Coxcomb bouquets are another sign that fall is here.

Fresh thread for those who want to discuss the firehose of news this week.

In case anyone is wondering, here’s what Charlie Kirk had to say when the state lawmakers were shot in Minneapolis earlier this summer:

“Total shocker that smearing a duly-elected president who won an overwhelming electoral mandate as a fascist or a king leads to violent political radicalization.”

After another shooting in Minneapolis, the one at Annunciation Catholic School, he offered this: “Was the shooter on hormone therapy?” and “Was he on SSRIs? We deserve to know.”

So while it’s obvious violence is terrible when it’s directed anywhere, I think I’m going to try to be better than Charlie Kirk at this moment — it’s about 4 p.m. Wednesday as I write this, and I don’t know Kirk’s condition — I’ll just keep my yap shut for now. I feel nothing anyway, so why embroider on that?

Croaky said something stupid about guns this week, too. “We had lots of guns when we were kids. Kids brought guns to school and were encouraged to do so.” He went on to blame psychiatric drugs for the fact they’re now firing them. I don’t know about you, but psychiatric drugs, while no panacea, have brought relief and normalcy to millions of people who suffer from mental illness. The conservative right is now very hot on “mental health,” which they seem to believe was something we all enjoyed until evil liberals took it away.

I’ve always understood the wholesale emptying and closing of public mental hospitals to be a dovetailing of the worse impulses of both the left and the right, the rare case where both sides bear at least some, and perhaps equal blame. I know many of us are older here, and as I recall we’ve talked about it here, too, but I was there and I remember. Liberals said it was cruel and illegal to warehouse people, that new psychiatric drugs offered hope to people who previously could only be treated with Thorazine and other heavy tranquilizers, the ol’ dozin’-and-droolin’ state on American mental wards. The right said, “Close expensive public institutions? Sounds great!” Unfortunately, community-based mental-health buildings never came to pass — they, too, were expensive — and we didn’t reckon that some people with some mental illnesses didn’t want to be treated with the new drugs. They were imperfect, they had unpleasant side effects, and they cost a lot. Lots of mental patients didn’t have any sort of home support network. And so they ended up on the street, almost literally overnight. You saw it too, I bet. It coincided with the closing of SRO hotels in many cities, as yuppies moved downtown and wanted those icky bums out of sight.

So every time a conservative bleats about mental health, ask them: What’s your plan? How much will it cost? Where will people be treated? Because as anyone with even a surface understanding of the issue knows, there aren’t enough beds available now, much less after we start taking the issue as seriously as they think we should. A man off his meds stabbed 11 people in a Walmart in northern Michigan a few weeks ago. It was a familiar story: Paranoid schizophrenic, in and out of treatment and shelters for years, only intermittently in touch with his family, etc. He desperately needed inpatient treatment and a lot of support, but in northern Michigan? Are you crazy?

You could say the same thing about the man who stabbed and killed the Ukrainian refugee in Charlotte. American prisons are already mental hospitals. You want to build a few hundred more? With what money?

Get ready for a new barrage of this, depending on who is arrested for the assault on Kirk.

It’s now 4:45 p.m. Just checked the Salt Lake Tribune, NYT and other sources; they haven’t pulled the sheet up over his face yet. Time will tell.

Edit at three minutes later: He’s dead.

Having bitched my heart out about the punishing heat this summer, I owe a debt to the weather gods to salute the lovely days that have been with us since the last week in August. We can use some rain, but the nights are cool and the days are on the lower side of warm, and that’s a good thing. Most days, my hair looks the same at 3 p.m. as it did right after I blew it dry after my shower, which means my head isn’t schvitzing like a dockworker all the livelong day. So that’s good.

Right now, I’ve leaning against some pillows against the footboard of our bed, spread out an old down blanket, and Wendy is curled up at my feet, snoring a little, sometimes wagging her tail in a dream. The laundry’s done, the larder is full, I got in a little workout, I restocked at Costco. I’ll owe some money to the IRS in another week, but the wolf is far from the door. My local CVS has the new Covid vaccines, and I’ll get one soon. It’s a good day.

Wendy’s getting on in years — 13, as far as we know — and is showing it in ways large, small and sad. So I’m taking time to appreciate my little dog. We go on more, but shorter, walks. I changed her food from kibble to kibble-and-canned to be easier on her achy teeth. She’s still got that spark, but it’s more mellow, like the autumn sunshine. One reason we haven’t taken a big trip this year is Wendy. I don’t want to leave her with Kate (no fenced yard, cats) for three or four weeks anymore, and she’s so sensitive, that much time in a boarding kennel would kill her. But I don’t mind. She came with us to the U.P., and for our next trip — three nights in Fort Wayne next week — she’ll be fine with a babysitter.

Did I mention we are going to the Fort next week? We were invited — GOD KNOWS WHY — to one of those Chamber of Commerce “homecoming” events. Does your city do those? Detroit’s regional chamber did for a while. They invite notable expats back to town to see the shine they’ve put on it in the meantime. We’re staying at the Bradley, the boutique hotel built by the Vera Bradley people, and some friends will be in the group as well. The idea seems to be to invite potential investors (not our cohort) or opinion leaders (ditto) and spread the good word. Honestly, I have no idea why we’re included, but I’ll try to sparkle and not be too mean to the Republicans.

Speaking of which! What a last few days it’s been for the GOP, and once again, I’ve lost track of the current outrage. Is it Croaky going on the attack about vaccines? Or the Department of WAR-RAWR-WARRRRRR rebrand? There are days when I have to avert my gaze and just appreciate the weather for a moment. Although there are moments of grim, black humor, as here:

While the criticism of Kennedy slowly grows from different sides, I fear it’s too little, too late. Considerable damage has already been done to Americans’ trust in vaccines under false pretenses. A veterinarian recently told NBC News about people expressing their concerns to her about giving their pets vaccines out of fear that they will harm their pets, causing autism or other cognitive issues. When people are afraid of dog autism, it’s going to take a lot more than some harsh words at a little-watched Senate hearing to get us back on track.

Dog autism. Dogtism.

On Thursday, the day this little-watched hearing took place, I took some time to take myself out to lunch, and watched the live updates with analysis on the NYT site as I worked through my pizza and Diet Coke. Claim after claim by Croaky was batted down, and now I can’t find it on their website, although there are plenty of stories wrapping it up. What a psycho that guy turned out to be. Alan thinks he’ll be fired, but I’m putting my chips on the No Way square. Trump never admits a mistake, and he likes anyone who stands up to Elizabeth Warren. We’re stuck with him. As the Onion noted: Kennedy Curse Sure Taking its Sweet Time With RFK Jr.

And now I think I’ll take myself out in this lovely late-summer sun and maybe slowly amble my old dog around the block. The Lions play in half an hour. It’s a nice Sunday.

A friend called me today to ask what I thought of the Epstein mess. I told him, first thing, that if we have to throw Bill Clinton over the gunwale, well, we’d just have to do it. That horndog got the biggest free pass in the world when he evaded significant punishment about Monica. He doesn’t get another.

But as we talked, I started to sort out my own thinking about it, and I think it’s this:

There are some who will think that any revelation of the Epstein affair that doesn’t include a photo of the president getting a BJ from a 13-year-old means he’s innocent, free, in the clear. I figure, if he was so innocent, he’d have had them printed on placemats at Chick-fil-A by now. But honestly, I think what’s going to be revealed, if anything, is something closer to this:

Epstein was rich, Trump is rich, they hang out with other rich people, and rich people don’t think rules apply to them. Any rules, at least behind closed doors. So what will likely emerge is a picture of Epstein as a guy who knew everyone, invited everyone to his parties, had his young masseuses passing canapés and occasionally slipping off to massage or bang this or that guest, and everybody knew what was happening, and further, no one said a word about it. Because they’re rich. Even if they didn’t participate, even if they disapproved, they wouldn’t say boo. Did they see anything directly? No. And it would just make a big mess for everyone, and after all, everybody’s rich. It would break the code.

Trump was ankle-deep, knee-deep, neck-deep in all this, I’d be willing to bet. Every day was “a wonderful secret,” the secret being that they could fuck young teens with impunity.

After all, Trump married a sex worker, maybe two of them. This is going to bother him? Not a chance.The rules are different for people like him, as we’ve all seen.

OK, so life is starting to return to normal. After my week of vacation, I had a week of pedal-to-metal work, then a long weekend of more work, then this week, and I’m hoping that things will settle next. I have enrolled in a creative-writing class at Wayne State, as a “non-matriculating student,” i.e. an auditor, and I have to read, write and prep for twice-weekly classes. My lifeguarding starts up again, in the early mornings instead of evenings, at least this semester. So I have, as they say, a lot on my plate.

But I will continue to show up here. So forward, into the fall, eh?

I said I’d be back Tuesday, and here it is, Tuesday. A woman of my word.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think President Shit-for-brains is dead. I think he’s an old, sick man, but he’s still exchanging oxygen. We’re stuck with him, at least for another day. The bells will ring around the world when he finally kicks the bucket, there will be dancing in the street and party snacks, but I doubt there will be much of a delay before we know, not with JD Vance circling like a vulture.

Sorry to start your Unofficial Fall with bad news, but there you are.

What a weekend. Very busy. I’m still not recovered, so I will leave you with this thin gruel, in the interest of getting something done.

At one point this weekend, I was way up in the sky:

I swear, I could see my house from the 69th floor of the RenCen.

When I said the week would be a whirl, I wasn’t kidding. The work I do for a local nonprofit is coming to a crescendo, and I don’t have a lot of time to do anything. However, I gots me some links for you. I’ll be back on Tuesday.

So.

Did you think it was impossible for the state of Florida’s slurpy MAGA community to get even worse? It is not. Behold the case of the Pulse nightclub crosswalk. You may recall Pulse as the site of a particularly grisly mass shooting in 2016 — 49 killed, 53 injured. As a memorial, or part of one, a crosswalk near the club was painted in rainbow colors.

Can’t have that in Ron DeSantis’ Florida, not when you-know-who is president. So earlier this month, workers painted over the rainbow in black and white. The club’s partisans painted the rainbow back, and state of Florida workers re-painted it black, sometime after 11 p.m. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy decided the rainbow was a safety hazard, I guess. But wait, there’s more!

A Florida state trooper is now parked at the scene, making sure those colors don’t come back. Someone went into police work, and is paid a state police officer’s wages, to watch over a crosswalk.

Moving on. As per our discussion of Jon Carroll a while back, a poignant piece about his wife, Tracy Johnston, who has Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. He’s calling it a pre-obit, and it’s lovely:

We were backpacking in the Sierra, sometime in the late 1970s. The day had been spectacular, and the twilight was glorious, and fading fast. Here’s a great campsite, I said, about a lovely piece of flat earth right beside a lake. Tracy looked at it. Nope, she said. We trudged on. Two more times I found lovely campsites, with trees and views and birds twittering, and Tracy said, nope. And we finally, near total darkness, found a campsite near a stream and a lake. It was in fact the best campsite.

Tracy’s handling of cancer has been like that. There is always more life to be lived, more books to read, more people to hug. Here’s the good news: She ain’t dead yet.

Finally, one of those daffy McSweeney’s pieces that people pass around: I’m the abandoned new Cracker Barrel logo, and you can all go fuck yourselves:

Oh, I guess you’re also mad that they revamped the inside of the restaurants. Heaven forbid they rearrange their collection of Americana garbage to make it look less like the hoarder house you lost your virginity in. Jesus hates a coherent aesthetic, I suppose. A touch of care when placing items on a wall is a DEI dog-whistle, according to the bozos losing their minds on X. Not sure what it is about white space on a wall that makes you think a business hates white people, but okay. I hope they didn’t put all that stuff in the actual garbage, because with what they spent on this rebrand, they’re never gonna be able to buy it all again. On the other hand, if they just scrounged it back out of the trash, who’d know the difference?

Always good to end on a high note, eh?

Like I said, back after the weekend. Enjoy yours.

I put this on my Insta stories earlier today, but what the heck, let’s put it here, too. Same person, same bar, different sign. 1974:

Friday:

Yes, it’s the dreaded vacation photo dump! If you haven’t figured it out, we were in the Upper Peninsula, nothing fancy, just a cabin at an old-fashioned waterfront resort. I have friends there, and a friend from Detroit was at the same resort the same week, so it was a very chill week of doing nothing much, drinking beer at lunch without guilt, napping after lunch ditto, sitting by the water in a chair thinking about nothing in particular, discussing current affairs with like-minded people, wondering if Dollar Island, which sits about a hundred yards offshore from where we were staying, would be a good place to wait out the zombie apocalypse. (It was for sale for $850K in 2019, the last listing I could find. Today, a faded For Sale by Owner is tacked to one of its buildings, and having learned they sustained a fire recently, I’d say that price is…ambitious.) The answer: Only until the ice comes in, at which point you better hope zombies can’t operate snowmobiles.

Funny to see this no-doubt-contemporary-but-looking-retro poster in a local bar, since this was our m.o. up here for many years:

Proof. One of the visiting tramps, in one of those years:

Here’s Alan in two of his happy places:

This garrulous pair of sandhill cranes could be heard every day. They hung out in the yard next door. The house was flying a Trump flag, so I hope their excrement was smelly and copious.

Much has changed since our last visit, even more since my first one. My friends sold their cottage (and that boat). But Mark, the surviving family member still lives there, in a different place, on the mainland. And he has a different boat, this lovely, triple-cockpit 1930 Dodge Watercar:

We went for a boat ride. Alan and I sat in the middle cockpit, along with Mark’s dog. Solo is an Anatolian shepherd / Great Pyrenees cross, which makes him both ideal for up-north living and very very big. One hundred forty pounds of big, in fact:

I couldn’t fit him in one photo while sitting next to him. He took up a lot of space:

After I left, Mark sent me a bunch of pictures of the old days. Here’s the last shot of a fall party, back in the day:

It was fun while it lasted. It still is. It’s just a different kind of fun.

A whirl of a week ahead. Expect light posting.

One of my lifeguard colleagues and I were shooting the bull one evening, and discovered we have one bedrock belief in common: The best temperature is shorts-and-sweatshirts, i.e., when it’s warm enough to wear shorts, but cool enough for a sweatshirt. Somewhere in the range from 65 to 72, say.

I’m in shorts-and-sweatshirts latitudes now. Heavenly.

Where, you ask? We had to cross a big bridge to get here:

There was fresh whitefish for dinner the first night:

The first day the weather was perfect:

The second day it was cool and breezy. So we went even farther north to look at the engineering structure that makes Great Lakes shipping possible:

Had a very mediocre lunch nearby. Atmosphere: 10-plus. Food: 4. Service: Also 4.

Finally, I want to buy this boat. I would not change the name:

That’s all for now. New comment thread!

You guys? I am feeling peevish. It’s the usual stuff. Work hassles, other hassles, seeing pictures of the new Rose Garden, reading the Kennedy Center list of honorees, and then this:

In the World as Ruled by Nance, there would be no “K-9 officers,” which is copaganda so prevalent most people don’t even notice it anymore. A “K-9 officer” is a police dog, and that’s what they’d be called in my world. I don’t know what bugs me more: canine rendered as K-9, or a dog being called an officer. They’re not officers; I don’t care if they wear a little outfit and a badge. They’re tools used by human officers in the course of their duties, but calling them officers themselves is as dumb as declaring a police car to be an automotive officer.

What irritates me as much as anything is having to pause at this point and declare my love for dogs. Of course I love dogs. Most dogs are better than many humans, and disliking dogs is a red flag so glaring I think it should be disqualifying for holding high office in this stupid country, and yeah, you know who I’m talking about.

For a while now, I’ve tried to stop anthropomorphizing the animals in my life. I may talk to them like they’re human, but I know they’re not, and that’s what’s great about them. Truly appreciating animals is striving to understand them at their level, in their true nature, not the one we’ve imposed upon them.

Some years ago, a stupid superintendent in the local schools allowed the local police to do an unannounced contraband sweep of both high schools, using cops from their own and other departments and, of course, their dogs. It served as a training exercise for the police, and a terrorizing event for the students. A lawyer later told me it also yielded a case for him, when one of the dogs “alerted,” as they say, on a car in the parking lot driven by a girl whose father became his client. The father was an FBI agent, and his daughter was a multi-sport athlete, a straight-A student, and otherwise a shining example of teenage humanity, not likely to be even a casual drug user. Her car was thoroughly searched, and nothing was found, but the girl was isolated and aggressively questioned by the police, which left her in tears. They only reluctantly let her return to her class and drive her own car home after school. No apology. After all, the K-9 officer alerted! And dogs don’t lie!

They don’t lie, but being dogs, and being German shepherds in particular, they are bred and trained to please their handlers. The lawyer directed me to copious research on this subject, and how often these alerts turn up nothing, because the dog isn’t “looking for drugs,” which it can’t understand, it’s looking for a scent that will make the cop say “good boy, Rex.” Sometimes it’s contraband, but sometimes they just want the good boy.

That is today’s rant. There are a lot in the pipeline, which is the long way around to announcing I’ll be taking a few days of R&R, and while I’ll have wifi and my laptop in the cooler climes we’re headed to, I may or may not use them. More likely, I’ll just post a lot of pictures with brief commentary along the lines of wish-you-were-here. I want to let the world carry on without me, just for a few days. Please feel free to keep the conversation going, and thank every last one of you for reading.

I update this blog three times a week, most weeks, not every goddamn day, so Neil Steinberg beat me to the punch, but the punch deserves to be delivered twice, a one-two, if you will.

Croaky and his boss, President Shit-for-brains, have blood on their hands. Specifically, that of David Rose, the responding officer for the attempted mass shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Friday. He was killed by Patrick Joseph White, the shooter who toted five rifles to a CVS across the street from the building and opened fire. White was said to be increasingly obsessed with the idea the Covid vaccination had made him sick. Wherever could he have gotten that idea?

Our HHS secretary has called the Covid jab “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” citing reports to VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Intended to be a democratic way for anyone to report sore arms, fevers, etc., it was most certainly set up for a simpler time, when people would be honest brokers of this information. A friend of mine, then a reporter for a prestigious magazine, was asked to poke around in it, see if there was a story, maybe.

He poked, and came away after a couple days with his conclusion: No. Why? Recall that the Covid vaccine was first given to those most vulnerable to the disease — the elderly and immune-suppressed. And so VAERS is full of accounts that run like this: My father had stage IV lung cancer, and received the vaccine. Three weeks later, he died. Or: My mother, 97 and bedridden in her nursing home, received the shot, and died after 10 days. Neither of these people had Covid when they died, so: Very suspicious!!!

And because VAERS is open to anyone — seriously, anyone can make a report — it is of course subject to manipulation by bad actors. And I’m sure it is. Anyway, it’s not a reliable source of information. Which Croaky should know.

One caveat that I should note: Something that’s always interested me is how mental illness cleaves to the culture of its time. People used to believe incubi and succubi came into their rooms at night and had sex with them. Today, it’s aliens who abduct victims to their ships to stick probes into their anuses. (Always the anus. Huh.) The man who killed four people in New York City a couple weeks ago was convinced he had CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, from being hit in the head as a football player. (He was in the building housing the NFL.) He was 27 years old (well below the age when CTE typically presents), played only high school (potentially dangerous, but hardly NFL-level dangerous) and had not been diagnosed with anything.

So both these men, White and the NYC shooter, had fixated on current events to explain whatever was jangling around in their heads, and it’s possible that White would have fired on the CDC in the absence of a led-from-the-top damning of the work they do. But I’d say those chances are slim.

How did Croaky react? With the usual thoughts-and-prayers statement, made on Instagram. Fuck him.

Finally, I leave you with this, which is so ironic I can’t stand it:

As a record number of people in the U.S. are sickened with measles, researchers are resurrecting the search for something long-deemed redundant: treatments for the viral disease.

After the measles vaccine was introduced in the 1960s, cases of the disease plummeted. By 2000, federal officials had declared measles eliminated from the U.S. This success led to little interest in the development of treatments. But now, as vaccination rates fall and infections rise, scientists are racing to develop drugs they say could prevent or treat the disease in vulnerable and unvaccinated people.

“In America, we don’t like being told what to do, but we like to have options for our medicine chest,” said Marc Elia, chairman of the board of Invivyd, a Massachusetts-based drugmaker that started working on a monoclonal antibody for measles this spring.

Yes, that’s correct: A drugmaker is looking for a treatment for measles (because “we like to have options for our medicine chest”) because increasing number of dumbass Americans are refusing a safe, long-established vaccine for measles. I can’t stand it.

OK, then! On that cheery note, go start your weeks! I’m off on a bike ride before it gets to…checking…89 degrees. Ugh.