How have your political views changed over time? Bloganuary, Day #3 I was raised in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, Coal Country. Unions were king there, and both my grandfather (United Mine Workers) and my Dad (West Greene Education Association) were presidents of their respective unions. I, as a precocious 13-year-old, sat in a freezingly cold, unoccupied
So, I have done the sleuthing, and it appears that WordPress may not be hosting a Bloganuary this year. This puzzles me, because I actually considered moving this blog from self-hosted to WP-hosted based on the teasers I was seeing for Bloganuary on the WP.com site in the fall. I opened a helpticket with WP,
Hello, my lovelies. Welcome, I suppose, to 2025. What? I don’t seem all that excited about it? Well, yeah. Have you even looked outside? It’s a goddamned dumpster fire out there. But we persevere. In 2022, on a whim, I decided to start a book blog. I was going to write one book review per
In a four-month period between October 2022 and February 2023, I lost my oldest cousin, my grad-school roommate, my dog, whom I loved more than anything on the planet, and my house, to a catastrophic flood. I guess I didn’t lose the house. Not permanently. But it had to be largely rebuilt, and I was
I have had the same anxiety dream for, probably, thirty-five years. Since soon after I graduated from undergrad, I don’t think that It’s a particularly original dream. I’ve talked to a lot of people who have had some variant of it. I’m in college. It’s the end of a semester, and I realized that I
Back in 2003, when I was working for the duck, I collected a ton of business cards. Wait. What? You didn’t know that I worked for a duck? WHICH duck? Well, that would be this mothereffer right here: See, after the tech bust, I was one of a gazillion people laid off from their extremely
I wrote this originally as an exercise a while back, but I thought that it was worth including here because it’s still true, every day. I’m still a weird Scrodinger’s experiment of fine and yet not fine, all the time. I saw this piece of poetry recently, and I felt, well…seen. I have built my
I spend a bunch of time reading what people a whole bunch smarter than I am (at least in the ways of politics) think about the current state of things in Washington. My preferred drug of choice is Substack, where all the smartest of the smart congregate. I happened upon a wonderful piece by Malcolm
One thing you should probably know about me is that I used to watch soap operas. A lot. I watched routinely 3 hours a day during the summers growing up, and from 1982 on (the year we got our first VCR), I sometimes watched more than that, continuing probably till I was in my mid
Home is an interesting idea. I have lived here in Washington DC for 33 of the last 36 years. Before that, I lived in rural PA for 19 years, and in WV for two years. In the middle of my tenure here, I lived in Pittsburgh for three years, to attend grad school at Pitt.
justlori