Screens so caked with snow, I had to open the door to see the accumulation.
So far, we have only four or five inches but it’s supposed to snow all day. Today’s plans cancelled, of course.
I left the writing retreat early yesterday and so did two others. They were predicting snow for much later in the day for Amherst and even later than that for Boston, but it was already doing SOMETHING at nine a.m. and anyway I was gonna be too tense to be able to write or listen well. It was the right decision.
What I wrote on Saturday and Sunday morning was disappointing in any case. For instance, the scene I produced yesterday started in Henderson, Kentucky and somehow ended up in West Feliciana, Louisiana. Oops. People didn’t know if the daughter was the mother or the daughter or dead or alive. Ha! This kind of feedback is helpful.
Other off-the-cuff writing didn’t land either. One narrator (um, that would be me) was dubbed “smug.” Yikes.
Listening was the best though. It often is at these things. Many phrases and characters will stay with me for a long time (I’m looking at you, Ronna!)
I drove briefly around the UMass campus on Sunday and there were so many new buildings that I barely recognized the place. Oh, there was the library (I liked a carrel on the 11th floor). There was the art complex (topped with solar panels — yeah!) And there was the ugly concrete Campus Center. There memory held — it was ugly in 1978 and remains ugly today.
Didn’t feel a lick of nostalgia.
Speaking of snow and blizzards and memory and the 70’s, I would’ve been at UMass during the Blizzard of 1978. Hmm. I don’t seem to have much memory of it and let me just say that is as good a descriptor of me back in the day as anything.
As for the tariff decision, I’ve been schooled by Hubbell. Let’s take the win, he says. Marshall got it wrong, he points out. Don’t be so defeatist, etc.
Yes, it could have been worse because in this timeline EVERYTHING can be worse. The SCOTUS could have, for whatever reason, hallucinated all over the relevant statute and invented more (MORE!) broad and sweeping executive powers. They properly read and applied the law. Hoo-hey!
Let me emphatically state that I am thrilled Trump lost on this.
I’m baffled as to why the Republicans are allowing this to happen, unless it’s true that they want to get rid of Trump without looking like they’re getting rid of Trump.
Of course Aileen Cannon is cocking up the release of the OTHER volume of evidence. The one where we learn (or so I read) that Trump sold classified information.
Why the last two days of rambling, incoherent, low-energy, wildly inaccurate, and dangerous speeches aren’t enough to send Grandpa packing is beyond me.
Or the Greenland threats. Or Venezuela. Or ICE occupying and attacking blue cities. Or the corrupt pardons, the crypto schemes, the extortion of universities and media companies. Or or or
Is it because Vance wants to be able to serve two terms and if they 25th Trump before X date, he could only serve one?
Or is it just the usual explanation — that the cabinet is a pack of corrupt, power-hungry fools that still find him useful.
The sale of bonds has begun.
Trump will be taking out his frustrations at looking like an ass Davos on us, you can be sure.
The state of Maine, which is 91% white but has a governor who back-talked Trump at a public luncheon, is now under siege.
No one has yet verified or punctured the veracity of the Sascha Riley interview.
A storm is coming.
The joke is : New England will get between zero and 25 inches of snow on Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday.
We need food and I guess I should get out and shop soon before people are going nuts. There’s also a Patriots play off game this weekend which can make grocery stores frenetic as well.
But not this morning. I have testimony to watch.
The best personal news?
An uneventful trip to the dentist yesterday.
For fun we’re watching 11-22-63 where James Franco time travels to try and prevent Kennedy’s assassination.
Digital/analog collages from this week’s Paris Collage Collective.
In yesterday’s AWA workshop, Kathleen Olesky supplied a Langston Hughes poem entitled Tired as a prompt.
Will 50 million protest this weekend? 70 million? If we are all we have, it had better be a good showing — the signs held high, rage surging on the street. We are all we have, our signs, our rage, our collective refusal to go along.
Let us take a knife and slit the skin somewhere obvious, but not life-threatening. Let us then watch vermilion beads of blood form along the edge of our self-inflicted wound. And then let us turn toward a person near, not unlike those handshaking mandates issued from the pulpit, introduce yourself, offer a greeting of peace, except this time let 25 million people turn to the other 25 million people and take blood oaths — “We swear we will not lie down in defeat. We swear fealty to each other. We swear fierce loyalty to our discernment, to our bones filled with the marrow of justice. We let our lungs breathe in freedom, which resides somewhere in our atmosphere, and likely somewhere reachable.”
Our blood-sealed oaths will signal a willingness to protect one another, to go the distance, to scar the skin in service of a better America, an America ready to be restored and go not one, two, or five, but 10 times further in the departments of honest tolerance and government that serves all.
The vermillion beads of blood will not lie, they cannot. Neighbor, put your sign down for one minute and trust my blood as I shall trust yours. We swear. We swear not to give up.
“Is it time for the tar and feathers,” asks one purveyor of the early history of our revolution. Is Renee Nicole Good like the fallen Bostonians of 1770, five of them, whose arbitrary and unfair deaths at the hands of a tyrant’s occupying force triggered the revolution and made Thomas Paine write the pamphlets that ignited the populace to take up arms?
We are all we have both inspires and terrifies.
Five years after the Boston Massacre, which was hardly a massacre but certainly what we would today call a mass shooting, five years later, a resolution was put forth. Thomas Jefferson wrote it. “The Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.” That was 1775. Now 251 years later we ask, we wonder, must we also take up arms? Is that what it will take to redress our grievances, to act in defense of freedom?
I still can’t quite see it, but I can easily imagine canceled midterms and maybe a rerun of Jan 6, this time with rainbow-striped flags.
I am so tired of waiting and wondering how this is all gonna turn out. The ancient political scientist online piping up,“we won’t recover from Donald Trump.” The Canadians on my feed screaming, “Don’t just complain do something!“ causes a private smile at the not very funny circumstance of an insane tyrant, shitting all over America and our allies being what it takes to crack that polite Canadian veneer.
But nothing is funny about this. The stakes are too high. He cannot be allowed to attack Greenland, can he? Little Pixie Speaker of the House says of the Venezuela bombings and abductions (practically under his breath and walking away, always walking away from the cameras), “It’s inappropriate.“
Inappropriate? Is that what we’re calling lawless violent tyranny now?
But honestly, that he said anything even mildly opposed to his Dear Leader shocked me, so complete has been his subjugation. Lindsay Graham crawled out of hiding. Where has he been? Speaking of unabashed Dear Leader recitals. I didn’t remember what an awful bite he has and here I refer to his teeth and jaw, not his powers to menace.
In other news, we can drink again and eat all the meat we want again as long as it’s organic. Things are upside down. So does that mean we can be fat and drunk when the measles rash erupts on chest and neck?
There’s nothing funny about this. We are all we have. I don’t have time to read about how this absolute firestorm of destruction has been decades in the making. No. No. Just swear to me, let our forearm blood, smeared one on the other, act as a pledge that says we are not finished.
The moral arc may have long ago snapped, but it doesn’t mean we are done. Let us become good and kind. Let us become good and kind, even in the face of illegitimate and rampant destruction. Let us breathe and bleed and resume carrying our signs even if we can’t quite believe that that is what it will take.
Later, I will sit down on a bench in Boston Common in view of The Embrace and eat an orange I quartered before leaving the house because no matter what, oranges are tasty in the winter.
There are no worms eating at the rind, no dessication, no mold – just sweet and juicy fruit that eats like sunshine.
Because I’m not actually recounting the events of the day here is a link to a Threads account that does so.
I am walking the dog on Christmas Day and I am glad. I am glad for legs that work and for a dog with boundless curiosity.
This microphone is nice.
I am twisting my neck and I am glad. Glad for functioning vertebrae, glad to have eyes that see, glad to be walking where I am known and where I feel safe.
It is cold and I am glad. Glad to make a home in a state with seasons, in a state where I was born, in a state where I went to college and graduate school, in a state where I worked in an office and in a prison, in a state where both my boys were born.
I am walking on Christmas Day in a neighborhood where the air is cold and I feel safe and I am glad. I am glad that our petty president, whose depravity knows no bottom and whose vanity knows no upper limit, has yet to start a war.
It is not yet noon on Christmas Day and we have no plans and yes, I am glad. I am glad that all the visiting, traveling, baking, roasting, wrapping, and unwrapping is done for the season. I will sit by the fire and watch some show on BritBox or Acorn, grateful for the peace, for the fire, for the streaming services.
I will sew more little Christmas tree ornaments, grateful for my supplies — the needles and beads and cloth and satin cord and polyfill — and my still-working hands.
I am glad that as an officially classifiable dom3stic terr0rist that you, dear readers, don’t need to ask why. I’m glad too that you also are likely classifiable in this new and bogus, fascist-serving category.
I’m grateful that when all is said and done, you and I will have lived on the right side of history — we have protested, written postcards, called our elected officials, donated to critical campaigns, spoken out against genocide, and called out the anti-constitutional everything — even when we weren’t necessarily buoyed by hope.
Home now. The heat comes on. In New England one never takes heat for granted. I’m grateful for that whooshing sound and the warmth it imparts.
Merry Christmas everyone. Even if you’re Jewish. Even if you were raised in a Christian church but don’t believe in Christ (ssshhhh! that makes you a terr0rist!).
I can awfulize with a regularity that’s demoralizing and I might feel defeated too early in cycles of effort, but I carry around a proper reserve of hope, even now. Even now, I believe this country is gonna get through this.
There’s been a great deal of suggestion online lately that being skeptical about the Epstein Bill producing any accountability is some kind of bad Democratic habit of defeat. We don’t know how to take a win, etc. As if skepticism is a function of pessimism instead of the result of being alive for the last ten years. Really?
It’s pissing me off.
I’m sorry if I remember the Mueller hearings. I’m sorry if I read the laid-out obstruction charges and believed the next AG would bring them up. I’m sorry if I was fully invested in the impeachments. I’m sorry if I watched the January 6 hearings with a sense of the inevitability of a Trump takedown. I’m sorry if I listened to endless podcasts, covering every fucking bit of minutiae about all the cases against Trump and cheered on every minor step of progress. I’m sorry if I thought Fani Willis was gonna be the winner.
So forgive me if I’m a little skeptical about the Epstein revelations producing a regime change.
For one thing, it should be clear to everyone that sexual depravity is not gonna bring Trump down. Otherwise he’d have been ousted long ago and certainly not re-elected. The Katie Johnson pleadings have been public facing for years (and yes, I read them and most of the Mueller report). More than two dozen accusers have been on the record for years. And years. Epstein survivors have come forward. There are pictures of trump partying with Epstein for Christ’s sake. There’s his gross and documented incestuous longing for Ivanka. I could go on.
No, it will have to be revelations about Russia. And Israel. And maybe the Saudis. Money. It’s always the money.
That’s why Senator Wyden’s pursuit of bank records interests me more than whatever the DOJ is gonna produce.
I could be wrong about this. I’d happily be wrong.
Will the lame and co-opted Fourth Estate cover it with even a fraction of the energy they devoted to Hillary’s emails? I’m not holding my breath.
The marches, the rallies, the whistleblowing ICE resisters, Mike Johnson’s clear sense of defeat, the overpass brigades, Schumer and Thune pulling off a unanimous consent vote on the Epstein bill, trump’s consistent defeat at the district and appellate court levels, the possibility that SCOTUS will find the tariffs unlawful, these produce sparks of not just hope but joy. There’s momentum! Momentum that will generate results!
See? That’s not defeatism.
But do I think Trump will resign? Do I think he will be impeached, convicted, and removed?
Do I think his cabinet, even after listening to trump’s comments at a McDonald’s function (complete gibberish) trigger a 25th Amendment removal? Will his inability to stay awake even during press conferences and cabinet meetings make any kind of difference? And all these mysterious health runs to Walter Reed?
No. No. And no.
He may die soon and that’d be a good thing (I choose to think about a JD presidency later), but I don’t think he’ll see the inside of a jail cell or ever be held accountable.
That’s not pessimistic. That’s realistic. Pragmatic.
