​From time to time I have imagined a great password Armageddon or rapture, where all of our secret codes to get into all of our email, social media, and Slack accounts suddenly disappear. Everyone's private conversations are suddenly open to anyone who can suss out the username. It's harder to imagine how we can guess everyone's username, so for the purposes of this nightmare please ignore that part and skip to the chaos: Every off-color joke, every angry behind-the-back shit-talking, every half-formed controversial opinion or even draft email is there for any one on earth to do with it what they wish. Every enemy, every former friend or lover, and every malicious stranger can dig in and find something. 

How long have you been online, and how many accounts do you have? O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, consider Mike Pesca, who once was as liberal and loved as you.

In the first few weeks the cancelations would be constant. Celebrities and politicians and journalists would be lit up by online mobs. Regular Joes and Regular Jos would be swept up too. Apologies asserting that the offender would "do better" and "listen" would be ignored as the DM raiders moved on to their next target, their next scalp. 

The only thing more maddening than a recipe that forces you to read someone's life story before you get to the ingredients is a recipe that lacks someone's life story. My life story is at the end of this recipe.

​Crunchy Fried Chicken Deanne
 
Ingredients:
 
8 whole (uncut) chicken wings
1 tbsp kosher salt
1.5 cups buttermilk
1 cup flour
3 eggs with a few tbsp water
2 cups panko crumbs
2 tsp seasoned salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp ground thyme
Whatever other spices you like, but don't go bonkers
24 ounces canola oil
1/4 cup bacon grease 
 
Hot honey (optional)
1/2 cup honey
Red Pepper Flakes
Hot sauce
 
Instructions:
​
​1. Put tbsp kosher salt in a gallon size ziplock that does not leak. Don't get capital-Z Ziplocks because they are a disgrace and will definitely leak. Hefty brand freezer bags are excellent and do not leak or burst. Put saltbag in your backpack and ride your bike into work. (DO NOT ride an e-bike. I mean fuck-off with that.)

[Author's note: I wrote this Thursday night and thus this says "today" about an article published on Thursday and "yesterday" for something posted Wednesday and I refuse to edit that shit out.]



Bigshot hard-drivin' lawyer Lara Bazelon has a love story to tell, sort of:

"There was no emotional or physical abuse in our home. There was no absence of love. I was in love with my husband when we got divorced. Part of me is in love with him still. I suspect that will always be the case. Even now, after everything, when he walks into the room my stomach drops the same way it does before the roller coaster comes down. I divorced my husband not because I didn’t love him. I divorced him because I loved myself more."

I'm not sure that is not how romantic love or roller coasters work, but if it is a good thing when stomach-dropping persists well into a relationship, then I would recommend she and her man stick together. Despite what you might guess, that paragraph is not from a letter to the CIA psyops program known as Slate's Dear Prudence column, but from Bazelon's essay "Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love" featured in today's New York Times Opinion section. Bazelon is a criminal defense lawyer on the Clarence Darrow, crusader-for-the-little-guy tip. The terse Times bio also says she is "a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and the author of the forthcoming book 'Ambitious Like A Mother.'" Get it? That's short for "like a motherfucker." Hahaha.  One assumes this is an excerpt.

In his essay "Why I Write," George Orwell observed that, "looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally." I have read a lot of Orwell and I have never come across a purple passage, but I will take his word for it. However, I am reluctant to agree with him that good writing necessitates a political purpose because it is in 2021 and I am exhausted. Politics is ubiquitous and obnoxious. Nary a coffee shop in America is free of a political slogan scrawled in chalk next to the single-origin prices. It is tedious, exhausting, and endlessly divisive. Literature without political purpose seems like a relief to me.  

In the same essay Orwell has an answer for my complaint. "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." Fair enough, but also exhausting. We have many, many writers today eager to stress that point. I mean, God forbid you write about the moon or a flower.

Despite my resistance to these claims, Orwell is probably right. The political purpose that is nearly always present in his books and essays gives his work moral force, but it does not make his views correct, nor is it the aspect that makes his writing stand out from the other sincere and humane political tracts of his time. Before all else, Orwell is a fantastic stylist. He has a casual, almost conversational tone that belies a confidence and an authority that nearly no writer can match. He is concise, direct, but never dull. To take one example of his many talents, he is one of the finest lead writers in English. Here are a handful of classic opening lines:

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is sound advice, but it’s unrealistic. Judgments happen immediately, reflexively. The real meaning of the phrase is not to trust our first flawed, and maybe even cold and cruel, judgments.
 
Anyone so morally perfect to never judge another human being by appearance would never enjoy those delightful moments in movies when we find out the Dumb Person is a Smart Person. Matt Damon suddenly goes from janitor to math genius in “Good Will Hunting,” and we marvel at the unlikely occurrence. In “Five Easy Pieces” Jack Nicholson plays a manic oil rig roughneck who spies a piano on the back of a pickup truck and hops aboard to belt out some Chopin. The reveal of talent in each case is dependent on an audience full of flawed people who judge books by covers constantly. The surprise is also validated by the fact we are usually right when we do so. Janitors do not tend to solve math problems no one else ever has, and roughnecks do not tend to be classically trained pianists.
 
This is not a defense of being judgmental, but an acknowledgement of judgment’s inevitability in daily life. It is also a preamble to say: show me a guy “running” a 15-minute mile in a mask with no one nearby, and I will tell you his politics.

Last month I compared late medieval depictions of hell with vague post-religious affirmations of beauty and found the latter inferior as a motivational force. Toward the end of my essay I wrote, “… while I don’t pine for the harsh, hell-focused Christianity of [the 13th century], I do wish there were more acknowledgement today of how we are often not beautiful, how we have the capacity for ugliness—like sin.”
 
This part of my argument needs further explication. America is still in the middle of the Great Awokening, and now we are anything but short on people pointing out our ugly sides. After the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the bitter and often toxic debates of college campuses and Twitter became common throughout America. Millions of Americans are demanding accountability from other Americans for our failings and crimes related to race, gender, and sexual orientation. It is impossible to read, watch, or listen to the news without the topic coming up within minutes. So why do I think that there should be more acknowledgement of our capacity for sin?

​One afternoon late last summer my wife and I were sitting on the porch working on our laptops when a man walking two large, white, and expensive dogs passed by. Without breaking stride he looked up at the Stars and Stripes hanging over our steps and said, “I love that flag,” in a passionate, breathy tone I now imitate whenever I see a giant flag flying over a car dealership.
 
This was a few months after the George Floyd riots, around the time of the Kenosha riots, and, as my wife and I working from home implies, several months after the coronavirus had sunk its protein spike into America. “I love that flag” is an odd greeting, and I have wondered, pretty much whenever I see a flag or a large dog, why he chose that salutation out of all possible options.

​Which one motivates you more? Which one do you think is truer to reality?
 
Are you, in fact, beautiful—currently, right now, no matter what? If so, how are you beautiful? Physically, spiritually, generally? Does your beauty come with any obligations? Does this statement/fence make you feel better?
 
Or are you, in fact, a loathsome sinner worthy of hell? Have your deeds made you a delicious snack for a demon? (I love his expression; you make it after your fifteenth Cheeto—dude is zoning out.) If you are not currently a stand-in for one of the munchable-damned in this painting, do you think you could be if you gave in to a few temptations? Do you see something like this and not laugh from the safe distance of the post-Enlightenment, but instead react like Rilke before the torso of Apollo and hear a voice saying, “You must change your life”?

I received the following email from Slack yesterday:

​April is National Humor Month and we’re celebrating by inviting you to a special virtual event.

Join us as we welcome the authors of the best‑seller Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life, Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas, for a conversation on how leaders can use humor to empower employees to bring a broader and more authentic range of their humanity to their work and to their team.

We’ll talk about:

--The behavioral science of humor, and why it is an underleveraged superpower to fuel creativity, foster resilience and strengthen bonds at work.

--How to flex a new leadership muscle that will foster greater boldness, authenticity, presence, joy and love—in yourself, your teams and at your business.

Written the evening of February 21.


I'm listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams's orchestration of "Greensleeves" on one of my dad's old vinyl records. This is one of my favorite songs, and this record is more muted and dull than many of his others. I don't mean dull in a bad way, which I guess means I am fishing for a word and coming up with the wrong one. It's a fifty year-old album, give or take, and probably got some use. It's not scratchy or crackly, but a little flat— maybe from wear, maybe it was never a great recording to begin with. But this flat, faded, almost AM radio sound works for "Greensleeves," that mournful, elegaic tune about... what, lost love? Williams's version is instrumental and I don't know the lyrics of the folk song it's based on, but I think it is a man remembering a woman he loved. To me the melody is so sad and beautiful that it must be the longing of someone around ninety, and not just for a long lost love but for a whole world, for an era and way of life that is now gone. What had seemed so alive, what was so alive, some gorgeous young woman in her distinctive green sleeves-- not only does he miss her, he mourns her, and not only her but his youth and everyone and everything he knew. That's what the song feels like to me, and the aged, faded quality of my dad's old record makes it more apt to the emotional core of the song than any higher fidelity recording.

Today would have been my mom's 81st birthday.

​When I was a kid growing up on the South Side we called all the bugs that make noise at night in July and August “crickets.” I am not sure why or if any are actually crickets. I think they are cicadas, but we reserved that word for the 17-year variety. As a boy I was told how much noise the 17-year cicadas made back in 1973, the year before I was born, and looked forward to 1990 for their next arrival in Chicago. When that happened I was in Europe on vacation and only arrived home for the tail-end of their emergence. They liked oak trees, everyone said and it seemed true, and my neighborhood had many oak trees. The trees themselves seemed to sing when the cicadas got going. When they came back in 2007 I was up on the North Side, where the cicadas where more muted and widely dispersed. But once that year I went to a cousin’s house in my old neighborhood for an engagement party for my sister, and I deliberately got off the train two stops early to walk over a mile down oak-lined streets to listen to the cicadas. I remember, on the deck of my uncle Bob’s, my great aunt Rosemary had a cicada sitting on her shirt like a living broach. Her husband, my uncle Kevin, sat next to me and asked me why no one made comedies anymore. I was somewhat confused, thinking maybe he meant the quality had fallen off since Chris Farley died, which seemed an unlikely opinion given his age. My dad later whispered “He means musicals.” Kevin was a daily communicant. Fought at Saipan, and was part of the first group of Marines who arrived at Nagasaki after Japan surrendered, which we only learned through a eulogy someone gave after his death a few years later. Rosemary, seated in the front row of the church, saluted the young marine who handed her the folded flag. I never saw her again.

Implicit in complaints about political correctness is that it (the statement, term, belief) is logically incorrect or at best misleading. It then follows that a deliberate logical fallacy creates aesthetic problems in essays or speeches or works of art-- or whatever the PC thing touches. In short, PC feels stupid just like any bad logical leap, and is therefore ugly and distracting.

That thought came to me while listening to a decent podcast from the BBC called "Living with the Gods." It's a series of 15 minute episodes about some of the core aspects of religious belief throughout history and across culture. The first several episodes are great, and generally it's way above average for podcast/radio shows, but I score it a mere "decent" thanks to commentary in several episodes that is simply PC bullshit of the 2017 vintage.

Last week I wrote an essay about Tom Petty and his influence on me. Read it here.


​

There are a pair of comic-relief scenes in Manchester-by-the Sea that concisely encapsulate my problems with the movie. 16-year old Patrick, whose father recently died, practices with his band, Stentorian, in the garage or basement of one of Patrick’s two girlfriends’ houses. The band sucks, and that is supposed to be True and Funny. In the first scenelet Patrick and his mates reprimand the drummer for playing too slow. In the second, they reprimand him for—hold on, you’ll never guess—playing too fast. Nothing else happens in either scene.

These two paired bits add little to Patrick’s character beyond 1) reminding us he is just a teenager and 2) showing us one of the things that binds him to his titular town. The latter is important because his uncle Lee may move him out of it.
​
Unfortunately, the terribleness of the band makes Patrick less interesting, not more, and makes this particular bond to his hometown flimsy. I’m not asking for Jack Nicholson suddenly playing a busted piano like a virtuoso minutes after clocking out of the oil-rig in Five Easy Pieces, but some nuance or passion or depth of character would have been nice. If I am supposed to spend over two hours giving a shit about a guy, please make him interesting. Beyond the death of his father, the boy possesses little to excite our sympathies. I mean, he’s one of those dudes juggling two girlfriends once. Nuts to him.