jabberwoCKY

I don’t want to do a single one of the things that I probably should, and absolutely nothing sounds like fun. Other than that, great weekend!

This is one of two essays I read this morning about friendships and reasons that they end. Both have given me cause for reflection on my own life experiences and relationships. This one in particular felt like it was written for me.

In my defense, your honor, I was an unmitigated disaster and a complete idiot at the time.

I’ve spent the better part of my life obsessed with language and the ways words are used in writing and conversation. And I know I’m late to the party here, but it’s remarkable how completely and in how many different contexts we’ve Trojan-horsed the concept of control within the word “protect”.

Couples therapy, but for my relationship with my facial hair.

This appeals to me both as a LOTR fan and someone who wishes that James Carville’s desiccated beef jerky ass would just gargle a chainsaw already.

DEEP DIVE is up! How the Star Tribune turned Republican “Somali gangs” rhetoric into an election-year crime narrative—and helped give demands for expanded local, state, and federal enforcement the authority of news.

“Shuttlecock” is one of those words that just feels like it should be an insult.

Truth be told, I’ve probably failed words much more than they’ve failed me.

My life spans the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and everything that followed. So it’s gobsmacking to watch the American right play pocket pool and pretend not to notice the President’s shameless embrace of Russia and the rejection of the loyal allies and a century of allegiances.

One of the useless things my brain is really good at is constructing airtight persuasive arguments intended for conversations that I’ll never have.

Go to your camera roll and search “boat” and post one that you like

The rest of the world will not trust us again in my lifetime. And I don’t blame them one bit.

If all else fails, I’m just going to become a life coach who listens intently to people tell me about their struggles in life and work and then calmly reassures them that they’re way less screwed up than I am.

If you wanted to build a system that actively works to enable worst-case scenarios instead of preventing them, it’d look an awful lot like the one we’ve got. That this is currently true of multiple systems is a real knee-slapper.

My superpower is turning what should be a simple “I don’t know” into a ten-minute rambling monologue about what I DO know, which may or may not be tangentially related to I’m sorry what was the question?

Some days, loss is measured in the conversations you can no longer have.

There seem to be a whole lot of folks who are still listening to the version of our cultural ideology that was recorded in mono. I’d say that they have no idea what they’re missing, but it’s nothing they have ears to ear.

Yes, yes, the authoritarian president is leading a hate-filled rally in which he urges his followers to physically assault protesters but do NOT call any of these people Nazis or you will make David Brooks sad.

Doing my best to savor and enjoy this unexpected return to schadenfreude season temperatures without being all insufferable about it. Probably failing.

It must be awesome to be someone who doesn’t read, listen, take notes, or pay attention at work because every day brings something surprising and new.

There’s the first draft. And then there’s the first draft you like enough to let someone else see.

16 year old me would not believe who I am today. Or the path I took to becoming that person. Which is kind of the point, I guess.

Experience is only the best teacher if you make a point of learning something from it.

I hope that at some point in your life, you experience music in a way that you lose yourself in completely, that makes the rest of the world disappear. If only for as long as the song.

Forget about drugs, keep your kids off of ChatGPT.

Kinda sad how every monkey book review is basically “An infinite number of me could have written this.”

People at work are curious about what my hobbies are, so I want to make sure I’m spelling this correctly: catastrophizing?

Can’t decide if this is a good omen or a bad omen.

It’s never too late to become a problem child.

In the fall of my first year of college, I saw my two favorite bands play live for the first time — R.E.M. on the Document tour followed by U2 on The Joshua Tree tour. On consecutive nights. I don’t think I could have understood at that time just how gobsmackingly, impossibly unlikely that was.

Dammit, baseball.

There are many things about the realities and challenges that high schoolers have to navigate today that I’m forever grateful to have avoided through the sheer good fortune of being born in different times. Specifically, promposals.

The person who demonstrates their grasp of the obvious as though they’ve just split the atom.

Simple things done well beat complicated things done half-assed or on the cheap, every single time.

“Wisconsin girls Daisy's age are driving the farm truck to The Sportsman's Club and picking up their folks because Ron and Sheila got real tuned up at bingo night.” Have a chortle, courtesy of @randballsstu.bsky.social midwest-excellence.ghost.io/first-americ... randballsstu.bsky.social

And that was the last time they let Thor play Whack-A-Mole at Chuck E. Cheese.

Is local media not picking up on this story--with the MPD documents right there in it--because it would poke holes in their own coverage of the Jan. 9th "clearing" operation? Or is it bc of their institutional relationships with MPD? Something else? I have some thoughts on this this below:

As a rule, I don’t often think about economists. But I do think about this 1963 quote from economist John Kenneth Galbraith quite a lot: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

“Write conversationally” is a useful maxim, especially after figuring out that “conversationally” means “Not the way *you* talk, Charles.”

Grateful for all of the things I’ve learned through the experience of being wrong, of making mistakes. Really wish my brain would cling with barnacle-like tenacity to the former and not the latter, but here we are.

You know, the UN General Assembly hasn’t been the same without Muammar Gaddafi around to go on endless, rambling, incoherent verbal rampages that make people long for a cataclysmic event of some sort just to make it a stop.

No visit to my personal museum is complete without a tour of the Maybe This Will Fix Me wing. It houses about 75% of the permanent collection, so you literally can’t miss it.

Being a writer involves learning about a large number and broad range of very specific things that give the decidedly false impression that I know a whole lot more about said things than I actually do.

The thing about logic and emotion is that they’re not on the same control panel. Heck, most of the time they’re not even on speaking terms.

I haven’t given up on my dreams. I’m just having a hard time remembering what they were, and the parts I do recall are all kinda weird.