Waldheim Cemetery
It’s hard to avoid them. The western part of Cook County is essentially one long band of cemeteries running north-south at approximately the longitude of the Des Plaines River. Presumably, about 200 years ago, shortly after c...
The horrifying wave of anti-Semitic garbage that is cresting reached an appalling new apex recently with Kanye’s “contribution.” Let me be unequivocal: this kind of hate is despicable and unacceptable. I condemn this bigotry in the ...
yay fall
I’ve said this before, but this time I mean it. I’m going to try to revive here a tradition from the ancien régime, “Friday Five,” which was loosely defined as a collection of five relatively brief, unconnected thing...
my office on Sunday
I love race day.
I like running, but I love race day. There’s nothing like the excitement of the starting corrals, that rush on the course as you realize that all the training is paying off, and the celebration and release ...
not the same deer
Out for a short run this morning—they’re all short now, and slow, as I struggle to clear the remaining damage from my lungs—I was coming up Forest. As I crossed the old CSX line near Augusta, I looked to my left a...
I mean, they’re all dark, kind of by definition.
For most of my adult life, especially since I understood the profound effects of seasonal affective disorder on me, the winter solstice has always been one of the biggest milestones of the year....
If you had told me on March 13, 2020, that I was done traveling for at least the next thirteen months, and that I’d be working from home every day during that time, I’d have probably been shocked at first. I thought we were just going to...
via today’s NYT
I’ve been watching that 70% dot move tantalizingly closer. As interesting and important as this graph is in its own right, perhaps more interesting has been how it has been changing over time. Two weeks ago, the Times was...
pic via @coachiex on @tiny_bit_of_giants_blood’s insta
I missed yesterday’s anniversary. February 15, 2020 was the last time I took to a stage. It was the TBGB album release party at Martyrs’. (You can still get your copy, and you ...
I came across the complicated TODO list tracker I was using before all this came down. Like a bug in amber, there it sits in a unearthed, forgotten Apple Note to remind me of what was a priority in early March of 2020, both home and away.
For the yea...
I find it darkly amusing, if you’ll forgive the adjective choice, how many otherwise thinking and compassionate people, the kind who would never dream to make fun of anyone’s physical or mental health conditions, absolutely dismiss suffer...
I don’t play a ton of poker. Some charity tournaments here and there. I’m usually good enough to be one of the last players eliminated before the payouts start. Better than the random fish off the street, but not quite as good as the sha...
As I’ve mentioned, I am winding down my Facebook experience. There are a couple of things I need to do before I deactivate my account there for good, including completing the email subscription version of this blog, and writing what is likely t...
On the morning of Thursday, March 5, Hell Year, I was getting ready to check out of the Westin in Waltham, Massachusetts, my home away from home for most of the previous year. Without thinking too much about it, I threw the little vial of lavender o...
I thought the right thing to do was to let him pull the new vanity up the stairs by yanking on the dolly, while I stayed below to push and steady from beneath. If something went wrong, I didn’t want him ten steps up and stuck between the 100-po...
Right up front: Neal Stephenson is my favorite author, and Cryptonomicon is my favorite book. Yet I remain objective about his body of work and its flaws, and in particular, I’m not afraid to call out that Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, his most rece...
Don’t tell me not to worry.
Don’t tell me not to worry about my 79-year-old father with chronic lung disease.
Don’t tell me not to worry about my kids missing a quarter (semester? more?) of classroom instruction.
Don’t tell me...
