Once again I find myself late on a Friday afternoon trying to beat a deadline, realizing that I’ve haven’t provided you with anything entertaining to sustain you through the weekend. Well… I don’t have any stories off the top of my head, and I’ve got to check in this fix in the next 30 minutes, so there’s nothing to segue from.

How about this instead: I wanna hear some Sabbath, so you’re gonna too.

Have a great weekend, and don’t forget that when the bird of happiness lights upon your shoulder, it’s up to you to bite its fucking head off!

This is quite an interview, looks like I’ll be picking up The Black Swan today.

A few days ago, I knocked out my not-very-old Facebook account. I was already feeling pretty ambivalent about the whole enterprise when I got a message from my past that I definitely didn’t expect. It’s not that I bear this person any malice, but the last 25 years of not being in touch with them was going really well, all things considered. There are some loose threads in each of our tapestries, I believe, that are simply better left unrepaired. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that what I ought to do is ask some of the folks I’d gotten back in touch with for their preferred method of contact, and that I should actually write (or at least call) them if I was really going to make the effort to “stay in touch”. So I asked, some have responded, and now the Facebook account’s toast. Good riddance.

Today, as I was scanning Twitter more out of habit than interest, I realized that there was nothing there I truly valued, that I was just spending time. Typically I feel like I’d get more out of watching the Brady Bunch for 30 minutes than I do reading people’s tweets throughout the day, and those are from people I know and love. I couldn’t come up with a good reason to keep the account, so that’s toast as well.

The problem with these revolutionary digital thneeds, like the consumer crap and cultural detritus that form waist-high drifts of meaninglessness in my life, is that there’s novelty, but little else worth caring about. Each of these toys cost precious and finite moments of my life that I could be doing something worthwhile, unrecoverable time I could be spending with my children before they grow up and I grow old, time I could be spending eating and drinking with friends or cuddling my wife.

I turned the same critical eye to this blog, wondering if it too needed to go, but I stopped short of dropping the axe on it. Updike I’m not (and thank the good Lord for that), or Mencken or Royko for that matter, but art, craft, and skill are part of what I’m doing here. I’m writing, and I enjoy it, that’s what this is about.

I would have a hard time justifying the time and effort I put into this, were it just about the roughly eight of you gracious enough to drop in on a regular basis. But making this blog, to me, isn’t just about the posts or the audience. It’s about thinking and writing and photographing and editing and publishing, about the joy that comes from creating. And it’s about more than just producing any particular work of art or craft, it’s about cultivating the artist and craftsman. I’d find value in that whether or not I ever showed this to another soul.

So the blog stays. Lucky me, lucky you.

Perhaps I’ll change my mind about all this tomorrow. Maybe I’ll see the value in the social media revolution, and decide that the rare, beautiful gem one occasionally finds in it makes all the digging and sifting through mud worth it. But for now, my distilled sentiment on such things is that social media can blow it out its web-two-point-ass. I’m just a blawger, I suppose.

Yep.

Howdy.

I’m blasting out a few things before this Friday expires, so not a lot of time for yarns, observations, or abuse. What I can say is that it’s been a very, very good week. I hope it keeps getting better.

Here’s another Gram Parsons track, GP / Grievous Angel’s been on heavy rotation lately. There’s so much to like about this one, sad and beautiful as it is, but it’s the harmonies with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt that just nail me. Hope ya like it, here ya go.

Have a great weekend, y’all.

[Update]: Honk my hooter, it hit 50 in D.C. today. Half a block into the ride home, hat comes off, a little further the shell’s gone and I’m down to a long sleeve shirt and a mid-weight wool jacket. I feel… blessed. Man that was a nice ride.

Gorgeous, want. Made right here in the Yoo-Ess-of-Ay too.

I woke up sometime after 4 a.m., one of those mornings when I open an eye and I’m unmistakably fully awake. I made a little coffee, played around with the Internet a bit, then decided that I wanted to take Cledus out for an early spin before the world woke up.

I put some long superhero tights on under the wool shpants, put a few layers of wool on my upper half, put on the cold weather gloves and a balaclava, and headed up the Northeast Branch Trail towards Lake Artemesia in College Park. Immediately I realized that the tights don’t work as well as Capilene when it’s really cold, something about spandex feels like it’s actually conducting heat away from my legs instead of insulating. Around mile five, my toes started getting a little numb, and my legs were pretty cold, but felt good so I kept going by the light of a splinter of moon.

The grass everywhere was covered in frost, every bridge I came to on the trail sparkled like pixie dust as the eastern sky brightened a little, and the puddles had hardened through. Every so often I’d look over at the Anacostia tributary I was following, and the surface would be shiny and still in the low light, frozen solid all the way across. I passed several spots where spillways had frozen into sculptures.

I went a little ways up the Indian Creek Trail, turned around at Berwyn Road, and came around the west side of Lake Artemesia as a glowing Metro cut through the darkness headed north. I skirted the frozen lake and headed back down towards the Northeast Branch Trail right around first light. By the time I returned home, dawn had given way to morning, I was frozen and ready for more coffee. The cyclometer said I’d put in around fifteen and a half miles over the course of a little more than an hour.

Once I’d warmed up a bit and greeted the family, I checked the weather and found that it had warmed up to 19 by 7:30. And there’s a lesson here: if I want to do early morning rides in winter before the family’s up and we’re all busy getting ready for the day, I musn’t ever look at the weather page before going out.

There’s been a couple mornings over the last couple weeks where I was awake and pretty motivated to go for a ride at dawn, but then I’d look at the weather forecast and see “Current Temp: 20″, that good feeling would evaporate, and I’d make coffee and a fire. There’s something about the idea of 20 degrees or less that’s more intimidating to me than the actual experience of it, something that drives me to the hearth wrapped in flannel. If I’d checked the temp this morning, and seen a sixteen, I suspect I would’ve bagged out and missed a really wonderful ride.

Do I lack courage? Well, it’s said that courage isn’t about acting without fear, it’s about facing your fear and following through on your course of action anyway. If that’s true, then when it comes to temps below the mid-30’s, I’m pretty short on courage. But I can often figure out ways to trick myself, to cultivate enough of a blindspot to keep me from determining that I should cleave to warmth, coziness, and caffeine. So what is it called, then, when you are seemingly courageous, but really just deliberately ignorant of the hazards? Delusional? Foolhardy? Pragmatic? Whatever it is, it’ll have to do.

So it’s gonna be like 50 tomorrow, right?

The president issued an order yesterday to stop the military tribunals at Guantanimo. This stood out for me.

Following Monday’s hearings, the Office of the Military Commissions held a press conference with several 9/11 family members, who had reportedly been selected by lottery to travel to the base to attend the hearings. Visibly angry, and holding up large photographs of their relatives who died on 9/11, they appealed to President Obama to keep Guantánamo open.

“Today we were in the presence of true evil,” said Donald Arias, who lost his brother Adam in the attack on the World Trade Center. “Mr. Obama needs to reexamine his decision and keep these tribunals going.”

Joe Holland, who lost his son in the World Trade Center, trembled with rage as he took the podium.

“My name is Joe Holland and I lost my son in 9/11,” he said. “When I said I was coming down here, people asked me what they could do. I said, ‘Write a letter to Obama saying that this place should stay open.’”

When journalists asked Holland about the possibility of trying the 9/11 suspects in federal court, he replied, “No, right here, at Guantánamo,” then excused himself from the podium as he fought back tears.

Report after report concludes that most of the people we held at Guantanamo were never affiliated with Al Qaida, weren’t picked up on any battlefield, and were being held for little or no reason, which means we were destroying lives and families across the globe in response to 9/11. I mean, put aside from the odd Taliban foot soldier who was conscripted, never understood what was happening to him, but finds himself imprisoned a world away from his family with no hope of escaping the Kafkaesque nightmare we’ve created. Perhaps you can’t stir up sympathy for anyone that picked up a gun for the Taliban. Fine. What about the fucking Uyghurs, that everyone, everyone, understood weren’t even peripherally involved? What about the fact that 18 Uyghurs were held in isolation for years and years in Cuba? Why isn’t Donald Arias concerned about that, and how can he be certain that he’s in the presence of “true evil” knowing any of that?

Some of the detainees were undoubtedly involved in planning or executing attacks against the U.S., but since we stepped over every bright line of human rights during their interrogations, bringing them to a fair, legitimate trial will be impossible. Maintaining the moral integrity and legitimacy of our judicial process is a prerequisite to bringing the perpetrators of 9/11, as well as terrorists we may apprehend in the future, to justice. But Joe Holland apparently doesn’t think this is important, or at least, doesn’t think it’s important in cases involving people even remotely suspected of involvement in the attack that killed his son.

And that, folks, is why victims of violent crime should never, ever be able to weigh in on how justice is best served. You can’t blame these people for being in pain, or for the depth and breadth of their grief. If I lost any member of my family to violence, I imagine I would be similarly consumed by heartbreak, rage, and vengeance. I am, after all, human.

By the same token, you can’t expect these folks to think rationally about what’s fair and just. I’m not saying that these families, or victims of violence generally, can’t overcome fear and anger to see clearly, but it shouldn’t be surprising if they can’t, and we certainly shouldn’t be asking their advice on how to proceed. It’s a circus sideshow, and the military folks that brought them down to Cuba to stir them up in front of the press ought to be deeply ashamed of themselves.

The makings of another shit sandwich, left by George W. Bush, for all of us to figure out how to eat. Thanks for that, George, and bon apetit America.