to the magic of time and healing, I could actually wash it with soap and water today. Yay, cellular repair.

It was that kind of a weekend. The painting continued, and is done now — Alan just stepped out to buy window blinds and switch plates. The room looks a million times better, and when we finally get the tree up, it’ll look a million times better, too. I even got some Black Friday weekend shopping done, online and otherwise.

We had a nice Thanksgiving. I did, anyway; Alan didn’t even get any turkey, as his part of the newsroom order-in came with “a piece of shitty dried-out pork loin,” he said. “They’d already run out of turkey.” Poor guy. Well, Christmas is coming. I got to experience my friend’s family, who are all Trumpers, including one gay man. I mainly stayed out of the discussion, but eavesdropped from the next room. Their calculus was simple: Is my life OK? Yes? Then the president must be doing a good job. Amazing. I wish it could be that simple for me. It must be like…like being a dog, maybe. Am I comfortable? Is this a good time to nap? Do I want to scratch behind my ear? Then I will do so!

Oh well. I have a new family room to wipe the paint drips from and return to functional use. Maybe I’ll rearrange the furniture, just to get that new-house feeling again.

You can see I’m running out of anything to say. On to the bloggage.

Marijuana became fully legal for adults in Michigan today. First buyers, a fair number of Hoosiers and Buckeyes. Sorry you guys can’t be as cool as us.

What is a failson? Let the Daily Beast explain:

He is an upper- (or upper-middle) class incompetent who is protected by familial wealth from the consequences of his actions.

… One is not born a failson. Nor does one simply inherit the status of failson. No—failson status is earned through a display of equal parts incompetence, stupidity, and arrogance. And until his book, no person in America—or maybe even the world, so bursting at the seams with louche heirs and dissolute royals with no throne to sit their pampered arses on—illustrated all the facets of a failson better than (Donald Trump) Junior.

A fun read.

So, let’s take on the full week ahead with optimism and gratitude. And all 10 fingers.

I had the house looking pretty damn good, although we’re not hosting Thanksgiving this year; Kate is staying in California until Christmas and Alan has to work, so I’m going stag (doe?) to a friend’s. I dusted, vacuumed, straightened and plumped all the pillows, so of course today Alan said it was a good day to start painting the family room and now that is what he is doing.

Sigh.

As for me, I spoke to Kate earlier. She locked her bike somewhere on Venice Boulevard yesterday and came out to find it missing both wheels. They’re special sizes, so it may well be easier for her to just get a new bike than try to track down replacements. That someone or many someones likely saw this happening in broad daylight and did nothing to stop it only underlines the essential pitilessness of the adult world for this new member of it.

Ah well. In another month she’ll be home, then probably staying home until mid-February, when the album she recorded for her senior thesis is released, and the band starts on first a U.S. tour (including SXSW!) and later, on to Europe. I keep pointing out she’s doing just fine and not to get so stressed, but then, my bike wasn’t stripped of its wheels, either.

A peaceful weekend, other than the cleaning. Ran into a good friend at the Eastern Market, and we went for coffee. He told me about the book he’s writing. It’s gonna be great, especially if he takes all my editing suggestions. Seriously, he’s a great writer and has a deep understanding of his subject (Detroit) and knows it better than almost anyone. I can’t wait to read it. And he inspired me to get back to work on something I’m writing. Not a book, but a longer essay/column I’ve been picking at for a while. Stay tuned.

Man, night comes on quickly these days, and we haven’t even seen the worst of it yet. Every so often I daydream about spending some unspecified future winter in Reykjavik, just renting an apartment from Halloween through the end of February and settling in for the hygge. I think I could do it, once I got used to it: Swim in the morning, soak in the hot tub, then tank up on coffee and wait for a couple hours of dim sunlight before it sinks again and the long night commences. There would be sandwiches. There would be pickles. There would be lots of reading and DuoLingo and meandering writing like this. The aurora borealis overhead so often it becomes routine. I think it’d be pretty great.

But this is just fantasy. Because of course we live in a hellscape, where the president intercedes to pardon/restore the rank of a war criminal. Where so-called moderate Republicans are silenced in the GOP of m-f’ing Wyoming, for god’s sake. Where a former Fox News exec tries to drum up followers for his allegedly “center-right” political news aggregator by employing Macedonian teenagers to whip up the proles and other media illiterates, on both sides (for once!).

Want something beautiful to read instead? It’s 7,000 words, so it’ll take a while. It took me one bus ride home, last Friday, but it stayed with me all weekend: “The Jungle Prince of Delhi,” by Ellen Barry in the NYT. I hope to one day write a sentence like this:

The door swung open, and before me stood a man in tiger-print pajamas.

Until then, I write here. Ah well. Have a great week ahead, all.

It’s going on 8 p.m. as I write this, and the hearings are still going strong in Washington. Nunes is still a barking twit. It seems important to tell you this.

And I’m sorry, but even if you believe all the dire stories about a tuned-out public and the needle not moving at all, blah blah blah, I can’t really believe this isn’t making a difference. I mean, even laying aside my personal beliefs in this case, I see one Trumper after another tripping over his own feet. Surely this isn’t playing well in the suburbs. Surely this is making a difference with people who have two or more brain cells to rub together. I have to have more faith in my countrymen, because otherwise I will have to sell everything I own and wander the world for the rest of my life, never returning to this brain-damaged country.

Wednesdays seem to come earlier in the week than ever, which may be a function of the quickening pace of the end of the year, or just my own approaching end of the road. When you’re 12, a week lasts five years. Then you have kids and they grow up in 20 minutes.

What’s going on in your world this week? Returning to the above mega-topic, i.e., the Disgrace of This Administration, I see DUI Steph stepped in it again, claiming the outgoing Obama staffers seeded the White House with nastygrams and “Obama books.” A stupid lie that was more or less immediately debunked.

To give the girl credit, though: She’s probably never seen a book in her life, and just assumed that the ones left behind must have been “Obama books,” whatever that is.

Meanwhile, I got a message from a distant acquaintance, informing me that the “classical school” movement has set up shop in my old Indiana neighborhood, and one of its administrators, also an editor for the Federalist, is living on my very own ex-street. Here’s one of her recent columns, Stop Turning Your Yard Into a Hellscape for Halloween:

Within a few blocks of my house are yards full of severed heads, decomposing corpses, positively demonic-looking witches, goblins, and ghouls, and moldy skeletons coming out of the ground (some even shake!).

One entire nearby neighborhood decorated all of its streetlights with hanging severed heads that have blood running out of the eyes. Some people have fog machines and motion detectors that emit noises from Hell every time a mom walks by with her preschooler and baby, or kids of all ages go past on their way to school.

What is wrong with these people?

This upsets her children, she writes: “Only fools make light of evil. Hell isn’t a joke.” OK, fine. I wonder what her position might be on my personal pet peeve from when I had a young child: The anti-abortion protesters who would show up on “procedure day” at the local clinic in Fort Wayne, which happened to be across the street from the library. We spent a lot of time at the library in those days, and I believe procedure day was also Storytime Day, so I had to carry a 3- or 4-year-old past their poster-size blowups of fetal body parts. After the first time, I learned how to park to avoid most of it, but sometimes it was unavoidable. My guess is, that would be A Difficult Truth We Must Not Shrink From, or some such.

Well, if I know my old neighborhood — and I may not, anymore — she’s an anomaly.

OK, time to hit the showers and get ready for the day. Gordon Sondland, up next.

And so it begins: I used to think of Halloween as the beginning of the year-end gallop, but since I no longer have a small child to get costumed, the race now starts with The Birthdays, three in nine days.

Alan’s and Kate’s was Saturday. Of course, Kate is in California, but we partied enough for both of them. Hence today’s mostly photo post. Not that I am hungover, just a little tired.

The evening started with a long, multi-course dinner at a Hot New Place called Magnet. (It’s a former radiator repair shop.)

This was only the first course, and yes, that’s hummus. The trick of this restaurant is that everything is cooked or baked over or with the help of a wood fire. I don’t have any more dinner pix because the food was so good I think I fell into a swoon and became unable to operate my camera. You can check out their Instagram, if you like. This was my cocktail choice, and it was outstanding:

View this post on Instagram

Scandinavia meets Middle East meets Midwest. ⁣ ⁣ Aquavit + Labneh + Elderflower + More⁣ ⁣ 🧲

A post shared by Magnet (@magnet_detroit) on Nov 2, 2019 at 11:31am PDT

After about a million calories and seven thousand courses, we retired to our friends’ house for birthday cake, so I sent this one to Kate, who was at Lake Mead with some friends for her own celebration:

She replied with a pic of her own that indicated the sun had set on Lake Mead and the party moved to Vegas:

She certainly didn’t look dressed for hiking, anyway.

Then we had one more round of drinks, Hank Pierce’s Brake Bumpers, because we are all “Succession” fans:

Then we pawed through Lynn’s grandma’s collection of vintage matchbooks:

This one is my favorite:

Dunno why. It just reminds me of a round of martinis after a OABI cruise. (That’s “once around Belle Isle” for you non-Detroiters.)

And then we went home. I was in bed by 10:30, and we all agreed Magnet is our new favorite restaurant in the whole world.

Some of you have asked how Kate is doing in California. Very well, thanks. Her internship period has passed at the studio and she’s now an production assistant (fewer sushi runs, more handling microphones), with the caveat that she is only scheduled on a gig basis, which means she’s doing the Gen Z Hustle, i.e, trying to pick up cash here and there. She just interviewed to be a personal assistant, the new version of the mail room, I guess. But she’s on her way, although still parentally subsidized.

With that, I will start making mashed potatoes for our own, far more prosaic dinner tonight. To discuss? Maybe the president’s are-they-or-aren’t-they chest pains. I’ll be back in a couple days.

Guys, I think we’d have been better off explaining climate change, early on, as something other than simply “global warming.” Most people hate winter; you say it’ll be shorter, and they shrug. Big deal, I planned to move to Kentucky after I retired, anyway, etc.

If, on the other hand, we’d have laid out more details: Polar vortices, blistering summers, super-hurricanes, apocalyptic wildfires, and so on, maybe we’d not be in the fix we are now. Oh well, too late now.

I write this looking out my bedroom window. We’re supposed to get 3-5 inches of snow today, at a time when lots of trees are still retaining leaves, most of those that have fallen have still not been picked up from the curb, and oh my it will all be a melty freezey mess. The upside? I’m working from home today. So there’s a balance.

An appropriately emotioned Veterans Day to you all. (It feels dumb saying “happy,” which I suppose only people who get the day off can claim.) Hope you all had a good weekend. Mine was…adequate. We watched “Midsommar” on the iTunes device, and it was that rarity of rarities — a horror movie I enjoyed, if enjoyed is quite the right word. It was flawed, but every flaw was a defensible choice, and parts of it were simply spectacular.

More Morocco? I thought you’d never ask! A short scooter video that I hope doesn’t clog the download time.

Scooters at night.

This was our first night in Marrakech. I was trying to capture the insanity of these scooters buzzing through the tight streets of the medina, but didn’t quite get there. But it is a good look at the unfashionable parts of the medina at pedestrian rush hour, and you get a sense of street life. I did notice, when we were there, how much same-sex affection you see on the street, but that it doesn’t necessarily feel…sexual. Women walk arm-in-arm, men with arms slung casually over one another’s shoulders. (Did I already talk about this? This feels like deja vu, but I’m too lazy to check.) Morocco was a big gay destination in the old days, but I don’t think people there are any gayer than they are anywhere else. I didn’t get a this-is-my-lover feeling from any of these couples; it was just different than here, where men have that weird urinal-choice etiquette.

Now that it’s fading into the past, I think about the things I saw that I was either too slow or too polite to get a picture of: The strolling couples, for one, but also the four or five Berber men I saw squatting around a big wok-like pot at lunch hour in the markets, scooping out their lunch (right hand only!) bite by bite. A kid racing toward me on a bicycle in Essaouira, his basket stocked with two sizable swordfish, swords sticking out one side of the basket and tails out the other; I jumped out of his way for fear of incurring a wound I’d have a hard time explaining at a clinic.

Such a magical place.

OK, now it’s snow and work and more snow, and I must get to it. Happy Monday.

I set a goal to clean the entire house yesterday and pretty much accomplished it, but it sapped my energy at blogging time and so, no Sunday-night blog.

But fearing that interest in the last thread may be flagging, here’s a new one. Some things to consider:

E. Jean Carroll is suing the president. For defamation.

Can you imagine, in some not-so-distant past, hearing that the First Lady of the United States would be visiting your child’s school, and that announcement causing a flipout/meltdown? Of course, this is no ordinary FLOTUS, either.

One more Morocco picture. We were walking around the port in Essaouira, I was trying to frame this gull, and said, “Hey, gull, look over here,” and it did. Just then, one of its colleagues flew through the frame as the shutter fell. Like I said: Hard to take a bad picture over there.

If you all will indulge me a little longer, another photo post from Morocco. Today’s subject: Cats.

Feral cats are common in Morocco, and elsewhere; I recommend a charming documentary about the cats of Istanbul, called “Kedi.” (Kitty, get it?) It’s not exactly the same in the Moroccan cities we visited, but similar — cats are everywhere, entirely wild, not entirely pleasant to consider what their lives are like.

They’re skinny, dirty, some with mange or eye problems. No one pets them, although some soft-hearted souls might feed them from time to time. One rubbed on my shins at a shop, but most kept their distance. We saw more in Fez than in Marrakesh (I theorize most had been run over by scooters). The Essaouira cats proliferated by the dock and port, where they competed with the gulls for fish guts.

If you’re a cat lover, you’ll get lots of pictures. But don’t try to touch them; they’re not that kind of cat.

But like cats everywhere, they were excellent photo subjects:

They were silhouetted in every alley in the medina, it seemed:

I saw this one early, on the way back from the patisserie. He was breakfasting on a fish head:

Lots and lots of kittens:

They walk in and out of the businesses, most of which are open-air in some way or another. So you’d turn around and see something like this:

I really was hoping you’d order the shrimp, lady. We were sitting on the roof level of a cafe, and he was a little higher. He watched us for a while, then disappeared.

At our last place, in Essaouira, our host told us to close the door to the riad balcony at night, because otherwise they’d come into the apartment. He told a story about a woman who was staying there alone, and called in a panic her first night. “Someone’s trying to get in the door,” she whispered, frantically, and he ran over, only to find the front door locked. He let himself in and flew up the stairs, where she pointed to the balcony door: “No, there!” It was a cat.

Sure enough, that night, the balcony door rattled with something that sounded exactly like a paw, knocking, along with the usual plaintive meowing. No dice, kitty, but I fed fish leavings to a couple in the port the next day.

Maybe it was this one; this was in the alley outside our riad:

This place is so picturesque it’s ridic. I’m not even a very good photographer, either. It’s just hard to take a bad picture in Morocco.

And what happened on this side of the Atlantic? Just the president’s allies attacking a Purple Heart recipient because he speaks a second language. Just another day in the greatest and richest country on earth.

Here’s to Wednesday.

I’ll be doing some miscellaneous mop-up posts from Morocco, although I am now back in the land of plenty — plenty of water, of water pressure, of a cloud cover so dense you doubt the sun exists at all, and, as Donald Trump is still president, of maddening bullshit.

Anyway.

We learned that when you rent a room in a riad, which is any building structured around an open courtyard, you are first shown to your room, and then to the roof. The roof is one of the attractions of riad life. Here I am enjoying Marrakesh roof life one morning:

(Pardon the lack of a pedicure. After Labor Day, I lose my patience for nail polish.)

Here’s the reverse angle, where I was sitting:

Nice place to lounge, eh? That low wall in front of my feet is the one that surrounds the open-air courtyard, so no one falls in and goes splat. The Marrakesh riad took the extra step of putting an awning over the courtyard, although it rains very little there. But the courtyard has wooden furniture, and I expect birds could be a problem. The view looking down into the interior:

Very nice. A couple of ficus-type trees next to a water feature, quite soothing. I’ll say this for riad life; you tend to stagger home after a day or even an hour of battling Marrakesh medina street life — the noise, the hustlers, and of course the goddamn scooters — step through the door and really feel like you left it behind. It’s nice, a design that makes a lot of sense.

Anyway, back to the roof. The French couple whose stay overlapped with ours took their breakfast up there, probably so they could smoke afterward. In the mornings, it’s quite pleasant at this table:

Then you step to the edge and get a sense of what’s below:

A rare quiet moment, there — most of the shops haven’t opened yet. This was a Saturday, so the kids weren’t in school. Note mama or grandma on her scooter. We stayed in a very un-touristy part of the medina; not so many Westerners along our close-by streets. You can see the building across is another riad, and if we lift our gaze a bit, you can see what looks like another well-appointed rooftop a block or two away; if you look closely, you can see a pigeon coop there, too. (P.S. Pigeons are for eatin’ in Morocco, but I didn’t have one.)

Looking left from where I was standing:

And no, I have no idea how you determine a property line in any of this chaos. But fortunately, it’s not my problem. But this is where we ate kebab sandwiches a couple nights instead of enduring the grueling Jemaa al-Fna, and listened to the final call to prayer. We bought them from a seller about a block down; he didn’t speak English, but fortunately at least one or two other customers knew enough to help us order. Yes, onions, yes, “spice,” yes very delicious. The French pastries we bought for dessert were easier — just point and hold up fingers for how many.

And now, yes, we are back. The laundry is done, the fridge is mostly restocked, and I’m going out for a new electric toothbrush to replace the one that died the day before we left. What crazy shit will happen in the week ahead? God only knows.