I’m a middle-aged, middle-class able white guy living in the US. Like many in my demographic I’ve been indifferent to my health for most of my life.

Until last year!

Last year a co-worker, about ten years older than me, had a serious, life-changing health event. “Regular check-ups,” his doctor told him, “would have allowed you to catch this much earlier.” At one point one of his doctors (who, whom?, he quickly dropped) told him to get his affairs in order because he was probably going to die. (Spoiler alert: he didn’t die.)

I took a cue from his experience and visited a doctor for the first time in about a decade (which in turn was the first visit in about a decade). Turns out I have two common, but potentially serious, health concerns: high cholesterol and high blood pressure.

Which means it’s time for a major, mid-life re-vamping of my diet.

In my youth, every time I ate a burger, or a pizza, or drank beer, or over-consumed fatty and fried foods, I knew the day would come when I wouldn’t be able to consistently indulge, and ignore the detrimental health effects of overdoing the salt, fat, and sugar. That day has arrived.

And, one of the big changes in my diet is more fruit.

“That’ll cause indigestion,” one of my friends said when I told him. And, frankly, that was my first thought as well. But the tummy upset only lasted a couple of days and now I’m a fruit-eating machine. The DASH diet recommends five helpings a day. I typically hit between 3 and 5 every day. That’s a lot of fruit!

“In the name of God, now I know how it feels like to BE God!”

Frankenstein trivia – apparently the original line about being God was cut after the initial release due to the newly powerful censorship board.

“The PCA, however, felt that this was not enough and removed Frankenstein’s likening himself to God from the movie. In order to hide the cut, thunder is used. For many years, the version of the scene that people saw had the thunder instead of the last half of the line. As a result, what’s persisted as a trope is “It’s alive!” punctuated with dramatic thunder.”

This summer I watched nearly all the Universal horror movies, starting with the Lon Chaney movies of the silent era. I couldn’t bring myself to watch the Abbot & Costello installments, however. If I was forced to watch only a single movie for the rest of my life, the original Frankenstein might be that movie.

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Tor.com is serializing Charlie Jane Anders Never Say You Can’t Survive, and the latest installment maps almost perfectly on my own experience.

Weirdness Gives Me the Strength To Keep Going – “The way I think about weirdness has changed completely of late. I used to think of strange and surreal art as a siege weapon—a cannon aimed at the walls of conformity and structural oppression and well-of-course-ness.

“But lately? I think of strange art as a source of reassurance and safety. A cozy blanket made out of nice fuzzy WTF.”

Anders also introduces me to the term ‘sweetweird,’ which I hope is a soon-to-be booming SFF genre.

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100.8 billion have died since 50,000BCE.

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At some point Dan Piraro, author of the cartoon Bizarro, fell off my radar. I noticed that he turned over responsilities of the daily cartoon to Wayno at some point, but didn’t give it a second thought. Turns out he’s creating a new strip called Peyote Cowboy, which is pretty cool.

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Hope is contagious.

I haven’t watched televised news since the first Gulf War. In the last quarter century I bet I haven’t watched a dozen hours of TV news. The closest I’ve come is occassionally tuning into The Daily Show during the Jon Stewart years.

How do I keep up with what’s going on?

Through Google News, RSS feeds, and judicious googling of trending topics.

In Google News I remove any source that pisses me off for inaccuracy. Browsing the headlines, and my ‘free’ allotment of articles gets me pretty far.

What do I pay for?

Washington Post – I have an annual subscription for electronic access. (I have free access to NYT through work, but rarely go beyond my monthly allotment.)

Tom Tomorrow – I shell out money regularly to Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World because I’ve been enjoying his work for free since the old Processed World days in the 1980s.

Popular Information by Judd Legum – My way of supporting independent journalism.

Wikipedia – I throw them a few bucks every month.

Wonkette – Wonkette shares my undying love for Molly Ivins, and keeps me sane with their righteous anger, irreverent humor, and prodigious cursing. I consider it my daily collection of op-eds. (Arrives via my RSS feeds.)

Entertainment Weekly (which now comes out monthly) – This is an annual gift to my SO, but I read every issue after she does.

Newsletters and RSS feeds

I use Inoreader as my RSS feed reader, and pay $20 a year to bump my feed limit from 150 to 500. (And, also to get rid of ads.)

For news, analysis, and pop culture I subscribe to the feeds of both Vox and AV Club.

I subscribe to The Nib newsletter. It serves as my daily editorial cartoon.

Right Richter keeps me up-to-date on the latest from the right. (Hmm, I didn’t realize he’d moved from TinyLetter to Daily Beast, but that seems to be the case. DB is not typically part of my news round-up.)

I subscribe to a ton of feeds, but some of my favorite are from Colossal (art), Reductress (humor), The Daily Cartoonist (commentary on the types of cartoons that typically appear in newspapers, both daily and editorial).

I also subscribe to a slew of newsletters I rarely open.

And that’s my filter. In the newsletters and RSS feeds I didn’t mention are sources for international news, local news, science, authors/bloggers/artists I follow, some image sources, SF and comics fandom, general weirdness, and some futurists, but that stuff often falls off my radar for weeks at a time. What’s listed above I use several times a week.

Allie Brosh, creator of Hyperbole and a Half, has a new book out. Here’s her interview at NPR, here’s her interview at Buzzfeed, here’s a chapter from her new book.

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Word of the day – Boreout – extreme tiredness and depression caused by being bored at work over a long period of time.

“Unlike burnout, boreout can be caused by there being no work or too little of it (rather than being overloaded with it), which can have an adverse impact on an employee’s psychological well-being. Although there are different boredom thresholds, the onset of boreout is directly related to work tasks being too few and far between, off-putting, or meaningless.”

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Feminize Your Canon: Alice Dunbar-Nelson – I had no idea Paul Laurence Dunbar was such a dick. I should have been reading Alice Dunbar-Nelson instead.

“Highly educated, with a strong belief in her own talent and determination to make her own living, Dunbar-Nelson was a New Woman, that protofeminist figure who dominated American culture at the turn of the twentieth century.”

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Douglas Rushkoff riffs on something that annoys me to no end. Significant portions the right-wing cultural playbook is drawn from the subversive antics I adored in my youth —

“Because now it’s the alt-right using pranksterism to promote fascism, and the formerly cheeky Left now stranded in the hall of mirrors it once created to destabilize the Old Guard.”

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I’m currently reading Bread & Wine by Ignazio Silone. It was published in 1936, and is about Mussolini’s fascist Italy. I’m only half-way through, but the first half is about a disheartened Marxist, who has been fighting against fascism for 15 years, returning to a village near his boyhood home, only to realize the peasants are indifferent to politics and political rule. Regardless of who is head of state; life is fear, random pain, and an uncertain future. Page 4 has the following quote (it really stood out since I was reading it the day after RBG died):

“[Truth] was more or less tolerated. But now it is tolerated no longer. Monsignore finds it expensive, primitive, and crude; while hypocrisy is smooth, always up-to-date, and not only cheap but profitable.”

I write posts, but they don’t cohere. They don’t make a point, or they spin off into rambling. Here are some summaries of the posts I started that didn’t go anywhere:

Snow Crash and The City & The City – Each of these has a unique way of divvying up the populations in an urban environment. I started a post mulling over the two systems, and wondering what a world might look like that combined the two.

Trance Formation of America and QAnon – Before there was QAnon, there was Trance Formation of America. What seemed in the 1990s like the utmost in bonkers conspiracy theory, is now mainstreamed.

Conflict Averse and the dismal unpleasantness of social media – a brief history of my disenchantment with social media and the internet in general.

Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality and the Degrowth Movement – Sort of a review of Illich’s Conviviality, but mostly a rant about those on the left who find intrinsically positive moral standing in certain groups of people. (Illich seems to embrace the idea that poor people will do the right thing simply because they have experienced poverty. Coicidentally, the book I’m reading by Ignazio Silone addresses this point exactly.)

A post bashing Ray Bradbury.

On a positive note – creative work is going tolerably well. I’m not getting a lot of work done every day, but I’m mostly getting work done every day; little by little, bit by bit. And if that continues, I should have a new ebook by the end of the year. I suppose a completed book > a bunch of blog posts, so I’ll try not to fret, and get back to the book!

I’m off Twitter for the foreseeable future.

I stopped looking at FB years ago, and shuttered my account at the beginning of the year.

I don’t do IG or or any other social media, so for right now I’ve cut out a lot of potential sources for doomscrolling.

Which brings me back to blogging.

Once upon a time the internet was fun. I’m going to figure out how to recapture that.

So, more blog posts. And, I expect there to be multiple brief posts throughout the day. For those of you on email, alarmed by the uptick in Abderitic posts, there’s an unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email.

For those of you NOT on email, but who would like to be, there is a subscription option in the right-hand column.

I can go for miles if you know what I mean.

This about captures my level of optimism these days.

via The Nib

We Wear the Mask

by Paul Laurence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
       We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
       We wear the mask!

Feeling more cynical than ever these days, but here’s Langston Hughes suggesting that the noble ideas the USA is supposed to stand for are aspirational goals to strive and fight for, rather than a done deal. Keep fighting for what can be, instead of pretending we are something we never were.

Maybe a little too on-the-nose, but a fine poem to read today.

Let America Be America Again
Langston Hughes – 1902-1967

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

Here are the laws surrounding the display and treatment of the US flag: 4 U.S. Code CHAPTER 1—THE FLAG

Here’s what it says about the display of the flag:

“The flag should never be carried flat or horizontally, but always aloft and free.”

I don’t know how many NFL games have the following moment, but it’s common.

This is the flag being carried flat, horizontal to the ground.

Drew Brees has never spoken out about this flagrant disrespect of the US flag. Nor have any of the other thousands of people who claim to love Kaepernick, but not his methods.

Hint: they don’t really care about disrespecting the flag.

I wonder if the Pentagon is still paying the NFL to be patriotic? Pentagon paid sports teams millions for patriotic events. I don’t remember Brees or the NFL owners complaining about that, either.

Oh, and all those flags that appear on uniforms?

“No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform. However, a flag patch may be affixed to the uniform of military personnel, firemen, policemen, and members of patriotic organizations.”

It’s disrepectful.

Martellus Bennett says it better than I ever could.

And if you read Bennett’s thread and think, “I’d like to read a fucking book!” let me suggest White Fragility by Robin Diangelo. There are so many places to start learning about white privilege and anti-racism, and this is one of those entry points. And, once you finish reading this one, read another, and another.