In the Natural History Museum we made a pitstop at the rest room for my sake. Someone was using an air blower to dry their hands as we entered. The Childe hates these. The sound is overwhelming for him. He clamped his hands over his ears and said, “Daddy, don’t use that!” I replied that I would not if I had paper towels to dry my hands, reinforcing that I also had to wash my hands after using the bathroom, just as he does.
I was short with my father on the phone today. I couldn’t take his fatalist “it will get worse,” (and he’s a Trump voter) point of view. It may seem ironic to some who know me, because I also can say “It will get worse” — before it gets better. I think I am still not fatalistic, but my hoarder, prepper, some-kind-of-Republican father, who doesn’t even think Trump will fix things, is.
To be fair, I am worried when I see hashtags on my tictacs.
…but I wish this hearing wasn’t so full of grandstanding to promote poor solutions to horrible problems. Not that I am particularly sympathetic to the witnesses.
But what’s new?
The 25th annual State of the World thread on The Well has commenced. This is one of my favorite rituals. It can get a little hard on the “catastrophizing,” a little digressive, and it isn’t necessarily the most inclusive… it is what it is, and that is part of what makes it interesting. Not necessarily the be-all end-all on the “state of the world,” just this particular group’s (whoever that happens to be at a given time) sense, as much as they can write it out, as much as you or I might chime in, at that moment.
Sky News had a split screen for the funeral of Shane MacGowan and the United Nations Security Council meeting on the UAE resolution for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict. Sadly, unsurprisingly, we expect the United States to veto this call. Perhaps these were seen as equal events (make no mistake, I am interested in both) because they’re things one might expect Bono to show up to? (Guess which one he [was actually reported to be]* at!
Christmas is the only time my wife lets me pipe jazz over the household Sonos without objection. I make a playlist and sneak in some things that aren’t on swinging Xmas streams—sometimes tracks that aren’t at all seasonal.
Or I let SomaFM do it for me—they love to play.
Tonight we read Dragons Love Tacos 2: The Sequel at bedtime. There’s a point early in the book when a time machine is introduced. You, the reader, are informed that you can go back to when you were a baby or into the future when you’re an old man. I paused and said to my son, “Someday you will be an old man, isn’t that silly?” Or something like that.
Children carrying other wounded children. I’m already incensed, horrified, disgusted at the latest failures of humanity that have produced so many dead children, among so many other dead. But my pacifist tendencies (the word “tendency” is doing a lot of the work, but it does have a breaking point) are tested at the murder and torture of children (as well as state violence pointed right at me—see, I’m ultimately not a pacifist).
The spookiest thing about my son’s Halloween costume—a monster truck—is the carbon footprint of both the imagined thing, and the construction of the costume itself (so much plastic—but we are re-using a cousin’s costume, so there’s that).
It is, literally, an electric powered thing with a battery pack to light-up the headlights and simulate engine revving noises.
We’ll have fun tonight tearing up and down the sidewalks tongiht during this seemingly (and increasingly) rare reprieve where the weather is appropriately seasonal.
Happy Halloween and welcome to Samhain!