I recently saw an article on one of the newsfeeds that treated the topic of fun, and how we’re not having any anymore. That in part, because of social media, there exists a heightened sense of shame and an inability to find joy because we’re so often comparing, so often seeing others who, from all appearances, are enjoying life more than we are.

On a different but related note, I’ve always had trouble with the analysis of athletes who emerge from an unproductive stretch by explaining that their game improved after they convinced themselves to just “go out there and have some fun.” Seems like a trite, arbitrary thing to say and to try and do.

I guess I get it from the standpoint of tricking your brain into somehow ignoring the scrutiny from fans and analysts in the broadcast booth, along with handling the pressure the athlete him or herself is already feeling with regard to living up to contracts and endorsements worth gazillions of dollars. It must be difficult to separate enjoyment from a focus on execution and handling the pressure of fans in the stands or behind the ropes, along with a TV audience who may want you to succeed but will also bite your head off if you don’t.

So, fun. Seems to me you can’t force it. Fun is fun when it’s less planned, more organic—or whatever word works for you. I can’t help but think that fun has gone dormant because people are too easily bored anymore. They’re trying too hard and getting stupid and ridiculous (think gender reveal parties with an incendiary component). Or they’re working long hours in order to have enough money to have a little fun… Maybe fun is just a guilty pleasure we can never truly enjoy because we feel we should be working. Yikes.

I used to have fun going out in our back yard and smashing rocks, just to see what they looked like inside. I can still play catch with someone and consider it fun. If I’m near an open body of water, I can skip rocks until my arm hurts and consider it fun. I can sit in one place for a while and marvel at a sunset or the scenery and consider it time well spent. I guess fun for me doesn’t necessarily require other people or exotic locales or activities that push the envelope, which all sounds more like work to me, and like someone’s just trying to show off.

Quick-hit developments in the Israel-Hamas war. Depending on the source, we learn that the fighting will go on for months, or that talks are unfolding between different players regarding a ceasefire or end to the hostilities.

It’s hard to know where things stand, but it’s clear if it were up to Bibi, Israel would fight on until not one Hamas fighter is left and his own countrymen and women are dying in (relative) droves as well.

Netanyahu is a hawk, seemingly oblivious to calls to let up, to show mercy on Gazans who are literally trying to stay alive, who have next to nothing going in their favor. He is coming across as not so much a good leader as just another hothead with something to prove, or something that distracts, something to hide behind.

Apart from trying to rid the region of a terrorist organization, how can he so insistently order the continued loss of his own soldiers, not to mention getting the nation to buy into his own sense of urgency, or whatever it is that’s driving him? It might cause one to think in terms of unacceptable sacrifices.

Meanwhile, the U.S has to walk the tightrope of supporting an ally and trying to get that ally to reevaluate its strategy, to ease up on the relentless bombing and indiscriminate killing of civilians who, in Bibi’s estimation, must be guilty by association.

The latest is that Nikki Haley is within 4 points of Trump. Maybe things will take care of themselves after all, though Haley is nothing to write home about. She’s a drawly conservative who, one might think, would still need to be mindful of keeping the old Trump base happy. So in some ways it’s just going to be SSDD, just a different talking head.

A variation on the attitude that prevailed in 2020—“at least Biden isn’t Trump…”

As for Trump, the clown who has shamelessly taken up way too much of our time? Maybe people will finally take the hint that his “greatness” is truly a figment of his imagination, all in his head. And Stephen Miller and the rest of the Legion of Doom will have to look for other coattails to hang onto.

Holiday gluttony. Marketing blitzkrieg… starting in October, or maybe even September anymore. How about August?

The job of remembrance, of focusing on true meaning, is left to the faithful who have to navigate and stay the course, ignore the distractions and the temptations and the all-out assault on belief.

Christmastime translates to income and profits and the year-end chance to climb out of the red and into the black. Commerce and faith are unlikely bedfellows, though the dependence is a one-way street. Faith ends up being co-opted for the sake of commerce, the bottom line.

I’m just sayin’ stuff. Maybe I should call a timeout and try to lighten up for a day.

We had our good years, the magical years early on, before the inevitable awakening. The extended family would gather at our house for the traditional Christmas Eve feast and the first round of gift-giving and getting. Christmas music would be playing in the background.

We’d go to the late (11pm) candlelight service at church, which meant that by the time it was over we’d be able to greet each other with a bona fide “Merry Christmas” before heading home. We’d get home, probably take a while to fall asleep, then Mom would settle into the role she relished—wrapping and putting gifts under the tree until 2 or 3 in the morning (I know—I caught her in the act when I was 7 or 8).

And then we’d awaken at 4am and start our reconnaissance runs out to the tree. Not every gift was wrapped, but I’ll always remember that feeling of anticipation and discovery. I’ll always remember the aroma of fresh balsam, or whatever kind of tree we got.

It was a time like no other, but I don’t remember thinking about Jesus very much.

Sometimes it’s more noise than anything else. Pick your network, if you must, and don’t get yourself in a tizzy over worrying about “fair and balanced.” Fair and balanced is a myth. Everyone has a slant– not just Fox, though Fox stands out. If you have to make “fair and balanced” part of your byline, then chances are you’re not fair and balanced.

Fox News is the nation’s subversive counter-narrative, its loud, cackling voices dispensing a steady stream of audible pablum, vocal diarrhea. Definitely another county heard from, but populated by anchors and pundits who have operated in an oxygen-starved environment for way too long.

Watched A Charlie Brown Christmas last night. I’m feeling a lot like Charlie without the change of attitude after Linus’ recitation of Luke 2.

I want it to mean something, even if Jesus was born in May or whenever. It used to mean something, but maybe what I was feeling growing up was just the filling of senses and anticipation of gifts under the tree.

I don’t think such shallowness was all I was feeling, though. There was something else, something deeper and more difficult to explain. Not magic, maybe mystery, most likely hope, and a need to know that the Greatest Story… was more than just a story.

Still waiting for confirmation.

The Dodgers have committed a billion dollars for two players—Ohtani and Yamamoto. The pressure’s on, LA. No excuses now. One might expect that you should win a lot more than you lose.

Is anyone gonna be able to afford coming to a game, though? Like much of everything else, professional sports are going the way of polo and royal parlor games—a real stretch for the average fan.

No biggie—you can get a decent experience watching from the comfort of your living room on a 75” flat screen with a boffo sound system.

At a bare minimum, the headlines themselves are enough to raise blood pressure and trigger a gag response. I don’t really need to read the body of the articles.

The firestorm over the Colorado Supreme Court decision is predictable, but the argument being made for Biden to criticize the decision mystifies me. I guess Fox News hotheads and other critics are taking this route because it seems obvious (to them) that we should all be outraged by this “overreach” or “misread,” i.e. this legitimate reading and interpretation of Article 3 of the 14^th Amendment.

Of course the Right is incensed, but they’re supposed to be. That’s their role here. They’re also blinded by their mindless support for Trump, who clearly incited an insurrection on January 6. The provision in Article 3 applies to him. It has to. He gets no pass because he was President. He has created this situation himself, because he just can’t help himself.

If anything, the statute or rule or provision should apply to Trump in a more forthright way because of the position he held—he was entrusted with the highest office in the land. He promised to uphold the Constitution and he clearly decided not to do that.

And furthermore, a majority of us know he’s an incompetent blowhard, a puppet who had no business being POTUS the first time, never mind running for the office again!

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I guess I’m a glass-half-empty guy most of the time. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s just that I see what’s happening in the world and find myself less than optimistic about outcomes and trends.

History has taught me that bad players often enough get their way, if only for a time. They get to have their moment, even if eventually they are stopped or stop themselves when they see the walls closing in. They get to wreak the damage and the suffering they seem so keen on dispensing, their warped ideologies carrying the day for too long, reluctantly embraced by people too afraid or too desperate to question the propriety of it all.

The internal resistance is there, but it is easily controlled because it’s deprived of the tools that would make it a force to be reckoned with. Of course I’m talking about people like Vladimir Putin and maybe Xi Jinping, but especially Putin. It seems he has mastered the strategy of crushing dissent before it has a chance to spread too far and deep. He has mobilized the military to fight Ukraine and eventually prevail, emboldened to set his sights on the next target, maybe a NATO member.

I’ve been looking at everything differently lately—the minutes and moments in my daily life that I cherish and have mostly taken for granted. The interactions with family, the simple pleasures of electricity and internet and running water and food availability and all the creature comforts that contribute to making this life bearable and even enjoyable.

The insidious and maddening and frightening part comes when I realize that someone like Putin and his cohorts would love nothing more than to take away all those things, sabotaging them, fomenting panic, turning us against each other and creating chaos. We know that Putin and people like him hate us with a burning and blinding passion. He will stop at nothing to destroy us. This is what bothers me every day—that there is someone out there with the growing means to destroy our way of life, someone who dreams of doing exactly that.

It’s both rage-inducing and troubling, that we find ourselves needing to address this threat, distracted from tending to other needs that one might think should be more important.