Top of the Spanish Steps?

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Zuma rooftop bar?

Stephen Sondheim זכרונו לברכה

Have yourself a merry little

Waukesha is about 100 miles away from us up here: a place that people mark as your quintessential American small city — although for those who still associate it with “Happy Days,” it was never quite that, either. It’s not the kind of place that makes the national, let alone the internal, news. Most of Wisconsin likes it that way and the number of times we’ve been part of broader news coverage in the last year is truly disturbing to a lot of people. “We” prefer to be quiet and get on with things.

By which I mean that we prefer not to sit in our cars and cry when the radio gives us the latest count of casualties in the children’s hospital ICU.

The editorial pages are full of anger, the air thick with it, the conversations in the lines at the coffee shop and the movies and the grocery store bristle with outrage. Wisconsin needs a death penalty. Lock him up and throw away the key. Everyone speaking and everyone silent knows precisely how four dancing grannies, a bank teller about my age, and an eight-year-old spectator could still be alive.  We need real legal penalties. We need a functioning bail system. We need better mental health care. We need better schools, better families, a better president, a better governor. The apocalypse is coming. Marana tha.

Outrage is easy but answers are hard. We have always already rejected every solution.

Our prisons are old and decaying and jammed full and nowadays, coursing with COVID-19. With no political will to renovate or build new, we literally can’t pay people enough to staff the facilities we have. Not only can’t we pay people enough to work in the mental health area, between the people who fear the mental health system as a locus of false imprisonment and those who see it as a shield for every sort of lying malefactor, its future is not hopeful. We want to be tough on crime and we don’t want to hire more judges or court clerks or public defenders. We want dangerous offenders to be kept off the streets and we are increasingly critical of the cash bail system. We want inner city families to be strong without jobs or public transportation to take people to them or housing protections and we want people to reject certain categories of addictive substances on force of will alone even as the rest of the state drinks itself–legally–into oblivion.

I don’t know the solution either. I do know that ideology predicts the crime and the outcome and ideology also feeds the outrage that keeps us predicting the crime and the outcome.

It seems to me, though, that what we can’t look in the face is the increasingly destructive fantasy of individual well-being as potentially separated from the whole. It’s easier to look away from everything that’s wrong on the margins of the picture than to acknowledge that while a large group of people is happily cheering the approach of the holidays and dancing in the street, a man with a history of domestic violence can leave the scene of a disturbance and destroy not just lives, but our convictions that we deserve a certain kind of life untouched by destruction, whatever the cause of it.

It’s the increasing apparent lesson of the last two decades at least. As long as one of us is not okay, all of us live at risk. There is no “we,” only we.

Gotta love N&S fanfiction

It’s the ten year anniversary of the appearance of the first self-published ones, and the authors are celebrating with a giveaway bundle. Details here.

A friend is blogging

Radaghast, who has been commenting here and elsewhere in the Armitage fandom for the last several years, has finally opened her own blog, Radaghast’s World. She is writing in French (and not about Richard Armitage for the most part), but for non-Francophones, I recommend reading the blog with Google translate. If you leave an English comment, she will understand. Allons-y!

Your Richard Armitage fandom approaching winter solstice holiday reminders

Here’s the update about Guylty’s plans for holiday charitable fundraising. Judging by my current mood, I’m not going to be updating at every point as I have in the past, so if you’re interested, please do make sure you follow her and mark the dates.

Also at Guylty’s, you will find Amazon Associate links for Germany, the UK and the US (about halfway through the post). Although it has fallen off in recent years, the money generated by those purchases currently goes to cover the hosting fees for RichardArmitageNet.com. To use them, enter the Amazon portal via one of those links before you purchase something. Instructions can be found there for bookmarking them.

Getting back on the horse

Here are links to two articles I found interesting:

A survey of the London theater scene that mentions Yaël Farber’s Macbeth. You remember how I feel about that.

Annabel Capper makes the New Yorker!

Time passages

It’s daylight savings time again. We’ve had gorgeous weather.

Lately this has been a stressful day. Dad always knew exactly what time it was (a gift he passed on to me and HL, incidentally), but as his time sense eroded post-stroke, he started assembling clocks to reassure himself. The house had eight clocks in sight lines of his favorite place to sit in the living room; his bedroom had four. Some were gauged to change themselves on their own, but others had to be physically changed. So the changeover day was always filled with anxiety until all of them had changed or been changed. He moved five into assisted living with him.

In the end, no one is anxious about changing the clocks today. Dad died about two weeks ago; the funeral was a week ago; Friday was the inurnment with military honors.

OT: Squid Game? [no spoilers please]

So discussion of “Squid Game” is all the rage right now. Are you watching it? Is this something I would enjoy?

Just say yes

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