Wit & Whim

 Machiavellian 'virtu' and real virtue are a world apart. Not to dunk upon Machiavelli, because the Prince was clearly a work of necessity and the disourses on Titus Livy are the real deal. But Real Politik and the desire of men to be hard rather than good christians is getting tired. The history of the world is full of men who are powerful: excellent in their own regard. They have panache. They say things that sound right. They do things that look right. But they are ultimately evil, and behave in ways that are true to their internal evil, and the evil of the peoples that they stemmed from. They delight in the exercise of power, and the exercise of their power is not for righteousness. Leonidas and Trump (who I will likely wind up voting for) are poster children. Molon Labe. Come and take, says the spartan king, who eats of the bread made by slaves, on grain grown by slaves, upholding his evil government that relies on the work of brutally surpressed slaves, their raped wives,...

Do you all remember Pottermore?  If it does not ring a bell, Pottermore was a Harry Potter fan website while I was in college. It was full of HP related games and trivia, and extra Harry Potter stories, all overseen by the author herself. But that is not why people went to Pottermore. No. Pottermore was where you took the most important test of your young life. Not the SAT. Not the ACT. Not Myers-Briggs, or the Wechsler, or whatever ISTEP nonsense was out there. Pottermore offered to put you through the sorting hat.  It asked you a battery of rotating questions, many of which had clear correlation to personality, and some of which were much more subtle. At the end of the quiz, you received your house assignment. I think virtually all of my college classmates went through this process at the time, and you could not escape hearing about it for a little while. As a child, I pretended not to be able to read well after I had acquired the ability--because kids can be real dicks, rig...

 My total phone screen time for the day is under an hour, even with me drawn to memes about last night's debacle like a dog to its still warm vomit. Part of that time is also just when it sat open playing my audio book. It just has not held any draw for me. Likewise I have spent very little time playing video games in the last while. Not that I could not enjoy it, but it feels less like time I felt I spent well. Naturally, this is all because I recently turned 30, which has unleashed all manner of new dadly powers. I look forward to getting up before the sun and running 4 times a week. I polished shoes that needed it, cut out half of my alcohol intake, got rid of all of the old shit that was taking up space in the garage, aside from the pallets, which are about to be converted to support the new hobby I've become inexplicably attracted to...well okay, Emma suggested it, and I get excited about it the more I read. Folks. I am taking up smithing. I am not doing this because I wan...

 I still remember the moment that Charlie discovered violence as an engine for enforcing her little Toddler will. She was right around 1-1/2. She had never witnessed violence, or even adult voices raised in anger (Emma's intimidating physical presence cowed me long before Char arrived on scene). She had been on a spree of increasing resistance to diaper changes, getting PJs on, and the like. She understood physical struggle, and that in the course of struggle that her pushes and kicks could cause us discomfort or cause us to pause. She must have been coming to the realization that she caused us pain in the process. We were sitting on the floor. She had my phone and was toying about with it and I decided that it was not time to be playing with phones anymore. I removed it from her possession and put it in my pocket. She tried to get it for a moment, pushed and tugged at me, then turned her back on me for a moment to make some angry toddler noises, banging her fist down against her l...

One of the key selling features of our house--besides it's lovely hard wood floors and great windows and light throughout--was the large wrap around wet bar in the basement. "This," I said, "is just the spot for entertaining." It looks like you might have torn it out of a small neighborhood bar and dropped it in this basement. Dark stained pine wall paneling straight outta the 50s with bar facade to match, aqua-blue vinyl counter-top of interlacing gray and blue boomerangs, shelves beneath for all the extras, and plenty of wall space to work with. I was certain that I would make it my own, and then I would have people down here (where did you think I was writing from?) two nights a week at least. The prospect of having people over was fun and exciting. In part, because it would be fun to have friends over in an actually comfortable space. And for the other part, I'm a bit of a social lazybones when it comes to putting in the effort to contrive additional s...

One of my great regrets is that I had absolutely no inclination to learn music when I was young. My dear, beloved, sainted, mother tried to get me to take piano lessons, and I did have some, but it really was not productive, since I wouldn't practice and I was a terrible menace the whole way through the process. Even now I remember why I hated piano lessons; that painful plucking one note at a time, all of the mistakes I made, and the fact that all of my mistakes and virtuosic inadequacies were broadcast to the whole house by that treacherous instrument. One wrong note and everyone in the house knew you made a mistake! The horror. This peculiar neurosis of mine was not in any way fueled by my parents, who always told me that trial and error were part of learning, and that it was okay to make mistakes--don't know how many times I was told this--but little single digit year old me was not about to allow himself to be lured into mediocrity in the hopes of someday being good at...