Whew, that last one was like passing a kidney stone. Cathartic, but it wore me out. Time to switch things up with a few quick thoughts I’ve had lately.
1. The first thing I think every March 15th is ‘Beware the Ides of March.’ Okay look, Julius Caesar was a prick. You’ll get no argument from me on that. I’ve never liked dictators, and of all the Caesars who’ve ever caesared, I’ve always preferred Augustus (formerly Octavian) and Marcus Aurelius. Those two were more my speed. Less autocrat, more philosopher.
But I’d be lying if I didn’t confess a little sympathy for Julius on this day, the day he was assassinated by his ‘friends’ in the Senate. Friends like Brutus and Cassius. Why have any sympathy for a dictator? Well, it may be misguided of me in this case, but I’m just not a fan of betrayal or stabbing people in the back–which is literally what happened here–no matter how big of an asshole the person is. Have some integrity. If you’re gonna kill a guy, do it to his face. None of this mafia shit.
I also detest hypocrisy and fake friends, which is what many of his assassins were. Ol’ buddy ol’ pal Brutus even issued a coin to commemorate Casear’s assassination shortly before his own death. Look at this fucking thing. Even Trump would be proud.
On the other hand, it’s not like Julius wasn’t warned. As we remember from our high school English class, a soothsayer warned the dude not once, but twice, that bad things were coming his way on the Ides of March. The second warning is the one that really gets me. On March 15th, Julius joked to the soothsayer that “The Ides of March are come,” and yet, there he was, still alive. Talk about hubris! The seer responded: “Aye, they are come, but they are not gone.” Oof.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 1000 times: always listen to soothsayers.
2. Here’s another confession: I know I said ‘Let it burn’ a few months ago, but I have not been letting it burn. No, I’m still quite ranty on social media, mostly on Twitter, which no, I have not abandoned as I planned to. (Bluesky isn’t ready for prime time yet, sorry.) In a bout of angry frustration over Gaza, I even donated a ridiculous amount of money (for me) to a Palestinian charity a few weeks ago. This is the shittiest period of American history in my lifetime, so it’s not a good time to be quiet and wash my hands of this mess. (That’s two ancient Rome references already in one post, wtf?)
Not that anything the motherfucker is doing is a surprise. In fact, he’s pretty much doing what I predicted he’d do a few months ago. But it’s the way he’s now arresting and deporting people for exercising their right to free speech that has me even more pissed off than usual right now. For now it’s just green card and visa holders he’s harassing, but anyone who thinks it’s going to end there is an idiot. This is a use case, a trial balloon, to gauge public reaction and prepare the country for something worse down the road that includes U.S. citizens who protest against his administration. I really believe that.
What’s more, the people doing the arresting of foreign nationals with visas or green cards aren’t identifying themselves, or even the agency they work for. They’re just rounding people up like a modern-day Gestapo, sending them to detention facilities, and processing them for deportation. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil in particular is beyond disturbing. He committed no crime and has done absolutely nothing wrong. Despite having a green card and being a permanent legal resident, he was targeted for arrest by a complicit Columbia University and jailed for participating in non-violent, pro-Palestinian protests, WHICH IS FULLY PROTECTED BY THE FIRST AMENDMENT.
The ICE goons who arrested him refused to identify themselves and didn’t tell his 8-months pregnant wife where they were taking him until after she called a lawyer, who told her to ask them. That’s when they finally told her where they were taking him. Then almost overnight they shipped his ass to a Louisiana detention facility in an egregious example of judge-shopping to get the guy deported. There’s a perfectly functional immigration detention facility in Elizabeth, NJ. I’ve been there multiple times. It’s huge. But no, they wanted him in Louisiana where they could get a friendly Foghorn Leghorn judge to deport him before anyone knew what happened. Fortunately, his lawyers filed a quick motion for a TRO in the SDNY to stop this shit before he got railroaded. And just tonight, a federal judge issued a 14-day injunction blocking Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, which hasn’t been used in decades and hasn’t ever been used in the way he’s trying to use it, from taking effect. The judge even ordered planes in the air to turn around.
A similar thing just happened to a New Hampshire resident who’s had a green card for 17 years. ICE arrested him when he was returning from Europe, stripped him naked, forced him to take a cold shower, and then interrogated him before sending him to Mass General because he collapsed from dehydration, influenza, and their refusal to allow him to take his anxiety and depression medication. Right now he’s in a detention facility in Rhode Island. The guy is an electrical engineer with an 8 year-old U.S. citizen daughter he parents with his partner, who is also a U.S. citizen. He is here legally.
This whole thing is fucking insane, un-American., and an abomination. What’s going to be really interesting is if Trump tells his ICE goons to defy these court orders. Then we’re in constitutional crisis and ‘take to the streets’ territory. Hopefully he’s not that stupid. But we all know he is, and it’s part of his martial plan. No, not the Marshall Plan. The martial LAW plan. The bad kind.
3. If you ever want a quick update on shit that fucked you up when you were a kid, go spend five days with your mother like I did last month. That therapy I did last year gave me a third eye, this heightened awareness, of her triggering habits and character flaws and their impact on me. They’ve never been more stark. Five days in that existential boot camp spent with Moms, with no beach to escape to because it was cold as fuck, was both educational and utterly exhausting.
4. Sometimes it takes years for you to understand why someone entered your life and the purpose of your connection with them. Sometimes it takes only a few sentences. A conversation or two.
5. Case in point. As previously mentioned, I met someone recently, someone who was unique enough to break my ‘one and done’ dating pattern in a real way. In the course of getting to know each other, she conveyed her belief that I think about the past too much and live there in my head too much. She’s into manifesting, positive thought, and being present in life and believes it’s important to forget about the past, start each day with a clean slate, and become whatever you choose to be without being a prisoner to your past. Living perpetually in the past or in the future makes you miss the experience of the present.
I’m sure I’m butchering her message and the way she said it, but generally this is what it was, and to a large extent I agree with her. I do think about the past more than I should and more than is probably healthy. I do sometimes get into rumination spin cycles, and I agree it’s important to put the past in its proper place, to not be tied down by it or live there all the time.
Everything she said was essentially the message in “The Power of Now,” which I probably need to re-read. But hearing this directly from another person was revelatory. The first time she said it (in a slightly reactive and presumptuous way I didn’t like) a lightbulb went off in my head. I thought to myself: I don’t love the way she’s conveying this, and I think she may be jumping to a few inaccurate conclusions about me, but she’s not wrong. I do think about the past too much, and I’m not present as much as I want to be. Then I thought: Maybe this is the only reason we met. So that I could hear this message from her, change my thinking and behavior, and switch to a different reality track. It’s weird because when she said this, it felt like it was coming from somewhere else, like she was channeling it from somewhere.
It was an important message, and I needed to hear it. But this is where The Unreliable Narrator comes in. I think a big reason she thought this about me is because talking about my experiences–whether it’s past travel, past relationships, my divorce, or my childhood–is how I connect with people. I’m a product of my past. We all are. My best and funniest stories come from the past. She enjoyed several of these stories during our dates, and they made her laugh her ass off. I also like hearing about other people’s past experiences. They’re always revealing to me about the person, and sharing them is one of my favorite parts of getting to know someone. Of course there’s a line between obsessing about the past and not being able to talk about anything else and referencing it normally in conversation as you’re getting to know someone. I really don’t think I crossed it. How else are you supposed to get in deep with someone, peel back their layers, without discussing the past? What’s the point of relationships without getting to someone’s core? For me, that intimate exploration is one of the best parts!
So while I mostly agree with her and see something in myself that I need to improve, I also think her message was filtered through her personal lens and certain assumptions she made about me based on our conversations and some past-oriented excerpts from this blog that I cut and pasted for her. (That may have been a mistake, but not for the right person, I don’t think.) She also may have her own issues with the past that she’s projecting on to me. She brought this up right after she revealed something about her past that she was sensitive about and apparently regretted sharing. It sort of came out as we were talking. I think she was worried about being judged, but it had the opposite effect on me. It made me feel closer to her because she trusted me enough to share it with me. That’s the kind of connection I want to have with someone, not eggshell walking.
But even though she seemed okay after we talked about it and we enjoyed the rest of the night, she became really distant the next day. This made me think that the reason she isn’t big on discussing the past has more to do with her than me. There could be healthy reasons for this–maybe she’s next-level evolved and really focused on manifesting a better future for herself by keeping the past out of her mind and starting each day with a clean slate. Or maybe the way she deals with the past is to bury it and not discuss it at all. Maybe discussing the past triggers feelings in her she doesn’t want to feel. I don’t know. We still don’t know each other that well, but my instincts are telling me–and I even felt some of this on our first date–that she has a few trust issues and some internal work of her own to do.
But my point is… Uh, what was my point again?
Oh yeah, I think her message to me about being too focused on the past and not living in the present enough is true, and it’s one that I really needed to hear. I also think it may be the only reason we met. There’s something to be said for learning a connection’s true purpose quickly for a change. Now I need to implement the lesson.
6. I have an 11 year-old nephew who has developed an excellent troll game at a very young age. Last weekend, my sister and I brought our kids to see the Celtics play the Lakers up in Boston. We had an absolute blast. There were so many great players–future Hall of Famers, I daresay–in one place: Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Luka Doncic, and of course, LeBron James. I’m so happy I got to see him play before he retires. And the Garden was ELECTRIC because they were playing the hated Lakers in the greatest rivalry in basketball.
Here are some blurry ass, heavily zoomed cell phone pics I took from far away. It drives me nuts how much better these look before I post than after I hit ‘publish.’ Really annoying. Anyway, the jump ball one is my favorite – I may add that to the gallery. (I’d love to share the ones of the kids, but no can do.)
Now my nephew is a die-hard Brooklyn Nets fan. I’m not entirely sure why he didn’t go for the Knicks like his dad. He loved Kyrie Irving, and I think he thought Kevin Durant, James Harden, and Irving weren’t the fickle gentlemen they are and that they were going to stick around Brooklyn a bit longer. Alas, they didn’t, and this is the type of lesson that’s best learned as a young sports fan.
Even though my nephew follows the Nets, he knows I’m a Celtics fan and that I hate the Lakers. So a few weeks before the game he asked my sister which player I dislike the most on the Lakers (LeBron). Then he had them buy him a bright yellow Lakers t-shirt with LeBron’s number on the back just to troll my ass. I respect this, and I’m really proud of him. He’s a Brooklyn Nets fan, but he did what was necessary and exactly what I would have done in the same situation.
Respect, my nephew. Respect.
7. Thanks to Mango Mussolini’s stupid tariffs, I won’t be checking my 401(k) any time soon. But I will be buying the dips. I suspect there will be many of them.
8. We’re only two months into this shit, and it feels like 10 years. How the fuck am I supposed to get through the next three years and ten months without hard drugs?
9. The other night I got my Nikon, long lens, and tripod ready to capture the lunar eclipse, the first one in a long time. I was ready to stay up until 4:30 am to capture the different phases and maybe combine them all in one photo in Lightroom, just like the pros do. I did some YouTube research to confirm the right manual settings and the time the eclipse would start. I was READY ready.
Turned the television off at 12:30, walked outside to my back porch, looked up, and there was no clear sky to be found. Just fucking clouds.
This is the second eclipse in a row that’s blown up in my face. The first one was solar, and I didn’t have the right lens filter, something I’ve now fixed. This time it was mother nature that screwed me. But that’s the thing about photography, you don’t just need to know what you’re doing, you need the weather and lighting conditions to cooperate with you. Many times they don’t. When that happens, you just need to accept it and of course, not think about the past, clear your mental slate, be present, and wait for the next opportunity. Every day is a new day.
Did I do that right?
10. Haven’t done this in a while, so let’s end this with a few of my favorite songs/lyrics at the moment. A bit pop heavy, but I live with a bad influence.
If you want a cowboy on a white horse
Ridin’ off into the sunset
If that’s the kind of love you wanna wait for
Hold on tight, girl, I ain’t there yet
No, I ain’t there yet
No, I ain’t there yet
— White Horse, Chris Stapleton
‘Cause I’m too messy and then I’m too fucking clean
You told me get a job then you ask where the hell I’ve been
And I’m too perfect ’til I open my big mouth
I want to be me, is that not allowed?
And I’m too clever and then I’m too fucking dumb
You hate it when I cry unless it’s that time of the month
And I’m too perfect ’til I show you that I’m not
A thousand people I could be for you and you hate the fucking lot
You hate the fucking lot
You hate the fucking lot
Messy, Lola Young
Anxiety keep on tryin’ me
I feel it quietly, tryna silence me, yeah
Anxiety, shake it off of me
Somebody’s watchin’ me
It’s my anxiety
Court order from Florid-er
What’s in that clear blue water
No limits, no borders
What’s in that new world order?
Marco (Marco), Polo (Polo)
Negro run from popo (Popo)
That blue light and that rojo (Rojo)
Anxiety, Doechii
But if you need my love
My clothes are off, I’m comin’ over to your place
And if you don’t need (If you don’t need) my love
Well, I didn’t want your little bitch ass anyway
Yeah, I’m a busy woman
I wouldn’t let you come into my calendar any night
But if you want my kisses
I’ll be your perfect Mrs. ’til the day that one of us dies (Oh, hey)
Busy Woman, Sabrina Carpenter
