Greetings, friends. Today I was driving around in Leto II, getting supplies before the big storm that snowed on Portland, and then really dumped on Minneapolis, comes tonight and drops a trifling 6-8” here. At least that is a trifle by New Hampshire standards. It is not a trifle to me when I have to shovel it.

Anyway I was driving around thinking how nice it is to have a motor vehicle that isn’t over 20 years old and has loose steering and makes strange creaking noises and is perpetually in need of some kind of maintenance. It feels… decadent. Almost like I don’t deserve it. Oh well. It’s a privilege I get to have and I hope to make it up to humanity in some other way.

Also, it makes me slightly anxious that I own a vehicle that I probably can’t, or at least, shouldn’t wrench on. I remember when I was a kid I would mess around in the garage, keeping my dad company on a weekend afternoon while he wrenched on one of his cars. I was fascinated by the dials and switches on what was probably an average automobile dashboard.

I promised myself that, when I owned a car, I would add lighted switches to the dashboard, and label them things like “Machine Gun” and “Rocket Launcher” and “Oil Slick”. The switches wouldn’t do anything besides light up. But I thought it would be cool. I’ve never actually done it. I wonder what happened to my childhood dreams. Maybe when I get home I will look into taking Muad’Dib’s dashboard apart. There’s a busted transmission indicator light under there anyway.

Greetings, friends. I’m in New Hampshire at my late mother’s house. I haven’t gone out today. Adah and Keith did bring over takeout for dinner. It is always such a pleasure to see them.

Other than that, I don’t have much on my mind today. I made an omelet with Ellie’s eggs this morning. They were delicious.

I discovered this morning when I went to make breakfast that every carton of Ellie’s eggs contains a printed slip of paper with a dad joke, e.g.:

How did the chicken feel after a long day on the farm?

Eggs-hausted!

Greetings, friends. Today I went for my longest training run yet, for a total of 4 miles. I’m back in New Hampshire, where there has been a brief warm spell, before the weather returns to its normal cold and wet for New England in mid-February.

And, by warm, I mean in the low 50ºF, because my concept of warm is still calibrated to San Francisco. Warm enough, at least, to “run” comfortably outside. I put “run” in quotes because I only managed a 12’30” pace, which is a brisk jog for people in better health than I am. Still it’s not bad by my standards, considering that I ran up Center Hill Road in Epsom, which is marked by the grade of the hill that it runs up.

Epsom, of course, is named for the town in Surrey in England, not the bath salt. Center Hill Road was apparently so named, firstly, because of the eponymous hill, and secondly, because the town of Epsom was originally clustered on the slopes of the hill when the town was founded in 1727. Technically Epsom was a part of Massachusetts originally, as this pre-dated the foundation of New Hampshire by about fifty years.

Epsom had about 700 people recorded in the first United States census in 1790, and today it is home to about 4,800 people. The center of the town is no longer Center Hill Road, though. US 4 and State Route 48 intersect about 2 miles west of here, and, by the time the traffic circle was built in the 1940’s, the town “center” had moved over there. The traffic circle is now where the McDonald’s and the Dunkin’s and the town office and the post office and the state liquor store all are.

Greetings, friends. Fifteen minutes starts… now. I am in New Hampshire now. I am le tired. I did that very silly thing that I often do the night before a long flight and just stayed up late packing and doing random things like putting up beef jerky to dry and also writing for an hour when I could’ve just written for fifteen minutes like I promised myself.

One thing I did not do is bother to check whether I had anything on my laptop with which to amuse myself on a long flight, or, for that matter, check to see if I had actually packed my Kindle. You might think that I would have taken a moment last night to do this, since I was up late anyway, especially given that Alaska Airlines thoughtfully sent me an email and a text at just past 2 a.m. to say sorrie internet no worky on your flight tomorrow hurrr kthx bai!

Very thoughtful of them. No worries, I said to myself, I shall spend the flight Kerballing.

Kerbal Space Program is my favorite video game of all time, and that is absolutely saying something. I have spent probably thousands of hours playing it. Like, so many hours that I actually stopped launching it via Steam after 278 hours because I no longer wished to know just how many hours I have devoted to this game.

Greetings, friends. You ever have a day where it seems like you were go-go-go all day and yet you’re not sure if you got anything done?

Today I was bound and determined to hang some bookshelves. Which meant drilling the mounting holes in the brackets in Besha’s shop, sanding and finishing them, and then driving over to Vancouver, moving the couch and then getting up on a ladder to position the brackets while Besha held the bookshelves in place and read off a level.

Friends, I got almost all the way through step one.

My plan to get up early was foiled by some assholes on the street around the corner from Besha’s house who insisted on playing recorded music at high amplification with a particularly accentuated bass line, starting at 3am.

Greetings, friends. Yesterday I went to a martial arts class for the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Way back in 2016, I was in need of an exercise discipline that didn’t involve trudging up and down Twin Peaks, and as I have mentioned before, I am strongly motivated by social expectation. If there is a place I need to be at a particular time, and people who are expecting me to be there, I am much much more likely to do it.

Anyway, training in martial arts had long been a bucket list item for me. Also it was 2016 and good old grassroots American fascism had freshly reared its ugly homunculus head.

At the time, I was working out of an office at 17th & Mission Streets, and I knew that if I had to go all the way to, say, the Presidio for classes, I was going to find ways to weasel out of it. The dojo, whatever it was, had to be within a 10 or 15 minute walk of my office.

Greetings, friends. Today I learned from the Actual Astronomy podcast that Terence Dickinson, the Canadian amateur astronomer, passed away a couple weeks ago. He was best known as the author of Night Watch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe, and co-author of The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide.

When I got into the hobby of visual astronomy a dozen years ago, Dickinson’s books were among the first I purchased on the subject, since they were the most universally recommended, and rightly so. Dickinson’s patient and encyclopedic advice informed a generation of amateur astronomers, including me.

My first telescope, an 8” Dobsonian, was one that I basically purchased at Dickinson’s recommendation. If you want to see deep sky objects, you need to maximize the diameter of your primary optics, since that’s what’s gathering all the light. The Dobsonian telescope is a modern take on the old reflecting telescope designed by Isaac Newton about 350 years ago.

Greetings, friends! I hope this Wednesday finds you well. Today I have some updates on previous topics.

Today is Day 912 in my Duolingo streak. ¡Viva el Español!

I have also been keeping up with the running. I mean, at the pace I’m going it’s really more like jogging. But I’m still going to call it running. On Monday, I was in Oakland, and I was supposed to meet Erin at her place in the Castro at a reasonable dinner hour. Needless to say I had not done my training run on Sunday, because Super Bowl, so I somehow had to squeeze a 3½ mile run in between work and getting to the city. If I don’t do my long run every week, I know I’m going to fall behind.

I came up with the hare-brained idea to make getting to the Castro the subject of my run. So I ran to West Oakland station, got on BART, got off BART at Embarcadero, and ran down Market Street, past the commuters and the underhoused folks and actually not a few other people also running. I spent 12 years living in that city and every street corner on Market has some memory attached. I ran past The Mint where Besha and I kissed the first night we got together. I’m glad I wore a hat. That onshore wind never changes.

Greetings, friends. Super Bowl weekend has come and gone, and it was full enough that I had to burn a couple streak freezes… But, as we say, don’t let a slip become a slide.

The Super Bowl itself was everything we’d all hoped for right up until the final two minutes. For those of you who didn’t watch because you don’t care, I’ll tell you what happened: The Chiefs and Eagles had been engaged in a pretty epic shootout, with the game tied and the Chiefs in scoring position, but with just enough time on the clock for the Eagles possibly to come back and tie it up or win in the final seconds.

Until the Eagles’ defensive back Bradbury grabbed Chiefs wide receiver Smith-Schuster momentarily by the jersey in mid-play, and the refs called a holding foul.

Greetings, friends. Tomorrow brings that long-awaited and/or widely-detested American spectacle, the Super Bowl. I wrote a bit about American football a couple weeks ago, but, as usual, I have more to say.

The sport, like those other two uniquely American sports, baseball and basketball, dates back to the mid-late 19th Century. Its origins are rooted in rugby, and the sport didn’t really take on its modern recognizable form until the adoption of the forward pass in 1906. The sport’s premier professional association, the National Football League, was founded in 1920.

The modern rules of American football are famously Byzantine, and have been constantly in flux. The core of the current NFL rule book is 88 pages long, and with appendices and revision history included, the whole thing weighs in at a staggering 245 pages. All televised games have a special rules analyst to interpret the game’s finer points for the folks watching at home, whenever an uncommon situation or a disputed referee call occurs. Fans like to complain about the sheer inconsistency of refereeing in NFL games, and not without reason, but with a rule book like that, can you hardly blame the refs?

As an aside, American football is not the only type of gridiron football played professionally. The most notable is Canadian football, which like most things Canadian, is recognizably similar to its American counterpart, but stubbornly different in specific particulars. Examples include the field extending to 110 yards, yielding two 50 yard lines; offenses having three downs to gain ten yards instead of four; offenses being able to have two players in motion downfield at the snap; and a one-point scoring play from scrimmage that I still don’t understand. The overall effect, if you are an American watching a Canadian game, is as if you are looking through a funhouse lens at a football game being played in Bizarroland. The game is the same but somehow uncannily, disturbingly different.

Greetings, friends. Today I want to talk about bereavement, and grief.

I’m writing this on a flight to Oakland, where I have a number of things I’m hoping to do this weekend. The first is that I’m planning to go to Temple Israel in Alameda, a synagogue I have never been to, in order to attend Friday evening Shabbat services and say Kaddish for my mother.

Kaddish is one of our more ancient and ubiquitous prayers. It is recited multiple times in every organized Jewish prayer service, in a number of different forms. The final time it is said in most services, it is known as the Kaddish Yatom, the Mourners’ Kaddish.

The word Kaddish itself, comes from the Semitic root קדש, *qds, where it means “holy” or “sanctified”. The prayer’s origins stretch back almost two millennia, and unlike most modern Jewish prayers, it is written (mostly) in Aramaic.

Greetings, friends. There’s been some traumatic news for a number of my friends in different circles, so I want to take a moment and express my love and sympathy for all of you who are struggling right now. I send you hugs.

Not to change the subject, but today I want to keep my journal entry light. I was originally going to talk about beef jerky. I absolutely love the stuff. I think I like any kind of shaved beef steak. Actually, if I had to pick a favorite food item, it would be a classic Philly cheesesteak, white American, with onions and hots, on an Amoroso’s Italian roll. I have a lot to say about cheesesteaks, but I digress.

What’s not to love about beef jerky? Aside from the entire American livestock factory farming industry, that is. But I sort of made my peace with that evil compromise about 15 or so years ago, when I gave up on a dozen years of ethical vegetarianism.

Beef jerky. Savory, salty, umami, compact, long shelf life, high protein. That last is especially important to me now that I’m borderline diabetic and closely watching my glucose levels in the hopes of having the full use of my extremities in my old age. But more about that later.

Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk about something that went right last weekend!

Besha and I are planning a trip to Ireland for her birthday in April, a place to which neither of us have been. Ireland has particularly been at the top of her bucket list for some time, because Besha is an avid genealogist, and she has maternal ancestors who hailed from County Clare.

So our vacation plan, currently, is to visit Dublin for a few days, and then rent a vehicle and spend the rest of the trip exploring Ireland by car and on foot, with special attention paid to Clare and the Burren.

As it happens, I also have ancestors from Ireland. My paternal grandfather’s mother was a lass named Mae Mullen, or so I thought, and she was born in Ireland, or so I thought.

Greetings, friends. Well, I finally did it: After 23 entries, I took my thumb off the page and duplicated an entry number. Had to go back into Substack and retitle yesterday’s post. And edit the slug, because it annoyed me. I also definitely dragged my heels on writing this post today. Hmmm.

Well, yesterday, as I said, I failed to get up bright and early, so after breakfast I finally “got my mukluks on” as my mother used to say. Except that, actually, step one was taking my moccasins off, because said mukluks are what Besha thoughtfully got me for house shoes a few weeks ago. What I actually put on were the steel toed work boots I got in order to protect myself when I drop hot steel on my toe, as I inevitably will.

As you will recall, your correspondent had set out to make a set of hanging bookshelf brackets.

On Saturday evening, I foolishly took on a modest side project, merely by way of confirming that the ergonomics of the forge and anvil were good in the place I intended to affix the concrete anchors in Besha’s carport.

Greetings, friends. Today was a sequence of catastrophes in miniature. I confess that almost didn’t write a journal entry, but I don’t want to burn a streak freeze. Please excuse the cheese sandwich nature of this post. It is almost 23:30 and I wish I were already in bed.

That’s partly because I woke up at 05:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep. At one point I actually got up and went and turned on the kettle because I figured it just wasn’t happening. Next thing I know it’s 09:00 and I’ve just had a set of absolutely terrible dreams.

This was mildly frustrating, because, having accomplished so little on the bookshelf brackets yesterday, I wanted to get up early today in the hopes of making some progress on them.

I started deep in the aforementioned yak shave, though. Remember, I just wanted some bookshelves to hang on my wall, so that I could finally finish unpacking the books. Then I decided I wanted to make my own bookshelves, and then my own wall brackets.

Greetings, friends. You ever have one of those days that just felt off for some reason? Today has been one of those days.

I did however get to discover the marvel that is the North Portland Tool Library. Hosted in an old firehouse in Kenton, it’s… a basement full of tools. Hand tools, power tools, you name it. You just need to be a resident of North Portland to sign up for a borrower’s account. “North Portland,” says the website, “Not NE, not NW.”

Their hours are strictly limited to 10am to 2pm on Saturday. You pick out the tools you want to borrow until next Saturday. They note down on your account the four-digit codes that have been marked on the tools in paint pen. And… that’s it.

Today Besha and I borrowed two hammer drills, a post hole digger, and a bench grinder. Yeah, a bench grinder. That was by far not the most exotic tool they had to lend.

Greetings, friends. I forgot to wish everyone a Happy Groundhog’s Day. It was my mother’s favorite secular holiday — probably because the doldrums of February are the best time to throw a house party in between the winter holidays and spring break.

Yesterday, I shared a screencap of a Twitter post that swam across my Facebook feed, and got a stupid comment in reply.

The meme simply read:

Greetings, friends. Blessed Imbolc to those of you who celebrate, and happy Black History Month.

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia on re-entry from orbit after a 15 day mission of scientific research. All seven crew were lost in the disaster. Their names were David Brown, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, Rick Husband, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon.

Amazingly, this portrait of the crew was developed from film recovered after the crash.

Greetings, friends. Those of you who pay close attention will note that I missed a day of journaling.

I blame “Andor” for being so good. Jeanne and I went out for dinner, and, after we got back to her place, I decided we should watch one episode of the TV show, and I would have a shot of bourbon over ice. What actually happened was we watched three episodes back-to-back, and I had at least as many bourbons. Angel’s Rest is good stuff.

So is Andor. I haven’t seen the entirety of the first season yet, but I am firmly convinced that it is the best thing to come out of the Star Wars franchise since, well, at least “Return of the Jedi”. The Galactic Empire as seen in “Andor” embodies the “banality of evil” that Hannah Arendt observed Nazi Germany — evil manifested through staff meetings and dehumanizing bureaucracy. Evil in the name of law and order. And Cassian Andor’s journey to rebellion is equally tortuous. No sudden off-screen Han-Solo-esque change-of-heart suddenly turning this guy into a Byronic hero. No. Diego Luna is so damn good. I can’t wait to see the rest of the series.

All of which is to say I got carried away last night, and, by the time we got through three episodes, and I realized just how of that delicious port-cask-finished stuff I had put away, I was not good for much.

Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk about habits in the context of learning languages.

Also, today I am going to try to be super disciplined about my time investment. I’m visiting Suzy and this journal entry is the only thing keeping us from spending the evening playing couch-coop Diablo III.

You probably know that I studied linguistics in university. In fact, I changed majors four times and this was the only topic that held my interest long enough to get a degree in it.

You tell people you studied linguistics and the first thing they want to know is how many languages you speak. To my perpetual shame, the answer was one: English.

Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk a little bit about habits.

But, first: How about that NFC championship game. Not at all what I was hoping for. The hand of Fate is fickle even to those lately graced by it. Maybe next year. I’m not mad. The Super Bowl ought to be pretty fun this year. Go Birds!

Habits. What are yours? I’m thinking about this today because, to be honest, after watching two football games and day-drinking all afternoon, I don’t super feel like writing! But I also told myself I would plan to take breaks from writing, rather than spontaneously taking a break out of laziness.

I tell my reports I want two weeks notice before they take time off from work, but when one of them comes to me saying her family arrives tomorrow, and can she take an extra day off to spend with them, sure, of course I say yes. I’m not a monster. She works hard. and time with family is more important than work anyway. But it’s still time off planned ahead of time, even if it’s the day beforehand. I owe myself the same diligence.

Greetings, friends. Today I want to talk about American football, or, as we call it in America, football.

The reason I am writing this journal entry today is that the 2022 NFC championship game is tomorrow, and I can’t decide whom to root for.

Uh, Schuyler, I can already hear you saying, your redneck is showing.

Yes, yes, but maybe not in the way that you think. I hope you will permit me to dissect my relationship to this uniquely American spectacle.

As I mentioned elsewhere, tomorrow’s 2022 NFC Championship game is not the first time that Jalen Hurts and Brock Purdy will oppose each other in a dramatic football matchup.

The first time was on November 9, 2019. Hurts was a “senior” and starting quarterback for the University of Oklahoma Sooners, when they hosted the Iowa State Cyclones, featuring the sophomore Brock Purdy under center.

I think it’s funny when football people talk about a “quarterback duel”. In point of fact, the “dueling” quarterbacks are never on the field at the same time, except to give each other manly hugs afterwards. They are dueling only in the same sense that solo figure skaters “duel” in competitions.

So I know almost nothing about college football, but Oklahoma and Iowa State are both in the Big-12 conference and are pretty regular rivals. Coming into the game, Oklahoma, who had started the season ranked seventh nationally, were heavy favorites over the unranked Cyclones.

Greetings, friends. Today I want to talk about my Grandpa Mark Sohn.

Technically, Mark was my mother’s grandfather, and then, technically, her mother’s adoptive father. I never met the guy, but he appears in many family stories, always and exclusively as Grandpa Mark.

This past week Adah and I found a cache of family documents, probably passed to our mother from her mother, that illuminates what a larger-than-life character he was for his time. My family, especially those who knew him, are guaranteed to jump on this journal entry with all manner of factual corrections, which I will be forced to print by way of retraction in a future journal entry. Such are the joys of family. I love them.

Anyway. My great-grandmother Adele Aronowsky was born in Bialystok, Poland, and emigrated to the United States as a child. She married a Bernard Meller, and they had a daughter, Lenore, my mother’s mother. It is to Grandpa Ben Meller that I likely owe my male pattern baldness.

Greetings, friends. Emily’s post reminded me that last night was Burns Night. I wish a happy one to all who celebrated. Burns Night, as you are doubtless aware, celebrates the birthday of Robert Burns, or “Rabbie” to his pals, that treasured bard of Scotland.

Burns, as in sick ones, are also what the poet was best known for. He famously excoriated the signers of the 1707 Act of Union with the Kingdom of England:

O would, ere I had seen the day
That Treason thus could sell us,
My auld grey head had lien in clay,
Wi' Bruce and loyal Wallace!

But pith and power, till my last hour,
I'll mak this declaration;
We're bought and sold for English gold-
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

Greetings, friends. I keep forgetting to wish you all a Happy Lunar New Year. In spite of the violence that tarnishes our humanity, or maybe because of it, I hope that those of you who celebrate the season have a fortunate and prosperous year.

I’ll have more to say about the violence, I’m afraid. I still have to answer danbri and my Uncle Pat wants to know why I end all my entries aping Cato.

I did another training run today, two miles on an absolutely abysmal 15:00 pace. Do I need to convert for folks who live in the real world? That’s 3.2 km at 9:23 per klick. Please write and let me know if you would like me to report on my training in metric. My cheeks burn in shame, as I feel Hal frowning sadly at me, while his app accords me “94% compliance” with my training plan for all my efforts. Or maybe the burning sensation is just that I’m overheated and possibly dehydrated.

The truth is I hate running; I merely love having run. As mentioned in a previous episode, your correspondent is not fond of deeply physical labor, or of repetitive tasks, and running is nothing if not both. I have to keep my mind occupied, or I find myself glancing at my watch every 1/20th of a mile to discover that I have traversed only another 1/20th of a mile. (That’s about 1/12th of a kilometer for those of you who have national healthcare.)

Greetings, friends. It is late and I am tired. But the day still has yet to come when I am ready to take a day off from writing. I would like to plan it ahead of time rather than giving up because I was feeling too lazy or exhausted. 15 minutes or 750 words, that’s all I ask. It’s 11:40pm, so I still have time.

Today our realtor came to look at our mother’s house. Actually, she is not our realtor yet, but her agency has an office right up on the highway, not a mile from the house. In New Hampshire, you turn to your family first, and then your neighbors before anyone else. It is how things work here. The realtor was affiliated with Adah’s Girl Scout troop. Her daughter went to school with Adah. Of course we called her first. That’s what you do here.

So I shoveled out the driveway again, and then left to get my celebratory latte. The realtor arrived shortly after I got back.

The realtor was all sun and smiles, as you would expect, and very understanding. She took one look at the place and said we would be putting it on the market “as-seen, as-is” which is to say, it’s a fixer-upper, buddy. She recommended that Adah and I refrain from making capital investments prior to putting it on the market — just fix the things that need fixing, for safety’s sake, make the necessary disclosures, and let the future owners worry about, say, the water supply. Okay then.

Greetings, friends. Everyone talks about the weather, and finally we are doing something about it.

That’s a play on an old, old joke, and I wish it were actually funny. It actually makes me want to crawl under the covers and sob.

I’ve lived on the West Coast for 15 years over the course of my life, most of it in the City and County of San Francisco. Naturally, with the Bay Area’s distinctive climate, the subject of the weather comes up a lot in conversation, especially when you work exclusively over Zoom with people all over the country.

Especially when it comes to snow, or San Francisco’s utter lack thereof. In the twelve years I lived in San Francisco, it never snowed once. But I grew up in Philadelphia, and I’m well acquainted with snow. I loved snow as a child. School got canceled for the day, you could go out and play in it, go sledding, build snow figures, make snow angels, throw snowballs, the works.

Greetings, friends. Today feels like it has been an immensely long day, even though I have barely been up for twelve hours. I have been staying at my mother’s in New Hampshire, where there was a foot of snow on the ground when I flew in on Friday, and another foot of snow is falling as I write this.

I slept in this morning, because I badly needed it, and got out of bed just in time for Adah to come over with coffee, bless her, so that we could dig back into the, shall we say, situation, that is our late mother’s house.

Yesterday, she and I went through the house and dug out every piece of historical re-enacting kit and loose fabric we could find, while Keith bagged up my mother’s old lady wardrobe for good will. We are expecting a number of her historical re-enacting friends to come over Wednesday to help us begin to filter through it.

That was yesterday. Today, we decided to pivot to the somewhat more sedate task of sorting through our mother’s papers and mementos. We threw away a lot of unopened and outdated mail, and then got to the good stuff. Some of it was delightful and some of it was heartbreaking.

Greetings, friends. I hope you are feeling better rested today than I am. In spite of having waxed lyrical yesterday about the wonders of modern air travel, one downside of being able to cross the northern United States in a little over five hours is that, in mid-winter, you manage to miss daylight almost completely. I was already going crosseyed at the carpets in PDX a quarter hour after the sun came up, and it had fully set by the time I collected my luggage at Logan. To be honest, it kinda messes me up.

A little less than 12 years ago, I was huffing and puffing up Divisadero Street in San Francisco, in a tank top, shorts, and trainers, covered in sweat, when who should I come across but Shannon and Besha sitting in the sun at a table outside Bean Bag Café. I stopped to say hello.

“Schuyler’s training for Bay to Breakers,” Shannon explained.

Besha hoisted her beer in salute. “So am I,” she said.

Greetings, friends. I hope you are well. The big news here is that Besha and I went to the Oregon Symphony last night to hear a two-fer: Brahms’s Symphony no. 4, one of my all-time favorites, followed by Itzhak Perlman performing Bruch’s Violin Concerto no. 1.

The evening’s aperitif was a piece by Samuel Barber called Overture to The School for Scandal, which was lively and delightful. The composition cast Barber in a very different light from his better-known, and IMHO, dreadfully boring Adagio for Strings. The overall impression was almost cinematic, as if Barber had been busy during his conservatory days consuming a steady diet of Stravinsky and maybe Gershwin. Which he probably was.

About Brahms 4, well, what is there to say. His last symphony is the culmination of the entire Romantic era of Western music, plain and simple, and I will fight anyone who wants to debate me on that.

Last night’s orchestra performance was impeccable. After the crashing finale to the opening Allegro, the conductor paused, then turned to the audience to quip, “… and that was just the first movement!”

Greetings, friends. How are you? I woke up groggy as usual but I’m feeling pretty good this morning. AutoSleep says I’m down to 4.4% sleep debt, which is my lowest in months. I think Besha’s good habits are rubbing off on me. I actually like getting up early now, even though this is my first time living north of the 45th parallel, which means rising before dawn in the Pacific Northwest winter. It makes me feel virtuous and productive.

Speaking of virtuous habits, I have been keeping up with Hal’s half-marathon pre-training program. I can run almost two miles without stopping now, and a good thing, too, because [fanfare] Michelle and I both got tickets to run the Brooklyn Half marathon in May! I am unreasonably excited to be cursing myself and my foolish ambitions of self-improvement about ten miles in, somewhere between Bensonhurst and Gravesend.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten some lovely responses from several of you in the last week that I’d like to touch on.

Eric and Jana, I hope you’re paying attention, because here’s some Latin for you.

Greetings, friends! This is entry #7, which means it’s been a whole week since I promised myself I would write 750 words or for 15 minutes every day. I will give myself a modest pat on the back. I can only aspire someday to match Rick’s 800-plus series of journal entries. It would seem contrary to my habits, but I’m already working on an 890 day Duolingo streak. Y pues, ya puedo hablar un poco español. I am an aging and lazy man, but I am finding the development of new habits of self-care extremely satisfying.

As of today, my memorial to Aaron Swartz has gotten 90-odd likes on Facebook, whereas my invective-filled rant about creeping white supremacism has gotten 11. I am permitting Facebook to leverage my journal to sell ads for your eyeballs, and undoubtedly a slightly sentimental recollection of an old friend is better for user engagement than a dark political screed. Apparently the almighty Algorithm values one over the other at a ratio of at least 8-to-1. It’s weird to see AI shadowbanning in such stark relief. All hail the mighty Algorithm!

Accordingly, I have pulled the covers off and made the journal public again. I wanted Quinn to be able to read my earlier post without having to sign up by email. I want Iván to have his RSS feed. I’d like my crotchety old Dad to be able to peer in now and again.

Greetings, friends. I have a fun topic for you today. Let’s talk about privilege, shall we?

[a dozen browser tabs close shut in unison]

Alka replied yesterday to say:

I appreciate the dialog, the way you ended acknowledging the privilege to own these arms.

Greetings, friends. First, let me say thank you to everyone who responded or commented on yesterday’s post.

I’ve been wrestling for the few days that I’ve been journaling in view of my friends as to whether or not to make this project fully public. My Facebook account is default private, but I started out with the Substack open by default. I thought about it for a day or so, and then switched the Substack to private, with approval required for subscription.

First off, this journal is addressed to you, my friends. Says so in the title. You are allowing to me to engage in a kind of (mostly one-way) group therapy, in which I have the freedom to be fairly open and honest and even, yes, vulnerable. Keeping it private like LiveJournal in the olden days, when dinosaurs crossed the information superhighway in large herds and modems creaked in the darkness.

But on the other hand, I do have ideas that I want to share, some of them quite passionately. I think our human world as a whole is, not to put too fine a point on it, utterly fucked, in at least a couple different ways. I do not see this view being widely promoted in the mainstream, nor so much views on what to do about it. Sure, everyone knows that global climate change is happening, and fascism is on the rise everywhere, but what are we going to do about it? Oh, maybe not everyone knows that. Well fuck.

Greetings, friends. This past week was the 10th anniversary of the passing of Aaron Swartz, a fact to which I was alerted by a Facebook post of Rich’s. Obviously I can’t believe it’s been that long.

I know it is poor form to speak ill of the dead, but they were human in life, once. I think people have poured into Aaron’s memory that which they wanted to see in him, but to me it all feels like a cardboard cutout of who he really was.

Aaron was, to say the least, exasperating. I met him at some open wireless spectrum thing hosted by Lawrence Lessig at Stanford circa 2002. What I remember from that first meeting was going out for lunch with him and Cory Doctorow and, in my recollection, Wendy Seltzer at a Thai restaurant in Palo Alto. Aaron poured over the menu at the restaurant and wound up ordering white rice. He was a supertaster, apparently, which was a thing I had never heard of.

He was absolutely brilliant, no doubt. Aaron was 14 going on 44, able to keep up with the intellectual heavyweights in the tech industry before he was old enough to shave. And he was possessed of a profound sense of justice, and fairness, and freedom, and he was determined to work for it. But he was also obstinate, he loved to thumb his nose at authority, and he was intensely competitive.

Greetings, friends. As is now standard, some corrections: Kellan kindly wrote me this morning to explain that “reduction in force” absolutely does constitute a kind of legal positioning. I can’t say I’m surprised. I probably should’ve looked it up first. The opinions expressed in this journal are strictly my own, et cetera, ad nauseam.

Also, 30 years ago I did still fantasize about making a living as a writer. Specifically, I was fifteen and I wanted to be a “poet” but after the fashion of Jim Morrison. No one should be surprised by this and some of you may remember it. (Looking at you, Moon.)

25 years ago, even, I was still an ill-fated creative writing major at Temple University. 20 years ago, oddly enough, I was still working as a software engineer at what had been until very recently still called “O’Reilly & Associates”, and the following year they would give me and Rich and Jo a contract to write a book.

So maybe I have always wanted to write, and write for a living, and I would still if given the chance. I still don’t want your money for this though. And at this point, writing would probably slot in at best third on my list of desired backup careers, after astrophysicist (you know, like Brian May), and voice-over artist. Maybe fourth, now that I’ve seen Ford v. Ferrari.

Greetings, friends. First things first — it is entirely characteristic of me to write a first journal entry, and then, in the immediately subsequent entry, have to publish several factual corrections. Michelle ran a 10k, not a 5k, and I mixed up Kimmie’s Morning Pages practice with Kellianne’s 750words.com writing tool. The latter are similar in premise but not the same! My apologies to all three brilliant people whom I admire. Also, I will never not think of Kellianne as “Moon”.

Speaking of Moon, she posted yesterday her own journal entry, and credited me alongside Rick with inspiring her to journal more publicly. I love it when friends bring out the best in each other. I hope Moon and I both keep it up the way Rick has. Someone commented that it’s like 2003 all over again. I eagerly await the widespread resurgence of cheese sandwich blog posting.

The layoffs yesterday… could have been worse. No one on my team was affected and our current goals and scope of responsibility remain unchanged, for which I am truly grateful. I got to hand-pick the team of five engineers I supervise, and as I told them this morning, I am grateful every day when I sit down to work that I get to collaborate with such talented people. I always feel good after giving a pep talk. I don’t know if I do it for them or for me.

About 15% of the company was laid off, including, somewhat surprisingly to me, that same proportion of the Engineering department. To digress a moment, the company leadership unfailingly refers to the event as a RIF, which is shorthand for a “reduction in force”. While not technically inaccurate, the term to me smacks of a kind of disingenuous doublespeak. The more prosaic and commonly-used “layoffs” seems too tawdry, too indelicate, and therefore we must apply a more technical and impersonal euphemism, which we further euphemize by reducing to a three-letter acronym, which we pronounce as riff, like the guitar lick.

Greetings, friends. Today I’m starting what I intend to become a habit of writing daily and sharing it with you. I’m inspired partly by Kimmie’s 750 words a day journal and Rick’s Good Morning. Hello. How Are You?, the latter of which he crossposts to Facebook, and which the Algorithm has decided I want to read every morning. And it turns out, I sort of do want to read every morning what Rick has been thinking about. Sometimes he’s ruminating about culture or politics, and sometimes he’s talking about what his daughter said to him at breakfast, but Rick is a pretty interesting guy. I often learn things from his journal, and at the very least I get a warm fuzzy feeling from witnessing a friend’s train of thought rumble through the same mountain tunnel at exactly the same time of day every day.

So here we are. I don’t expect, and indeed don’t care whether anyone ever bothers to read this, but I do want to develop a habit of writing, and almost nothing motivates me more reliably than a sense of social obligation. If I have told you that I intend to write 750 words or for 15 minutes daily, whichever comes first, then I’m about 10000% more likely to actually do it.

In like fashion, it’s worth me mentioning here that I messaged Michelle over the weekend to congratulate her on running her first 5K, and she told me that she was training for the Brooklyn Half Marathon in May. Running a half marathon has been on my bucket list for years, and of course seeing an opportunity to hitch that intention to a bit of social accountability, I immediately offered to run it with her, and that led to me signing up for the Brooklyn Half ticket lottery. We shall see if either Michelle or I actually get a bib, but, if not, there are other races out there.