Tomorrow, Tuesday, Mom had two home health care visits scheduled — physical therapy, and a shower. When health care professionals ring the doorbell, my presence becomes less vital, so Katrina and I agreed that I’d have the day off.
Yup — once in a great while, I take a day off from helping Katrina take care of our mom. I sleep late, and hope to do nothing. And I love those days off.
My plan for tomorrow was a bus ride to my bank, which is necessary once monthly because the landlord doesn’t take checks, plastic, or anything but cash. He’s a libertarian, I think, but we don’t talk about it because I’m not good at chatting with stupid people.
And usually, when I’m out and about on a day off, I’ll treat myself to a meal out. I already knew where I’d be eating — a return visit to Falafel Salam, where I’d try the vegetarian options, now that I’m avoiding meat.
That was the plan, but Mom’s home health people are flaky, often canceling or changing appointments, and last night Katrina texted that both Mom’s appointments had been rescheduled for Monday — today, instead of tomorrow. So with no notice, I swapped my day off to today.
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The #128 bus is electric on weekdays, and I hate the electric buses. Had to sit sideways, and the trip had one of those drivers who loves to play with the pedals — gas, brake, gas, brake, gas, gas, brake, brake, swerve. In a stretch with no traffic, no bus stops, he laid on the gas and then brakes in exactly the right combination to twist my back. “Motherfucker!” I shouted, and I’ve been limping ever since.
While withdrawing the rent from the bank, the teller made me wait while he explained some new security protocol to another employee. I didn’t understand much beyond the fact I had to wait, but he twice referred to “DNA sampling,” which presumably means some new high-tech insult is coming, and they’ll call it “security.”
From the bank, I limped painfully to the falafel place, but they’re closed on Mondays. Slowly crossed the street to my second choice, Puerto Vallarta, where a sign on the door said, “On break, back in 45 minutes.” My third choice would’ve been Great American Diner, but the windows are papered over and they were tearing down the Great American sign, which seems fitting for 2026.
All this was in Seattle’s Alaska Junction, a mildly upscale but tolerable neighborhood with dozens of restaurants. I didn’t want dozens of restaurants, though. Didn’t want someplace new. I’d come for the falafel, damn it, and might’ve settled for Mexican or even whatever’s vegetarian at the out-of-business burger place, but fuck the rest of the restaurants.
Sighed and limped onto a bus, with the same driver who’d wrenched my back getting there. Spent the ride cursing my back and my luck and the driver.
But hey, there’s decent food in the fridge and freezer at home. Decided I’d microwave some frozen fries and a fake chicken sandwich on raisin bread, mmmm. By the time I tenderly winced my way off the bus, I was really looking forward to lunch, but …
Dean was in the kitchen, wearing his puffy white chef’s hat and apron and everything, which guarantees he’ll be in the kitchen non-stop all afternoon. Chicken body parts were spread on the naked counter, which I’m certain Dean hadn’t washed before plopping raw meat on it, and hoping he won’t forget to wipe the blood and bacteria away afterwards. He’s forgotten before.
And he started talking at me soon as I stepped into the house, telling me what he was making, and what ingredients were in it, and how everyone had loved it the last time he’d made it. And also, “Looks like you’re limping, bud. Did you do something to your back?”
With as few words as possible, I evaporated into my room and closed the door on whatever he was saying.
It would’ve taken ten minutes in the kitchen to prep my microwave meal, but hell if I’m going to spend ten minutes being talked at by Dean, so fuck it and fuck him. Ate a big sack of corn chips for lunch, with a small sack of potato chips on the side.
While chewing my chips and disappointment, I banged out a text to my brother Clay. For weeks, he’s been insistently inviting me to his house next Monday, to watch a Mariners game on TV with a few friends (his friends, strangers to me). I’ve said no nicely already, but he keeps asking so this afternoon’s no wasn’t so nice.
In 2022, I moved back to Seattle, where I grew up, where my family is. The idea was to be part of the family again, for at least my final few years until croaking. And I do want family, in theory, but it’s gotta be on my terms — I am not going to church, not going to watch the latest right-wing fake-Christian movie, and not going to some little kid’s birthday party, even if the kid is my grand-nephew.
Having said no to those invitations, though, there’s nothing much left to say yes to.
I’d say yes to the baseball get-together, if it wasn’t at Clay’s house. He lives in Prairie Dog City, about 50 miles into the suburbs and beyond, but it feels like 100. No bus comes within miles of that town, so the only way to Clay’s house is riding in someone’s car, which adds two hours of chit-chat coming and going. Factor in a baseball game, and it’s a minimum of eight hours of conversation.
Normal humans do that all the time, I suppose, but I ain’t a normal human. Cripes, if my dead wife came back — my very favorite person in my entire life — I don’t think we could talk non-stop for eight damned hours.
What’s worse, the baseball shindig is a week from today, right after another weekend in Straggle. Yeah, damn it, I’m going to another family reunion on the other side of the mountains. I do not want to be there, thanks for asking, but Mom does, and Katrina’s taking her, but the heavy lifting — Mom up from bed, up from a chair, into another chair, etc — is too much for Katrina, so I’ll be there.
That’s family.
The only route to Straggle is via the freeway over the mountains, and then a hundred miles of one-lane 50 mph highways, which terrifies me just typing it. Riding in a car, I’m always aware how quickly our lives could be snuffed out at 70 miles per hour. Gotta keep my eyes closed or I’ll scream.
Four or five hours on the freeways and highways, coming and going, and between those awful rides, two days in Eastern Washington’s always, always scorching dry summer, while half-attempting to socialize with strangers. They’re family, but we have nothing in common, beyond a few random chromosomes.
And if I make it back over the mountains and freeways alive, the very next day, comes a day of conversation with Clay and a few strangers in Prairie Dog City, watching the Mariners lose again? No, no, no, and actually I texted “no” seven times, while eating corn chips and listening to Dean rattle cookware and talk to himself in the kitchen.
That is not a day I’d choose, and neither is today, and you know what? I’m old and damned tired of days I didn’t choose.
Today’s my day off, but everything since waking up has sucked. My back hurts and Dean’s still cooking and talking on the other side of the door, and it’s only 2:00 in the afternoon. Plenty of afternoon and evening ahead, plenty of time for everything to suck worse.
Excerpt: The agent was with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which operates under Immigration and Customs Enforcement. HSI was sent to Memphis as part of a crime-fighting task force composed of roughly 350 federal agents and 1,450 members of the Tennessee National Guard, according to the U.S. Marshals Service. It began last fall at the direction of President Trump and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee.
At least five people — including Jonah Neal in May — have been shot by a member of the Memphis Safe Task Force. Four of those confrontations were fatal. In one deadly encounter last week, two National Guard soldiers were the ones who fired their weapons.
Excerpt: In its nationwide immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has charged hundreds of people with assaulting or impeding federal agents. President Trump has branded them “insurrectionists,” “animals” and “thugs,” part of a broader effort by his administration to cast protesters and immigrants as violent criminals.
But a close examination of those cases reveals that in its rush to meet White House demands for deportations, federal law enforcement has engaged in extensive misconduct — ranging from attacking protesters to destroying evidence and misrepresenting facts in court.
Excerpt: “What this court has done to constitutional rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law,” Eddins wrote, “explains why Hawaiʻi’s Constitution takes no instruction from it.”
Excerpt: Though the panels do mention slavery and the people Washington enslaved, the new exhibits mostly offer a broad timeline of U.S. history that significantly strays from the original intent of the President’s House as outlined in the park’s foundation document in 2017: “It would explore the historic context of the site in the context of its ties to slavery and the lives of the enslaved who lived at the site.”
Excerpt: In January 2001, after years of review, the Bureau of Indian Affairs granted the Chinook recognition in the final days of the Clinton administration. After objections from other tribes, the incoming Bush administration rescinded the decision months later.
“We had all these plans for what we could do,” said Gary Johnson, Tony Johnson’s father and predecessor as tribal chairman. “And then, with really no reason in the moment, they were gone.”
A similar fate befell the Duwamish, a Puget Sound tribe that traces its ancestry to the people led by Chief Si’ahl, for whom Seattle is named. The Duwamish also won and then lost recognition as President Bill Clinton’s appointees made way for President George W. Bush’s team.
Excerpt: Hegseth said on Wednesday that service members aged 30 and older would be tested every year during their annual health assessments. He said if treatment is recommended, troops can decide if they want to receive testosterone replacement therapy.
“By addressing these health markers early we’re keeping you on the leading edge of lethality,” he said in a social-media video with the caption “The High-T Department of War.”
He didn’t say which testosterone levels would necessitate treatment. He also didn’t specify if there would be separate standards for women. The Pentagon declined to comment Wednesday.
Excerpt: The right-wing preacher turned politician Victor Marx has said that he first killed a man when he was 7. He’s not sure how many deaths he’s been responsible for since. Marx has been arrested at least twice for disorderly conduct and has described terrorizing a psychiatrist with talk of murdering him. He told the Colorado journalist Kyle Clark that he can perform exorcisms by phone. On Thursday he was declared the winner of the Republican gubernatorial primary in Colorado.
Excerpt: Influential figures on the right have also painted Nixon as an early victim of the deep state. On an April 2024 show that racked up more than 18 million views on YouTube, Tucker Carlson alleged that Watergate had been a “deep-state coup” orchestrated by the CIA and FBI. Joe Rogan later repeated the claims on his popular podcast, arguing “the whole thing was set up by the government.”
Excerpt: “But mostly my fond memories of spending time with Lindsey (and we traveled the world with John McCain) was not about the ups and downs of his policy positions,” she said. “It was about his love for the world, his loyalty to hard causes and his friends, and the pure joy he brought to life. I will miss him.”
Excerpt: The video evidence, made public almost a year after Ruben’s death, is consistent with what Josh told me and others: He was trying to comply with conflicting directions from law enforcement about what to do. He was driving slowly and braking repeatedly and was not a threat to the officers. His car was in park when they pulled him out. An ICE agent, Jack Stevens, shot him at point-blank range through the open driver’s-side window multiple times. A toxicology report noted the presence of alcohol in Ruben’s system — which is obviously no justification for his death.
Excerpt: So what can be done? There is one viable path to greater accountability — if politicians have the stomach for it. The Supreme Court has essentially left it to Congress to determine the degree to which federal officials can be liable for constitutional violations. If the Democrats retake the House and the Senate in November, that will set the stage for individuals to sue ICE, Border Patrol and other agencies for constitutional violations and wrongful deaths. There has already been discussion about that. But the Democrats could also take it a step further and create a path to sue policymakers like Stephen Miller, one of the president’s top advisers; Tom Homan, his border czar; and Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary.
Excerpt: Bridges, rail lines, power and water facilities and other targets that can serve civilian purposes in Iran, Kuwait and elsewhere in the Middle East were attacked in airstrikes on Friday as the United States and Iran deepened their weeklong crisis over the Strait of Hormuz.
Me again: And the New York Times can’t bring itself to mention that these are war crimes, expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.
Excerpt: From coconut sellers to billionaires, more than 90% of Brazilian adults—more than 140 million people—regularly use PIX, a government-run program that allows users to transfer money in seconds on cellphones at no cost. In less than six years since its creation, PIX now handles more transactions in Latin America’s biggest economy than credit and debit cards combined.
Marcos Rosa, an evangelical pastor who spends his days visiting remote Amazonian villages, said PIX hasn’t only made payments easier but also shrunk distances across the world’s biggest rainforest.
“Everything happens much more quickly,” he said, explaining how PIX and satellite internet mean villagers no longer spend days on the river to buy a bag of rice. Instead, they send a PIX payment to a store in the nearest town, which loads the goods onto a boat already heading upriver. “It’s been a tremendous help,” Rosa said.
The Trump administration disagrees. Washington said Wednesday that, as of next week, it would impose a 25% tariff on some 3,000 goods from Brazil. It is the first country hit with duties under the Trump administration’s new strategy of using Section 301 of U.S. trade law to punish alleged unfair trade practices.
Excerpt: A 31-year-old man who targeted more than half a dozen women by groping or chasing them through one of Portland’s most iconic parks faced a reckoning when the women — a “sisterhood” of strangers, according to one victim — surrounded the man, stopping him in his tracks.
“We just started hitting, punching, scratching, pulling his hair, pulling on his clothes — everything,” said a 74-year-old victim, whom The Oregonian/OregonLive is not naming because of the nature of the crime. Seconds earlier she had kicked the man off her as he tried to crawl on top of her.
“I didn’t feel in any danger because the sisterhood was there,” the woman continued.
One force that was conspicuously absent, however, was Portland police. It’d be 31 minutes before the first officers arrived at Council Crest Park to arrest the man, who targeted woman after woman on an unseasonably sunny and warm afternoon April 9, according to emergency communications logs released to The Oregonian/OregonLive this week.
Records show a 911 call-taker spent about three minutes gathering necessary information and relaying that to police — meaning the police response took another 28 minutes, in what victims described as an excruciating wait.
Excerpt: Pretext traffic stops are one of the most common and consequential ways police officers exercise discretion and act on racial bias. These stops—in which officers pull drivers over for low-level traffic violations, such as expired registration tags, often as an excuse to fish for evidence of unrelated crimes—overwhelmingly target people of color and are regularly escalated by police. According to the New York Times, from 2017 to 2021, police killed more than 400 unarmed civilians in these types of stops—a rate of more than a death a week.
He’s the Mayor of Chicago, so I assume Brandon Johnson is an idiot, and this is idiotic — especially in Chicago, where police corruption is a redundancy like ATM machine. File a report on ICE with the CPD, and they’re more likely than not going to turn it over to ICE and consider the matter closed.
Excerpt: I got to see the 57th loss live and up close as the FerryHawks fell to the High Point Rockers—as in rocking chairs, since they come from a North Carolina city famous for furniture. It was unlike any game I’d ever been to before, because my $12 ticket was in practice a general admission pass to the entire hollow park. The FerryHawks’ home has an advertised capacity of 7,171, but I would be surprised if there were more than 100 people in the seats on Wednesday night (plus one seagull who chose to bring his fish dinner into the outfield). There was only one concession stand open on the concourse, though they did sell surprisingly excellent hot dogs for just $2, owing to the fact that it was Weenie Wednesday. We were able to walk right down into first-row seats directly next to the home dugout, close enough to see the umpires spit and hear snippets of conversations about the players’ girlfriends in the foul-territory bullpen. One of the coaches ribbed me about keeping my head up when I was looking at my phone between innings.
Excerpt: “This exhibition was meant to solidify pipe makers’ inclusion within the broader sweep of art history,” Silbert said. “Instead, its cancellation risks cementing their outsider status.”
Nothing will meaningfully improve until billionaires fear for their lives.
7/19/2026
News always and only from reliable sources, and I decide what’s reliable — no right-wing bullshit, no Substack because fuck Nazis, no RawStory, Newsweek, or other clickbait sites, and no Glenn Greenwald, Ezra Klein, Matt Taibbi, Matthew Yglesias, or other famous writers with nothing left to say. Written news is preferred; video links will be rare, and damned near never to videos where the reporter sits, stands, or strolls in front of a camera — that’s show biz, not news.
If you’re blocked from reading anything linked above, please send an email, and I’ll reply with the article’s complete text, via my vast array of fine ad-blockers and paywall-vaulters.
Special thanks to Linden Arden, Becky Jo, Joey Jo Jo & John the Basketemeritus, the aforementioned Mr Meyer, Dave S, Name Withheld, and always extra special thanks to my lovely late Stephanie, who gave me 21 years and proved that the world isn’t always shitty.
