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.
Adjourned to the porch.
I said “it’s gonna freeze tonight, going to take the hose off, back in a minute.” The hint to the contrary was the whiskey in hand.
Shame on The Guardian. They took the coward’s way. They could have done the work of linking or adding the context they suddenly feared was missing. Meanwhile, these words, whatever each of us make of them, will only proliferate more—Barbra in full effect.
My son meets his mortality in a storybook
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.
The Hell I do not believe in is real
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!
Maybe someday I will again travel solo (and not for work). As it stands, it’s before dawn in Seattle. I am “awake” with my very East Coast time-zoned toddler watching the nth episode of Super Kitties. This has been true for a while already this morning. And sure, I’m still grateful if bleary-eyed.
I believe in truth and reconciliation, full accountability of each and every one of those with power or who exercise violence, and in a zero state solution.
Maybe someday we’ll learn.
On what little patch of Earth will be left that we hope to sustain.