There is no other home for you, there is nowhere for you to go, because you are too American. You live in the dead center — the dead, rotting center– of America, of every battle and every misdeed, every hideous thing that was said and done, every cemetery split to accommodate the dead of both the Union and the Confederacy. If they try to carve up the country, you do not know what will happen to your city or your state or your family of your friends. You do not know if you are north or south or east or west. You are a Gateway and a Memorial, you are the Lewis and Clark landing and the Mother Road, you are the Louisiana Purchase and you are one bad bargain.

Sarah Kendzior

It’s been cold and wet, and the dirt path through the woods is slick with mud that clings to the soles of my shoes. The skies are full of clouds; they’ve been that way for a week. But it’s actually quite beautiful in the early morning, when the skeletal oaks and maples and hackberries and sycamores are backlit against the new light of day, monochrome and mystical, a reminder that the new year has not quite arrived, that we are still sweeping the remnants of the old one from our porches, last November’s wet leaves and fairy wings.

I’ve been reading Sarah Kendzior’s They Knew, her latest attempt to wake us from our stupor and acknowledge the mess we’re in. The quote above is from somewhere in its midsection, in a chapter called “America is Purple, Like a Bruise.” Indeed.

Sarah Kendzior lives in St. Louis, three hours to the west of me and north of the confluence of her river (the Mississippi) and mine (the Ohio.) Her sense of belonging to her patch of flyover country — “there is no other home for you” — is not one I’ll ever know; I’m still trying to work out why I’m here. But the overall sentiment, that of being bound up in this dark heart of America, resonates.

As Nanci Griffith sang, “I am guilty, I am war, I am the root of all evil.”

They Knew chronicles the history of rampant corruption and conspiracy within various departments and agencies of the government, and the memory hole into which so many terrible crimes are dumped, all of it compounded by the complacency of those who would rather believe that things can’t be that awful or surely someone would have fixed it by now.

Surely.

The greatest education I ever received was when I worked for a corporate communications firm that specialized in crisis management. It was there that I learned that powerful people are rarely concerned with fixing anything. Why would they be? They are insulated from the brokenness; indeed, the brokenness is often the point, being as it allows for more wealth extraction. Health care, prisons, higher education, news media, housing — why fix what’s broken when you can turn it into a profit center?

This is not cynicism. This is the culture of transaction and extraction expressing itself through its human interlocutors, and those interlocutors are sociopaths.

Just the facts, ma’am.

January is a hard month. A beginning that isn’t. Not the best month, perhaps, to read a book like Kendzior’s, to be reminded that things are awful and nobody’s coming to the rescue.

And the sky is still grey.

But there’s blue up above, and every now and then a gap in the clouds gives us a glimpse of it. (Last Friday that glimpse was named E. Jean Carroll.) So let’s have a potluck, so much more neighborly than a revolution. Bring the guitars. We can sing some songs by Woody and Pete. Maybe I’ll bake a pie.

The woods beckon but it has been cold. I’m reluctant to put on shoes, the cat is not eager to see me go. He knows his meals will be delayed once I’m on the other side of the door.

I’ve been poking around at intentional communities again, even as I know I’ve aged out of the desired demographic of the communities that most appeal to me: income-sharing, labor-sharing. I invite friends for dinner and we all still talk of it, dream of it, but we are all aging out. We will have to find another way to walk away. It was Daniel Quinn, in Beyond Civilization, who wrote that you don’t need to move someplace different to get beyond civilization, you just need to make your living in a different way.

And aye, there’s the rub, for we are all tired of making our living. Of sitting at desks, tapping on keyboards, of looking at last month’s p&ls and saying, “There’s no way we can keep this going.”

The rich live on leverage. The rest of us pay cash. Except no one wants our cash these days, they want the intermediated data stream of ones and zeros, where profit is extracted with every transaction, and we are all, yet again, both consumer and consumed.

I try on my old wool coat, the one I’ve been wearing for ten winters or more. The lining is torn and there is a hole in the pocket through which my lip balm regularly escapes; I know I will find it at season’s end, hiding somewhere in the hem. The coat feels constricting, too many layers underneath, or maybe I’ve just gotten fat. It’s not a hiking sort of coat, but my woods is not a hiking sort of woods. It is a strolling woods, a flat expanse along the river’s edge, bisected by the levee, the access road. You never escape the drone of civilization in this woods, the murmur of traffic on the highway, the trucks hauling gravel from the crushed stone company at the bend in the river. Still, there is leaf mulch underfoot, and the occasional call of a hawk overhead.

I sense a hollowness in this year’s wintering, when no snow has yet fallen and the hours pass undifferentiated. I tap at the core of these days and hear an echo of winters past, but when I reach inside there is nothing there.

And perhaps the lesson is: don’t reach.

Just walk. There is ground beneath your feet even as your fingers find the hole in your pocket, worrying it with your probing and making it worse.

I read that we are falling into superstition, giving in to magical thinking, that we were this close to ending history when it all went pear-shaped. Woe is us. I listen to podcasts in which the host exhorts us not to give in to despair, but at what point do you say, this is not despair, this is the sanity of adaptation: to walk in the woods that is not really a woods, because it is the only woods you have.

---

_{^{(Photo Credit: A New & Accurate Map of the World ca 1651, NYPL)}}

I didn’t intend to write again so soon, but I woke up to rain this Christmas morning and this song came to mind, so here you go. 

He supposedly said he didn’t intend it as a Christmas song but of course that’s what it is, released in the fall of 1975, when the dreamscape of onward and upward forever and ever amen was beginning to pixelate, and evidence that we’d been sold a fairy tale of grand proportion had become rather difficult to ignore.

A Wiki page tells us Greg Lake wanted his composition – lyrics by poet Peter Sinfield of the prog rock band King Crimson – to be understood as a protest against a commercialized Christmas, while Sinfield says the words are about a loss of innocence. I hear both/and. Yes, “I Believe” is a protest. It’s a protest against disillusionment. The title, after all, is not “I Believed” but “I Believe.” It’s a protest wrapped in a yearning and tied with a ribbon scrap of nostalgia. And that’s what makes it a Christmas song. 

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*Not really. It’s just a song.

A year is a long time. Hello.

Let’s call it a sabbatical, from the Hebrew, sabbath, a rest from toil, even though it really wasn’t that. It was a redirect: I toiled elsewhere.

I went to work, I came home. I got up at five every morning and wrote morning pages, and didn’t write anything else for months and months.

---

I read books. Lots of books. Some were good. I liked Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. Liked Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

A good one I started and failed to finish was Timothy Egan’s Fever in the Heartland. Kirkus calls it a narrative about America at its worst. They’re not wrong. It’s a history of the re-emergence of the KKK in the 1920s right here in Indiana. I put it down because it was breaking something inside of me and I didn’t want to be broken like that, not then, maybe not ever, even though the jacket cover told me the good guys win in the end.

I stopped reading when I realized, midway through, that even if they won, it wasn’t the end. Because here we are, a short century later, and a candidate for President is calling us vermin, and enough people are okay with that to have him leading the pack of contenders. By a lot.

What, you didn’t think he was talking about you?

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A few months into the year I helped my kid relocate to their new home a few states away. As I re-arranged the furniture to fill in the gaps left by their departure, I brought my easel back from its garage exile, set it up in the room that holds my dining table, my work desk.

For a few weeks it sat empty in its corner. Sometime in late summer I started painting again.

---

I learned that my house has a name. Not a place-name like Monticello or Falling Water, but a name: Emile. Or Emil. It’s unclear which. I might have more to say about this at some point.

---

Around the time I started painting again, I remembered I was supposed to be working on a novel. I now have what might (generously) be called a first draft. It’s terrible. I don’t care. It exists.

I listened to hours upon hours of interviews with Gabor Maté.

I feng shui-ed my interior rooms. I drew a daily Tarot card.

I talked out loud to Emile/Emil. Asked them how they felt about the new storm door, the new water lines strung across the basement joists. There is a language barrier, and no AI translator that I know of, but from what I can tell they’re indifferent to the storm door, though I suspect they’ll like it more in a month or so, when the cold weather comes and they notice the front room is no longer drafty.

They seem pleased with the water lines.

---

I worked on letting go of my grievances. From the Latin, gravare, grave, to make heavy. Sharing a root with grief, which is everywhere, in multitudes.

Grievance is a burden. A grudge against the world, against what is, after all, just what is. Lay your burden down, say all the great spiritual teachers. Right there would be good. By the curb, where the trash truck can take it away on Wednesday.

Lots of Wednesdays in a year. Lots of opportunity to let that shit go.

Last month, over Thanksgiving weekend, I shuffled the Tarot deck, drew the Three of Cups. An invitation: celebrate with friends and family. So I took myself on a walk in the woods.

Today it rained, and the squirrels chased one another across the roof. Hello friends. It’s been a while.

_{image: wesselmanwoods.org}

When Jason Kottke of Kottke.org went on sabbatical for seven months I missed his blog terribly, so I was happy he returned this month with a long list of the media he consumed during his time away. Lots to sift through: books, movies, games, music, tv series, even a couple of restaurant recommendations, with a line or two of commentary for each, a rating. Worth a look, if you’re in need of fresh consumables.

It’s mid-December as I write this, nearly the end of 2022. I don’t do year-end lists or anything so ambitious as that, but I will note that I read 52 books this year. And there are still two weeks to go. Favorites? Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory, and Liberation Day, a collection of (very strange) short stories by George Saunders.

I have one last book in my audio queue, and one on my nightstand, which happens to be Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation. I thought that one might set the stage for 2023.

When I was younger (so much younger than today) I thought I might become a novelist. I’ve never really abandoned that notion, nor have I pursued it with any real vigor. (Need I remind you that the most popular post on this site is a ten-year-old riff titled, “Lazy. So?”). I do have several unfinished manuscripts laying about, on hard drives and in drawers. I’m thinking I might poke at them in the new year.

Do I detect a bit of ambition after all? Perhaps.

I’m also returning to the piano after a year-long hiatus. Wish me luck.

Meanwhile, I’ll let this here blog sleep in heavenly peace until I have something of consequence to share.

Enjoy the Solstice, dear friends, the shift of the seasons, the slow nights, the long now. Check out Jason’s list. Maybe you’ll find something to set the stage for your own 2023.

As one half of a shared-parenting divorced couple, I have some experience with solo holidays, those years when the kid was with the ex and I just wasn’t feeling it, all the gathering and festivities and so forth. Rather than try to create some alternative for the sake of the season, I would generally just have a day or two to myself, doing what I wanted, which was often nothing much at all.

A movie, a walk by the river. Then maybe another movie.

On those holidays when I was solo, I didn’t share my lack of plans with anyone until after the fact, because when people learn you’re alone for The Holidays^tm they get all sad for you and you have to reassure them that no, no, it’s really okay. And then they seem to feel a need to include you in their own holiday stuff, and bless their generosity of spirit, but no. Those inclusions are awkward and uncomfortable and whenever I’ve accepted them I’ve felt compelled to demonstrate what a good time I was having, which isn’t the way having a good time works.

Now I say, “No, thanks, I’m really looking forward to being with no one at all,” in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a complete misanthrope but still gets the point across.

This year, though, with the kid doing a Friendsgiving out of town, I did make plans. I said yes to an invitation for dinner with a group of friends, bought the ingredients to bring a salad of greens and pears, glazed some walnuts to put on top of it and looked up what sort of dressing I might want to to pour over it (a balsamic vinaigrette with a bit of raspberry.) I was looking forward to it. The salad. The friends.

And then I got a cold. A sore throat. A sniffle. Congestion.

Once upon a time I would have taken a Sudafed and motored on through. These are not those times. As another friend who had to bow out because of the flu said, “I wouldn’t stay home if I didn’t like y’all so much.”

So it’s the cat and me this Thanksgiving, along with this lovely salad. Maybe a movie. And a walk by the river. Then maybe another movie.

After spending election night at my radio station babysitting the live feed for NPR’s election coverage so that I might add the hourly legal ID and break in with any local upsets should they occur (spoiler: they didn’t), I came away with little more than a sense of relief that it was over.

It would take a while to tally everything up, during which time we would be treated to (useless) speculation about whose messaging succeeded and what it all meant, but the clock had run out on the voting part, at least. We could now return to our precarious lives without the ever-present electioneering adding to the crazy.

But no. We could not.

Because elections in the U.S. are now the show that never ends (Welcome back, my friends!)

In an instant, artillery is re-positioned and even as the returns come in, a fresh wave of grievance pours forth. Power struggles commence and agendas are announced that include none of the issues that were the focus of campaigns. Inflation? Yesterday’s news. Today we’re promised investigations and impeachments and a whole lot of wtf.

There will be a run-off for a Senate seat in Georgia, between a man who seems pretty decent and one who… doesn’t.

And of course the season wouldn’t be complete without a reminder that the former president still intends to be crowned king in 2024. Cue the handwringing on the part of those who’d kissed his ring for all these years and now find him a bit of a drag. Something something dogs and fleas.

The people in charge do not want to make the future better or easier or more enjoyable. They want to make more money.

^{Kelsey McKinney}

She’s writing about Ticketmaster — which has a monopoly on major venue concert ticket sales and doesn’t care how awful their system is because, monopoly! — but she could be writing about pretty much anything: the health care system, the legal system. Politics.

If I had to guess I’d say the Republicans’ big takeaway from the midterm elections is not that the American people have voted against the worst of the crazy and would like abortion to be legal, so maybe it’s time to do some soul searching. Heh. No. The takeaway is that states in which they achieved the greatest successes were those that relied on voter suppression and gerrymandering and cruel political stunts that delighted their base.

I expect we’ll see more of all that.

Earlier this year Wired founder Kevin Kelly shared 103 bits of advice in a post on the occasion of his 70th birthday. It was a very popular post.

It was so popular that it’s been updated with the news that the list is to become a book, one that will include selections from a previous list of 68 bits (shared on the occasion of his 68th birthday), and some new bits written especially for the print edition. The original 103 bits in the more recent post (and the 68 bits in the earlier one) have been reduced to a half-dozen teasers, bringing to mind something about a horse and a barn door, but I’m sure there are reasons.¹

“These are not laws,” he wrote. “They’re like hats. If one doesn’t fit, try another.”

I like lists; I enjoyed these. Here’s one bit I tried that fit especially well: “The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.”

Setting aside the quibble that the only reliable prevention against getting old is to die young, I am inspired by the idea of astonishment.

Astonishment is cousin to surprise, only more so. Here’s an example: I was surprised when Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016. I was astonished when he was elected. I remain astonished that people would consider voting for him again.

So, no moss on me, I guess.

But here’s the thing: it takes effort to maintain a capacity for astonishment. It takes effort to hold sufficient space for it, to acknowledge that we don’t know what we don’t know even when we’re pretty sure we do and that no one would ever… oh, look, they just did.

Holding space takes energy. It also leaves us vulnerable. And if we’re (unpleasantly) surprised one too many times, who can blame us for deciding it’s just easier/safer/saner to withdraw from the whole exercise. Let ourselves become a little more jaded. A little less willing to be surprised by anything, let alone astonished.

A little old.

I don’t know about you, but my own energy is in short supply these days. I never had COVID, so it’s not Long Covid. Maybe it’s Long Capitalism. Why not? The professional managerial class that pulls the economic levers is all about mitigating surprise, flattening out experience in the name of efficiency. Not for nothing those quarterly reports and projections.

Which is to say, if we wish to remain astonished and open to the world, we might benefit from a certain disengagement with the all-consuming casino economy.

There are other economies, of course. Economies of place, of mutual aid, of extended families and families of choice, of community support and radical inclusion. Gift economies, cooperative economies. They’re all around us. We’re in them now, we just have a hard time seeing them. The glare from the casino overwhelms, flattens, distracts, enervates.

And after it rains, there’s a rainbow
And all of the colors are black
It’s not that the colors aren’t there
It’s just imagination they lack

Paul Simon, “My Little Town”

We might want to start looking for those other economies, consider that it’s okay to grow old in one or more of them. And also, you know, fuck the casino. At the risk of mixing metaphors, nothing says we have to go down with this ship.

What astonishes you these days?

Personally, I am astonished by sea life. Ponder these prints. Tell me you don’t feel the same.

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¹You can still find the complete lists on other sites. Here is the list of 68. Here is the 103.

For the past two weeks the (only) bathroom in my house has been torn up so that some very old plumbing could be replaced, a process that created a bit of disturbance in my home life. Scheduling with the plumbers, coordinating with the contractor, taking time off work, then more time, hoping they wouldn’t find anything else in need of repair as they went along.

And, of course, wondering how I was going to pay for all of it — which is what we’re all doing do these days, is it not? The wondering, the calculating, the gratitude for days when we don’t have to drive anywhere, don’t have to buy anything, need neither furnace nor air conditioner to keep things comfy, and feeling guilty for wanting things to be comfy when there is drought and flooding and fires and hurricanes and all that going on.

The final bill came in at less than I’d expected. That was a nice surprise.

It was followed by another surprise, though, this one not so nice, when I learned that a project I’d been developing since March at my radio station was not going to be included in the new fiscal year budget. But! They were still very excited to see what I could come up with, given no additional hours or compensation to actually, you know, do the work.

It really doesn’t love you back, does it.

So I’m moving into autumn with six months of oh-well behind me and a season of now-what stretching out ahead. Which isn’t great, but it’s freeing. And let’s be honest. Six months of poking at a project that could have been up and running in six weeks is a good indication that something was amiss all along.

Was it me? Yes, it was me. I was amiss. Remiss. Something.

Though institutional plodding bears some responsibility. So many meetings. So many discussions. So much revisiting. I miss my café days when I could decide on Tuesday to put something on the menu and have it there on Wednesday.

Not that I miss food service. I do not. What I miss is the opportunity to be nimble. My employer — my entire industry — is a lot of (mostly good) things, but it is not nimble. Which is why I’m not hugely disappointed my project was scuttled. Just a little… bummed. Yes. Let’s go with bummed.

There are other projects.

There’s this here blog, for instance.

Meanwhile, mums are appearing on porches, pumpkins, too, for the early adopters. Perhaps I can stop mowing for the season. That’s reason to rejoice.

That, and I’ve got a functional bathroom once again. Two cheers, at least, for that.