11/29/24: Blogging Roundup
Trump wins! Quincy Jones forgives! My son’s GF doesn’t gives!
Happy Thanksgiving! Despite the country’s trailblaizers eventually annihilating and forcing the Native Americans from their lands, these United States and most of us in them have much to celebrate. Showing gratitude is insufficiently taught to our children, and low on our daily To Do Lists, yet here’s a toast to doing the best we can despite ourselves.
My decades-long Chicago friend Erika and I just chatted live, a luxurious indulgence within today’s digital swirl of texting, emailing, social media posting, and asynchronous voice messaging. She continues sharing her lovely poems, and I love sharing them here as wonderful counterpoint to my more heady and formal rants…
Democrats — especially Progressives — have been shitting their pants since Trump reigned supreme at the Electoral College and even the popular vote, the world again turned upside down. In this post and a few others I’m accentuating the positive from my self-proclaimed, Bad Libertarian point of view, eager to see how this clusterfuck plays out:
All bullshit aside, we are what we do. Propelled by the momentum built from writing and self-publishing my first novel a couple years ago, I’ve been, by any standard and stretch of the imagination, a writer — slamming my keyboard, on average, from five to twelve hours and more a day. Blogging has been great counterpoint to longer form writing, check it out:
During the frantic election run-up my MAGA friend Ed and I engaged in a robust debate, which wound up as an illuminating post. With that spirit of open and honest conversation between political tribes in mind, I suggested a similar exercise post-election with my liberal friend, HP, out of which thoughts about our deteriorating uniqueness became apparent:
An avalanche of Democrat soul searching has tumbled down the mountain of losses this month, much of which strategic and analytical. So I wanted to start my own decompression in a more subjective and personal way by sharing the stories of four disillusioned liberals whom I’ve known for years, and have witnessed their slide into apathy and anger.
Thanksgiving approaching, I wanted to share an emotion complementary to gratitude — letting go. The Quincy Jones clip captures that feeling perfectly, further accentutated by its source — a creative dynamo as talented as he was commercially successful. What might he have to complain about? Enough to need to free himself of himself:
One of the countless thrills and spills of parenting is seeing yourself in your children, this post a funny and irreverent tale of such woe of mischief. An unexpected surprise was the effectiveness of the unintentionally clickbaity title, which got me to thinking that writing erotica could become a fun and potentially viable outlet #staytuned
Trump won by 2.5M popular votes, less than 2% overall — hardly a “mandate” — yet both sides of the aisle are either gloating or grieving. The Democrats didn’t totally blow it, and the Republicans didn’t get everything right, yet our simplistic, binary political system destroys all nuance, making us all less governable, and more pooly governed:
Another poetic gem from Erika, one that seemed so apropos for our confusing and self-critical times. I also had fun using AI tools to generate the image, becoming a more common practice for me despite the clunkiness and “inhumanity” of the exercise. If nothing else, I love the random elements, and when the algorithms get it wrong in quirky ways:
Like most of us, I have two types of friends, family, and colleagues: those on the Right feasting, and those on the Left freaking out. Given what I’ve written and thought about the Middle East, here’s my take on what seems to be unfolding in the region, and why Trump 2.0 might actually result in a higher probability for peace than war — but at a cost:
Thanks again for reading — and I always welcome your comments!
