10/31/2026

 Saturday, October 31, 2026

Trick or treat!

1517 Martin Luther sent his Ninety-five Theses to Albert of Brandenburg, Archbishop of Mainz, precipitating the Protestant Reformation

1992 The Catholic church apologized for its treatment of astronomer Galileo Galilei after 359 years

1999 Roman Catholic Church and Lutheran Church leaders signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, ending a centuries-old doctrinal dispute over the nature of faith and salvation

2000  John Paul II declared Thomas More as "the heavenly Patron of Statesmen and Politicians."

2019 House of Representatives voted to formalize impeachment proceedings against  Donald Trump

2023 Kenyan President William Ruto held a state banquet for King Charles III in Nairobi, whose speech acknowledged that “the wrongdoings of the past are a cause of the greatest sorrow and the deepest regret "

In bed at 9, up at 4:10, 117/69/65 100 203.6; 50/45/59/50, cloudy all day

Morning meds at 6 a.m.  Entresto at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.

This is such a magical time of year, not that every season and every day isn't magical, but in Autumn the leaves on the deciduous trees all around us turn color, shifting from green to bright reds, deep maroons, oranges, yellows, and golds.  A couple of nights ago, the female ginkgo tree next to our garage turned a lustrous gold seemingly overnight.  From a distance, it appears all gold, but up close, I can see that the leaves still have some lovely green near their stems.  The photo didn't capture it, but the area where the green and gold meld is luscious (for want of a better term).  It's a gorgeous tree, and I'm glad we have it, though in the weeks before the recoloring of the leaves, it drops its many yellowish-orange, plum-like seeds, about an inch in diameter.  When they fall and begin decomposing, they release butyric acid, producing a particularly nasty, vomitous odor.  It's hard to avoid stepping on any of them and bringing that stink into the house.  As always, my photos don't come close to capturing the real beauty of what I photograph.

 

All That's Unseen.  I finally finished Emilee Hackney's memoir this morning.  I'm glad I read it, though it's not a book that I would enthusiastically recommend to another reader, unlike, e.g., Sarah Smarsh's Heartland and Tara Westover's Educated.  It's a long book, covering 366 pages but only about 23 or 24 years of her young life.  As I read the last several pages, I thought she got a bit too literary in her writing, leading me to wonder how much of her narrative was made up as she wrote it, rather than based on experiences as she lived them.  It also caused me to think that this must be a problem with all memoirs and autobiographies.  Our brains, minds, and memories are not AIs, full of facts (of a sort) stored as 1s and 0s on microchips.  If we are intent upon writing a narrative that is of interest to a reader, the writing can't consist only of "this happened, then this happened, then this happened."  There has to be some narrative flesh built up around the bare historical bones, and some blood flowing through it in terms of emotions, understandings, and judgments.  I first thought of the memoir writer's challenge while reading Barbara Mullen Keenan's memoir Every Effort, about her life after Bill was shot down over Laos.  I ought to sit down and read my own untitled memoir to see how much of it is just "here's a fact, here's some more facts," and how much is flesh and blood.  The same goes for my entries in this journal/blog.

A disappointment in the memoir was that she devoted so little time to her relationship with her younger brother, Erik.  What happened to Erik as he grew older: his education, occupation, religious beliefs, whether he remained in Appalachia, or whether he experienced a transformation comparable to Emilee's.  Why was her relationship with him, if there was one, so ignored?  As one who had such traumatic problems with her religious upbringing and the constrictions of small-town Appalachia, did she care nothing for her little brother's experiences?  She also didn't have much to say about her strained relationship with her parents during her involvement with and engagement to Sam, the child abuser, and during her rebellious period following her breakup with him.  She is candid about her pretty shallow relationships with men after Sam (excepting Jeremy, to whom she dedicated the book, "wherever you are"), using them as emotional props to steady her shaky sense of self-worth, but she seems to carefully avoid saying much about her thoughts about sex, men, and love before, during, or after her promiscuous phases, or her brief sex worker phase.  I suppose though that every memoirist is a narcissist to some degree, at least while s/he engaged in the writing process, plumbing their memories and so focused on themself.  I suppose further that the same is true, but to a lesser degree, of guys like me who keep journals online, and of all diarists.  Why do we bother recording the days of our lives?  Why did Samuel Pepys, Anne Frank, Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo, Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell, André Gide, and so many others bother writing down their experiences and thoughts each day?  For some, of course, journaling was necessary for historical or professional reasons, like Lewis and Clark and Charles Darwin, but for every one of those folks, there are thousands of Joe Blows like me, scribbling away, writing only for themselves.  Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly...

Emilee's book was published this year, 10 years after J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy was published in 2016 to great fame or notoriety.  It's not exactly a rebuttal of Vance's harsh judgments about Appalachian culture, but it's a rejection of them.  Her book ends as she is about to leave the mountains for the Creative Writing Program at Vanderbilt.  She is with her Dad in his big vegetable garden, filling grocery sacks to take with her to Nashville.  Her last lines are, 

"The crickets were quieting now.  I looked toward the Western ridge where the cooling sun hung low, and my heart clenched with something like guilt.  Leaving Appalachia, especially for the second time, felt like a judgment, a declaration: This is not enough for me.

I loved Appalachia.  I did.

But right now, I couldn't stay.

Her whole narrative seems like an expatiation on John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads:

Almost heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River

Life is old there, older than the trees, younger than the mountains, growing like a breeze

Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong

West Virginia, mountain mamma, take me home, country roads 

Peggy Noonan's WSJ op-ed yesterday about Tuesday's election.  Excerpts:

Mr. Trump’s problem is that everyone on both sides of the issue knows that he’s out of his depth in running a major war. They weren’t sure of that when it started.  Democrats think he went in because he’s a bumbler, Republicans think he can’t win because he’s a bumbler. Supporters and opposers of his decision are united: He’s a bumbler whose bumbling made things more expensive. . . 

This is what I hope for: that it won’t be a close election, that the outcome is unmistakable. Let it be a clear and obvious rebuke—a rejection, a rebellion, a rout.

But I want to return to the idea of trauma. America needs to inch toward rough political health. It has to start this now. It will continue in 2028 and 2032, but should start now.

If MAGA takes it full in the face on Tuesday, it will begin to shatter on the state level, where it matters. In that shattering, room will be created in which not fully MAGA figures can start to rise.

The Republican Party has to get healthy again. Healthy doesn’t mean “the establishment returns.” It will never return. The GOP establishment of 1990-2016 ran things into the ground, is discredited and over. Also they’re 80. They destroyed the party by detaching from the legitimate needs and pleas of its base and by secretly regarding that base as stupid nobodies. 

 Only a big wave will allow either party to shake things hard and pour. If it’s close, no one will bother to pick up the shaker.  So may it be a big wave of many colors, and may it be a clear rebuke, rebellion and rout.

I love her description of Trump as a "bumbler whose bumbling has made things more expensive."  It reminds me of the great title of Rick Wilson's 2018 book, Everything Trump Touches Dies.  Wilson calls Trump "President Strangelove," "a bellowing, statist billionaire with poor impulse control and a profoundly superficial understanding of the world.” and " "the avatar of our worst instincts and darkest desires as a nation.'   Wilson argues that "Stephen Miller needs to spend a week getting laid," and that Trump has "tiny, tiny lemur-paw hands."  Peggy Noonan just calls him "a bumbler."  They're both accurate and, in their own ways, they remind me of Hannah Arendt's famous phrase "the banality of evil."