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   Actual photo of a real whale taken by me off the coast of Monterey, California, in 2009.

     Call me Neil. Some years ago — all right, about 40 — having little or no money in my pocket, and nothing particular to interest me in business, I thought I would write for newspapers a little and see the inky part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the ...
     OK, enough of that. If riffing on “Moby Dick” is an odd way to begin my first column of 2023, stick with me. We’ll circle back.
     No sooner had I polished my blog post for Tuesday when Facebook tossed up an ad for Jasper. “Write blog posts 10x faster using AI, without sacrificing quality,” it promised. “Create high quality articles in seconds.”
     “In seconds”?! And just as good? Well, sign me up! I clicked on the link, and came to the page for “an app that uses AI to create any kind of content you need” according to the explanatory video, where a jumpy woman — older, tired, — despairs at saying something fresh about socks until Jasper, personified into a little robot friend, offers up this line: “The perfect pair of socks is like a hug for your feet.”
     “Hot damn, that’s good!” she marvels.
     Is it? Hold that thought while I make sure those readers who still carry cash are following along.
     “AI” stands for “artificial intelligence.” It’s the same collection of circuits that makes a calculator work, but complicated enough to mimic human thought, supposedly.
     If you assume AI is a long way from affecting daily professional journalism, you weren’t looking closely at Friday’s column, about medical decisions. A full-service columnist, I write my headlines — unaided by tools like Sassbook AI Headline Generator — and try to pick my own art, to save my superiors’ time and perhaps delay the day when I’m ushered out into the pasture of the tragically defunct.
     The find-a-photo process went like this: First I searched Merlin, our Sun-Times photo database, looking for some retro black-and-white 1950s Marcus Welby MD image of a doctor in a white jacket. Finding nothing close, I looked at my own photos of hospitals. Busy and grim. I tried the Library of Congress and the Metropolitan Museum of Art banks of public domain images. Nothing. Twenty minutes of fruitless searching. Then I sighed, jumped onto Dall-E, the graphic AI provider, and created a free, useable image in about 10 seconds.

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Death and the maiden

"Death And The Maiden," By Marianne Stokes (Musee D'Orsay)

     What I want to do today more than anything else is amplify, in my small way, Nicholas Confessore's front page article in the New York Times yesterday, "The invention of Elise Stefanik."

     Yes, the Times doesn't need me to promote their stuff. But I'm not doing it for their benefit; I'm doing it for yours. The Trump enormity is so, umm, enormous, and so ongoing — nearly seven years in its current phase and no end in sight — that we can forget just how awful he is, how he really does kill everything he touches. I've certainly been vigorously ignoring it, hoping the national firestorm won't surge back to life. But this in-depth story of the moral death of an undistinguished congresswoman is a valuable cautionary tale, a reminder of the poison we as a nation are struggling to metabolize. Sure, I could pull up an old photo and spool something about it. But nothing I have to say is as important as this article. Read it. It's long, but it has a really good kicker, and I encourage you to soldier on to the end. It's also a good example of journalism finally, finally flexing to deal with the situation we find ourselves in. The tone of utter moral revulsion is appropriate. This is still an impartial story, but also one that burns Stefanik to the waterline. I don't know how she could ever show her face in public after this. But then again, if she had a functional sense of shame, she couldn't behave the way she does. None of them would.

The thing with feathers

 

T-shirt, "Out of the Darkness Walk," Dallas, Oct. 29, 2022

     My wife asked me about my hopes for 2023, and I began to unspool the usual litany: a new book, get in better shape, fix up the house more. I don't know if those really count as "hopes" — "goals" might be more accurate. What's the difference? "Hope" seems more passive, scanning the sky, waiting for the arrival of something out of your control. While a "goal" is the mountaintop you set your sites on while climbing. Goals are better, more active. 
     Then again, I'm down on "hope" lately, set against it by an aphorism of all things. 

     I was going over an old post about hope — Hope is the thumb you suck waiting for things to get worse — and one saying, that seems to have slipped past in 2014, stung now: ""Hope makes a good breakfast but a poor dinner," offered by a reader, Tom, quoting Francis Bacon.
     Aphorisms are dubious currency. Easy to spend — I sure fling them around — often overly familiar, worn smooth,or directly contradictory. If "Time is money" and "Love of money is the root of all evil," then is time the root of all evil? I sure hope not. (Although, on second thought...)

     Aphorisms sound good. That doesn't make them actually valuable. 
     As frequently happens quoting such truisms, Tom got the wording slightly wrong. Bacon, a scholar, scientist, politician, contemporary of Shakespeare (who sometimes is credited with writing some of the Bard's plays) was famous for coining phrases. His death in 1621 did not stem his publications, and the second edition of his 1661 Resuscitatio contains numbered vignettes, "Apophthegms New and Old."
     In No. 36, Bacon meets fishermen casting at a river and offers to buy their catch. They ask for 30 shillings; Bacon offers them 10. They refuse, so he settles down to watch them (the tale smacks more of a set-up for the line than reporting). After they catch nothing, Bacon chides them: "Are you not mad fellows now, that might have had an angel in your purse, to have made merry withal, and to have warmed you thoroughly, and now you must go home with nothing."
     "Ay but," reply the fisherman, "we had hope then to make a better gain of it."

     "Well, my masters," says Bacon. "Then I'll tell you, hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper."
     Meaning that hope has value early in the day, but curdles as evening falls. Which every ambitious person has to keep in mind as the years slip past, and whatever you'd thought might have been, dances away, unachieved, forever out of reach, a will-o-the-wisp.
     That's the problem with hope, its contains its own parasitic twin, disappointment. Hope is writing a check to yourself. Sometimes it get cashed. Usually it doesn't. After a while, the overdrafts pile up. Thus late-in-the-day hope takes on a delusional quality. 

     What to do? Abandoning hope — for a certain level of success, say — sounds like surrender. It clashes with a favorite aphorism from Dr. Johnson, "I will be conquered; I will not capitulate." So the hell with Francis Bacon, throwing shade on the adored blankie that's carried by so many over the years. It may not be much, threadbare and tattered and stained. But it got us this far. No getting rid of it now.

Seize the day.

   "The Pillars of Creation," Eagle Nebula (NASA James Webb Space Telescope)

             

     Thirteen point eight billion years ago all the matter in the universe was condensed into a space far smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.
     As to how that is possible — it seems a very tight fit — well, that is above my ability to understand, never mind explain, beyond observing that the known universe, like American politics, is mostly empty space. The physicists making the claim seem very confident about it, and they ought to know.
     Whatever the true size — c'mon guys, a grapefruit, a basketball, give us something we can work with, intellectually — the gathered stuff exploded in the "Big Bang" setting all existence in motion, sending matter hurtling in all directions (that's why astronomers can figure this complicated situation down to a specific if enormous span of time, assuming that rounding to the nearest 100 million years can be called "specific" — they see where celestial stuff is, how fast it's all moving, and work backward).
     Leading us to today, you and me on Jan. 1, 2023. The holidays behind us. Entering the dead of winter. Heading toward the third anniversary, later this month, of the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, an epochal explosion in its own right, killing millions of people on our little planet in a little solar system in a remote corner of the galaxy, jarring societies into all manner of contortions. I don't want to project my own situation onto humanity as a whole, to be one of those people who, to use Thoreau's delicious phrase, "mistake their private ail for an infected atmosphere." But entering 2023, reality does not really seem to be expanding. On the contrary, quite contracted. The horizons narrower. Less public. Less promising. I once put on a suit and tie as a matter of routine, went downtown to a crowded office where I might interact with dozens of people, head to the East Bank Club for lunch to play racquetball with the editor of the paper, then slide by a meeting to chat with some mover and shaker.
     Now, well, nothing like that. Nothing close. Ever. Maybe it isn't COVID. Maybe it's the general etiolation of journalism, denied the healthful rays of fresh advertising and new readership, coupled with my own steady decay, a man entering in his mid-60s, as physical and mental systems gather entropy. Set against the backdrop of COVID. A triple whammy.
     What to do about it? This is where the vast, unfathomable amount of time since the creation of the universe comes in. Because really, whether you are 2 or 6 or 62, the amount of time you've had, the amount of time you've got, on a geological, never mind universal scale, is the briefest span. The single splat of one warm raindrop in a monsoon covering a continent and lasting a century. Not even that.
     Given how little our portion, the only strategy is to flip that around and declare it a bounty. Because it's all we're going to get. So enjoy the splat. Don't spend more of our brief span unhappy than we absolutely have to. There's enough of that without you contributing more. Experience our tiny, fleeting realm as fully as possible. As a person who, as an infant was nicknamed "the professor," given to introspection, to cerebral dourness, it might be late to change now. But wasting these precious days and years seems both ungrateful and unwise. There will be a near eternity to not be bothered by ... anything. Meanwhile, glories glitter above, and below, and among us.  Look at these photos from the James Webb Space Telescope. Look what a beautiful place we find ourselves in. How fortunate we are not only here, but are creatures who are able to perceive it, mostly. As opposed to rocks or worms or cobalt. Lucky us. Or as Hemingway said, "The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for"

       So wake up in the morning, stoke your internal fires best you can, and resolve to try to wring something of benefit out of the day. Then go to it. That's what I try to do, plan to continue doing, and hope you will too. It is incredibly gratifying to me that thousands of people visit this blog every day. Three days a week I serve up near professional grade newspaper journalism that goes in the Sun-Times. One day the spiritual wake-up call of Caren Jeskey. And the other three days, a combination of old chestnuts hauled out of the vaults, hopefully dangling from a thread of relevancy, along with original essays like this one. 

     I think I've taken enough of your precious time today, which beginning-to-end, is only a few eyeblinks compared to the massive scale nature plays out its still-boundless mysteries. (Speaking of which, I've always thought that matter, having exploded from the Big Bang, flies out in all directions, then, billions of years hence, will return upon itself, in some curved space quality we don't understand yet, and so maybe in another 13 billion years it'll all start hurtling back toward each other to reunite in another spot smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. There to linger for another unmeasurable span there until some unknowable force cries out "One more time," or meaning to that effect, and it all starts up again. That makes sense to me, a promises a sort of immortality).

     Until then, thank you for your attention. Happy New Year. We get another one, let's not waste it. Welcome 2023. But since even a year, short as it is, is too much for humans to grasp in totality, let's start with a more manageable unit: one day. This day. Jan. 1, 2023. Today. Carpe diem, as the Romans said. Seize the day.

Taken by the NASA James Webb Space Telescope. Used with permission.

Northshore Notes: Teaching Children

Created by Dall-E AI software

     Well, we made it through 2022, almost. The year ends with a sweet reminiscence from our Northshore bureau chief, Caren Jeskey. They didn't offer yoga in school when I was a kid. But this sure makes me wish they had. Happy New Year.

By Caren Jeskey

     After spending hours writing and erasing and writing and erasing, at 10:00 pm last night I realized I have a full-fledged case of writer’s block. So, I took a note from my fearless editor Neil and decided to offer a piece I wrote in 2001 for Yoga Chicago Magazine, a simple and sweet story on this last Saturday of 2022.

     This past summer, I had the pleasure of teaching yoga to sixth to eighth grade Chicago public schools students. They were enrolled in the DePaul Preparatory Academy, a summer enrichment program. We met weekday mornings in a classroom at DePaul downtown. I’d surreptitiously (and very carefully) burn a stick of my favorite incense, Nag Champa, before the children arrived. “Why does it smell like marshmallows?” they’d ask.
     They’d request to “please start class with that lying-down pose.” They’d take their shoes and socks off, and lay down on their backs on yoga mats. I’d talk them into a deep state of relaxation, savasana. A form of meditation. Sometimes snoring would ensue. After allowing the tired kids to decompress for a while, I’d gently talk them back into the room; they’d wake up rejuvenated and ready to try some yoga poses.

     I encouraged the children to ask questions during the times we sat around discussing whatever was on their minds. “How do planets float in space? If teachers know things, how come they look in books to teach us? Is there life beyond our world? What is love and hate? How do you forgive someone you care about even though they were wrong? Why are there locks on 24-hour Walgreens stores?” Fun conversations would commence.
     It was a good-vibe class. The youngest student told me “besides lunch, my favorite class is yoga.” He shared that yoga helps him get over feelings of anger. I once taught the children how to use techniques to keep an ornery teacher calmer. The teacher came to me afterwards and said “I don’t know what you told the kids, but they were terrific today. Thank you.” Once must have let it slip that something unusual was going on. I simply asked them to sit next to someone new that day, rather than the friend they normally sat next to (and probably chatted with a lot, frustrating the teacher). I suggested that they think “may you be happy, Mr. O” when he seemed angry.
     When we practice peace towards others, we might see it in return if we are lucky. And at least we are not adding fuel to the fire.
     On the last day of class, a perky, muscular girl of 12 with a calm demeanor sensed my frazzling nerves. We were completing displays for families to visit during the closing ceremony later that day. (I found that it was much easier to teach yoga than it was to get the children to complete a more academic assignment). She took my hand, gazed into my eyes, and said: “Ms. Jeskey. It’s OK to have a bad day. Even if you do yoga.” She rejoined her poster-making group, lay down on her stomach and got back to coloring. I was a little embarrassed, then realized she was only giving back to me what I had been offering her all summer. Kindness.
     So now back to the present day. December 31, 2022. I’d love to know where my former students are today. They'd be in their 30s by now. I hope they've all landed on their feet. I've often wondered about the 12 year old who brought gin in a 7-Up can to class. At that time I took him to lunch and let him know that people cared about him.
       Reflecting back to memories of connection with other humans is reassuring, especially in these disconnected times. Wishing you a safe and cozy New Year’s Eve. See you in 2023.

     "A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; how could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he."

        — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

When should you listen to doctors?

Created on Dall-E AI.

     Anti-vaxxers have a point.
     Not in their blanket rejection of vaccines. Those save millions of lives, maybe mine. I’ve taken five, count ‘em, five, COVID shots and wish you would too, even though you probably haven’t — 90% of Americans didn’t bother with the latest booster.
     But they have a point about questioning medicine. Doctors are not always right; their advice is sometimes clouded by self interest. Some are highly skilled; others, less so. How to tell the difference?
     In 2019, when something was obviously wrong with my spine, I fled the first surgeon I spoke with, but let a second, at Northwestern Medicine, cut open my neck — decisions based on differences of bedside manner and because Illinois Bone and Joint Institute’s name sounded to me like something plucked from a Lemony Snicket novel.
     It’s a gut call. Earlier this year my father contracted COVID at his senior lifestyle community in Buffalo Grove. They sent him to a hospital. After a few days he was discharged into a rehab facility in Arlington Heights, and the facility told me he’d need two weeks of physical therapy to learn to walk again.
     Interesting if true, as they say in my business. As soon as he was out of isolation, I hurried over to the chaotic facility. Eventually I found him in a wheelchair in a dim room. We exchanged pleasantries. His roommate watched a blaring television.
     “Let me wheel you into the hall, Dad, where we can talk,” I said. I looked closely at him. He smiled back. A youthful 90, heavier than in the past, due to not remembering that he’s just eaten.
     “Dad, can you stand up?” I said. He did. “Dad, could you walk over there and back?” He walked over there and back. I went to the nurse’s station.

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"I don't want to go on the cart" — The State of the Blog, 2022.

In January, we went with the Night Ministry to visit the homeless.

     Two thousand twenty-two was another bad year for newspaper columnists. Media critic Robert Feder threw in the towel and Sun-Times obit maven Maureen O'Donnell retired. As did the always readable Leonard Pitts at the Miami Herald, citing "emotional exhaustion" as if that were a bad thing. I kinda like the drained-of-everything feeling that comes from cranking out a big story. Good tired. Makes me feel alive. 
     But maybe I'm strange in that regard. When I plug "newspaper columnists retiring" into Google I find a cemetery worth of folks whose names I've never heard, or forgot if I did, the fate of every columnist not named Mencken or Royko. That's why I'd be reluctant to write a farewell column — that seems how you learn about the existence of most columnists, at their goodbyes, their lives illuminated by their final spark as they gutter out. No thanks.
     And 2022 followed 2021, another lethal year in the pundit biz, when both Eric Zorn left the Chicago Tribune and Gene Weingarten was shown the gate at the Washington Post, his two Pulitzer Prizes tucked under his arm, driven out after a lame joke about Indian food. Mark Brown quietly stepped back from the daily thrust and parry, offering up the occasional column as the mood strikes.

     Honestly, those last two give me comfort. Because if Gene Weingarten can hang it up without the sun going dark at noon, and Mark Brown can decide to cough into his fist and amble offstage, then Dante's quiet harbor can call to me, too and, when the time comes, I can furl my sails and coil my rope without reluctance or regret.  Anything more is hubris.
     Though in the time that remains, it is getting lonely. The very idea of opining on the news, or having a distinctive voice, seems antique, out of favor in a world become free-fire zone where everybody is upchucking opinion at everybody else all the time. Sometimes it seems like I'm already performing a useless task, polishing the zeppelin mooring mast, scanning the skies, ready for the airship that isn't ever coming.
     What makes it worthwhile, still, are the stories. To me anyway. I can recall those without regret or foreboding or anything besides pride of accomplishment. A quick recap of the highlights of 2022:

Ashlee, left, at Roseland's COVID ICU.

     In January, I teamed up with Ashlee Rezin, covering the hospital side of COVID, returning to Roseland for "People are exhausted." I tend to pooh-pooh augury, but on Feb. 15, I did write "Why Russia is about to invade Ukraine," nine days before the war began, while many were still in denial of the obvious. In March, we cleaned out my father's art studio in "Doing time's dirty work."
     In April, the US Census for 1950 was unsealed, and I packed a lot of personal exploration along with some Chicago celebrity sleuthing with "Tracking down the family and the famous."
     In May, I let Smuckers conduct a master class in inept public relations with "Why does peanut butter taste so good?" 
     In June, I wrote my second most clicked post ever, "Why restrict child porn but not guns?" You'll notice that I didn't say "most read," because it's hard to believe the bowl-haircut yahoos reacting to it — with a Beavis and Butthead babble of "heh heh, you said 'child porn'" — actually read the column. One tweet had 10,000 comments, and I didn't read one, though people who did expressed concern for my safety, which I waved off. Bullies are cowards, and the fact that I'm still here means I gave their threats exactly the consideration they deserve.

Photo by Ashlee Rezin

      In July, Ashlee Rezin and I attended "Hearts to Art," a program for children who have parents who have died, "A camp that saves young lives." Again, her work is so outstanding, my writing functions pretty much as something to fill the space between her photographs.
     In August, I had a lot of fun with the dance of the seven veils that former Tribune columnist John Kass did over where he lives. "And John went down to the land of Indiana." Self-importance is a folk illness among columnists, and nothing keeps me humble better than watching the Kasses of the world fail to even try.

     Talk about things that keep you humble, in September, the book based on this blog, "Every Goddamn Day: A highly Selective, Definitely Opinionated and Alternatingly Humorous and Heartbreaking Historical Tour of Chicago" was published by the University of Chicago Press, a fact I ballyhooed in "Book Event This Weekend." If you remember Daffy Duck going down on one knee and spreading his arms to a chorus of crickets, you'll know what that felt like.
     In November, I finally submitted to the constant drip-drip-drip encouragement of Chicago Public Square's Charlie Meyerson, and started sending out emails with the link, "Receive EGD via mail." Forty days after I began, it now has 150 subscribers, which is both laughably small and enough.
     Which brings us to December. Caren Jeskey finished up her second full year of providing a clear, distinctive, alternate voice on Saturdays, with gems such as "Silurian Sea."  I am grateful for her consistency, professionalism, kindness, imagination, energy and spirit. The advertisements went up for Eli's Cheesecake, the 10th Christmas in a row that the venerable Chicago cheesecake company has supported this blog. If for some unfathomable reason you have not ordered their cheesecake, shame: go to it right here, right now.

     It seems we've all made it through 2022. Good for us. Hearty back pats all round. I can't imagine what 2023 will bring, but you can read about it here, before the day comes when I look down and see the big hook that has already yanked so many other better writers offstage now fixing itself around my waist. Until then, thank you for reading, and commenting, and sending in your email addresses to subscribe, and for buying cheesecakes. This won't last forever, but I am fairly confident we can get through another year. Let's give it a try.

Can't forget June's fulfillment of a longtime dream: a visit to the Neenah Foundry.