milk and honey

Exhausting, Exhausted

Before Trump took his golden escalator ride, life was different. Then, even if I thought a candidate would make a terrible office holder, I rarely thought he or she was objectively a bad person. Even LBJ, and he was pretty bad on a personal level, or Nixon, who was pretty bad as a leader. One consequence was, while I might have thought folks who supported “the other guy” naive or misguided, I didn’t think of them as bad either.

But Trump by any measure is actually a bad, bad man. And he’s bad in many, many ways. So, that makes my response to his supporters quite a problem. In my life, there are folks I love who definitely will vote for that bad, bad man. I know those folks are not themselves irredeemably bad. But I cannot help but wonder, “What is wrong with them?”

And that is one important reason this is all so exhausting.

The Christian Gospel in a Nutshell

Luke, Chapter 15. Lost sheep, lost coin, lost boy. All wonderful. But the best is at the top in v.2: “… the scribes murmured, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.'” Good news, huh?

RepublicBank

A nice appreciation of Dallas' Republic National Bank building. I enjoyed working there for many years.

So nice to have a backyard this time of year

RIP, Kris Kristofferson

Well, I woke up Sunday morning
With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad
So I had one more for dessert
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes
And found my cleanest dirty shirt
And I shaved my face and combed my hair
And stumbled down the stairs to meet the day

I'd smoked my brain the night before
On cigarettes and songs that I'd been pickin'
But I lit my first and watched a small kid
Cussin' at a can that he was kickin'
Then I crossed the empty street
And caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin' chicken
And it took me back to somethin'
That I'd lost somehow, somewhere along the way

On a Sunday morning sidewalk
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned
Cause there's something in a Sunday
That makes a body feel alone
And there's nothin' short of dyin'
Half as lonesome as the sound
As a sleepin' city sidewalk
Sunday mornin' comin' down

In the park, I saw a daddy
With a laughing little girl who he was swingin'
And I stopped beside a Sunday school
And listened to the song that they were singin'
Then I headed back for home
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin'
And it echoed through the canyons
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday

On a Sunday morning sidewalk
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned
Cause there's something in a Sunday
Makes a body feel alone
And there's nothin' short of dyin'
Half as lonesome as the sound
As a sleepin' city sidewalk
Sunday mornin' comin' down

For reference

Zac Crain, RIP. What a writer. What a loss.

“He laughs, staccato, huh huh huh, like the engine of a lawn mower trying to catch.”

Pretty fun

Modern AI recreations of historic characters

Hell Weed

Smilax (or bindweed or greenbrier, among many other names). It covers everything, and its roots reach down to hell. But, once a year for about a week, it puts out pretty purple flowers. So it’s got that going for it. Which is nice.

Audere est Facere

Micro.blogger Tottenham Hotspur fans (if any, besides @frjon and me), might take some heart from this article in the Evening Standard. COYS ⚽

It’s so fun to grow plants (in this case, Cosmos), from seed! Fun for the bees, too.

O Liverwurst, Where Art Thou?

Sad memorial in the NYT. I loved liverwurst on rye with mustard and red onion slices from the late ’70s Stanford Coffee House. I still wonder why people crossed to the other side of the street after I’d enjoyed one.

At Zabar’s, 1970 - Credit: Michael Gold/Getty Image

A Thought

Extraordinary people in arts, business, etc., can be so focused that their relationships suffer. Maybe that’s the price of excellence. But those who nurture relationships also pay a cost. They may be less successful at making money or art. Might that be a price of deeper connections?

Cahokia Jazz

Loved the audiobook of Francis Spufford’s amazing novel, read by Andy Ingalls. It’s a great listen, and Ingalls is an excellent reader. But I recommend also getting a print copy for the great maps, family trees, etc. (Check your library!) Dynamite as a pair.

I am a huge fan of the lunch-size brown paper bag. (And not merely because of its contents, though they often also are worthy of praise.)

My mom died September 1, 2022: 4 months and 4 days shy of her 99th birthday.
I think of her and Dad all the time. The best is when they're in my dreams.

Will you, sometime, who have sought so long, and seek

Still in the slowly darkening searching-ground,

Catch sight some ordinary month or week

Of that rare prize you hardly thought you sought—

The gatherer gathered and the finder found,

The buyer who would buy all himself well bought—

And perch in pride in the buyer’s hand, at home,

And there, the prize, in freedom rest and roam?

“By never trusting, cynics never lose. They also never win. Refusing to trust anyone is like playing poker by folding every hand before it begins….

The cynical voice … claims that we already know everything about people. But humanity is far more beautiful and complex than a cynic imagines, the future far more mysterious than they know.”

Jamil Zaki

(Odegaard, #5, appears to be wiping the pitch — literally — with an unfortunate Villa player. Right-click to open a bigger image in a new tab, then embiggen.) BTW, the Stinkies won. 🙁

Image: Wikimedia/Jakub Hałun, CC BY-SA 4.0)

I am so lucky to have the world's greatest brother-in-law.

>Tradition is a good thing. It is traditionalism that is bad. Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. > >—Jaroslav Pelikan

(h/t blog.angloromanticism.org - btw, my new band name)

Jim Schutze:

... his entire industry is on pins and needles, terribly anxious about a Trump victory. I asked him if it’s because Trump is opposed to his industry on specific policy issues. He said no.

“That’s not it. It’s that Trump is crazy. That’s what we worry about.”

My friend’s business involves putting big chunks of money into long-range investments that already involve plenty of risk. The added risk of wild wombats in the White House with regulatory power over their deal is way too much.

RIP, Duane Thomas, one of the greatest runners in Cowboys history. When an interviewer referred to the Superbowl as "the ultimate game," Thomas' never-to-be-forgotten response was, "If it's the ultimate, why are they playing it again next year?"