The Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts can suck it. The vertical playground at Swampoodle is one of The Childe’s favorite places to play.

It is near several places we make regular errand runs to and, in addition to climbing fun, it provides him a vantage point to observe the train traffic coming in and out of Union Station (The Childe is a trainspotter, although he does not yet know this term).

Like many park areas with something interesting for different groups, it is a small oasis in the city. We need more such things for all of us. (We also need the city to keep the drinking fountains in clean, working order in all the parks. I did just put in a 3-1-1 request with regards to Swampoodle’s drinking fountain.)

This says nothing about me (except to significantly explain my stint of SAHD duty in the latter case), but I am proud to know people directly involved in each of these efforts:

I don’t have to let go of my broader and deeper political critiques to appreciate some of this progress.

This’ll do.

A lot of security in my neighborhood (or the adjacent one, anyway), including out of town police known for instigating violence with demonstrators, to protect a war criminal running out on a international warrant for his arrest.

Everyone else's ego running my world

I still cannot claim genuine and deep sports-ball fandom, but today was a day where I was glad to have a couple of sports to distract me for most of the day. On very light reflection, I see the age-old (can it even be) irony in that I traded hating the decisions of couple of egocentric competitive madmen on the national and world stage for getting entertainment out of a particular one in a fast car and another couple-three that were on bikes.

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Here we go… hold on tight!

Me: I don’t like this timeline man. Not a new thought, but I tried to make peace with it and find sources of optimism or outcomes to hope for and angle towards and fuck fuck fuck.

Friend: Yup. 110%.

Caught up with the most recent episode of Maron’s podcast & enjoyed the bit in his usual rambling opening where he called out Trump on not citing his sources, being a coward for not giving credit to Hitler.

Design to survive the sacrifice

This feels like design for sacrifice zones… I’m not sure I believe that, but I hate the ideas that both people may need things like this and that whatever capital went into this has been dwarfed just by the fight to keep burning fossil fuels, never mind the wealth extracted and costs externalized on our lives by the continued burning.

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A good trick is not being too high on being present, when one is lucky enough to experience that, to not capitalize on what you might notice.

I don’t think I’ve learned that trick yet.