Here, eat your cheese: The State of the Blog, Year Six

     Last July, the newspaper sent me down to Granite City, to see Donald Trump give a speech at the U.S. Steel plant there. On the way home, I stopped for lunch in Dwight, a small town about 100 miles south of Chicago that turned out to have both an unexpected visitor's center housed in a refurbished vintage gas station, and a stunning bank designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1906 and still in use.
     I wrote a blog post about it, part of the carnival of quotidian essaying that is this blog, shifting from the important to the trivial, the current to the recycled.
    Neither news nor entertainment, fish nor foul, EGD wasn't a commercial endeavor, mostly, though it does have aspirations. And of course holiday advertising support from Eli's Cheesecake and its owner Marc Schulman, a tireless supporter of the blog since Day One. Thanks to him, and to all of you who ordered cheesecake. 
    For five years, the blog marched steadily upward. Readership grew. I imagined it become a Blog of Significance.
      Then this year Mark Zuckerberg turned a dial at Facebook, and readership fell 33 percent between August of 2018 and February 2019. Either that, or the public suddenly became indifferent, which is possible too. Though I do believe it is the former I like to think the quality, such as it is, hasn't suffered, but I'm not really the person to judge. And besides: the whole idea that good work is embraced while bad work is ignored is as baseless a fantasy as belief in faeries. 
     Besides Twitter has also closed down. Last year, I could get 100, 120 new followers a month. Lately I get none. My theory: people see the tweets either pushed by advertising dollars or sent by people with a million followers, neither of which describes me.
     I almost didn't count the numbers this year, but figured that would be worse. What's the point of being honest if you fall silent at bad news? 
    Bad news such as: in July, 2018, EGD had 75,928 readers.  That progressed steadily downward, lower and lower, month by month, until now, when June 2019 clocked in at almost exactly 50,000. with average of about 60,000 hits a month, putting us back to where we were in 2017. And a near-guarantee that next year will be worse.
    This, I believe, is where determination becomes a factor. Never never never and all that Churchillian folderol. 
    When we shift away from statistics, the picture improves. 
    In August, I started The Saturday Snapshot, using reader's photos to soften the weekend, both for the writers and, I hope, readers. Thanks to Tony, Tom, Nikki and all the regular contributors. We also marked Kitty's anniversary. 
    The blog carried all my columns in the paper, sometimes with sharper elements that the paper balked at, such as the Spanish headline on Friday's column. I won't run through all my favorites, though I have to mention the one in September where I featured women who donated their breast-milk to soften their grief after the death of their babies. In October, we hung out in Greenwich Village, at Caffe Reggio. 
     In April, I wrote a dozen pieces of a South American diary, including ones I was proud of on the tango as a guide to life, and a charming cheese shop. 
     Through it all, a steady fire directed at our president and the quislings and lackeys who support him, such as November's "Bias makes you stupid." For that reason alone, I think the blog is worth doing. Not for its limited and dwindling scope now, so much as to tell people in the future that we pushed back. In case they care.
    Which they might not.
    This is the place in the first draft of this report where I pressed the back of my wrist to my forehead and complained of being tired. But luckily I looked at past year-end summations, and noticed I was doing that during the blog's go-go sophomore year, when the numbers were zig-zagging skyward. So dispense with that.  Nobody likes a complainer—well, except for Republicans, who seem to love their whiner-in-chief, for reasons I can hardly fathom.

     I think that sums it up.  Wherever the beating heart of the internet may be, this ain't it. 

     But we are not without pride, and like to run a tidy shop ourselves. The cheese store in Necron, Chile wasn't Kraft Foods, either, but its proprietor still served up a delicious slab of fresh cheese for my two dollars. I try to do the same. Thank you for finding your nourishment here, and I'll hope to see you often in Year Seven. 


    
    

         

Time's up, Joe.

    Two nights. Two debates. Twenty candidates.
    How many are left now?
    That question is beyond my skill set.
     Four years ago I remember handicapping the 16 Republican contenders.
     Because it's easier to pan than praise. And I've already taken Beto O'Rourke to the woodshed for showing off his high school Spanish.
     Yeah, New Age guru Marianne Williamson was loopy. But you don't really need me to tell you that, do you?
     I will say the first night left me unmoved—so much so that I fell asleep halfway through. I get up early. My wife, who stayed awake, was very enthusiastic about Julian Castro. But I will have to take that on faith.
     Thursday night was very different. Kamala Harris was the breakout candidate, speaking with confidence, power, emotion and none of the wooden punching-above-my-weight quality that candidates like John Hickenlooper exhibited.
     Right up there with her was Pete Buttigieg, the South Bend mayor. So that's what the fuss is about. A man who is clear and direct and fearless and takes responsibility. "I didn't get it done," he said, asked why the South Bend police force was still 6 percent black in a city where the general population is a quarter African-American. No equivocation, no tap-dancing. It was almost shocking.
     Joe Biden wasn't bad, but he wasn't good either. He seemed to be taking a state's rights approach to civil rights, which is nearly a code for supporting racism. If he doesn't know that, he should. One problem with these longtime hacks is they think they can sugar-coat a turd and feed it to the public, because we're stupid, when we're really not, Donald Trump supporters notwithstanding. When California Rep. Eric Swalwell quoted Biden saying, 32 years ago, that it was time to pass the torch to a new generation, Biden replied, "I'm not letting go of that torch." It was a frank admission of the egoism and selfishness of his campaign. He won't let go, so somebody has to take it from him.
     The most inadvertently candid thing Biden said was when stopping himself from speaking. Most candidates barreled on as moderators tried to shut them up. Biden pulled himself short and said, "My time's up."
     Is it ever. 
     Maybe that's good manners. Or maybe it's the timidity that crumples before Donald Trump. The 2020 race won't be played by the Marquis of Queensbury rules.
     We have a long road ahead of us. Things change. But right now, I'd like to see Harris and Buttigieg together on a ticket. They seem in good position to pry the torch from Biden's claw. Then to be the splintery stick to shove up the ass of Donald Trump. If he beats them, well, then we deserve four more years of his clown show misrule.

¿Es este titular mejor en español?

Restaurant sign, Santiago

     An appeal to unity followed by a bald pitch to the nation’s Spanish speakers—the headline translates as "Is this headline better in Spanish?"—is a delicious irony, and exactly what is going to re-elect Trump.

     Beto O’Rourke was asked a question early at the first Democratic Presidential Debate Wednesday, about whether he supports a 70% tax on those earning more than $10 million a year.
     He replied that “it’s going to take all of us coming together,” then started speaking in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish. So while he talked, I idly mused whether I could get the $50 back that I gave him when he was running for Senate against Ted Cruz in Texas.
     Because while I have no trouble at all with Spanish being spoken under almost any circumstance, and fully support immigration reform, creating a path to citizenship for our nation’s 11 million undocumented residents now living in limbo, and an end to the various indignities committed against Hispanic American citizens and immigrants, what I do not support is four more years of Donald Trump.
     O’Rourke’s unprovoked, out-of-the-blocks flaunting of his language skills is the most wincing bit of Democratic tone deafness since John Kerry snapped a salute at the 2004 Democrat National Convention and said, “I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty.”
     An appeal to unity immediately followed by a bald pitch to the nation’s 30 million Spanish speakers is not only a delicious if easy-to-miss irony, but also exactly what is going to re-elect Trump.
     The Republicans won in 2016 by building a coalition. They locked down their largest group of supporters, Whites Who Didn’t Go to College (and so missed classes like “Why Treason is Bad A01,” and “How to Grasp When You’re Being Lied To”). Then the GOP added Evangelicals Who Don’t Follow Their Faith, Jews Who Care More About Israel Than Judaism, and Various Minorities Trying to Pass By Ignoring their Own Interests — some 29% of Hispanics voted for Trump, despite his platform of open hostility toward them.

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All those books with F*ck in the title are going to look timid someday

Eric Brunetti

      Before I had a blog, I had a name for a blog: everygoddamnday.com. It wasn't exactly an edgy name, but it wasn't bland either. Some people were offended by it, and at the start I felt obligated to explain the name, and that it was not only as a statement of purpose—there would be something new here every day, a lure in a time when web sites sat for long stretches, untended by their hosts—but a kind of filter. Not everything is for everyone, as Robert Crumb said, and if you don't like the name of the blog, that's a subtle hint that you won't like the writing either, and maybe you should take your business elsewhere and, please, don't let the door hit in you in the ass on your way out.
     It isn't so much that I'm a fan of obscenity, per se, so much as I like to have as many arrows in my writer's quiver as possible. I also like to explore the full range of topics. The post exploring Amy Winehouse's use of the word "Fuckery" in "Me & Mr. Jones" is one of my more popular among readers.
     So I have to note with pleasure that the United States Supreme Court on Monday took the government out of the trademark vetting business, striking down a federal law forbidding the registration of "scandalous" or "immoral" trademarks.
    Just the words "scandalous" and "immoral" have a fusty, 19th century butter churn and coal scuttle bonnet feel to them in this era where the president of the United States is a vile rapist and Russian catspaw married to an East European stripper, a leader who describes our impoverished neighbors as "shitholes." . Compared to that, how can a clothing line called "FUCT"—which prompted the case—be considered anything but trite?
     I distinctly recall walking through the first floor of Macy's and seeing "FUCT" on lucite panels six feet high. (Though in my memory, it stood for "French Union Clothing Trade" or some such thing, and not "Friends U Can't Trust," which was the trademark Los Angeles artist Erik Brunetti tried and failed to trademark in 2011, setting the case in motion.
      I remember thinking that we'd come a long way from ladies in white gloves serving tea in the Walnut Room, but also that there was something twee and disingenuous about the fake explanation of the acronym. It seemed vaguely insulting.
     So now we see what the market will bear. Will Whole Foods start selling tubes of Cunt Salve? I somehow doubt it, as we need to keep certain words in reserve to express our more extreme moments.  If we have a six-pack of Fuck Cola in the fridge, what will we say when we hit our thumbs with a hammer?
      The unspoken irony in all this is that, in our age of internet behemoths, it's going to matter less-and-less what the government permits or forbids, and more-and-more what the online corporate overlords allow. The government letting you to sell Cocksucker Lollipops won't matter much if Facebook won't post your ad and Amazon won't sell them.
     Though, if there's money to be made, not much risk of that.
     Whatever happens, we'll get used to it. My old friend, the New Yorker cartoonist Robert Leighton, once wrote a whimsical piece for the National Lampoon—not available online, alas—about how the word "fuck" will become a daily part of ordinary commercial communication, starting, if I recall, with a newspaper mistakenly publishing a play reviewer's enthusiastic immediate response, "fucking fantastic" or some such thing, and ending with cheese-flavored Pepperidge Farm Fuck-a-Ducks. I'd buy those, for the name alone, and that probably means we'll see that kind of thing on store shelves sooner than later.

Don’t be silly: We are NOT better than this

Workers in a cotton mill, Newberry, South Carolina, 1908.

     “We are better than this”?
     I’ve heard a lot of wistful liberal catch phrases in my day. From “The whole world is watching” (the whole world is living under a tarp hoping there’s dinner and couldn’t care less if the police bust your head) to “Not in my name” (funny, because your name was on the tax bill paying for it) and I have to say, the current indignation over immigrants, particularly children, being kept on the border in hellish conditions, is, well, cute.
     “We are better than this.”
     Since when? Leave it to Americans to turn our intentional abuse of refugees into an occasion for pride. Our government greets those turning to us for asylum by dividing their families and torturing their children, while our citizens start preening about how our supposed values are being violated by this freakish aberration.
     Pretty to think so, as Jake Barnes said.
     This isn’t the exception. It’s the rule. We are NOT better than this. We have NEVER been better than this. We are exactly this, and always have been.
     Cherokees had children too, you know.
     ”The bugle sounded and the wagon started rolling,” wrote John G. Burnett, a Tennessee soldier who saw Native Americans “loaded like cattle” as they set out on the “Trail of Tears” in 1838.
     ”Many of the children rose to their feet and waved their little hands goodbye to their mountain home, knowing they were leaving them forever,” Burnett wrote. “Many of these helpless people did not have blankets and many of them had been driven from home barefooted. ... The sufferings of the Cherokees were awful. The trail was a trail of death.”

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Flashback 2003: Some of life's treasures uncovered amid a blizzard

The boys, 6 and 8, work on a clue. Saturday, Dec. 6, 2003

      I heard from a reader on Sunday with an unusual request.

    "I hope I'm not bugging you," she wrote. "My 86 year old Dad passed away this week and I'm writing his eulogy. Years ago, you wrote a column about walking home and the warm glow coming from the windows of home. Maybe you talked about your childhood home. My Dad read your column regularly and he was telling me about your column that day and as he spoke of it, he choked up. He never cried, and your column meant a lot to him. I was hoping to reference it in the eulogy, but, I cannot find it. I have no idea when you wrote it. It could be 10 years ago, could be 5. Do you have any recollection? I like to think that what you wrote in your column was his conception of an afterlife, if there is one. Any help you can provide, I am most grateful."

     I vaguely remembered that it involved a cancelled flight, and that was enough to let me, eventually, dig up the following. The neat thing about this column is that I have a family photo that illustrates it. I could never photograph the boys playing the Clue Game, because I was always gone when they played it. But I wasn't gone this one time, due to the cancelled flight, so could get a single shot of them working on the opening clue.

     My mother calls. This is last Friday, a week ago today. There's going to be five feet of snow in Boston, she says. Mmm, I say, mildly concerned, even though I am set to fly to Boston on Saturday to spend a few days at the John F. Kennedy Library and then on to New York.
     Hanging up, I apply the formula designed to transfer my mother's concerns into quotidian reality. Now my mom is great (Hi, Mom! Don't be mad; it's just humor) but sometimes, when a lone sentry of fact enters her centrifuge of love and anxiety, it emerges as a battalion.
    I log onto the National Weather Service Web site, expecting to find, perhaps, light flurries. To my vast surprise, a major storm is coming to Boston. Not five feet, but two, which is close enough. Score one for mom.
     Still, I go home and pack and try to gather the research materials that an organized person would have been assembling for weeks. On top of it, I have the Clue Game to concoct. I have never written about the Clue Game, because it goes against the image I cultivate as a bitter and cynical man living on bile and bourbon. But whenever I go out of town, I leave behind a scavenger hunt of envelopes containing clues and prizes to occupy my boys until I return. They love it, and I'd explain how it works in detail—each clue is a puzzle or riddle leading to the location of the next—except I'm certain nobody else in the world would bother doing it. Even I forgot, until Friday morning, when my wife mentioned the youngest had asked about the Clue Game, and I leapt into action.
     So I'm packing, I'm writing rebuses and coded messages in purple ink and hiding envelopes underneath carpets. Meanwhile, the weather in Boston—monitored through the miracle of the Web—gets worse and worse. I go to bed anxious, hopeful and resigned.
     Now it's Saturday, 4:30 a.m. With the distant storm in full cry, I'm just steeling myself to a day at the airport, slouched uncomfortably in a plastic chair, when I make an uncharacteristically bold decision. Don't wait for them to cancel the flight. Don't go. Don't try. Call now before everybody else wakes up and shuts down the system. So I phone American—the automatic voice tells me I have to wait four minutes—and shift the flight to Sunday afternoon.

Happy to have Dad underfoot

     And here's the surprising part, the reason I'm boring you with all these travel arrangements. The rest of the day goes wonderfully. The boys, who have their bored-with-dad moments, are delighted that I am so unexpectedly home. They insist on hugs and Monopoly. The wife—and how shall I say this?—who is, like me, like anyone in the third decade of a close relationship, sometimes not exactly aglow with the wonder of being in proximity to another person, seems truly happy to have me clumping around the house.
     Or maybe they are the same and it's me who is different. I still want to go to Boston, with New York to follow. I want to paw through the stacks of the Kennedy Library and marvel at the soaring reading room in the New York Public Library. But I am so happy to be home. It's as if I've never been there before, as if I'm one of those dead people in the movies who comes back to wander among the living. The boys insist on starting the Clue Game, though I haven't left, and when I point out the envelope resting on the sideboard, marked "Begin," the youngest one seems about to vibrate himself apart with excitement. I've been making those damn games for four years, and this is the first time I ever got to see the boys do one—I'm usually gone—and it makes every minute spent composing riddles and burying pirate chests worth it.
     Sunday is a repeat. We finish Monopoly, make french toast. It's still snowing in Boston. American kindly cancels my flight before I even consider going to the airport. I phone—now the wait is 23 minutes—and reschedule.
     About dusk Sunday I walk over to the Northbrook Public Library, in my back yard, to return a book that's a few weeks overdue. Coming home—and I wish I were a good enough writer to convey this properly—walking back through the chill evening. Carrying the stack of books I of course had to check out while I was there. Softly singing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" to myself. Catching sight of the lighted windows of the house through the fir trees. It's one of those inexplicably joyful moments that live in memory. I stop, marveling, and remember what Ruth Elias once said in a speech. Elias wrote an excruciating book about surviving Auschwitz. I heard her five years ago, so can't quote her, directly, but she ended her speech by saying something like this:

     I have this dream. I dream I am walking up to my family's home in Czechoslovakia. The windows are all lit up, and I know that everybody is well, and there, home, waiting for me. And then I awaken, and it's so sweet, because they were all there, clearly, and so sad, because it was only a dream. And that is what I'd like to tell you today—if you are lucky enough to be going home later, and the lights of your house are bright, and your family is all there, waiting, you should stop and savor it as the precious gift it is, because someday it too will be just a dream.

     It was sort of like that.
                            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 12, 2003

Two little birds are causing a big controversy

Piping plover on Montrose beach. (Photo by Fran Morel) 

     Even birds get tired.
     After a long dark flight over Lake Michigan — most songbirds migrate at night — they’re ready to flop down on the first solid ground they see.
     “The sun comes up, and they will immediately look for the closest place to land where they can find shelter, and in the Chicago area that place is Montrose,” said Greg Neise of the American Birding Association.
     Montrose juts out, a half-mile long welcome mat offering a smorgasbord of habitats for 300 types of birds: trees for warblers and thrushes, grassland for bobolink and meadowlarks, and of course beach, where endangered piping plovers scoop out tiny nests in the sand and lay their brown-speckled eggs.
     I admit, when the piping plover saga erupted, I did not rush to the ramparts. For those late to the party, JAM is moving its “Mamby on the Beach” music festival to Montrose, raising concerns about trampled plover nests.
     I like birds, but I’m not fanatical about it. There are a number of plovers, and if the piping plover goes down, well, the Wilson’s plover will do.
     This callousness vaporized after my friend Tony Fitzpatrick got me on the phone. You know Tony — artist, actor, writer, general Chicago renaissance man.

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