I know some people, maybe some of you, were able to relax at 12:01 p.m. January 20. It was a trendlet on Twitter to say you’d had the best sleep in four years, that night and thereafter. It didn’t happen that quickly for me. But I cracked my third novel in a month and realized, Holy shit, I have an attention span for this stuff again.

It’s been a minute. It’s been a lot of minutes. For a long time — four years, to be exact — it was hard to concentrate on anything other than the brewing shitshow in Washington. I had trouble sleeping. I still have trouble sleeping, but not as much. I’ve decided to go limp on my insomnia. No more melatonin, no more cannabis; I just accept that sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and don’t get back to sleep for an hour or two, and that’s OK, because the same world that gives us insomnia also gives us black coffee, which is delicious. Little by little, it’s getting better.

The great unclenching, like most transitions, didn’t happen all at once. But the world feels a little less clenchy at the moment.

Honestly, stuff like this helps:

We’re having a challenging discussion of late about our responsibility in how we cover the candidacy of Republican Josh Mandel for the U.S. Senate in 2022.

This is from the Cleveland.com (RIP, Cleveland Plain Dealer) executive editor, and Josh Mandel is the former state treasurer. He is, shall we say, cut from the Trumpian cloth. Chris Quinn goes on:

Usually with political campaigns, we cover where the candidates stand on various issues and report what they say. They lay out how they would improve the lives of constituents and attack their opponents’ failings. It’s pretty straightforward.

The issue is that Mandel has a history of not telling the truth when he campaigns – he was our PolitiFact Ohio “Pants on Fire” champion during his first run for Senate because of the whoppers he told. More recently, he is given to irresponsible and potentially dangerous statements on social media. He’s proven himself to be a candidate who will say just about anything if it means getting his name in the news. We have not dealt with a candidate like this on the state level previously.

What an excellent question for a journalist to ask. You can click through and read the whole thing — it’s not long — but here’s the tl;dr:

As we get closer to election time, what Mandel says might be news, and I don’t believe the right approach to covering dangerous statements by candidates is the traditional “he said-she said.”

A round of applause for Editor Quinn! It took four years of hell, but we’re starting to get it.

I trust everyone’s weekend was good? Mine was fine, although I spent a chunk of it working, which chaps my ass. But I got a good book from the library (“The Sympathizer,” Viet Thanh Nguyen) and, well, see above. Also, saw our pot of chives stirring to life, so even though it’s still fucking cold, it’s less fucking cold, and that’s good.

Bloggage: Like my insomnia, it’s going to take a while to rinse these tinpot con men out of the system, because there’s a sucker born every minute, and sometimes they converge in a state legislature:

In early October, Kris Kobach, Kansas’ former Secretary of State, and Daniel Drake, a Wichita-based venture capitalist-turned-CEO, made a sales pitch to Kansas legislators. The duo wheeled in what looked to lawmakers like a “refrigerator” — a shiny metal box Drake called a “revolutionary” device that would “kill COVID” and bring “several hundred jobs back to Wichita.”

“This stuff is very cutting-edge,” Kobach said. The local development of such exciting technology was why, he told lawmakers, he wanted Kansas to get the “first bite at the apple.”

During their pitch, Drake explained that his company, MoJack Distributors, had developed a line called “Scent Crusher” that uses aerosolized ozone, a tri-oxygen molecule, to sanitize hunting and sports products, “only to realize that we weren’t here today to be able to get hunters or sportsmen to be better athletes or better hunters, but to kill COVID.” He told lawmakers the sample product next to him was part of a new line called “Sarus Systems.”

See if you can guess how well this miracle device works:

There is no evidence Sarus Systems has made material steps toward rehoming hundreds of jobs to Kansas, and shipping records show products are currently being manufactured in China. There is also scant evidence their machines, or ozone in general, can safely eliminate SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. And while the pair have hyped the products’ popularity, claiming a three-month backlog and international interest, we were unable to verify any purchases — from the state of Kansas or otherwise.

Kris Kobach, I remind you, used to serve as Secretary of State in Kansas, and did the GOP thing of implementing strict voter ID laws, purging voters from registration rolls, etc. Presumably his post-officeholder career is as a petty grifter. As I said on Twitter, the Trump era is sort of a rancid remake of “The Music Man,” only no one can sing. And Marian the Librarian is a villain now.

Oh, well. It’s Monday, and we can all do better. So let’s.

By the next time we gather here, it’ll be Daylight Saving Time. What used to be a transition barely worthy of a Monday-morning — or Sunday-morning at church — comment now seems to yield a week of whining and, lately, policy re-examination.

After years of this, I’ve come to realize it’s all about where on the time-zone line you live. The three main states I’ve lived — Ohio, Indiana and Michigan — are all on the west-ish part of the Eastern zone, and so I don’t have that early-darkness extra winter sucker punch that…New Yorkers and Chicagoans have to endure. When we went to London for an insanely low package price in December one year, we got a clue that the insanely low price might have had something to do with darkness lowering around 3:30 in the afternoon.

But sorry, year-round DST is not the answer. Who wants to confront winter with a late-rising sun contributing to the misery? A girl in my high school got hit by a car walking to school in 1970-something, the year Congress decided the way to confront the energy crisis was to adopt DST in, like, January.

There are only so many hours in a day, and only so many of them are daylight. Trying to stretch the clock to fit over them is like pulling a too-small T-shirt over a pot belly; pull it down, you’re gonna show too much chest, pull it up then someone’s gonna see your gut. Winter is a prison term, and the only way through it is through it, so: Get through it. Enjoy DST when it arrives and brings those long summer evenings. If you’re going to whine about it, then never take a vacation that takes you across time zones again. Three days, maybe four, and you’ll be adjusted.

Why didn’t anyone tell me Geraldo Rivera had moved to Ohio? When did he do this? And now he’s talking about running for the Senate? (I don’t take that part seriously, but honestly — an Ohioan. I’m amazed.

Oh, here comes the weekend. Warm spell is over, but the next one won’t be forever arriving. Spring, soon. Finally.

So I didn’t watch Meghan and Harry and Oprah. From the Twitter reaction, I believe a bomb has been detonated in Buckingham Palace. I read the highlights and lowlights, and I’ve come to — jumped to — a couple of conclusions.

Conclusion No. 1: Meghan was never going to kill herself. Depression, sure, but she strikes me as a striving and ambitious woman. She could have exited her marriage if it were that bad, and honestly, I’m not sure I even believe she was denied help for her despair. Diana saw a therapist, and royals see medical professionals of all sorts. But saying one had “thoughts of suicide” is a neat way of getting the attention and sympathy without having to actually do it. Hell, probably all of us have at least had thoughts of suicide; what would I do if I were diagnosed with a terrible disease and all hope was gone? I’d think about suicide, yes I would.

Conclusion No. 2: The racism is offensive, and not surprising, although I really want to know who wondered idly about the skin color of the unborn Archie. Prince Philip came up in the Empire days, is a million years old, and racism is in his DNA. Charles I’d be more disappointed by, as it seemed he is, relatively speaking, the progressive of the family. But I guess we’ll have to wait for a follow-up special to see that.

Did we see Archie at all last night? Has anyone? Is he a cute baby? I expect so.

Of course this will reanimate the Diana Cult, but at this point, who really cares. The Firm will survive the way it always has: By keeping calm and carrying on.

And that’s as much attention as I plan to devote to this.

You could read my story about Detroit’s Covid anniversary, written oral history-style, which is one of my favorite ways to do pieces like this. (I submitted the transcripts to all the subjects for approval, and only one told me to fix his grammar, which was a matter of changing two adjectives to adverbs.) I was struck, again, by how little we knew a year ago, and this is why I cannot abide those who now complain “these doctors, they don’t know anything, they keep contradicting themselves.” Oh, fuck you.

My favorite single quote from that story: When the governor shut down everything, you know, I live at the top of Lafayette Tower and I looked down at the streets where no one was out, it just looked deserted. I told my wife, this must be what Passover was like.

OK, then. Monday. Let’s take this bull by the horns, but first: The crossword puzzle.

In our foolish faith that one day, HBO will get good again, Alan and I have been watching “The Investigation,” a Danish series. It’s a dramatized version of the painstaking police work it took to imprison the killer of journalist Kim Wall, in 2013.

Wall went for a ride in a Peter Madsen’s submarine and never came back. Madsen lied and lied and lied, first claiming he put her ashore, then saying she was killed by a falling hatch cover, then switching his story to suffocation, and that’s as far as we’ve gotten. (His dismemberment and dumping of her body was harder to explain, but it was something like, “I panicked and wanted to bury her at sea, but I couldn’t carry her up the ladder to the exit hatch, so, y’know, I parted it out.”)

Anyway, I like to think of myself as a fairly sophisticated consumer of filmed entertainment. I don’t mind subtitles, I respect artistic choices even if they are not what mine would be, and I enjoy foreign films, if only for the glimpses they provide of life in other countries. But man, is “The Investigation” ever slow.

And by “slow,” I mean I said this the other night, as the main character left his office for the day: “You watch. We’re going to follow him all the way down this long hallway, and out the doors,” and we did. About 30 seconds of screen time, an eternity, all to say: He’s leaving work now.

One episode consisted of the police shuttling between various undecorated offices. All the walls were white, lightly tinged with gray. All the officers have the same Scandinavian efficiency in their speech, movement and dress. No one talked about a partner at home, or their children or dogs. No one goes out for a drink after work. No one swears or throws a file folder down on a desk in disgust. No one is particularly good- or bad-looking. The only gun fired is a shotgun, because Jens, the main character, shoots skeet and duck-hunts. The search for the remains by divers is about the only break from tinged-gray white walls we get, and even that is agonizing. They dive, and find nothing. They dive again. They dive again. Etc.

Jens is the most well-rounded, if only because the writers tacked on a subplot of him trying to connect with his adult daughter, who is drifting away from him because he works so hard and is never there for her. They have short, tense conversations in which much is unspoken. Jens expresses sadness through his wide-set eyes. It looks a lot like all his other expressions.

And yet, still we watch. I did some outside reading, and learned that all these choices were deliberate, that the intent was to concentrate on the work it took to bring Madsen to justice, not the lurid crime itself; in fact, Madsen’s name isn’t even spoken aloud. Journalists hear that a lot: Why do you even tell us the bad guys’ names? You’re glorifying them. And no, that’s not true, unless you think having your photo all over the news under headlines like SPREE KILLER constitutes glory. I guess it’s good for the casual viewer to learn that police work, like most work, can be a slog, that it’s interviews, lab testing and diving again and again in hopes of finding human remains. But man, talk about Scandinavian bleakness.

Will I finish watching it? OF COURSE.

What else to report at week’s end? Not too much. I made a spinach soufflé for dinner last night, with roasted potatoes on the side. It turned out OK:

People act like soufflés are alchemy, but it’s all about folding egg whites. I could teach you, I promise.

So, have a great weekend, all.

I attended a meeting of some government-related board in downtown Detroit a few years back. It was my day off, so I was dressed casually, which I believe that day was clean dark-wash jeans, Frye boots, blouse and a blazer. I mention this only because I started noticing the clothing others were wearing. Most of the people in the room were men, so I concentrated on them. They fell into three distinct groups.

(I have probably told this story before, because I’ve told all my stories before. I’m out of stories, sorry.)

At the bottom, the full-slob cohort, were the journalists. A writer from one of the dailies rolled in sporting hair that could have used a cut three months ago, an untrimmed mustache that no doubt captured food and some sort of got-dressed-in-the-dark shirt/pants combo. Another well-paid reporter came in jeans, a ratty sweater and a pair of sneakers I might choose to wash my car. Of the photographers from the TV stations we will say little, because they always dress like slobs, but at least they have an excuse — their next assignment might be a working fire, and you don’t need, or want, to wear your best outfit for that. Their on-camera partners were the only reporters in the room who wore what I would have considered the uniform for men in my business, when I started in it a million years ago — khakis or khaki-adjacent pants, shirt with a collar, maybe a tie but OK if not, and a jacket of some sort.

The second group were the white men on the board, or serving the board somehow. They looked fine. Their clothes were off the rack and untailored, but clean and appropriate, if unremarkable.

The last were the black men, who looked fiiiiiine. Not Sunday-church fine, but really good. Grooming was impeccable; they all looked like they’d had haircuts and shaves five minutes ago. Suits, good ones. Shirts in beautiful colors, ties of creamy silk that matched in interesting ways, picking up the shirt or pinstripe color in a subtle echo. And the accessories, oh my — cool eyeglass frames, tie bars, fancy wristwatches.

I mention all this because I chuckled over this Robin Givhan appreciation of Vernon Jordan, who died this week:

Over the years, it was impossible to miss Jordan in a crowd. Often that was because he was the only Black person in it. But he was noticeably well-dressed. His suits were attentively tailored and he had a love for Turnbull & Asser shirts, Charvet ties and fedoras. His style was full of European élan, Adam Clayton Powell flair, Wall Street pinstripes and Sunday morning going-to-church polish. His aesthetic drew upon the collage of influences that make this country exceptional but that connect us on common ground. Years ago, after writing about his style — a story for which he did not return my messages — Jordan called to express his gratitude after it was published.

If you live in a city with a sizable black population, you know that nothing about the meeting I described is particularly unusual. It’s pretty commonplace for powerful or well-off black men to dress well, and racists will snicker about some preacher’s purple suits, but fuck them. I think it’s notable that another fancy dresser in Washington, Roger Stone, ends up looking like a Batman villain when he leaves the house in the morning, but Jordan, in every photo I ever saw of him, just looks completely relaxed and natural. He wears his clothes, but Stone’s costumes wear him. Stone is a fop. Jordan had style.

Fort Wayne people remember when Jordan was shot by a would-be assassin there, in 1980, I believe. The shooter was Joseph Paul Franklin, who did the same to Larry Flynt, and escaped punishment for both, although he got the needle in 2013 for another murder. The story in Fort Wayne was that Jordan was brought into the ER and no one knew who he was until a black surgeon recognized him on the gurney and got him the top-level treatment that perhaps saved his life. Jordan, in town for a speaking engagement, was shot while returning to his hotel with a white woman who was not his wife. She was his driver/handler for his visit, and while many inferred what you’d expect from her presence, I don’t know that there was anything untoward about the fact she walked with him to the door of the hotel. They said Jordan was a charming man and a smooth talker, and who knows, maybe he was giving her career advice. But Franklin was enraged by interracial couples, too — it’s why he shot Flynt, after seeing an interracial photo spread in Hustler.

I recommend Givhan’s story. She captures not only his style, but his magnetism:

In public, as an eminence grise, Jordan used charm to batter down doors. His style reflected the words of Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston: “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

…As a college student, he worked as a chauffeur and his employer regularly used the n-word. This elderly White man, after discovering that Jordan spent down time reading in his library, announced with condescending dismay to his family that “Vernon can read!” The phrase later became the title of Jordan’s memoir.

“When I have told this story to younger people, they often ask why I was not more angry at Maddox. How could I have continued working for him under those circumstances?” Jordan writes. “Each of us has to decide for ourselves how much nonsense we can take in life, and from whom we are willing to take it.” In other words, this small, old man didn’t matter. He was not someone to slay. Instead of fanning his racism with outrage, Jordan doused it with pity.

Ah well. A life well-lived.

What else should you read? The final of no fewer than 250 separate election audits has been completed in Michigan. Stand by for news:

Among the more prominent of the reviews was a hand count of every ballot cast for president in Antrim County, which found a net gain of 12 votes for former President Donald Trump’s 3,800-vote victory there, and a hand count of 18,000 randomly selected ballots across the state to ensure tabulated results matched the paper ballot.

The city of Detroit also was able to confirm that the clerk’s office, while it made some clerical errors, properly counted 174,000 valid absentee ballots that corresponded to signed envelopes for registered voters, Benson’s office said.

Auditors were able to bring into balance or explain imbalances in 83% of counting boards, up from 27% at the close of the canvass, Benson said. The total number of ballots out of balance accounted for 17 of the 174,000 absentee ballots counted in Detroit.

Tell your Republican friends, not that it will make a difference.

And hello Wednesday. Alan’s getting a vaccine tomorrow. I hope to follow him one of these days.

I guess we’ve known who the heirs to Trumpism are for a while now, but with the fat man out of the way, they’re starting to come into their own.

Politico dropped a major profile of Marjorie Taylor Greene on Friday. If you didn’t read it, I recommend it, but please — remove all razors, sleeping pills, firearms and hanging rope from your immediate area. Here’s the passage that jumped out at me:

Greene declined to comment for this article, but Nick Dyer, her communications director, responded in a terse email: “You are a scumbag, Michael.”

This is the way these people talk to the media, of course. When I tried to tell Mellissa Carone that there was zero proof of the assertions she made about the Michigan absentee count, and pointed out that even one of the more notorious county canvassers admitted she’d seen no evidence of fraud, she replied with, “You are lying.” (Reader, I was not lying.) I believe there was a line about the fake news media, etc., too. But then, why should they care what the so-called MSM thinks of them? They have their own alternate reality media ecosystem that will present them as the heroes they consider themselves to be.

Anyway, the Politico piece is long, but good. It’ll make you yearn for the days when a term in Congress was preceded by an apprenticeship in a state legislature, or even a city council. And yeah, AOC skipped this step, too, but at least she’s not aggressively stupid or a liar, like so many of these people. Liiiiike, for instance, this guy:

Madison Cawthorn was a 21-year-old freshman at a conservative Christian college when he spoke at chapel, testifying about his relationship with God. He talked emotionally about the day a car accident left him partially paralyzed and reliant on a wheelchair.

Cawthorn said a close friend had crashed the car in which he was a passenger and fled the scene, leaving him to die “in a fiery tomb.” Cawthorn was “declared dead,” he said in the 2017 speech at Patrick Henry College. He said he told doctors that he expected to recover and that he would “be at the Naval Academy by Christmas.”

Key parts of Cawthorn’s talk, however, were not true. The friend, Bradley Ledford, who has not previously spoken publicly about the chapel speech, said in an interview that Cawthorn’s account was false and that he pulled Cawthorn from the wreckage. An accident report obtained by The Washington Post said Cawthorn was “incapacitated,” not that he was declared dead. Cawthorn himself said in a lawsuit deposition, first reported by the news outlet AVL Watchdog, that he had been rejected by the Naval Academy before the crash.

Big, big Trumper, I don’t need to tell you. Also, like his role model, quite the handsy guy with the ladies. That story’s been breaking of late, too.

And so we begin to see the rotten fruit of the worst president in the country’s history. Add to that the shenanigans the party is pulling with quote election integrity unquote oh god what a joke, and you can see this is wreckage we’ll be cleaning up for quite some time.

Hope you all had a good weekend. We were kissed by the promise of spring, but by the time many of you read this, it’ll have been beaten back by more winter. Still, it was nice to go for a walk in a light jacket. Beyond that, not much happened; with new strains, we’re just waiting on our vaccines and the chance to walk in the sun again and not be quite so tuned in with what’s streaming this weekend.

So we don’t leave you with nothing but bummers to start the week, here’s some pretty-pretty: The recent cold snap came down pretty quickly and froze off a few areas of the upper Midwest quickly. As these are usually “severe clear” cold fronts, i.e., without precipitation, we had some places with clear, open ice with no snow atop. which made for near-ideal ice skating. Here’s Marquette, in the U.P., where the whole community had room to do their thing, and here’s a solitary speed skater working out on the ice off downtown Milwaukee. Nice video, won’t take up much of your time. Enjoy.

So. Monday. Bring it on.

Wednesday was the warmest day of the year so far. I think the temperature passed 50 degrees. I’d already arranged to peel off work for half the afternoon, to go to the Detroit Institute of Arts. To limit capacity, you have to make an appointment to visit, and the weekends are booked through the middle of March, so we did a weekday. There was a photography exhibit I wanted to see, and the usual — it’s a pretty great museum. But this being Detroit, of course there was a car thing.

Truth be told, it was just meh, a few concept cars from past auto shows with no unifying theme other than Detroit design. However, I did find the Buick interesting, because it appears to have a cloaca:

Look it up.

Afterward we had one beer in a tent outside a brewhouse before the sun went behind a cloud, the temperature dropped by five degrees and our brief hint of spring became less pleasant. Came home and ordered carryout.

But man, it was nice to get out of the house and go somewhere other than food shopping.

And now, at week’s end, I feel a bit tapped out. There are some good links to follow in the comments from yesterday, and I recommend them, but if you’re tapped out, too? Join the club. Have a good weekend, all.

From the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency — which is to say, since the election — I’ve been appalled and puzzled by the tenacity of Republicans who’ve continued to press the case that votes were somehow stolen, blah blah blah.

This is because I am stupid, and also a fool.

It’s pretty obvious what the game is, now. They’re going to use “valid concerns about election integrity” to roll back reforms that have made voting easier for more people. This won’t be possible everywhere; in Michigan in 2018, voters approved, by a wide margin, election reform via constitutional amendment, and once something’s in the state constitution, it’s very difficult to remove it. But other states have GOP legislatures going after voting rights hammer and tongs. Georgia is talking about restricting early voting, favored by Black churches that do “souls to the polls” outreach. There are others.

Needless to say, this is all bolstered by “concerns” about “election irregularities,” i.e. Democrats finding it too easy to vote absentee in a pandemic. Many of these concerns are pure bullshit. Ballots were not mailed unsolicited, at least not in Michigan. (Ballot requests were; I spent a week in October processing them at the now-notorious TCF Center.) The late-night “ballot dump” there was the last batch of last-minute absentee ballots, legally submitted. And so on.

The Detroit News did a really good piece on how Antrim County, an overwhelmingly conservative county in northern Michigan, had a ballot glitch that was caught when the results came in, and had Biden decidedly beating Trump. It was caught, fixed, and double-checked with a hand recount of several thousand ballots. And yet, the county clerk is still opening her email and finding accusations of deep-state blah-blah election chicanery.

Most of you won’t be able to read that story, because it’s paywalled, but here’s a poignant passage:

At the center of the firestorm is a passionate and plainspoken 59-year-old Republican clerk who said she hasn’t taken a vacation since 2008. Guy has faced threats and name-calling. The fallout has left her afraid for the country’s future and altered politically.

“I voted Republican. I’ll never do it again, I don’t think,” Guy said last week. “I just think it’s a changed party.”

Here’s an un-paywalled, condensed version available to the general public.

So this is why we can’t back down from pressing a case against the Capitol rioters, against every dimwitted or sharp-witted legislator who would repeal voting rights, who would try to poison the grassroots. We just can’t. It’s too important:

Last week, lawyers representing the state council of the Service Employees International Union sent a letter to Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm requesting a criminal investigation into whether laws were broken when 10 would-be Wisconsin electors sympathetic to Trump met behind closed doors at the state Capitol on Dec. 14 and tried to appoint themselves as the state’s representatives to the electoral college.

The group signed illegitimate certificates of election and sent the fake documents to federal and state officials proclaiming that Trump had won the state’s electoral votes.

…“Some of this is about trying to bring bad actors to account. But the bigger part is trying to make sure we never go through something like this again,” said Jeffrey A. Mandell, a lawyer representing the union. “We have seen an intensification from election to election of how far people are willing to push these issues. And we need it to stop.”

And since the right wing is basically calling for this to happen again, we have to keep pressing it. They’re a minority party now, but they think that entitles them to rule forever. Sorry, no.

Also, fuck Clarence Thomas.

And get well soon, Tiger Woods. But I fear your golf career is over.

Wednesday dead ahead.

Another late-arriving Monday blog. Sorry about that. Yesterday I did a hands-and-knees scrub of my kitchen floor, swung by a local demonstration to take a couple of pictures, swung by the lake to ditto, and then came home and made brown rice pancakes for dinner. (Recipe at the link if you’re so inclined. They sound like hippie crap on the page, but dab a little sour cream on, and they’re right tasty.)

Then I watched two episodes of “Freaks and Geeks,” and no, I did not watch “Farrow v. Allen,” sorry.

In my crone years, I have come to the conclusion that not everything happening on the earth requires me to have an opinion about it, and this includes “Farrow v. Allen.” I have read both sides. I have thought about it, probably more than it deserves. And I think both sides are telling at least a somewhat credible story, and one is telling the truth and one is lying, and maybe it’s a mix of both, and anyway: I can’t say who I believe and so I’m tapping out of this one, and spending the next three nights of this thing watching comedies, which is my preference these days. I’m working my way through “30 Rock,” which I only saw in bits and pieces the first time around, and I’m not sure why, but by the middle of season two I’m basically relying on Tina and Alec to be my friends, because I’m so distant from my own, these days.

(I do think Mia Farrow is a bit tetched, however. I’ve known women like that, who have (or adopt) baby after baby, eventually filling their houses with chaos and bowls of half-eaten Cheerios and unflushed toilets. I know for them it’s all about love, but I think it’s possible to be all about love and not be a kid-hoarder. And yes, this has a bearing on my inability to reach a conclusion in the case at hand. Beyond that, I will say no more.)

So, then. The weekend came, the weekend went and now it’s Monday and a thaw is in progress. Big improvement over last Monday, but it means potholes will be opening all over the area. Good thing I have no need to go anywhere but the grocery store! Because that is my life now: I get up, I exercise in my basement, I prepare, serve and clean up after meals, I work, I watch “30 Rock.” If you sense a thin layer of hysteria to that, you’re not correct; it’s more like depression. A walking-around, non-crying, subclinical depression to be sure, but definitely the mid-to-late-winter doldrums.

I picked up a book this weekend that seems to fit the mood. I was returning books to the library (located next to the grocery store, how about that) and stopped to peruse the giveaway rack. Selected “Stoner” by John Williams, which rang a distant bell in my stressed-out brain, like I read about it somewhere, but couldn’t remember where. Turns out I did, but god knows where — apparently it was republished recently, became a huge hit in Europe and has been bouncing around in cult-favorite and movie-option world ever since. It’s not an uplifting story, and is in fact sad and depressing, but it’s so honest and unsparing that I’ve been devouring it.

I’m glad one of you posted this Slate piece in the comments last week, about Limbaugh, and even gladder that you singled out the passage that most hit home with me, in the final graf:

It’s not that everything bad about American politics today can be traced back to Limbaugh. It’s that the sneering, self-pitying, bad-faith style of argument that he perfected is practiced not just by right-wing media, but by many right-wing politicians, too. Every senator who jumps on television at a moment’s notice to whine about cancel culture even as hundreds of thousands of Americans have died of a virus that many on the right had been loath to admit even existed; every representative who exalts baseless conspiracies while railing against stimulus payments for the unemployed; every governor who cares more about owning the libs than about administering his or her state; every local official who seems not just to misunderstand the role of government but to actively resent it: They are all Limbaugh’s children. The mean, self-pitying illogic he mainstreamed is endemic now. The chief ghoul is gone, but the ghoulishness is here to stay.

A-men. OK, conference call in 20 minutes. Let’s let this week unfold, shall we?

I learned of Rush Limbaugh fairly early in his career. WGL in Fort Wayne was one of the first stations to pick up his show when he went national. I believe I’d listened for five minutes when I said to myself, “This is a fat guy who cannot score with chicks.”

Nothing against fat guys! Decent fat guys score all the time. Malevolent ones whose lack of Clooneytude has metastasized into a deep hatred of women are the ones who can’t. And while he was able to lure four of them into matrimony, none stuck around for very long. The last two lasted 10 years apiece, but I’d be willing to bet that as his wealth grew, the women in his life maintained separate bedrooms. Like Melania Trump, because she couldn’t stand the sight of the bastard “liked to read.”

I mean, five minutes with that foghorn voice would make me stick a drill in my ear. Rush would eventually lose his own hearing, likely through opiate abuse, which suggests even his own body was sick of carrying his blackened soul around after a while.

So anyway, that’s where it started with me and Limbaugh: The sexism. The racism, the homophobia, the casual bigotry and contempt for anyone who he perceived to be a lib-rull, as he pronounced it — that would come later, but only about 10 minutes later. You gotta give him this: The man was who he was from the beginning, and never really changed. If he had a conscience, if he ever evolved on any issue, if he grew, if his heart softened or expanded in any way, if he discarded one position and took up another, I never saw it. Of course, I didn’t listen to him for very long and had to depend on what was reported about him.

But you didn’t have to listen to him to listen to him. In Indiana, I heard him coming out of my neighbor’s kitchen window, out of cars stopped at lights, in restaurants. God, the restaurants. Alan, when he was a reporter, did a story on the “Rush rooms,” i.e. dedicated rooms in restaurants where they played his show over speakers for those who maybe couldn’t listen at work, but could catch the first or second hour at lunchtime. People only talked during the breaks. The rest of the time these places were like church with the clinking of silverware. Some people came every day.

I have been a fan in my life, a superfan of some, but honestly, I cannot imagine being so wound up with any one entertainer, one writer, one broadcaster, that I would devote this sort of attention to them. But I was never in Rush Limbaugh’s target audience, the people who not only listened to his show, but subscribed to his newsletter, bought his horrible books (even a “history” series, for children), attended his speeches and book signings, all the while looking at the sky or their shoes as the man revealed himself: As a serial bridegroom, a sex tourist, a drug addict, an all-around piece of shit from head to toe, from day one to whenever his last breath rattled his larynx.

Ordinary people, those with decency, stumble in all those ways, too. There’s no crime in multiple divorces (although when they come with NDAs you might want to check yourself), in patronizing sex workers, even in addiction. But you’re supposed to learn from these things. They’re supposed to humble you. If they did, the listening audience never got a sense of it.

It all culminated with that ghastly moment at the last State of the Union, when the worst president in history arranged to have his sex-worker wife hang the nation’s highest civilian honor around his neck, cheapening it forever. By then we all knew cancer was going to take him home sooner rather than later. I viciously hoped he’d live long enough to see Trump lose, and he did, but he was happy to walk in the president’s slime trail to the very end. Game recognize game.

Even Lee Atwater repented on his death bed. I guess we’ll have to see whether Mrs. Limbaugh numero quatro tells us what his final words were.

Alan noted that when people Rush Limbaugh didn’t like died, he’d say they “assumed room temperature.” I guess his corpse has gotten there by now. And the world is an incrementally better place today for his loss.

(This being the third entry of the week, I’m going to take the next couple of days off, unless Trump kicks the bucket, too. Then we’ll open the champagne. See you Monday.)