Telling You Today: September 25, 2025
Dear Friends,
I just got back from walking Birdy on a short loop through the neighborhood. On work from home days, usually Thursday and Friday, I'm sedentary compared to my typical M-W, which at the very least has me biking 30-40 miles just to commute. Wednesdays, at least for a few more weeks, I'll join one or another social bike ride that might add 15 or 20 to that. But the second half of the week I'm pretty much just at home. So I'm trying to revive my habit of longer evening walks with the dog on some of those evenings to balance out sitting at a computer.
Of course, Birdy is getting old - 13 we believe, and often by 5pm seems set on just a perfunctory trot down the block to excrete before heading back to slurp down some mushy canned meat. A walk around the neighborhood is still nice though, and I always see something that makes me glad I went out, like a young mother pointing out a grasshopper on the sidewalk to two skeptical toddlers. While walking today I also noticed the September sun was not so blistering as it was a few weeks ago, but it was notably humid in a way that isn't ordinary here.
For those following from afar, the ICE raids have been subdued in L.A., at least compared to June. But an impressive community network is consistently spotting agents in nearby parking lots, and they are still kidnapping and deporting people, just not in showy spectacles. Also I just learned there were predator drones over the protests in June.
Over the last couple of months I've been reading the books that comprise Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun , which I've enjoyed a lot for its immersive strangeness. I'm a sucker for getting lost in a tome.
Also worth checking out:
- Speaking of The Sun, the Bill McKibben piece I raved about last time is but an excerpt from his new book Here Comes the Sun. I have it on hold at the library and I have high hopes. As Cory Doctorow writes in a review, "Everything else might be utterly fucked, but solar is going great." If there's a thing to be hopeful about, it's the spectacular, civilization-altering energy transition that most people I know seem to not have any awareness of.
- I loved this dispatch from Rebecca Solnit, not least because it goes in some unexpected directions, connecting human solidarity and the instinct to care with buddhist teachings, culminating in a formulation which I felt connect various threads I've been chasing recently: "we are not mutual because of the provision of aid; we aid each other because we are already mutual."
- Heather Cox Richardson wrote this brief history of the death of Rubén Salazar from a Los Angeles County Sheriff deputy's rubber bullet 55 years ago. Deputies are still firing projectiles at journalists today (and sometimes at the LAPD lol).
- I don't really know much about Evelyn Quartz but I enjoyed her examination of the military occupation of D.C. through a lens critical of both the fascist invasion and the "liberal technocracy" that enabled it (and our current regime). Writing like this is great elucidation of why I consider myself a leftist and not a liberal, though I sometimes have trouble explaining the difference succinctly.
- On a lighter note, we watched Such Brave Girls last month and I fucking loved it. Maybe not the best time to recommend a hulu show, and also this show talks about suicide constantly, but trust me it's hilarious.
Anyway, here's some pictures!
