“Corrections officers” are quitting their jobs caging and humiliating Americans so that they can work for ICE rounding up, deporting, and detaining minorities in concentration camps.
Remember, kids: people who take jobs meting out cruelty for money shouldn’t be respected or trusted.
I imagine a future in which everyone is free. In that world we spit in the faces of everyone who once worked as a kidnapper and cager.
Have you ever been arrested? All my homies and all my heroes have been arrested.
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Twelve years ago (it feels like a lifetime ago) I hosted Morning Prayer at a church a few blocks from where I live now, across the street from where I lived then. Three days a week a few nice Kensington ladies would sit with me in a 150-year-old church building in the heart of Kensington and we’d pray through the Book of Common Prayer’s Morning Prayer service. Sometimes nobody showed up. On food pantry days I had a few regulars who would hang for prayer before helping set up. Before start time we’d sit around and bullshit.
One morning I was saying how nice my week-long trip to Colorado had been, thanking them for holding down Morning Prayer and the food pantry in my absence. I told the sweet ladies about the three-night backpacking trip Naomi and I had gone on, showed them pictures of bighorn sheep and elk, rambled about my Grandfather’s ranch, described what a legal cannabis dispensary is like. Sue was happy for me, smiling, listening along, nodding. God bless Sue. We still had a few minutes before Morning Prayer. “What’s the best vacation you ever went on?” I asked.
“I never had a vacation.” She paused. “Well, that’s ungrateful. When my brother was locked up in central PA we went out there. Took the kids. Stayed in a motel that had a pool. They had a lot of fun.”
“That’s ungrateful,” has haunted me for over a decade.
Sue’s dead now. Lung cancer. Her memorial was the same week as a local bartender. I barely knew him. We knew each other’s names. He got killed by a motorist right outside Atlantis, a bar where he worked and I’ve spent hundreds of hours of my life. I pass his ghost bike often. I skipped both funeral get-togethers. I was tired of people dying and me having nothing to say.
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“My friends are all dying or already dead.” -The Hold Steady
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Ebikes are cool. We just bought one. The tech is moving fast, the questions of sustainability and repairability get me preoccupied with my usual hemming and hawing about the implications of adopting a new technology.
“Ebikes are bikes” is an obnoxious mantra of the pro-ebike crowd. OK. A car is a horseless carriage. A motorcycle is a bike too and a vanilla soy latte is a three-bean soup. Not helpful.
The Amish are embracing ebikes.
Say what you will about the Amish, they take the social implications of technology seriously.
Ebikers are often annoying to share public space with. The doordash guys on the rented ebikes whizz past me on the sidewalk and I don’t like it. One e-scooter guy crashed into my shoulder and then said “Watch it bro.” I was walking in a straight line on a sidewalk. You watch it bro. Sharing space with light motorized transportation like ebikes isn’t statistically dangerous, but it feels unsafe and that’s not nothing. “Feels unsafe” and “is unsafe” are different things, and I’d like public spaces that neither feel unsafe nor are unsafe.
I’m not anti-ebike. Toting seventy pounds of children about on a regular ol’ bicycle would be nothing but a joy to me if not for the goddamned cars everywhere. I'm in no hurry. With low enough gearing no load or hill is impossible. But the motorists with their loud noxious deathmachines honking and yelling have made it unpleasant and I wanted to be able to accelerate faster from traffic lights and have the kids in a more crash-proof seat than the ones they were on before. To keep them safe from cars, the real enemy.
Ebikes and e-scooters have displaced 4x as much fossil fuel demand as electric cars according to this article.
Ebikes get cars off the road. They are more fun to operate than a car. They are less dangerous than cars, less ugly than cars, require less physical public space to accommodate their use, encourage more neighborliness than cars, are less noisy/stinky/unsightly than cars. Yay ebikes. I’m a curmudgeon and a hater but don’t let anybody tell you I’m anti-ebike.
I’m pro-bicycle. I think calling an ebike a type of bicycle is as unhelpful as calling breakfast cereal a soup. A taco is a sandwich. Socks are very short crotchless pants. Once you fasten your seatbelt, a car is a kind of belt-mounted clothing accessory. Something can be technically true whether or not it is pedantic and unhelpful.
Maybe this is a pointless diatribe. This blog is free to read and may subject you to the things I think about, most of which are probably less important than they feel to me.
Ebikes are a new combination of technologies that are shaping their users and society at large. Cool. Let’s be honest about it and not just say they’re bicycles. They’re something else, something new. A good thing I think.
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“Move fast and break things,” the motto of “tech” “innovators” is so sad and cynical. Move slowly and repair things. That’s what an ent would say. I’ve been working through my mending pile.
I own more clothing than necessary or reasonable, largely because I refuse to admit that an article is worn out. I tell myself it won’t even sell if donated to the thrift store so I keep it in the “to-be-mended” pile which is a large box in the closet.
Darn it dammit. I got this cozy green sweater well over a decade ago from the thrift store. It is soft and not itchy. 100% wool. Maybe a merino or cashmere or lambswool blend? Tag came off long ago. Tons of holes. I’ve darned the big ones.
When my friend Stephen worked at Philly Aids Thrift and I was a barista at a coffee shop that no longer exists he brought me this shirt which had some kind of blemish that made it unsellable. No idea what it was. It’s been worn hundreds of times now, all but one button sewn back on, both elbows patched, some holes here and there mended. Wool.
This wool cardigan was pilfered from my late grandfather’s closet. It’s not busted/repaired. I just got in the mood for show and tell and now you have to see more of my cute outerwear.
Shetland wool. Poppies. From eBay. Hand-framed in Scotland.
Shetland wool. Thistles? Surprisingly warm. Fits too tight. Oh well. Thrifted. Also knitted in Scotland.
Thank you for attending my fashion show.
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“He who has two coats should give to him who has none.” My boy John the Baptist said that. I relate to him despite my ungodly quantity of outerwear. Do you think he was disappointed in Jesus? Do you think when they pulled him from his cell to chop his head off he still believed that a new order was being ushered in by the Jesus man he’d baptized? What was John wrong about? What was he right about? I like the Grunewald altarpiece where he’s just pointing at the catastrophe of the crucifixion. J the B dedicated his life to pointing to this Jesus person but did he understand who this Jesus was? Do any of us? Some, like myself, feel compelled to keep pointing at this lynched godman, unsure what it all means, how it all works, but sure it means something, something that could save us from the kind of world where kings behead their critics.
Saint John the Baptizer, pray for us.
It’s funny that the text portrays him as this deranged filthy bug-eating freak who says shit like, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee the coming wrath!? GTFO! A savior is coming and he’ll burn you alive! You are less special than a rock!” and 15th century painters are like, “OK, my assignment is to paint him. I guess I’ll draw an albino hallmark baby snuggling with a lamb.”
I get it. The lamb is Jesus. He’s pointing at Jesus.
A pigeon is a dove. A dove is a pigeon. How differently would you perceive the story of Jesus’ baptism if the Bible said, “the spirit of God descended on Jesus like a pigeon,” rather than “the spirit of God descended on Jesus like a dove?”
I love pigeons. Dirty homeless sky-rats with iridescent purples and greens shimmering, those haunting unreal red eyes. Sacred messengers, harmless invaders, pictures of God Among Us irreverently defecating on our monuments.
I dig the Orthodox icons of J the B. He’s got that mangy hair.
The most metal ones are the ones where he’s got his own decapitated head on a platter. John the Forerunner, haunter of the dreams of kings who think themselves gods, pray for us.
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Some Wikipedia pages I have enjoyed reading or consulting recently:
Contrafreeloading
It turns out animals prefer to work for their food. Except for cats. So stop giving free lunch to animals that aren’t cats I guess.
Inequity Aversion In Animals
Some animals don’t like when resources are unequally distributed. Some animals either don’t care or understand.
Clever Hans
There once was a horse and it looked like he could do math and solve puzzles. Turns out he just moved around in ways that seemed to make his trainer happy. He had no idea how to do math. He was a horse.
Mohair
Mohair is the yarn made from the wool of the Angora goat, not to be confused with Angora wool, which is the yarn made from the fur of the Angora rabbit. I wonder if anyone has made a sweater out of a blend of Angora goat hair and Angora rabbit hair.
A wiki page a day keeps the sadness at bay.
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In praise of Book Trader at 2nd & Market:
Characteristics of an excellent used book store: stacked to the ceiling with books, located somewhere I travel past regularly, has cozy reading nooks, reasonable prices, a cat, fond memories of specific books I stumbled upon there.
Book Trader checks the boxes. They will also buy your books for store credit. The prices are reasonable enough. No, they won’t buy them for cash money. I like this policy. Keep book money for books. Money is pretend. Books are real. They don’t call you to tell you how much they’ve credited you for the crate of books you’ve dropped off. You just magically have more store credit next time you check out. I like this.
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Craig Finn is a lyrical genius. His most recent album is probably my most-listened-to record of 2025. He captures the devastating banality of unnameable longing. The characters in the songs are credibly unremarkable and there’s this sense that it’s because of their ordinariness, not despite their ordinariness that they’re worth the attention and description.
I like James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk for the same reason. A sex scene between two people the author has repeatedly assured us are emphatically not Hollywood pretty leaves the reader cheering for them. It’s their being loved that makes them lovable.
“I believe in love because I’ve been in love and I loved right back,” sings Craig Finn on the Hold Steady song Our Whole Lives.
“Dana I don’t get depressed anymore except possibly December on the Delaware shore, or maybe missing numbers on the motel doors, the toy section at this drug store.” Fuck, that’s so good. Hey, I’ve burrowed my way out of the haunting despair and it only pops up all over the place every time I see grassy weeds growing in a parking lot or a million other real things.
His music describes a world in which there are no places or people that don’t matter, that everywhere I go there’s holy ground, everyone I meet is somebody’s everything. Every particular ordinary place is in its own way haunted by just being what it is.
I have a tramp stamp of a Hold Steady lyric about a tramp stamp of a resurrection/boner double entendre. You only get one skinsuit to wear in this short life— may as well decorate it whimsically. It’s only on there til you die, barring dismemberment. And it’s not long til you die!
Damn right I’ll rise again. Yeah, damn right you’ll rise again
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Lonely country. Lonely people. I recently heard one in eight Americans say they don’t have any close friends. I lucked out. Here are some things which I credit at least partially with my continuing stupid good luck in regularly seeing friends and being surrounded by community. List in no particular order:
-talk to people on the bus
-make an effort to live within “slipper distance” of people you love. I live within a five minute walk of a half dozen people I have asked, with little to no notice, to babysit for as little as a half hour and as much as a few hours.
-organized religion
-organized labor
-book club
-engage in civic and/or activist work with a group chat, discord channel, or similar.
-be a regular at a bar or coffee shop
-Spread the word if a home near yours is up for rent or sale. “Intimacy scales with proximity,” my friend Wes the idealist of a realtor says. My daughter flushed his car’s key fob down the toilet when I last borrowed his car. He has staging furniture stored in a vacant property I’m restoring. Neighborliness! It’s fun! Go live super close to your homies.
-Take any neighbor up on any offer. If they said you can borrow their car sometime just go borrow it. They’ll feel more comfortable asking you for things after that. We’re here to do things for each other. Borrow things from friends and neighbors. You don’t need to own a sledgehammer and a pickaxe. In fact not owning them is an excuse to knock on your neighbor’s door every six months and say, “Hey can I borrow that pickaxe again?”
-Host lots of parties.
-Attend lots of parties.
-Ride a bicycle. Wave at pedestrians/crossing guards/neighbors.
You don’t have to do anything I say. I didn’t intend the list to come off preachy. Add to the list in the comments if you like.
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I do not have a natural aptitude for navigating bureaucracies. I admire people who do it well for good. I’m married to a social worker who is an absolute pro at submitting the right forms to the right people to get people housed/fed/legally defended. I wish a liberated future didn’t lie down a road paved with properly-filed forms but it seems it does. As a union man I wish praxis looked more like slashing the boss’s tires than filling out grievance forms to negotiate with a supervisor in preparation of building a case to send to arbitration or uploading documents to the NLRB through a glitchy portal. Alas, my union steward tenure has included no tire-slashing.
Mamdani’s good at bureaucracy. Here’s a Dissent Magazine article worth reading.
I admire David Graeber and he is a significant influence on my thinking. According to this article, he once debated Peter Thiel, who is shockingly stupid and evil, who said, “There’s a disturbing amount I actually agree with David on here.” That’s unnerving!
I liked Graeber’s book about bureaucracy. I read it too long ago to offer you a good summary.
Not the phrasing used in the article, but my long-standing take on this tension on the left is we’ve let too much get muddied by the anti-“big-government” rhetoric from Reagan and his successors. It’s a framework that makes no sense. The right loves big government when “the government” is a lethal machine of foot soldiers domestically and abroad wielding expensive cutting-edge massacre technology. The left thinks “the government” is an efficient means to provide services and build infrastructure to allow more people to thrive and live fuller easier more joyful lives. “Big government” rules when they do things like provide free public restrooms. "Big government" sucks when it bombs kids in other countries.
Is the government bureaucracy good? You talking about the war machine or choo choo trains?
You’ve read enough of my thoughts. Read the article. It’s given me something to mull over. What does the “anti-establishment” left and “anti-establishment” right have in common? And who does it really serve when we burn down an institution? I was born with a burn-it-down disposition. A few decades in I’m trying to learn what’s worth fixing or building instead. Still think there’s lots we ought to burn down.
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Lent, my favorite liturgical season, starts this week. It's not as marketable as Christmas or Easter. Not so easy to sell kitsch when the season's message is this: Shit's fucked up and you'll die.
Have a blessed Lent.
Love these rambling tales and your Scottish sweaters! You’re the best!!