[Content warning: Definitely not vegetarian]

Greetings, friends. This morning I woke up with irritated sinuses and a slight sniffle. The reason why will become apparent momentarily.

Besha and I went to Costco yesterday for $900 worth of staples, even though we are planning to move house in a few weeks, because I’m not entirely certain that the Trump regime won’t invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 when the Department of Homeland Security releases its report on April 20th. While it may seem far fetched now that the Federal government would occupy Portland with military force, I will simply observe that neither good sense, decency, nor the rule of law has restrained the current regime so far. That, and the foolhardy trade tariffs, make it seem worth the trouble to lay in dried staples and canned goods, while they are readily available. If we haven’t used them by next spring, we will donate them to the local food bank, and buy more. I’m also pricing out dual-fuel portable generators.

The most expensive item on yesterday’s Costco receipt was a bag of frozen salmon fillets, which is what passes for culinary luxury in this house. The second most expensive item was a Costco-sized bag of bully sticks for the dog. These are not a luxury — they are utterly essential for distracting her when she gets rambunctious and annoying.

Greetings, friends. Happy Imbolc to all who celebrate! And also a Happy Lunar New Year!

Yesterday was also Groundhog’s Day, which will always make me think of my mother, because it was unquestionably her favorite secular holiday.

I don’t think it was because she spent half her life living in Pennsylvania, the cultural and spiritual home of the holiday. Although I’m sure that didn’t hurt.

My mother was not always great with quotidian minutiae, but she loved a grand gesture. She was a big one for birthdays, because birthdays are a prime opportunity for grand gestures, like throwing a party.

Greetings, friends. We’re into the last few hours of the first month of 2025, and I’d like to do a bit of stock-taking. Taking stock? I just experienced semantic satiation writing this paragraph, which I was only able to break by investigating the etymology of the idiom “take stock”. Reddit says it was attested in English in 1736 with the denotation of “compiling an inventory of dry goods”. So there you go.

At the end of December, Besha and I used the long hours on the road to Joshua Tree, and the blessed respite of a few days holiday in the desert to formulate some goals for the new year.

One of the few broadly applicable ideas I acquired in my interminable years in Silicon Valley was the notion that no goal is truly a goal unless it is “SMART”: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound. If it isn’t something concrete that you are likely to be able to complete definitively within a specifiable timeframe, it’s not a real goal.

Let us be charitable and call this sort of non-goal an ambition. It’s a thing you want to do, sure, but the means and/or plan is nebulous or lacking.

Greetings, friends. When I feel the need to write something that I don’t want to write, I am capable of the most astonishing things. Emails get answered. Plants get watered. Chores get done. Anything but writing the thing I need to get out of my head but don’t have the emotional energy for. This post is about a year overdue.

You may remember that I was posting to this journal by the day, right up until I packed the truck and left my mother’s old home forever. Part of it was that I was just exhausted by the experience.

But after taking the second half of 2023 off, I found I had another problem, which was that my journal was hosted on Substack, and they were making money off white supremacist content. They had terms of service but weren’t enforcing them.

Substack, basically, was turning into the punk bar that Michael Tager posted about so eloquently:

Greetings, friends. A few nights ago, I was lying in bed, eyelids getting heavy, while listening to my favorite soporific:

There are warnings of gales in all areas… The area forecasts for the next 24 hours: Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire. Southerly 4 to 6, backing southeasterly 7 to severe gale 9, veering southwest gale 8 to storm 10 later, showers, rain later, good, occasionally poor… Shannon. Cyclonic, storm 10 to hurricane force 12, becoming west, gale 8…

My eyes shot open. Hurricane force 12?

In seven years of listening, I’d never once heard the phrase “hurricane force 12”. Holy shit. The Beaufort scale doesn’t go any higher than twelve.

Greetings, friends. Last time I attempted to honor the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., by reflecting on some of his words and their relevance to our time. Today I will tell a story that would probably have made the Reverend Dr. King wince and shake his head in sadness.

As I have surely mentioned, I was not the most well-adjusted teenager. I came to public high school with a poor sense of social norms and not particularly good impulse control. I did have a handful of close friends, but I think most of my peers regarded me with bewilderment, when they regarded me at all. In my senior year, I was voted “most individualistic”... along with my friend Krista, may her memory be a blessing.

That all lay in the future. This was my freshman year; it was 1992, and I grew out my hair and wore flannel shirts and jeans torn at the knees. I idolized Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains and I listened to classic rock and an awful lot of Guns ‘n Roses. But I'd always been a big kid and had never really been a target for the physical kind of bullying.

Greetings, friends. For years, I have considered myself a utopian humanist. I believe that the greatest good is the permanent and sustainable actualization of the potential of as many human beings as we can lift up.

I believe that the surest way to achieve that is for society to provide its members with the foundations of their hierarchy of needs: Clean food, water, and air, adequate clothing and housing, complete health care, and education into adulthood.

I believe that anything less is a false economy: Anything less and some members of our society scrape to survive, in ways that make life worse for all of us.

For years, I was convinced that utopia was possible for all humanity, if we had the will and the inspiration to achieve it. Bill Hicks said it better than I could:

Greetings, friends. On December 11, 2016, a little over eight years ago, a guy named Eric Garland posted a long thread on Twitter that quickly became infamous. The thread started out like this:

What followed was something like 125 messages about, among other things, a speculative history of Russian interference in US politics, starting from the turn of the millenium, and running clear through the 2016 US presidential election and its immediate aftermath.

This thread took its author almost two full hours to write. It was regarded by some at the time as brilliantly insightful, but by others as utterly unhinged. Notably, Garland’s rant contained virtually no game theory to speak of. For this reason alone, its opening phrase became an Internet meme.

Greetings, friends. Besha and I left Joshua Tree yesterday, scooted across L.A., stopped in Camarillo for a burrito with Erin, and then hauled up 101 clear to Santa Cruz for the night. This morning we caught Jasmine & Kellan en passant for coffee & a stroll along the waterfront in Capitola, then set off for Oakland.

As we were coming into San Jose, Besha noted that we were due to arrive early for our respective social plans, and suggested mounting a side quest to visit the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum.

The what now?

“There’s a museum of Egyptian antiquities right here in San Jose. I’ve never been, but I’ve always wanted to see it. It’s just a couple miles up the highway.”

Greetings, friends. On January 1, 1925, exactly a century ago yesterday, Edwin Hubble addressed the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society to confirm the discovery of Cepheid variable stars in the Great Nebula in Andromeda. This announcement decisively demonstrated the existence of other galaxies beyond the Milky Way, and paved the way for our modern understanding of cosmology.

I still find it hard to believe that, in some sense, humanity’s most advanced conception of the true scale of the universe wasn’t even a century old until… yesterday. My grandfather was born into a world where even the most educated scientists weren’t certain that other galaxies existed. My paternal grandmother was only a few months old when Hubble’s bombshell settled a debate that had raged for years among the leading astronomers of the day: Just how big is our universe?

I am personally obsessed with this question. Not with the answer, I mean. I think, in this the year 2025 of the Common Era, that scientific consensus has a pretty good idea of the extent of the visible cosmos.

I mean that I am obsessed with the question. For as long as human beings have entertained abstract thought, some bright lad or lady out there has probably wanted to know: How big is the world? How far away are the sun, the moon, or the stars? Is there anything beyond them?

Greetings, friends. Happy new year! I celebrated, starting last night, and continuing as I normally do, by sending everyone I love the most obnoxious topical animated GIF I can find.

It really is festive, isn’t it? There, now I have shared it with you. I love you too.

It is Suzy’s birthday and she and Jared and his kids and also his mom are gathered in the guest room of the AirBnB we have rented in Yucca Valley, outside Joshua Tree. They are watching some children’s show on the TV.

Greetings, friends. I returned home Friday from a ten-day roadtrip to California, to my wife - my wife! - informing me that our bathtub faucet had developed a leak in my absence.

“It’s the hot water tap, so not only are we wasting water, we’re also wasting electricity,” Besha said. “I called the plumber but they won’t be here until Thursday.”

We examined the tub together. The hot water tap was plenty tight but the faucet dribbled a pretty steady stream of water. Besha had it running into a gallon kitchen pot, which was already overflowing.

“I hate wasting water,” Besha grumbled.

Greetings, friends. Today I got to see the Portland Thorns FC play their second home game of the season, against Racing Louisville FC. After giving up two goals in the first six minutes, they came back to tie it in extra time, 2-2. Not bad after having lost their previous two games, but not great for a club that sat at the top of the NWSL for much of last season, and who were league champions the year before that.

You could be forgiven for not knowing who the Thorns are; I had never heard of them before I moved to Portland, either.

You probably already knew this, but I’m vaguely embarrassed to admit that my favorite spectator sport is professional American football. Sadly for me, Portland isn’t much of a football town. (Before you bring up U of O, I will point out that Eugene is almost two hours from here.) Most NFL fans around here follow Seattle, but I lived in San Francisco too long to root for the Seahawks.

Greetings, friends. It’s been a while. Those of you who know me — and let’s face it, you all know me — probably are aware that my emotional health waxes and wanes over time. One key sign of depression for me is a tendency to fall off of maintaining habits that require sustained investment without providing an immediate dopamine reward, in favor of ones that do, like playing video games.

Contrariwise, one can tell that I’m doing well, mentally and emotionally, if one can answer yes to the following three questions:

1. Is Schuyler writing?

2. Is he running?

3. Is there something fermenting in his kitchen?

No joke. For the last couple months, the answers have respectively been, (1.) no, (2.) not really, and, (3.) actually, yes.

Greetings, friends. Yesterday was the first anniversary of my mother’s death.

A lot has happened in a year. The first half of the past year was dominated by the aftereffects of her passing. I thought I would spend the remaining half telling a little more of her story, and be done by now.

By all rights, I should be done by now. Jewish law and tradition do not permit us not to grieve forever. We get three periods of mourning when we are bereaved of a parent, each one a widening container to hold our grief, but each one also rigidly circumscribed in time. We are allowed to grieve… but not permitted to wallow.

Greetings, friends. In the last couple days, I’ve been trying to apply a lesson I’ve learned about my temper.

Years ago, I had the honor to have on my engineering team at work a colleague named Andy. Andy was one of the most brilliant engineers I have ever had the pleasure to work with.

One day Andy was complaining to me, as his manager, about something that he had been relying on me to do, I don’t recall what, but which I hadn’t done. I told him I would try harder to do it next time.

Andy said to me, “I don’t need you to try harder. I need you to try better. Tell me what you are going to do differently so that this gets fixed.”

Greetings, friends. My grandparents, though dead for many years, nearly caused me to make a grave error in my mother’s name this past weekend.

As I mentioned previously, when my mother passed back in November, we buried her in the Manchester Hebrew Cemetery, which is, incidentally, the only Jewish cemetery in New Hampshire.

How my mother’s final resting place came to be in New Hampshire, of all places, was a simple process of elimination. The rest of our family, including my grandparents and great-grandparents, are all buried in Old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens. My grandmother Lenore is buried in between both of her husbands, a fact which occasioned a wink and an elbow from my uncles during her headstone unveiling.

Greetings, friends. This past week, I went to San Francisco primarily to attend a day-long manager training at my employer’s office. This first session of this nine-week management training course consisted of an eight-hour kickoff workshop, during which the dozen or so of us management trainees were asked to put away our laptops and phones for the day.

If there is one thing I learned from having sat in this management training for the better part of eight hours, it is that I am not cut out for classroom learning.

Having recently re-read my grade school report cards, I realize this is not a surprise. In fact I have always been this way. Classroom learning moves too slow to hold my attention. I haven’t been subjected to this kind of mandatory learning in years. Even at professional conferences, I and about 85% of the other attendees all have phones out or laptops open. I watch most YouTube videos and listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed or faster, unless I am doing something else at the same time.

It wasn’t all bad. The day was peppered with prompted one-on-one and small group discussions which served to anchor the material in practical experience, and offered the chance to get to know some of my colleagues a little better. I just feel like the whole workshop could’ve been about two hours, and I’d have gotten the same amount of value out of it. All of my colleagues seemed engaged so I did my best to hide my considerable discomfort and look like I was paying attention.

Greetings, friends. Yesterday was my mother’s birthday, the first since she died. All I could think to do in honor of it was to text Adah and say hi.

I like celebrating birthdays and making a big deal out of them, which I learned to do from my mother. I like going the extra mile for my loved ones’ milestone birthdays. I think it’s nice to celebrate people and make them feel special once in a while.

When I look back, though, I sort of wonder if my mother’s emphasis on making a big deal out of our birthdays was about us or about her. She liked to make elaborate themed birthday cakes. Some of them were pretty impressive, like the time she baked a cake in the shape of a globe for one of mine, with the continents and oceans elaborately frosted into place.

Greetings, friends. Last Sunday, after visiting the graves of my great-great-grandparents, I continued on through my old ancestral stomping grounds.

Saturday’s rain had moved off elsewhere, and the day started out clear but cool. I drove north. On my way out of Sayre, I passed a cleaning supply house with my family’s name on it. Some third cousin, presumably.

Across the state border in New York, I drove through Waverly, where my grandmother Pippy was born. About a half hour beyond it, I crossed over into Schuyler County, for which I was named, indirectly.