Card of the day: The Emperor
Currently listening to: Plastic Manmade Sunshine Machine, “Tripping Down A Hole”
Today I switched the font of this site to a Google Fonts version of Futura called Jost. I like it very much. It reminds me of the good old days when I used Tumblr more often and thought using Futura was a hipster thing to do. I thought it would tell the world, “Yeah, I’m a cool person. I know about fonts.” Okay, 20-year-old Will. Take about fifty percent off.
Anyway, changing my website font, scrolling through Bluesky, and watching the sun go down have taken the place of doing any actual work, physical activity, or creative nonsense today. So much for my resolutions, huh? Today has a weird vibe, though. If you look at the calendar, you will understand why. Five years ago I was staring at the TVs in the Blink gym in Gowanus. I could not process what was happening. But I thought, “Well, the guy who started this won’t be in office in about two weeks, and then the new administration will gut him like a fish, and that will be that.”
Five years later, and the guy who started it is president again, and he’s had his cronies put up an official page on the White House website about how January 6th was all the Democrats’ fault, actually. So unfortunately I was wrong about what would happen. But so were a lot of other people.
I was speaking with a friend of mine about the post-World War II era of German history, where the Boomers grew up not knowing about what their country had done between the 1920s and the end of the war, because their parents and grandparents were too ashamed to talk about it. Only in the ’60s and ’70s did people in Germany begin to reckon with what had happened under their country’s name, especially because of the other major schism occurring in the nation during that time. In the later years of the 20th century and earlier years of the 21st century, Germans looked down on any support of Nazism at all.
But now, as we enter the ’20s again, far-right groups like the AfD have come to power, and there is great unrest worldwide, with the groups that plagued Germany in the 1920s now popping up in America. This is Peter Turchin’s theory of the cycles of political violence in a nutshell. One would think people would see the rhyme in the poorly-written poem of history. And yet our reading comprehension has dropped along with our attention spans.
(My wife tells me she can’t get her students to write five sentences about the topic in class without using AI. Those kids are lucky I’m not their teacher. The Chromebooks would get thrown out the window. The blue books would be on the desks. The children would write in cursive.)
I had already written this day off in my calendar, anyway. The Tuesday after the holiday break always hits the worst. At least on Monday, I’ve had all that time to rest up and heal my brain. But then that first day back always drains me, and therefore I get nothing of worth done the next day. Wednesday usually turns out better. I hope tomorrow I can get some solid stuff done.
That will be all for now. I have a few articles to write for Start-Track, and if I put my head down, perhaps I can finish one before it’s time to prepare dinner. I mean “put my head down” in the metaphorical sense, of course. If I put my head down in the literal sense, I will fall asleep. Be well.