The Carpentariat

Please donate to Andrew Sullivan's Uppers Fund

Though I'm not a subscriber to Andrew Sullivan's Substack columns, I receive them, via email, every Friday. Generally I read them, even though they've become what I once, as a backseat-yawning seven-year-old on Sunday drives with my paternal grandmother — who, by the way, never allowed herself to be addressed as such — thought of landscape scenery: You've seen one tree, you've seen them all.

Please don't mistake: I harbor no obsession with the mind of Andrew Sullivan. His is a good mind, an active mind, a once-ranging mind — and perhaps that range will, someday, return. But for now, the poor thing is mired in a desperate, seemingly inescapable gloom of doom — something similar to the wearied life and mind of my maternal grandmother. We're headed straight to hell, the Visigoths are at the gates, we've no defenses. Every Friday, Sullivan's weeping, indistinguishable trees flash by my computer's window, as I peer into an inalterable national cataclysm. Yesterday:

The months since Trump was removed have shown the tenacity of our underlying crisis of liberalism…. The social and cultural forces behind liberal democracy’s unraveling are gaining strength…. People in public life are no longer subjected to brutal but civil questioning. Their motives and worth as human beings are routinely deemed foul, their homes are no longer safe from protests or violence, they are doxxed, demonized, or fired, and they often need security for their families….

Are there any signs of liberal revival? Few that I can see….. We will stagger on, as Rome and Weimar did. In democracies which are slowly being undone, things carry on, until they suddenly don’t.

My God, get me a drink.

Saturdays through Thursdays my historical memory labors to recall that America has not always been on the edge of imperial Roman disintegration and Weimar destruction. And then, Fridoomsday comes, with its Sullivanesque apocalypse. Verdant spring will, in fact, be unavailing this year; the birds shan't return, the tress shall remain barren, and our cultural, sociopolitical landscape will persist in resembling a WWI post-battlefield.

As of this morning, however, my brain once again strains to recall similar crises of liberalism, the "social and cultural forces behind liberal democracy’s unraveling." Let's see, in no chronological order, we somehow successfully struggled through unionists vs. secessionists; McCarthyites vs. social democrats; the dirty, drunken Irish vs. the virtuous; brutal industrial management vs. oppressed labor; Vietnam War protesters vs. hardhats; America's first Firsters vs. prudent interventionists; Protestants vs. Catholics and Jews; Bull Connorses vs. peaceful protesters; Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists; suffragettes vs. misogynists; Red Scaremongers vs. anarchists and Bolsheviks; and Coke vs. New Coke.

In each of those eras, the final crisis of liberalism was at hand, the forces of unraveling liberal democracy had prevailed. Except they hadn't. We did soldier on — precisely because of the tenacity of liberal democracy's enemies.

Vigilance may be tedious, and politico-cultural wars may seem endless — because they are. Which is why vigilance, however tedious, tiresome and wearying, is so necessary.

Ironically, perhaps, I do applaud Mr. Sullivan for his unremitting doomsdayism. For though as full of historical holes it may be, it reminds us to remain watchful. The danger comes only when we give in to our innermost fears and, consequently, concede defeat.

Please consider throwing a few dollars into the kitty. This site is always in need of new contributors among its regular readers, as well as, of course, the continuing support of veteran donors. This morning I made a few observations about a certain writer's Substack hysteria, which, from what I've read, earns him a half-million dollars a year. Last year, in what I can humbly, modestly assess as far more reasonable commentary, this site earned about $7,000. Reasonableness deserves better. The other writer is welcome to his boodle, I don't begrudge him that, but, as Joe Biden would say, C'mon, man; where's the "equity"? So, again, please think about contributing some bucks. It's only fair. See the "Make a Donation" button in the sidebar. I thank you — PM

An epic journey into America's new Conservatism Inc.

As president of the Young America’s Foundation, established in the hardhat era of 1969 — and folded into Bill Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom in 2011 — "[Scott] Walker is positioning himself as the leader of a campaign of intellectual restoration" of what once was known as American conservatism, writes the Bulwark's Charlie Sykes, one of the last survivors of center-right brain activity. 

Wisconsin's former governor, muses Sykes, could use the organization "to move away from the bigots and crazies who had begun to dominate Conservatism Inc.," and now own it outright. "Might he try to restore some of the intellectual heft of a movement launched by William F. Buckley Jr.?" asks Sykes. "If a new video campaign is any indication, the answer seems to be: No. As in, God no, not at all."

And here it is, a seeming two-minute+ parody of an SNL parody of today's Conservatism Inc., which includes the visages of such inveterate crazies as secessionist Allen West and Dinesh D'Souza, a convicted felon presumably dedicated to inspiring America's conservative youth to … FREEDOM! — sometime after having assured America's youth that African-American slaves were treated "pretty well."

But hail fellows well met such as Mr. D'Souza are scarcely the most preposterous of Walker's video survey course, which teaches, essentially, that our youth must be very afraid: "In its abbreviated history of the leftist takeover of America, the video draws a straight line from 1960s radicalism (Saul Alinsky) to Joe Biden, who, Walker says, is now 'working to take over everything we hold dear.'"

Everything. Dearly. Leave aside that Mr. Alinsky, in his Rules for Radicals, vociferously underscored the need for political pragmatism — not militant extremism, which, according to Walker, President Biden now practices. (Not that today's conservatives have actually read Rules for Radicals; they just sort of know that it is very, very radical.) Yes, the video is that preposterous, its lesson that ludicrous, its fearmongering that rank.

Sykes, with more conservative enthusiasm for Bill Buckley's National Review than I could ever muster, does, however, present a list of the publications' historically leading commentators. And I grant it is impressive: Russell Kirk, James Burnham, Garry Wills, John Dos Passos, Whittaker Chambers, Irving Kristol, W. H. Auden, Michael Oakeshott and sociologist Robert Nisbet, the latter of whom is perhaps the most endearing grump of all times.

Walker, aspiring to fill Buckley's shoes in print, similarly promises "the best minds in conservative thought." Thus does Walker enlist also such bigots as Ted Nugent, and James O'Keefe, creative artist and video editor.

The least preposterous angle of Scott Walker's new venture is that he is indeed offering Young America the very best in modern conservative thought, which, as I have suggested before, is somewhat equivalent to the doctrinal flow of the Hitler Youth. And, of course, Walker will have a huge assist from Fox News, as its superannuated audience is, one assumes, gradually replaced by the more youthfully weak-minded:

In going down, Conservatism Inc. is simply doubling down.

Donald Trump is entering the annals of "Where are they now?"

I hesitate. Writing about Donald Trump today seems akin to writing a NYT headline about the Peloponnesian War. He's a relic; a broken, brooding, boundlessly pathetic creature who sits and thinks, or sometimes just sits. Or cheats at golf. Or dials reluctant recipients of deranged phone calls.

I'll blame The Atlantic for re-stirring disagreeable thoughts of the man. He had planned on remaining a powerful force in Republicans politics despite his popular thrashing last November, writes the magazine's David Graham. "But the plan didn’t go well." How Trumpian. Even his 2016 election plan didn't go well. He never planned on being elected.

"You get tired of listening to" his telephonic rants about the unfairness of it all — meaning everything — disclosed one of Trump's friends to Graham. Yet even though he's fading from above-the-fold news coverage, Trump still commands the loyalty of millions in a party reduced to Gaetzian-Greenean stewardship. "He tops polls of GOP voters for 2024 presidential candidates," observes Graham, which in itself is astounding, given so many other demagogic psychotics to choose from. Mitch McConnell, who hates the Donald's guts, has, in a symptomatic Stockholmian show of feudal mentality, offered to support his potential nomination, and of course quivering backbenchers linger in terror of a Trumpian swat.

The former i-president's Twitter ban is likely contributing to his larger evanescence, although his tweets "had already begun to lose their potency by 2019," according to a social-media tracking firm. Instead, he now dispatches lengthy incoherences in (so to speak) written statements, hoping the press will give them some oxygen. So far, few takers; at least in Trump's case, the press seems to have learned a lesson in airing the laundry of personality disorders. What's more, as Graham reasonably asserts, "Trump’s ability to control the news depended in part on ever greater provocations. Once you’ve tried to overturn a presidential election, you don’t have a lot of room to escalate."

His re-presidential prospects? Dicey, at best. First, having state and federal prosecutors crawling up one's ass has a tendency to reconcentrate the mind from political campaigning. More severely, maybe, is that many of his self-declared supporters also privately recognize him as a loser — the worst possible sin in TrumpWorld. Others may write off politics altogether, convinced that the Biden machine, Hillary Clinton and a pizza parlor are now in total control of the electoral process.

My evaluation of Trump's grinding, divine vanishing act is simpler still. Most Americans who give any thought at all to politics possess the relevant memory of a gnat. Yesterday's politician is as pertinent today as the Peloponnesian War. With his post-presidency came his relic-ness — irreversible, earned, and blessed. If anything, may he become the 21st century's Harold Stassen.

The myth of "independents"

​​​​​FiveThirtyEight:

"The share of Americans who say they’re independent has climbed considerably…. Independents are often portrayed as more open-minded and less dogmatic in their political views….. The problem is that few independents are actually independent. Roughly 3 in 4 independents still lean toward one of  the two major political parties, and studies show that these voters aren’t all that different from the voters in the party they lean toward. Independents who lean toward a party also tend to back that party at almost the same rate as openly partisan voters."

More Americans self-identify as Democrats or Democratic-leaning (49%) than as Republicans or Republican-leaning (40%), thus the growing contingency of independents can be accurately guessed at before political scientist Samara Klar explains it: "[Independents are] not actually changing their views on politics. [They] are simply recusing themselves from publicly identifying themselves as a partisan."

In brief, Republicans are increasingly embarrassed to reveal themselves as such. (Wouldn't you be?)

The other problem is that "with party building left to more stringent partisans, the parties’ bases have largely cultivated candidates who tend to be more ideologically extreme than the voters they seek to represent." Closed primaries don't help; when candidacies are cut off from the entire electorate, there results no mixture of prudence or common sense.

Still, in the contest of "uncivil and rude behavior of many politicians," as Klar puts it, there's no objective contest between the parties. For sure, Dems have moved evermore leftward and more assertive, yet Republicans have lurched toward outright extremism. And that which tends to go with extremism is the scientific art of incivility and preternatural rudeness. One can be not only pridefully uncivil toward those unfortunate many who lack all the answers wrapped and bowed in ideological righteousness — one owes it to them.

The deepest, largest problem, though, is this: Why would 40% of American adults wish to associate, by name or no, with such boorishness?

The smugness James Baldwin had to deal with

​​​​​Perhaps more than any other bio in conservative historian Paul Johnson's Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (1988) that absolutely infuriated me was that of novelist, essayist, activist and African-American expatriate James Baldwin, a brilliant, vastly influential writer who pleaded for the universality of human decency — a not too "radical" idea, as Johnson would have it. Wrote the biographer, with unparalleled smugness:

In the second half of the 1950s, Baldwin sensed the emerging new intellectual climate, of permissiveness on the one hand and approved hatred on the other. He was, or believed himself to be, a homosexual, and his second novel, Giovanni's Room (1956), dealt with this theme. It was rejected by his own publisher and he was forced to turn to another, which (he convinced himself) paid him too little. The experience filled him with rage against the American publishing industry. Moreover, he discovered that rage, at any rate from a 'deprived' person like himself, was becoming topical, fashionable and just.

I just read Giovanni's Room, a book that opens so painfully, I had to put it down for a while. Baldwin, who died a year before Johnson's biographical publication, didn't believe himself or permit himself to be a homosexual; he was a homosexual, although Giovanni deals with his early bisexuality and his struggle between man or woman; in sum, a struggle with his adolescent beliefs in manhood, as learned in America. And Baldwin didn't sense an emerging, new intellectual climate; he contributed enormously to its literary creation. As for his "discovery" of rage, surely it was aimed more at smug, complacent conservatives such as British historian Paul Johnson (Oxford educated) — along with being denied so much as a cup of coffee in "white" American restaurants — than any publisher. Last, Johnson's cynical air quote — a "deprived" person like Baldwin, in the segregated U.S. — is just beneath contempt.

But to modern conservatives, historian Johnson is something of an intellectual hero, slashing against "topical, fashionable" justness (which now goes by the "w"-word). Is it any wonder, then, that modern conservatism has become as intellectually bedraggled as Trumpian syntax?

John Boehner's "moment of clarity" - several years too late

"None of the so-called conservatives who were willing to blow up our economy [in 2008] ever paid any price," writes former Speaker John Boehner in his just-released memoir, On the House. The year was his "moment of clarity," says the Washington Post's James Hohmann, as 133 House Republicans denied the Bush administration's plea for a $700 billion bailout of a collapsing economy. Boehner finally persuaded enough of his members to pass relief, but he realized they "seemed more worried about pleasing Fox News’s Sean Hannity than preventing another Great Depression." 

He was a bit slow on the uptake — and to that, he added more pain.

Boehner & Co. (and their counterparts in the Senate) went on to oppose every Obama administration proposal to recover a broken economy. Millions of American would suffer needlessly as everything from stimulus to healthcare was slow-walked or monolithically blocked by Republican pols. I also recall the former speaker once saying he possessed no persuasive powers — that he should possess no persuasive powers — when it came to counteracting insane charges of birtherism.

The insanity began well before John Boehner and his racist promotions, of course. There was Reaganism's mean-spiritedness, Newt Gingrich and his arsenal of bile, Bill Clinton's whimsical impeachment, George W. Bush's manifest lies as a candidate and president, on and on. And with each escalation, no price paid by Republicans. In fact, they profited from the madness. And by now the profits are spectacular — for the exceptional crazies.

Within three months of inciting terrorism and attempting to dismantle American democracy, Sen. Josh Hawley raised $3 million from nearly 60,000 contributors. House member Marjorie Taylor Greene scooped up the same amount in the same span, after losing her committee seats for psychotic rhetoric. "And," notes Hohmann, "several corporations that suspended donations after Jan. 6 have resumed writing checks to lawmakers who voted against certifying Biden’s victory." Well blow me down.

Boehner's hope is that Jan. 6 was "a wake-up call for a return to Republican sanity." His hope may not be in vain.

Without noting the upside, Hohmann also observes that Trump "used his Saturday speech [at Mar-a-Lago] to again attack Sen. Mitch McConnell as a 'dumb son of a bitch' for not trying to overturn the election." Hohmann's omitted upside? I later read that several attendees left the speech early, complaining that Trump's tirade was nothing more than another of his "greatest hits." Same old shit. They got nothin'. No ideas, no plans, no programs, no platform other than raving Trumpism. Just the same old shit.

And as the Biden administration moves ahead with overcoming the pandemic, "rebuilding better" and in general improving Americans' lot in life, the same old Republican shit won't sell. (Probably.)

Chauvin, the prosecution and its very risky business

I'm stunned that the prosecution just recalled pulmonologist Martin Tobin to testify about blood gas testing of George Floyd in the Derek Chauvin case — "new evidence," disallowed — given the judge's stern warning that any indication from Dr. Tobin about the new evidence would instantly be cause for a mistrial — "pure and simple," said the judge.

Sure enough, right off, the good doctor made such a reference in his rebuttal testimony.

The judge did not in fact declare a mistrial (a panicked sidebar ensued). But the prosecution, which until now has performed brilliantly, just opened manifest grounds for an appeal, and a new trial. For such a minor, even negligible issue, of which the jury was utterly unaware, the prosecution was inexcusably reckless, it seemed to me.

Derek Chauvin could, for at least a while, walk. For no good reason. Just a dumb one. 

With the evidentiary trial now over, defense counsel can probably be found doing backsprings.

What makes so many of us so stupid?

George Will:

"In 1858, when the first transatlantic cable connected New York with London, the New York Times worried that the telegraph might make the velocity of news 'too fast for the truth.' Sound familiar?

"Today, the Internet and social media enable instantaneous dissemination of stupidity, thereby creating the sense that there is an increasing quantity of stupidity relative to the population’s size. This might be true, but blame it on animate, hence blameworthy, things — blowhards with big megaphones, incompetent educators, etc. — not technologies. Technologies are giving velocity to stupidity, but are not making people stupid."

It's true that easily rivaling today's technology revolution were the 19th century's transportation and communication revolutions: the railroad and the telegraph. The best and most influential work I read on this is yet another book I've misplaced, or I'd cite it. (For years my daughter offered to "rationalize" my library by authors and titles, cross-referenced on computer, but I could never bring myself to inflict on her what she so willingly proposed.) What might seem to some as rather dry history was an enthralling read, as one follows the immense changes in American life through (then-rapid) rail transportation and overnight news from coast to coast. Neither development made people stupid; in fact, each also revolutionized business, converting American artisanship into industrial giantry, and the United States into a superpower.

What Will overlooks in his contemporary analysis, I think, is the sheer volume — less so than velocity — of today's disseminated stupidity. It's everywhere, from millions of witless tweets to unsubscribed emails to idiotically misleading ads to even more misleading political "messaging" on hyperpartisan television. The printed, undigitalized word is one's only escape, as long as the blinds are closed, the phones are shut off, the doors are locked and a solitary lamp burns.

But neither is it modern technology's blowhards, megaphones, nor even incompetent educators who make people stupid. Stupid parents make stupid people. They literally make them, since sexual concourse, well, even the stupidest of people can figure that out.

Plato's solution to generational stupidity was the state's appropriation of innocent, impressionable children from stupid parents. A trifle authoritarian, that. And to some extents, it has been tried by actual states, with worse outcomes than before: stupid automatons.

Will concludes by writing, "Like railroads and the telegraph, today’s technologies have consequences about how and what we think. They do not relieve anyone of responsibility for either." But how do we hold the irresponsibly stupid responsible?

Matt Gaetz, working hard for the people of Florida's 1st congressional district

I just checked Rep. Matt Gaetz's congressional homepage to see what the young stud is up to. And here it is, his lead banner, with exciting news:

An event 17 days ago.

Vanity Fair nicely summarizes Gaetz's standing as a United States representative: "Last Friday we noted that the Republican lawmaker was 'well and truly f—ked'…. On Tuesday, though, new reporting indicated that he has been upgraded to exceptionally, royally f—ked."

 

Rs are killing it on the border

Biden is taking his worst pounding in public opinion on the border "crisis," which suggests that Trumpian Republican fearmongering on "illegals" has lost no steam. Quinnipiac:

"On President Biden's handling of six issues...:
* the response to the coronavirus: 64 percent of Americans approve, 29 percent disapprove;
* the economy: 50 percent of Americans approve, 42 percent disapprove;
* climate change: 48 percent of Americans approve, 35 percent disapprove;
* taxes: 45 percent of Americans approve, 42 percent disapprove;
* gun policy: 39 percent of Americans approve, 49 percent disapprove;
* the situation at the Mexican border: 29 percent of Americans approve, 55 percent disapprove."

He's still in net-positive territory — 48-42 percent in his job approval rating. Most of his disapproval ratings come from little but partisan hostility; we could have 100 percent employment with an average income of $200,000 a year, and 42 percent of American adults — Trumpers — would still denigrate Biden's handling of the economy. It's the border issue, nearly alone, which is critically damaging his overall approval. Thus we should expect Republicans to crank up the fear even more.

On her 22nd birthday, it appears Daughter Ellie is settling into her new, Northwest home just fine. (She does have an actual home there, when not consorting with the bears.)

Out of Afghanistan - finally

In faulting President Biden's decision to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan by September, the Washington Post's editorial board — a journalistic outpost of neoconservative recidivism, by now grown atavistic — harbors the seeds of its own contradiction: "Mr. Biden has chosen the easy way out," which "could lead to the reversal of the political, economic and social progress for which the United States fought for two decades, at a cost of more than 2,000 American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars."

In other words, America's Twenty Year War, a playback of other prolonged interventionist catastrophes in that ungovernable nation, has, most likely, accomplished nothing. Afghanistan's "political, economic and social progress" can scarcely be called such if the withdrawal of an external power points ineluctably to the status quo ante.

For centuries Afghanistan has been steeped in medieval sectarianism and unremitting tribal warfare. Russia and Britain's military occupations were doomed to ineptness and inefficacy, thus did the Bush-Cheney administration follow suit. Naturally. And ever since, the United States has struggled to extricate itself from this imperial graveyard.

Biden is said to have overruled "warnings from his military advisers," which only accrues to Biden's stature as a military leader — knowing when to cut our losses and leave illiberalism to its own primitive devices. While it's true that Afghanistan could again shelter anti-U.S. terrorist forces, so could any shambolic excuse for a country. We can't occupy them all. And if our hundreds of billions of counterterrorism investments fail to counter foreign terrorism, then why the vast investments?

Only two items are certain. One, except for a few Democratic hawks and all the Republican scolds, Congress wants nothing to do with actually executing foreign policy. Congressional cowardice has dropped it in every recent president's lap; let him take the risks as they snipe from the sidelines.

Second, we do indeed have a terrorism threat. It's right here, in our own backyard, led by rightist goons as primitive and sectarian as the Taliban.

The law - and politics - in focus

​​​​​A courtroom trial is a form of combat — without the violence. At bottom it's a civilized version of political conflict, which lacks civilized behavior since it also lacks what Al Gore once unfortunately called a "controlling legal authority." In a courtroom, the controlling authority is the judge. Except for the captain of a sailing vessel there is perhaps no man or woman alive with more singular power than a magistrate. He may be overruled by an appellate court, just as a Navy captain can be court-martialed, but until that contingency, he rules as a god.

Then, the combatants: the prosecutors and defense attorneys, whose skills are as varied as a Monet poppy field. And in the courtroom drama of the Derek Chauvin trial, which in my moments of partially hydrated lucidity has fascinated me, I've been impressed by both. I know that's an unpopular thing to say, given that the defense in this case is representing an almost embarrassingly guilty man.

But consider that one day last week, after the hours-long testimony of a pulmonary specialist with a c.v. as long as most doctoral dissertations, the defense attorney noted that the witness' immense research findings into George Floyd's cause of death were dropped in his lap the night before his cross-examination. And this, the controlling legal authority permitted. No pause, no postponement, no extra time for defense preparation. Our legal system is confounding.

A third degree murder conviction carries a prison sentence of up to 25 years. I hope Mr. Chauvin has a hobby he wishes to perfect. Perhaps a martial art. He'll need it.

And now, another Minneapolis tragedy — yet another police officer who should have never been; a cop who couldn't distinguish between a firearm and a taser. She's gone.

As is the police chief. That's not the legal system, that's just politics. And that I do understand.  

Confessions of a writer

​​​​​Full disclosure:

Alongside my other debilities of late you may have suspected that I've been undergoing a crisis of writing. Not writer's block. In fact, the opposite. I've been writing too easily, and writing should not come easily. Good writing takes thousands of hours of practice to master; indeed, I once read that roughly 10,000 hours of practicing anything are required before one can gain even proficiency. Online I've racked up approximately 35,000 hours of writing: about five hours a day over 20 years, more than 12,500 posts here, plus hundreds of columns elsewhere.

The art of writing requires self-discipline — the willingness, if not always eagerness, to rise each morning and get to it. This, I have always managed. Until lately. I found myself dreading the blank page, not because it was blank, but because it had become too easy to plant words on a screen. And that is a danger sign. Good — and always better — writing is a struggle, not a breeze.

I believe my moment of crisis began incubating a few months ago when it was alleged, in a private correspondence, that my writing was "clever." (The remark was not meant harshly.) I had never intended it to be clever, in the sense of frivolous or effortless. I meant it to be precise, using precise words with precise meanings, leading to something of a special, unique take on whatever topic was at hand.

But above all, a good writing style was the means to the end. Otherwise, why would anyone read me?

What I have discovered, however, is that most online readers give not one whit about style. What they want is confirmation of their own convictions, which can be as badly written as a small-town newspaper column by a bigoted blowhard. The writing makes no difference. And when that's the purpose of reading, then one might as well just read an abstract of 1984, Anna Karenina, or George Kennan's Memoirs rather than the works themselves. (I am not comparing mine to them.)

My good fortune is that you, a reader of this site, appreciate good, stylistic writing, or so I assume. (This is not meant as one of those posts; this is but a straightforward explanation of the last couple weeks.) My ill fortune is that there are far too few of you. And of those who do read this site regularly, even fewer contribute to its continuation. But that's my problem, not yours, since I am the one continuing the site. All I can do is also continue asking for your financial help.

Over the last several days, whether I would continue writing was touch and go in my mind. My crisis has not ended; with most writers, it never does. This one, though, was exceptionally acute and indescribably painful. But I have decided to go — forward, that is. Someday, reader contributions may become so insufficient as to make the time I spend here utterly pointless. As Samuel Johnson once observed, only a blockhead writes for free.

Doubtless, some readers may interpret what I have written this morning as self-pity. I can assure you that that is not at all the point. I'm only letting you know what has gone through my cob-webbed mind a few hundred times in the past few days — as noted, this is nothing but full disclosure. From here on out, may my days and yours be better ones.

I am on the upswing. I shall return in a few days, a very few days. I'm still overcoming drams of acute depression, dehydration (with associated dollops of delirium), dizziness on standing (low blood pressure) because of sodium loss, and extreme fatigue. But little steps aimed at improvement are helping to overcome these little inconveniences, which foolish men like myself cope with on our own, because foolish men like myself believe in our invincibility. I appreciate your forbearance.