Category: Rants

A Journal Entry Of Sorts

I do the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Some have called this the definition of insanity but I prefer to see it as dedication.

Now then, making records. Berkeley Cat Records has a slogan – a tag line, if you will –

We’re from Berkeley. We are cats. We make records.

And it’s… TRUE!!

By gosh we do this.

I have some webby updatings to do, on this and a few other webbysites.  To bring my archive up-to-date. Been rather prolific, this year, and I’m pleased with my output. Each track is unique and different, so in this regard I guess I lied earlier. I do the same thing, that is, I get up (early, wow, very early these days) and make Peet’s coffee (various blends, current fave is Big Bang, no they don’t pay me to say that, it’s a Berkeley thing), and some days, some mornings, the light bulb over me head says, hey, here’s a track or a song idea! And I go there. Expecting what? Why, Petunia, I just don’t know.

Trying times, trying times, what a cliché that becomes. 2024, what the FUCK?! OK damn, my great friend and confidante, my career counselor and living Buddha Garden rock star beautiful human being Luke Kreinberg, died by suicide earlier in the year. It hardly feels real and if I start in talking about it I’ll write a novel, so let’s call that a headline. Grief sets in long and slow as comprehension of this slowly forms in my dumbfounded and stunned heart and mind.

Politics, another headline, shall we?   Biden, the drama, then Kamala, the campaign! The energy, the enthusiasm, the embrace of good values, decency and the rule of law, the rejection of all that is horrible, and then.. The most staggering debacle. It tests my optimism.

Optimism. I have lived most of my life with an intentional, deliberate optimism. Even in difficult times, in my personal life or career or through difficult events in the world around me I have chosen through and through to be optimistic. Part of it is calculated. I’ve found that pessimism can lead to the expected (bad) results and optimism can seem to help to lead to good outcomes. You get the result you imagine, to some degree. It’s not magic or hocus pocus, I think the current popular word for it is intention, setting your intention.

This year, yeah, it’s been tested a bit, this willful optimism of mine.  And becoming aware of that, becoming conscious of this inner struggle, certainly informed some of my songwriting and creative efforts.

A month after Luke’s passing, I went to see a psychotherapist. Private, expensive, several sessions, somewhat helpful. Smart fellow, wise and doubtlessly expert in his field. Younger than me, by at least ten years. After the 3rd visit I thanked him and canceled. You know, making records costs a bit, too. And I found, that the process involved in telling this gentleman, this professional, my stories and trying to understand myself a little better, is not wholly different from my process in writing and recording my own songs. Things are revealed, things I like and sometimes things that surprise or even disappoint me. In short it helps me work on myself, to hopefully become a better person. Well, funny thing – I even at one point some months ago said I was done making records for a while. Ha! That didn’t fly, so, well, I decided I can afford one or the other – record-making or therapy.

To become a better person. Now that is a worthy goal. And it’s one worth saying out loud at this time in our world, I believe.  Because there seems to be, among our fellow man, an embrace of values which are indecent. And I chose every word in that sentence. Our fellow man. Yes, also in women and in humankind more generally, but in men, I speak of men, men who have lost their sense of honor. Who have somehow been influenced, or brainwashed, if you prefer, to celebrate and reward simply the worst possible traits men can have. That is a mistake, and a dire one, and I doubt any good will come of it.

Meanwhile nature bats last, and she’s at bat. Instead of focusing our considerable human genius on dealing with the climate crisis intelligently, with the sort of organized focus which landed men on the moon, the human race is instead fighting wars over territory, power, religion, oil, water and vengeance, dumping more carbon into the atmosphere than ever before.

So how’s my willful optimism doing? Well, surprisingly ok. Because after all, it is willful.  What am I doing, with my time? Well, continuing to make art, for one thing. NOT making “art” with generative AI (I laugh out loud as I write this), and striving to be the best version I can imagine of myself. And I know, I know without doubt, that my friends and colleagues, and untold millions of good people whom I don’t know personally, are similarly striving. And THAT realization changes my optimism from willful, to easy and natural.

Our capacity for self-invention is considerable. And that’s some good news.

A Week Ago And Only Once

HERE is a scan of the set list I played at Ivy Room last Sunday. Blogging it as a memento, as it was a fun slice of life. Funny detail? I’ve started to use non-cursive print lately, along with my usual BLOCK LETTERS. With a pen, mind you, these ancient instruments.

I’m scheduled to play a set for Peter Montgomery’s 60th birthday party, at Gilman, in January, with a luminous cast of luminaries. Here’s the flier for that, as created by Peter himself:

And good morning

Sensible Comments Lurcheth Toward Babylon To Be Borne

Due to appalling lunacy I have completed my Sensible Comments album, and it will be foisted onto the unsuspecting streaming services on April Fool’s Day, because of course it will.  You may view the titles and (in theory) hear some audio snippets here -> ericdin.hearnow.com

As part of Berkeley Cat Records International Science Labs’ ongoing adventures and research, I distributed this release through CD Baby, instead of my usual Distrokid.  I was surprised to discover how different their artist-facing interfaces are.  Both excellent in their own ways, but rather than get into that here, I will instead quote myself from the album:

Tomorrow is a day
Yesterday was one also
There have been some before
Presumably there will be more

-from Derogatory Matrons, track 2 on Sensible Comments – a 14-track album of what I have the temerity to call songs.  I confess it’s one of my favorites.  Definitely not a pop album.  More in my experimental vein, you might say. Existential rants of bafflement and madness. Or as we call it here, Tuesday.

Already live in Bandcamp, per tradition, and on April the 1st I’ll update the release date there. All perfectly sane, don’t you think? Enjoy responsibly.

 

Barbercontenheimerglobbus

Resharing this from my Substack..

In which..

Ba Ba Ba, Ba Barbarella, Ba Ba Ba, Ba Barbenheimer, Ba Ba Ba, Be Bop a Thing..

Hello! It’s Caturday and there are things to be done. Cats to be played with, guitars to strum. Rivers to jump in, if it can be arranged.

What of the movies? Barbenheimer, or as I prefer, Oppenbarbie. Will I set foot in a movie theater for the first time in lo these many years? I might. I hope it’s not too loud. My last movie theater experience was bad. Too loud, and, lots of commercials! Yes, commercials. You pay the cover, you pay for parking, you buy the popcorn, you’ve paid, right? Captive audience, commercials. No mute button. This plus internets has made me stay home for my movies. But.. Barbarellaheimerbarbenopalypse.. I think it’s on. I may need to experience this moment of popular culture in its undiluted form. The Barbie preview – I pulled it up on Apple TV yesterday, and wow. I think I like. As for Oppenbabyheimerdude, I have read quite a bit about him, and his brothers, and his colleagues and friends and lovers, over the years. A fascinating and complex man to be sure. Epic moral dilemmas, giant world-changing science with huge secret team in the desert, why not? What we need is both films, side-by-side or even overlapping, to save time and maximize popcorn value. I’d sit through commercials for that.

OK, CONTENT! All of this is content. The writers and actors strike brings up so many fascinating issues. AI does its inevitable advance and hoomans try to understand it. An amusing feature to all this is the ads I see on FB and elsewhere – telling me to use AI to write blog posts or songs. I find it darkly funny that people would spend money to buy ads and target me with that message. I can spell out the reason, that will never appeal to me in any way at all: THE MEANING OF LIFE!

The meaning of life. I enjoy writing, creating, recording, and all of these things. I do them because they are fun. I learn things about myself, by doing them. I might entertain some people, or even inspire them, sometimes, by creating and sharing things that start in my imagination. So, no, thank you, dear AI company, I think I’ll not have you doing the fun bits instead of me.

Hey, my second solo album comes out August 1! This is the title track, sort of, and it may address some of these hot topics. Be well, stay cool and hydrated, <3 E

Twaaap

Yesterday I ranted, that I did not want any more social networks. It was a lie. I would be delighted if a better platform emerged, that was not driven by advertising and raw capitalism, but rather by our human desire to connect, and stay in touch.  I’ve joined a few attempts at this, and honestly, I can’t even remember the names of them.  Because nothing happened there.  My posts were ignored, much as they were on Twitter.  I don’t pretend to have anything particularly brilliant to say, but at least in FB, I experience some quality interaction.  Many of my real friends are there, amongst my FB friends.  Some I don’t really know well, but all I find interesting.  I’ve curated my friends list fairly carefully, since 2007.  I pass on friend requests that seem dubious, and block the occasional trumpy.  I have no time for them.  If there were some way to export my friends list from here and import them into a new platform that is less ruthless and more wise, I would do it.  Maybe someone can write an app for that ?
Doesn’t seem likely.
Anyway, I’m still here.  All of this is temporary.  But of all the social networks I have tried, FB is the most significant, for me.  Because so many of my peers are there. As Twitter collapses, and the world turns, I wonder where we will gather in the digital space, in another 10 years.

Tweeep

I don’t miss Twitter.  I quit on the day whatshisbutt took over.  I now have one less site to update when I publish a song, or a podcats episode, or mewsletter.  I find I like less, more, these days.  The other day someone sent me an invite to another webby socially networky thing, and the only emotion I felt was anxiety.  Based on that, I didn’t click through to learn more about how this was the better revolutionary democratizing responsible fun platform of the future because I don’t believe it and I don’t care.  Bah.  I’ve gone full get off my lawn about this.  There’s no sense in denying it.  Humbug and bosh. 

Now then, I feel better.  TODAY The Cow Song went live in boodles of streaming noodles, AND is famous in a subway car somewhere, apparently. 

 

 

Nay, I lie, it’s a pic from Distrokiddy’s nifty raft of promotional widgetys, of which I am a user.  User, isn’t that a word for our times?  Are you a user?  I am a power-user.  I was an early adapter (adopter?).  I don my pondering cap and cop: I AM DISENAMORED OF TEH INTERWHUTS!!

Language, spelling, these things are gone.  In the Before Time there were Copy Editors – I, myself, am still at times, a copy editor!  Professionally or with friends, I enjoy it.  And yet I also enjoy inventing words or spellings.  The meaning can be enhanced or altered, satirized or twizzled, anyporp is mossible.  Take for example, DISENAMORED.  I mean it’s plain, what it means. 

Liberties we take.  Do dictionaries stand a chance, anymore?  Official words in the Oxford Officialdom?  How can they keep up now?  How long did it take for Tweet to become a noun, a verb, and nothing to do with birds, enabling the end of civility, and Dystopian Crushing Darkness And Despair (DCDAD)?  We study, we wonder.   I DON’T MISS IT!  I didn’t like it.  The fact that it’s imploding while “Meta” also creaks and lurches precariously is interesting.  The era is shifting. What next, I wonder.

I double-space my sentence breaks and fall easily in love with English professors.  I LOVE language and the little rules of it, the ever-changingness of it, I’m fascinated that recording artists exist with names you can’t read phonetically.  I form whole sentences with emojies sometimes.  It’s like hieroglyphics – getting back to the foundations of written language.  Here’s a picture of a bird.  Here’s a smiley.  Here’s a heart.  I understand.  

CaturRanterSunday, it must be.  I don’t want any new user accounts in anything.  I’m going to try and trim it back further, so I have less to deal with.  My fascination with social networks has waned, and FB is the only one I’m still on, for now.  Oh and I grudgingly try to use Instagram but I find their interface utterly incomprehensible.  They want you to do it on their app, of course.  Everyone wants you to have an app, for their things.  I prefer my laptop, I prefer not having apps, I would prefer standardization of navigation methods and metaphors, and, I would like a pony.   Double-space..   thank you,

Good afternoon

Title? Title. Title!

Changed my mind, because of course I did. Rather than a two-CD set of 25-ish tracks, pressing a one-CD album of 13 tracks. I feel better about it. Decided the kitchen sink approach was not for me. This rocks from front to back without the weirder B-side-y stuff. Release in early 2022, deets to be bleated (TBB)

Oh, I started a Berkeley Cat Records mewsletter! Because of course I did. Signup is at the top of berkeleycatrecords.com.

Russ Ellis CD is available, for actual! Package came out great, we’re all delighted with it. You can pick up a copy at our beloved bandcamp.

What else? Got my flu shot. Made appointment for my “booster.”

As for societal collapse, I can’t help but be amused by some of the permutations. Parents giving guns to teenagers, apparently is a thing. One must laugh, because.. how?! What level of irresponsible stupid nihilism does it take, to provide a deadly firearm to a teenage boy? Let’s try that slowly. A. Teenage. Boy. Have you ever been a teenage boy? I have. About half the people I know have been teenage boys. Don’t give teenage boys guns. Especially when they’re having emo-crises and yelling “I have nothing to live for” at the world. You see, that part can pass, and it generally does. Teenage-ing is hard, and it passes, and then you’re a young adult. But once murder is done, it can’t be undone, there’s nothing to laugh about, and the life of the murderer also is essentially over. This kid in Michigan is finished. Whatever the legal system does, the child’s karma is wrecked forever and he’ll spend his life wrestling with his conscience and never win. His parents are astonishingly horrible idiots. They should all do time for the lives they took, of course, but it brings no one back. What happened to responsible gun ownership? This is zombie-apocalypse parenting. Some folks should not be parents. Done ranting.

Meeting with my esteemed album artist and art-director this morning, for my CD cover artwork finishing. The title of the record is not what I had said – “Eric Din plays the songs of Eric Roy Dinwiddie” – it is now something else. And by gosh I’ll share the title and the artwork soonishly. I’m rather thrilled about it.

Here’s my Holiday message! Religion is mostly stupid, but the parts where they say be nice to each other, those bits are good. Bye now.

Ranty McRantface Loves Football

Today they play the sport where they crash into each other with their heads. You can’t get across town in Berkeley on game days, because so many people enjoy watching young men giving each other concussions. Our higher learning institutions are happy to host the very intelligent running at each other with their heads business. It’s a family affair. We gather in the blazing sun to drink beer and watch young men crash into each other with their heads. I mean, why wouldn’t you, if you could? Dress up in a padded suit with a helmet in 90° heat and charge at each other and crash your heads together repeatedly? I can see no downside to it. The spectacle is made complete by young women in the sidelines dancing and cheering on the young men, as they bash their heads together. Concussions are awesome, and we celebrate, with beer. Colleges wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t smart. Some of the boys, if they are really good at this, and their knees still work, go on to play in the NFL. Where they’re paid lots of money to crash into each other even harder, until their bodies are destroyed and they spend their retirements trying to manage chronic pain, opioid addiction and brain damage. It’s totally awesome. If it wasn’t totally awesome, why would Americans love it? It’s the number one thing. Our single largest entertainment product. It’s nothing new, but today, I see people flocking to the stadium, old and young alike, with their “Bears” gear and I think, how wonderful that we have such a grand tradition. We should expand on it. It should just be the way we greet each other in public. Just straight run at each other and crash into each other with our heads. Then we can be even smarter. Because obviously this is smart. Or we wouldn’t do it. We certainly wouldn’t encourage young men to do it, at our universities, where we do the smart-being. It’s so wonderful, that today, I’m taking a shortcut, because I want to join the fun. I’ve purchased a six-pack of Budweiser and Hank Williams Jr.’s entire catalog to play while beating myself over the head with a mallet. Hey, when I get into something, I tend to go large. I want to be part of this. I’ve avoided this piece of American culture for too long. If only I had a son, I would encourage him to play football and tell him he’ll never be worth anything if he doesn’t win State, like the asshole drunk dad in Friday Night Lights. It’s the life for me now, I don’t know why I missed it. The new game is streamlined, however. To hell with these safety measures they keep talking about, trying to make the game less dangerous. Bunch of pussies. In the new version, the players will all have mallets and clobber themselves mercilessly until they’re passed out or dead. We need to stop coddling these boys. They need to man up and beat themselves to death. I’m excited about the possibilities. We’ll sell a lot of beer. Think of the cheers you could write for that! “RA! RA! SIS BOOM DIE! DIE! DIE!” It can’t miss. Sponsors will firehose money at this. Branded mallets will be the rage. You wont be able to go anywhere without seeing young men diligently beating themselves over the head, perfecting their technique. It’s Football Plus. Football distilled to its essence. Simplified, perfected. Girls can get into the act, too. No more gender bias in New Football, no. Anyone can beat themself over the head with a mallet. We’ll sing the national anthem and then just start right in a’self-clobberin’ and save a lot of hassle and time, not having to mess with helmets and medics and all that snowflakey nonsense. A more advanced player can simply behead himself, as his beloved coach yells, “PLAY THROUGH THE PAIN!” and the drunk dad bellows, “THIS IS IT, SON! YOUR MOMENT OF GLORY! IT WILL NEVER GET BETTER THAN THIS!”

Looking Backward

If a company has a failed product or campaign they do an “autopsy” to try and understand what happened in the hope of not repeating mistakes. I don’t know if the Democratic Party has done this intelligently regarding 2016. I try not to dwell on this, and we need to look forward, but I’ll tell you my take for what it’s worth. I say this as one citizen with one voice, and in a democracy one voice is important, and out of many we are one, and all that good stuff.

I think the Clinton campaign should have put Bernie Sanders on the ticket as VP / running mate and Sanders should have accepted. The progressive / left of which I am definitely a part, would have voted along with more mainstream middle-right voters, and the Dem ticket would have won in a landslide. Instead, they put Tim Kaine on the ticket. I actually had to look this up just now, because I couldn’t even remember the guy’s name. A potato would have been more exciting. They didn’t even ask Bernie, did they?

The progressive / left was utterly demoralized and disgusted by the way the Sanders campaign was torpedoed, and that led some people to stay home or vote 3rd party. There’s little room for that in a gerrymandered system with the Electoral College and “Citizens United” (Orwellian double-speak at its finest), and CNN pointing its damn camera at the “reality TV” clown’s podium for hours, talking about his stupid ass while WAITING for him to speak. Yes, and they did this while Bernie Sanders rallies were taking place simultaneously with overflow crowds everywhere he went, and he went basically everywhere. The Clinton campaign ignored states they thought they had in the bag, not realizing the populist mood and desperation of people who wanted to vote for anything that said “Wall Street bad, Main street good!” which Bernie Sanders said and meant, and the orange buffoon said and did not mean.

Autopsy: the Clinton campaign won the popular vote by nearly three million. Three million. Three million living breathing human citizens of this beautiful country, correctly voted against this disaster, and their votes did not elect the president because of the Electoral College, which was written to placate goddamn slaveowners a century and a half ago. I congratulate Clinton on her win, she would have been a decent president, possibly a great one, who knows? Would she have leaned into her more humanist tendencies, or her more hawkish ones? We will never know. We do know she is qualified for that office, and that the current infestation of the white house is most definitely not. She’s over-qualified for god’s sake, what were people missing? A two term senator, Secretary of State, oh, and she lived in the white house for 8 years and was deeply involved in policy at the highest level the whole time. I actually can understand why her campaign might have thought there was no way the raging orange walking lobotomy could possibly defeat her, because that was a rational conclusion to make!

What happened was irrational. Autopsy not easy to perform. There are so many pieces to it, and not one of us is privy to all of the relevant information. No one can see the whole picture. We can try, though, and by doing so we may learn some helpful things.

We know now that Russians were poking away at our social networks, riling people up to increase angers and divisions that were already there. We don’t know how much of an effect that had.

We also don’t know what sort of blackmail the ridiculous commander in chief is vulnerable to from his extensive ties to Russian mobsters, but we do see him passionately servicing Vladimir Putin with his mouth. Putin won. He’s loving this. He’s been working on this since the Cold War. Yet people in this country, American citizens, are still howling “Make America great!” even as our attempt at civil government of the people by the people for the people is put in its worst peril since the Civil War, by their traitorous babbling hero. I have no doubt the remaining “MAGA” crowd really does think they’re patriots. Though they have become the opposite.

Silver linings. What are they? This sure is one immense and horrible dark cloud. What flowers are growing from this biblical turd? Well, for one thing, women are running for office in record numbers. Also, early special elections in 2018 have shown a strong trend flipping Blue, even in some historically beet-Red districts. This is good.

And bless their sweet hearts, a group of high school kids from Florida, motivated by unimaginable grief, have stepped up with unity, courage, inclusiveness and eloquence, and they are great. They are America, and they are great.

Make America great “again” is a non-starter. That’s more Orwellian double-speak. What “MAGA” means is bring back white supremacy, do not go forward, oppress people of color, women and LGBT folks, build walls, be afraid, hate and close your mind and be limited, uninformed and miserable. Who really wants that? Thankfully the vast majority of us do not.

I voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton after strongly supporting Bernie Sanders in the primary. For my part of the autopsy, I would like to be able to say I campaigned hard for Clinton, but I did not. On election day I walked to my polling place and had a Star Wars “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” moment. As I waited in line I thought, “damn, couldn’t I have put in an afternoon of cold-calling swing voters, or something?” Because I did almost nothing. Before, in the primary, I helped raise over $3,500 for the Sanders campaign, and a number of people told me my early posts about Bernie made them look closer and get onboard. Then it became this huge groundswell I had a small role in creating, and I was proud of that.

After the Bernie wing was amputated, discussions among some of my friends got ugly. I put it aside. I couldn’t grieve it much. I wrote it off to politics as usual and said, OK, now I’ll vote for Clinton. And to my dismay, I got some really harsh blowback from that! Yes, in fact someone even called me a “Good German” for going along with it. That’s funny of course because I am half German! But I was taken aback. An intellectual, a person I know to be educated and smart, and for all I knew, kind and thoughtful, saw fit to equate my public declaration that I was voting for the Dem candidate and not a 3rd party, and that I was not writing in Bernie, she figured this made me a “Good German.” Or at least, she was willing to say that at the time, to make her point. I wonder, looking back, whether our discussions were or were not, in subtle or not so subtle ways, affected by nefarious actors and bots? Regardless, I walked away. I gave it some minimal effort but after a few interactions like that I just said to hell with it, Clinton will win, business as usual, I’ll vote like I always do and hopefully get another Bernie type opportunity later, done. So. Autopsy. It was not business as usual at all, and by the time I got that “bad feeling” on election day there was no way to move the needle.

Move the needle. That’s what democracy involves, right? You show up, you can do something. You don’t show up, others will do something. I write my little autopsy not to beat myself or anyone else up, just to observe. Maybe someone who reads this maybe shared some of my experiences, and may gain some insight from it. Why do I write this? Maybe because I’ve thought about it a lot. I really was bewildered by much of what happened in the last few years. Starting with the GOP treatment of president Obama. I mean, why? He was a great centrist corporate-friendly middle-of-the-road nice extremely smart family man whom they opposed on every single issue because of one thing. One thing. I didn’t think they would do that. Not so extremely and blatantly. It was heartbreaking and horrible. Rather than show us we have gone beyond racism, Barack Obama’s presidency revealed that the GOP is racist to its core. Or at least, they are willing to play to the racist part of their base, which is functionally the same as being racist. And now, you know, a white supremacist in the white house who screws around on his wife and brags about assaulting women and is loved by white Evangelical Christians. Could you make this stuff up?

It all has to go. At least finally the GOP is clearly exposed for what they are. What they are willing to go along with. They’re insulting kids who are grieving their murdered friends for the love of God, how low can you even possibly go? We must remove them from office.

Why am I on about this? What energizes me this morning? How am I again shaken out of resignation and sadness, and again toward action and resolve, to try and help improve matters for humanity and our sweet and only earth? What could possibly be the thing that inspires me so? Ladies and gentlemen, this:

Humble To Be Human

A peculiar observation of Vice President Pence: he’s white. I mean, white people aren’t usually white, as such. We can be sort of tan, or pink, orange even, but not white. Pence is white. White like a piece of white paper. There’s no pigment. He must bleach himself. No one can be that white. It’s unnatural. He and Jeff Sessions must go to the same bleaching spa. It must be a thing. They are of course also White Men in another sense. Champions of the expiring monsters of idiot patriarchy, white supremacy, theocracy, Pat Boone and every other bad thing on earth. They oppose all forms of freedom for anyone but themselves. And perhaps for other old men who also attend the bleaching salon. But even the bleached old men are sniping at each other now, as their rusted ship of bigoted fools plows at full steam for the jagged rocks of destiny’s shore.

Ahem. I’m white, according to convention. European-American. English, Scottish, Scandinavian, German. I took the mail-in spit-test, perhaps hoping for a surprise, but nope. Alabaster. Lily. Caucasian. Typical of straight white males, I didn’t spend much time thinking about my gender or race, while growing up. You’re born into your skin and gender and that’s it. Fate dealt me these privileged cards, and I don’t worry much about getting shot if I happen to get pulled over by the police. I was actually mistaken for a bank robber once, faced a small army of police with their guns drawn on me, and I survived. I’ll save that story for another post, it’s amusing. But we can’t escape our race, can we? It strikes me as odd, because it’s a fiction that we are different. That our worths are different. That our lives matter more or less. All of it is human-manufactured fiction that goes back centuries. In ancient Rome more than a third of the people were slaves. Our little baby nation practiced slavery just a few generations ago, yet some say “get over it” like it were anything less than a catastrophic crime against humanity that lasted for centuries. We’re all still affected by its legacy, our souls wrestle with it daily in myriad ways.

The weird kids screeching “you will not replace us” with tiki-torches last year displayed something I naively thought was gone. I thought that was in the past. These are kids who want to attend the bleaching salon, but can’t afford it! They want to be privileged slave-owning masters and they wont be. They want women to be second-class citizens again, and they wont be. Mike Pence probably sees “The Handmaids Tale” as a blueprint rather than a cautionary tale. But he is in a tiny minority. The United States of America are vast and multivarious. Our diversity is our strength. Bigotry will not win out. But its poison causes harm every day and its champions are in power for this dreadful moment.

I sometimes laugh at the comedy playing out in DC. It’s bloody entertaining, to see this lumbering wreckage, this blovious orange farce of a man, pretending to be president, and his clown men fanning him. It’s funny. It’s funny, but the harm it causes is anything but funny. Our poor country. Our poor world. It’s so sad.

What do I do, as a white man? This garbage presidency has shifted the context of whiteness, and of maleness, a bit. Religion, too. Oh, I left out Christian, in my self-privilege-assessment. Protestant. Lutheran and whatnot. Not practicing, mind you! But that’s my heritage, my background. Other than vote and try and be fair and kind in my affairs, I don’t know what to do. I don’t have answers. I have questions.

Why did people think we couldn’t elect a Catholic president? Kennedy sorted that out. Why did people tell me, when I supported Barack Obama’s campaign from the very day he announced, that he couldn’t win in this country? That we hadn’t evolved that far yet? Why also did people say more recently that Bernie Sanders could not win because he’s Jewish, or too old? A female president is as inevitable as the dawn, and Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by about 3 million.

For all of our flaws, our terrible history, our wars, our bigotries and our mistakes, this country is and will remain a nation of diversity, a nation of immigrants from all over the world. Unless you are a Native American you can only be several generations down from immigrants here, so the exclusionary rhetoric of division and fear vomited on us by the orange buffoon is patently absurd.

And what of racial pride? Why do we do that? Am I proud to be white? Am I proud to be straight? Am I proud to be an American? Or am I ashamed of these things? No, goddammit! I’m proud to be a human being! I am proud to share this precious and improbable world with humans, and critters, and plants and oceans and trees and air and joy and love! I am proud to be under the stars in a canopy of oxygen and nitrogen just right for breathing, and walking and swimming and running and playing music and living! And I’ve never hated a person in my life, least of all for their gender or race! Because why would you ever? What could be more boring, or impoverishing, or unpleasant, than that? To live that way, in fear, in bitterness, in grief, in the sadness and isolation and ignorance that bigotry requires. Why? Why choose that horrible darkness, when there is so much glory and light?

The “greatest nation on earth.” When did we start saying that? “One nation under God.” What unmitigated and utter bollocks. The presidents all ending their speeches with “God bless the United States of America.” Ridiculous. God bless the world. And everyone in it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is my interpretation, of the “American way.” God bless the whole world. Whatever your interpretation or understanding of God may or may not be, we can all rest assured, He, She, Them or It does not recognize our silly borders. Does not favor a race, or a gender or a country. Or a species, or anything for that matter. God is everything, and God is love. God does not discriminate. So why should we?

I am more pleased, than proud, I think. Amazed to have eyes and ears and senses and a body, with which to perceive the short time I have on this magnificent planet in an infinite and incomprehensible universe. Proud? Sure, I can be proud. But maybe humble is the better path? Humble to be American. Humble to be my race and gender. Humble to be human. Yes, I like that better.

I love humanity and I am humble to be in it, and you will never find me at the bleaching salon.

God bless You.