Bought Valentine's Day chocolate from a clerk who, I now realize, was so tired he could not actually see me. He was held up by occupational pride and long training. Now I feel bad for making him think more than necessary by trying to be friendly and chatty.

It is important to remember that any kind of pleasure is failure to realize the situation's gravity, and therefore dangerous, immoral, corruptive, betrayal of those less well off than you, and all the more delectable.

This time of year light comes back, but not warmth. It is like being a vampire caught out at sunrise. Undeath was a familiar dark corridor. You were used to it. Now light is tearing you apart.

Upon reflection, I have decided that probably Mr. Tumnus is The Great God Pan and Aslan is Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos, only they are much more polite to guests than generally supposed. They were all "Oh fuck, someone at the wardrobe. A child, for fuck sake. God damn it, where are our clothes?"

Maybe prissiness is a psychological state present in all, stronger in some than in others, that has to be vented somehow. If it isn't attached to one sort of sex, it must be attached to another. If not to one kind of food, then to another. If not to one kind of language, then to another. 1/

I have been trying to figure out what the dog gets out of rushing at the door bellowing whenever someone stirs in the hallway, so as to substitute some equally satisfactory behavior. I still don't know, but now I kind of want to do it too. I think I must be doing empathy wrong somehow.

I am reading a Max Weber essay where he says that states are the organizations that have a monopoly on violence. This sounds pragmatic and hard-headed, but NYPD commits about a tenth of NYC homicides, and most people would be unhappy if they committed most of them. Weber seems to be assuming that

Long ago, one would work, go to dojo, come home, feed the boy, and sing 3 songs and read 3 stories so he could get to sleep. What with dojo and having read all the stories 9,000 times, sometimes one would trail off and wake up with a small finger prodding one and a small voice demanding "Wead!"

We built the greatest information distribution network the world has ever known. It is used primarily for dissemination of lies and advertising. What on earth is wrong with us?

Badman Brown says "Take three steps further, and I'll do you in" because when Pete takes those steps he is close enough that Brown can cover the distance with his knife before Pete can get the pistol into line. open.spotify.com/track/3GH2K6...

The potato famine on my grandfather's side. The Finn grandmother died so young that no one has her story, but maybe crop failures. On my mother's side, probably something both adventurous and prudent. They are like that. Well, except maybe her.

We should rejoice that we can get coffee, tea, sugar, and chocolate without performing monstrosities now. A drug that consoles without wrecking you is a miracle, a triumph, and an advance in civilization.

Heh. Apparently my favorite mechanic/influencer/roustabout reads Joanna Russ. www.facebook.com/share/1818so...

There is a poem about looking at a guy standing there muscly, beautiful, and mostly naked and either suppressing or failing to suppress the impulse to say "Look at you in your little white socks!" as to a small child. I wish I could find that poem. You would think Nikki Giovanni, but evidently not.

"America was far better suited to be the World's Movie Star. The world's tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world's acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions.” ― Bruce Sterling, Distraction

So far as I can tell, the English slowly turned into monsters between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. From an etymology of "silly:"

From Lord Dunsany's preface to his Stories of Wonder, written from his WWI barracks. And now I will write nothing further about our war, but offer you these books of dreams from Europe as one throws things of value, if only to oneself, at the last moment out of a burning house. DUNSANY.

What baffles me about assertions that immigrants will somehow dilute Western culture, whatever that is, is that most immigrants to the US are Roman Catholics from Latin America. Is it the Catholicism or is it the Spanish heritage that is non-Western?

I want a comic about superpowered border collies that herd New York pedestrians. Everyone is made to walk to the right. No one is permitted to stop without pulling over. Jaywalking is right out. Crossing against the light is OK if the dog thinks it safe. Stopping in a choke point is right out.

One month to Valentine's Day. Headcanon: Waits's Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis is her telling him that she'd like to straighten up now. It is all lies, but lies that she would like to be so, and what she would like to be so is her happy with a good guy. Hence the last line.

Meditation will not make you enlightened, invincible, correct, immortal, happy, safe, serene, or wise. It will make it possible to look more clearly, closely, and cheerfully at how none of those things are so.

Your dog loves you. In no way does it follow that your dog admires, or even respects you. You are slow. You can't smell, and you can barely hear. Your emotions are transparent. You are a dullard at reading dog emotions. You are in every way like a large puppy, and best treated as such.

I wonder if exercising one's facial muscles would make them bigger and thereby reduce both wrinkling and the face's tendency to slide downward and depend as wattles from one's chin.

Mississippi, the second poorest state, has now the 10th-highest 4th-grade reading scores. This seems to be the result of teaching phonics, grading schools both by student achievement and by student improvement, and teaching teachers how to teach reading. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/u...

Over in the park they are feeding discarded Christmas trees into a chipper and spreading them over the soil as mulch. It is reminiscent of killing the king and sprinkling the fields with his blood. What you would expect of a people that eat and kill Jesus every Spring, I suppose.

The Cloister and the Hearth, by Charles Reade This was recomended to me by a character in a Kipling short story. Another Kipling character had recommended John Ruskin, and was right. This one was too. It is not literature. It is a picaresque historical romance about 500 pages long.

What if about half the U.S. electorate is bad? Suppose, for instance, that 15% of them would prefer to have slaves, 15% are intolerant religious fanatics, 15% are indifferent to anything but wealth, and 4% are all 3 at once. How do you run such a country?

A small boy standing firmly on the leash of a greyhound taller than him while his mother cleaned up after the other greyhound. The dog under the boy's supervision staring at him anxiously, worrying that he would fall over and the dog be blamed.

Sitting staring at my phone trying to find some particularly intemperate way of venting anger online about the catastrophic political situation, till finally the heavy bag manages to catch my eye.

Old age is philosophically interesting because one is visibly no more than what one does regularly. As soon as one stops doing anything physical, one begins to lose the ability quickly enough to watch it happen. This is likely true of mental faculties too, but the mind covers losses up better.

We knife spar in class sometimes, mostly as a way to practice faking, feinting, footwork, and remembering that probably you die in a knife fight. We work on grabbing the wrist of the opponent's knife hand because it is high-return, though high risk.

Martial arts, mostly striking, sticks, and knives now that I am old. Innate, cultural, and scientific classification systems. Natural kinds, should any exist. Use of classification systems to bury, scatter, or defame fields of knowledge. Reclassification. Hey, you asked for esoteric.

Castle in the Sky, to a large degree because of the broken war robot in the dungeon who can't make it clear to the princess that, though a monster, he is her monster. Also, the relationship between the two children. Also, the air pirates.

The heartbreaking thing is that Trump II is all more of the same. He is one of a long series of buffoon presidents to be cleaned up by historians. These are customary crimes done for customary motives. This is who we are. Our society is a factory producing lazy, careless, wilfully ignorant voters.

Does saying "boo" to a goose actually work? I have been reduced to hitting Canada geese with my bicycle because they would not forego pecking my ankles, but I confess that I never did try saying "boo."

This article is about a fascinating 3-way reproductive strategy in which aggressive lizards beat less agressive lizards, sneaky-fucking lizards beat more aggresseove lizards, and less aggressive lizards beat sneaky-fucking lizards. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/s...

People are posting about what almost killed them, and I feel all left out. I just never got that near death. Once three Sikh cab drivers had to do some very fancy driving to save me back when I was a bike messenger, but they were engaged in not killing me.

Why is there not a Leeloo Dallas Multitool? Must I think of everything?

A meditation for rhe chronically defiant:

The forest librarian lives in a hollow tree lined with shelves holding her catalog and indexes: leaves stitched together, rolls of bark, and stones. Nothing is written on them. She reads the veining, markings, and fracture lines themselves.

I gotta confess that it would save me a lot of time if my phone would scuttle after me meeping.

Reading Kipling's "The Brushwood Boy," and realizing that, though I have got his number, in that I have his racism classified and analyzed, he has mine. He wants to be brave, stoic, and hard-working, and at the same time have a rich, active imagination that works all the time. As I do. How not?

The Republic is a model of a just person's soul scaled up to the size of a city in order to study it better. The Republic is founded on a "noble lie" about how some are naturally suited only for service.

Letting the winter forest into the house and throwing it a party. Inviting a wild man from the Northern wastes to break into our houses while we sleep. Remembering the time we were disgracefully inhospitable to God when he came to visit and were forgiven yet again.

I am just absurdly happy because our adult son and his sweetheart came to visit us on Christmas. What an odd thing it is to have one's happiness vary so much with someone else's behavior. How odd it is to be human. This happens every year, for fuck sake. Nevertheless, happiness.

Glancing into A Christmas Carol, I note that the Ghost of Christmas Past gets enough repentance out of Scrooge to suffice for complete reform in most novels. Not here. The ghosts know how long cheap reform lasts. They smash him. They leave him almost mad. That's what really turning it around costs.

Good fortune attend each merry man's friend, That doth but the best that he may; Forgetting old wrongs, with carols and songs, To keep the mouse king at bay.

Pale, pitiless winter light.

A waterbug wandered up the ventilation shaft into into the bathroom, and I did everything I could to trap and release it and could not. It kept escaping till I had to kill it. I am one of the lords of creation, god damn it. I should be able to preserve an intricate little mechanism from itself.

Every so often I get reminded that I am built to be intermittently happy while cold, hungry, injured, scared, and sick, having most of my children die, and having large men steal my property, this being my people's natural condition, and that this hasn't happened so far. I am a peasant in paradise.