Penny Deposit, No Return

By this time every year, my taxes are done and in the mail, if only so I can forget about them ASAP.

Whether I’ll need to write and send a check–one about ten years back was just over $1,600–or I’ll expect a check doesn’t matter. I just want it done and in the mail, with my own copies buried back in some drawer. And so it happens on the first weekend of this month, usually complete by sundown, Saturday.

But here we are about to enter February’s third weekend, and I am sitting with an assortment of six W-2s and 1099s, for which my chaotic life calls, ready to record on federal and state forms that remain blank. Problem is: I need seven.

You may be wondering just how impossibly wealthy I am if I can boast of seven sources of income. In truth, I have eight, but the New Hampshire Dept. of Corrections apparently takes care of any money that a convict owes you. All I know is that NHDC has never sent me a tax statement since they started bleeding the wayward cousin who stiffed me for $2,000 back in 2000. Apparently, she only pays when she’s back in chronic custody, so I get a check for $70 literally about once in a blue moon.

Of the statements that I do have is one for royalties from Amazon which sells my three books on demand, and which, as I understand it, lets people view a few pages for as little as two cents. Pay the Piper!, my memoir of life as a street-musician, is now, gulp, twelve years old, and even the most recent, Once Upon an Attention Span, is four, so sales have faded, and the statement is just over $11.

Another statement arrived unexpectedly. This summer I took advantage of an offer of $300 to open a checking account in a bank nearby after my bank of 25 years merged with another and shut down the local branch. Never occurred to me that the $300 would be taxed, and this will be the first time I can recall putting anything but zero on a 1040 line for interest.

Add that $311 to the combined $6K of two seasonal musical gigs, and you can begin to see why I have so many. Of those remaining, both part-time, one ended in July and the other is but a day a week. Combine those totals, which I am not going to divulge, to those on the aforementioned $6,311, and it is still less than the amount on the missing form.

Shouldn’t take too much reading between the lines here to figure out that, despite the number of these endeavors, the time they require is minimal. Yes, although it is my misfortune to have those two musical gigs, as fortunate as they are, happen at the same time of year. Put it this way, my life is a nine-month vacation interrupted just one day (Wednesday) each week. In September and October, I am full-court press, and in November I am basket case.

By now you have no doubt figured out that the one delinquent form is, of all things, my “Social Security Benefit Statement.” Worth noting here is that many Americans do not realize that Social Security allotments are taxed. And for good reason. Logic should tell us that, if the federal government has determined a sum you should have, why allot more than that sum, and then withhold a portion–in turn, causing the recipient through an annual course of mathematical hoops and hurdles to determine how much more the government should send out or have sent back?

As envisioned during Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, logic ruled. It was all done in one step, and it worked very well until the 1980s when Pres. Ronald Reagan initiated the bill to tax it. As I recall, “added revenue” was the stated reason, but as always with Republicans, it was part of an overall scheme to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans who tend to contribute to Republican campaigns. This is what they call “Trickle Down Economics,” but by now only the most gullible among us believes that it is anything other than “trickle up,” or maybe “tinkle down.”

Call it political poetry: the same US Treasury that requires me to submit its form back to it, withholds it, preventing me from meeting its own requirement. Don’t the folks there know they are supposed to withhold only the money as an estimate to offset a fair share determined by April 15? And that both refunds and bills are issued when the paperwork is done?

Instead of half a weekend doing forms, I’ve spent half this past week on-line and on the phone trying to get through to an actual person. Instead, I get new passwords that get me to a window asking for a “passcode.” No idea what they are, where they are, and certainly unable to fathom why they are, I give up. The phone menus are impenetrable, referring me back to the site, which refers me back to the same phone numbers.

So aggravating that I went to bed last night resolved to email a request for assistance to the office of my US Congressman, Seth Moulton. Oh, how I hate to bother those good people with such a mundane matter when they are trying to hold the GOP (Guardians of Pedophiles) to account. But congressional offices seem to be the only federal offices of any kind where you can connect to a fellow human being without suffering the interminable, insulting, and paralyzing algorithms of AI.

And so it was that, as soon as I downed the last bite of eggs fiesta and poured myself another French press, I was on this Lenovo letting my rep’s staff know the agony and frustration of an old man wanting only to perform his civic duty of paying taxes–or at least making sure I’ve paid my fair share. And, as I am often prone to do, I started with such detail that I just kept going. And now here I am inflicting it on you.

Apologies for this ordeal, but I may make it up to you with some comic relief:

Royalties from Amazon are directly deposited into my checking account, and so I learn of them on about the 17th or 18th of each month when my bank statement arrives. When my books first appeared, I might see entries for $120, and then it would gradually decrease a few months, to maybe $40 in the fifth month and then disappear. Most months would then not have it, while others had a small amount, including one for just seven cents. I’ve been joking about it ever since.

A few days ago, I pulled a bank statement from my mailbox, opened it right there in broad daylight at the foot of my driveway, and laughed as hard as I’ve ever laughed. Amazon deposited a royalty of one cent.

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The Worst & the Darkest

If America’s Reign of Hate began with a TV show, maybe we can end it with one.

Face it: The combination of cruelty and crudeness of The Apprentice made him appealing to enough Americans to elect him president in 2016. And if you think that was a fluke, then you were in a coma when he won again in 2024.

He is Archie Bunker reincarnated, but with Archie’s harmless hard-headedness turned into the merciless humiliation of “You’re fired!” To those soaked in resentment constantly stirred by Fox News, those two words carried a decisive authority that made Hillary (“Stronger Together”) and Michelle (“When they go low…”) sound like wimps.

Moreover, Archie’s incidental racism is now full-blown white supremacy disguised as a law-and-order effort to control cities. To avoid the charge of racism, it is cast as suburban and rural vs. urban. If you’re still amazed that your Republican friends refuse to acknowledge that the Capitol was invaded by a mob on Jan. 6, it’s because the Republican dictionary defines “mob” as “city.”

The foremost unremarked reality of America today is that what we call Reality TV shows have nothing to do with reality, and yet enough of us are so enthralled by them that we have elected to live in one. Unreality is our new reality. George Orwell’s 1984, intended and always before read as a cautionary tale, is now an operator’s manual.

But enough of the problem we all know. To solve it, let’s start the show:

A friend suggests that we “turn The Apprentice upside down. Call it The Secretary. Instead of ending each show with ‘You’re fired,’ this would have the Chairman saying ‘You’re hired!’ to the worst candidate.”

Might take some effort to find a team of people capable of taking stage directions who are as shockingly pompous and/or ridiculous as Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, Steve Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, RFK Jr., Karoline Leavitt, Cash Patel, and Pam Bondi. But I like the strategy of holding up a fun-house mirror to a reality already grossly distorted. There has to be some point at which even those who superimpose The Chairman’s face on the American flag can, oh say, see how anti-American they yet wave.

So, too, the title “chairman” suggesting a corporate CEO (with a subliminal echo of Chairman Mao) is more honest than “president.” But I might prefer a title to highlight the thuggish bent of someone who hints at threats of violence and who has rewarded those who have committed violence on his behalf. Call him “The Godfather.”

Also, The Secretary suggests there’s just one. We want a depraved, demented, delusional team worthy of the one now running the country. Our title should be a warped reversal of Pres. John Kennedy’s “Best and Brightest.”

Could be a variety show (remember those?), but of various TV offerings. Start with a game show. Contestants are asked basic questions such as naming the three branches of government. The one coming closest to “Mar-a-Lago, the Westminster Country Club, and Trump Tower in Manhattan” gets the points.

Then a reality segment of an ICE raid. Describe it as lawful, neighborly, and helpful, and you get points. Then a sitcom of Noem answering questions in her latest costume, hat, lip fillers, basketball-hoop ear-rings, and necklace with cross. Describe her as intelligent, coherent, and honest, and Points R U.

Maybe then a weather forecast to let the Marines know the best time to land in Greenland, or the Navy when to surround Cuba, or the Army when to ransack Seattle. Extra points if you can recommend restaurants and nightclubs where our troops can enjoy themselves.

The highlight would be a segment with Miller & Vance wielding charts to show the need for a forever domestic war. Orwell predicted “forever wars” to sustain a police state, but those were with foreign powers. We, as “Oceania” (America), would have only “Eurasia” and “Eastasia” (Russia and China) to choose from, though we could switch either from ally to enemy or vice versa at any time and insist that it had always been that way, that no change ever happened. Alternative facts beget alternative history.

With a forever domestic war, think of all the cities and states our federal government could attack and occupy where our troops would already know the language and be able to read signs to specific targets like grocery stores and elementary schools. Call this segment “Out Orwelling Orwell.”

The contestants would then be asked for the best course of action based on what they’ve seen. Those reluctant to send US troops into US cities would be gone from the show upon return from the last commercial break. And there would be no lack of ads to accommodate all the Republican donors eager for a piece of the action.

Also banished during commercial breaks will be invasion-curious contestants who have qualms about Congress (whatever that was) or the courts. Left on our screens will be those gung-ho to inflict punishment at home and abroad–though they might want to wear masks.

The last segment will be a rendition of the National Anthem as played by a marching band. Points will be determined by who can keep a straight face while singing “land of the free” and “home of the brave.” Upon those who do, The Godfather himself will bestow the blessing: “You’re hired!”

With the point made like that, Americans might ask not how our current Reign of Hate began, but ask what we can do to stop it.

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L-R, US Attorney General Pam Bondi, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem look on as US President Donald Trump speaks to the press before signing an executive order that aims to end cashless bail, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on August 25, 2025. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP)
https://www.elmundo.es/internacional/2025/08/25/68acaf5ee4d4d8291a8b459e.html

By Inclination If Not Practice

Many friends from my Dakota days, bless them, know that I am, as one recently put it, “an amateur cartographer by inclination if not practice.”

Perhaps those of you who have been reading this cartographically named “Mouth of the River” blog for any length of time have noticed scattered blogs over these past six years on the subject of geography. As well as many more about history that include maps as featured images.

As a graduate student at South Dakota State University, I took an undergrad cartography course at 2/3rds credit for the sake of adding my own maps to a thesis titled The Forgotten Realist about Edward Eggleston, a contemporary of Mark Twain, best known for The Hoosier Schoolmaster, a serial novel in the 1870s which still circulated in the children’s section of libraries back in the 1950s.

Maps of Indiana, the Ohio River Valley, and the Great Lakes were well-done enough to impress the English Dept., but not enough to dissuade them from adopting a new rule at semester’s end restricting grad students from taking undergrad courses. They wanted us taking nothing but their courses. Must admit that my map of the USA was so embarrassingly bad that it ought to be ripped out of every copy, though I just can’t bring myself to do it to my own.

Must admit as well that I had also taken a music class at the same 2/3rds rate, which helped tip the scales for the minor-keyed English profs who thought it flat-out heresy to be answered with sharp rebuke. I was safely back in Massachusetts by then. It was called “the Garvey Rule.”

Also got myself in some salt water twelve years ago when the North Atlantic started whacking Plum Island with serious erosion. Never occurred to me that the owners of homes that were knocked down, compromised, or left vulnerable were already planning to rebuild and reinforce right on the very spots reclaimed by the Atlantic.

My second column about it began thus:

Not long ago, I told you that Plum Island is not an island but a barrier beach.

Geography 101 will tell you as much, but my penchant for verbosity—a polite word for BS—led me to add the phrase, “glorified sandbar,” a remark that did not exactly endear me to some of my neighbors.

Where to hide from people offended by what they read?

Hello Public Library!

Rolled my sleeping bag in the history aisles where no one ever goes and started looking for something else to plagiarize when a book about the Hudson River—or so I thought—grabbed my attention.

I’ll attach a link to the full column down below, but that passage and the next offer a useful background for what has happened in recent weeks. My reaction to the book’s intro:

… I was surprised to learn that the Lower Hudson, the 150 miles from Albany through the Palisades to NYC, is technically not a river but a fjord—“a long and broad tidal estuary.”

That’s why it is so direct, with slight angular bends rather than the constant twists and curves of rivers. Salt water reaches over 70 miles inland.

All because a glacier cut it wide and deep—which made Henry Hudson think he could sail his Half Moon up there and find China.

Instead, he found Poughkeepsie.

No idea how he could tell the difference. Thought it looked a lot like Barbados myself, but maybe that’s just on account of the crowd my daughter ran with.

Headline that I submitted for that column was “Pounding PI Sand Up an NY Fjord,” but the editor softened it. And the book is titled simply The Hudson, a History, although it’s so incisive with history and ecology and so much in between, it ought to be titled, Up Yours, Albany!

This memory was refreshed by a recent day trip to the Hudson Valley on which a friend and I joked that we should have brought our state flag to wave as we declared New York State re-named “New Massachusetts.” Instead, about halfway between Albany and quaint Saugerties, we stopped at the New Baltimore Rest Area for the same coffee now selling alongside I-95 and I-495.

That, of course, hints at why my cartographic leanings have become so prominent since, oh, say, January 20 of this year. But that’s not my inclination, that’s my practice. And this is still the weekend.

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My Hudson River column, April 2013:

https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/archive/2013/04/24/sitting-in-off-plum-island/39785754007/

As you likely know, the standard maps that have been placed on classroom walls for years have been criticized for distorting shapes and sizes. This is a consequence of having to project a round surface on a flat paper. Try pressing the peel down on a table top next time you have an orange, and you’ll get the idea. Furthermore, because there is so much more land in the northern hemisphere than in the south, Gerardus Mercator moved his 1569 projection so that the center is north of the Equator, further exaggeration sizes to the north over the south. I’ve always preferred the 1963 Robinson Projection that lessens the distortion with curved corners and moves the Equator back down to where it should be.

In 2016, a Japanese designer offered an alternative which beats Robinson for size and shape, but at the expense of positioning. Not bad, but I think the moral of the story is, if you want the unaltered truth, get a globe.

Hajime Narukawa won Japan’s prestigious Good Design Award for developing the AuthaGraph World Map, a groundbreaking projection that preserves the true proportions of continents and oceans.

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/accurate-map-authagraph

Ask What You Can Dodge

Biggest loser of the election has yet to be mentioned.

Since then, we’ve had Veterans Day, the holidays, Martin Luther King Day, the inaugural, and the most truly American event of all, the Super Bowl.

So perhaps Presidents Day is best to finally identify and consider the foremost victim of 2024.

Not a candidate or referendum question or anything on the ballot, but an ideal, a concept, an attitude. The founders never spelled it out, but it is easy to infer from the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers.

Washington implied it in his farewell, as would Eisenhower. Lincoln didn’t say it, but it’s in the spirit of his Gettysburg and Second Inaugural addresses. FDR didn’t say it, but his New Deal put it in action.

Not until 1961 did JFK spell it out: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Seems safe to say, following an election in which the price at the pump outweighed the price-gouging of those who own the pumps, that Kennedy’s rallying cry for citizenship is dead.

And fitting that the president who met that call to the end of his century-long life would die days before a con artist who sells Bibles is sworn in without ever putting a hand on one.

We’re all consumers now. And nothing more.

My friends still wonder how so many voted for the Republican candidate despite the felony convictions, insults, flagrant lies, praise of dictators past and present, cruelty, crudity, hinted threats of violence, and incoherent speeches—including a weird admiration for Hannibal Lecter and worrying envy of Adolph Hitler.

The answer is glaringly obvious, but no one wants to say it. Well, at my age and with nothing left to lose, I’ll say it:

Over two-thirds of the American electorate want authoritarian rule—one that excuses their indifference to others and conceals their fear and distrust of anyone not like them.

Whoa, you may say, Trump gained just 49% of the vote! Sorry, but anyone who did not vote said, in effect, that they want government left to others.

Ask not what I can do for my country, I don’t wanna be bothered!

Trump gained 31% of eligible voters, edging Harris’ 30%. The landslide was non-voters, 38% of eligible adults. Added to Trump’s vote, by any honest measure, it is a landslide for authoritarian rule.

Doesn’t matter if non-voters consciously want it. The Constitution is premised upon an informed, educated, participating citizenry.

By definition, then, if you do not stay informed, if you do not participate, you forfeit self-rule and welcome, or at least allow, authoritarian rule.

If election day was an alarm, then Veterans Day was its snooze button.

Social media was flush with tributes to veterans who risked their lives in wars they believed necessary to protect democratic rule. I lost count of such posts made by people who avoid politics as fiercely as they’d avoid a skunk, who refuse to see or hear or read any news.

You like irony? While all veterans who began their service after January 1973 did so as volunteers, many who today sing their praises dodge any and all implied commitment of “an educated citizenry.”

The veterans they praise risked death for the USA, but they can’t even pick up a newspaper.

For all the disdain aimed at draft dodgers over the years, it is democracy dodgers who have failed America.

Worse were so-called progressives who refused to vote or voted throw-away-party due to Biden’s uneasy dealing with an Israeli leader wanted by the International Criminal Court for intentional attacks on a civilian population.

A friend’s daughter, a teacher just two years out of college, said weeks before the election that she couldn’t wait for Harris to secure a win so that we could “start attacking her and Biden regarding Israel’s genocidal war.”

With Harris we had a chance if we kept working, participating, making our case known and keeping it in front of officials we could influence.

With Trump? Ask not me. Ask any of our most revered presidents. Or simply read the US Constitution.

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Before the address: JFK asking what Robert Frost could do for the country while LBJ assists with the wind-blown pages. Photo: Associated Press.

This site includes a video of the address: https://www.sott.net/article/269048-President-John-F-Kennedys-1961-Inaugural-Address

Lollipops & Rainbows

A day before The Townie posted my essay on weeding, the removal of old books from local libraries, the local daily ran a front-page story on the “success” of the Newburyport Public Library’s new volunteer program.

“New” because the volunteer program was suspended in the summer of 2023 by Mayor Sean Reardon. “New” because the new gig was crafted by the newly appointed Head Librarian Kevin Bourque. Also “new” because none of volunteers at the time are with the new crop. Considering that all of them were retirees, you could say that they, too, were weeded.

Nor could any of them rejoin the renewal. That would be awkward in light of the petition to the City Council that they and a few supporters, including me, signed calling for an investigation into the manner of their dismissal. The petition was successful, although the delay in choosing an investigator allowed a City Hall official who played a key role time to find a municipal position and new home in Western Massachusetts.

Coincidence? Maybe. But is it also coincidence that the local paper heralds nothing but success just as the investigation is drawing to a close in February? Here’s a sentence that appears midway in the 850-word report:

After collecting feedback from staff as well as former volunteers, Bourque crafted a new program and policy that was approved last May by the board of directors as well as library staff.

The phrase “from staff as well as volunteers” is no doubt true because he did listen to anyone who walked through his open door at times he set, including me. And a few of the dismissed vols told me that they have spoken to him. However, in the context of this all-lollipops report, those six words create a rainbow impression that they approve of all that has happened, and that all is forgiven and forgotten.

Another item in the report appears as a glaring contradiction to anyone who has followed the NPL saga, but would go unnoticed by casual readers. A reason for dismissal was that vols were doing staff work, a breach of the union contract.

That was then. Now, Bourque openly reveals that the new vols are doing nothing but reshelving books in the stacks. How is that task not among the various items in a librarian’s job description? Call it a clear case of “Which is it?”

But that’s a rhetorical question. Starting with Reardon’s suspension, this has been a shell game to disguise the removal of people well-acquainted with local history who actually knew how to research and could help patrons find things.

Reasons given for the dismissal begin with “bullying” and “harassment,” but no one who knows any of the elderly, professional, and highly competent dismissed vols believes that for a moment. Which may be why no incident or quote was ever specified despite numerous requests for them over these past 18 months.

My own speculation is that many young people expect a raise of inflection and or a giggle at the end of every spoken sentence, as well as smiley face or heart or huggy emojis after written ones. Normal talk, people my post-menopausal age often find, sounds angry to them. A matter-of-fact question is not heard but felt as assault and battery.

To nail down a breach of the union contract, charges against the dismissed vols included money. We were told in the daily paper that they took money from patrons. In the most extreme case of a public institution “airing dirty laundry” that I’ve ever seen, the NPL website posted it prominently for five weeks. The intended impression was to make the dismissed vols appear to be exploiting their role. The truth is that some patrons gave them coins for the photocopier because the vols were familiar with machines those patrons had never used.

So much for the veracity of NPL staff. Added to all of that, Bourque’s recent, unwitting admission regarding shelving seems like old news.

What’s new is the claim, or at least the impression, that the dismissed vols had a say in Bourque’s redesigned volunteer program. It should not take John Kerry to come here and tell us of the consequence of not answering false claims. And some of us still wonder if Kamala Harris missed the Swiftboat by never answering the repeated charge that she advocated sex-change operations for penitentiary inmates.

Don’t mean to tax your patience with yet another critique of a public library, but false information and insinuations that go unanswered stick. For that I reason, I write this not out of choice, but of obligation.

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Photo from *The Townie*, an on-line “public square for the passionate voices of Greater Newburyport.” Here’s a link to another *Townie* essay critical of NPL–this one about the “cultural homogenization and the sidelining of local knowledge” since Reardon’s banishment of the Archival Center’s volunteers.
https://www.townienbpt.com/education/2024/11/12/the-newburyport-public-library-can-do-more-to-promote-our-communitys-diverse-past

E Pluribus Whatever

Friends keep asking, and I keep answering that the 25-hour, 235-reader Moby-Dick Marathon went very well. Yes for many reasons, but only days later did my bell ring in one more that should be true of all public events, all readings, memorials, services, weddings, baptisms, trials, classes, assemblies:

Not once in the ten minutes I read or the 16 hours I listened did a cellphone intrude on us.

Forgive the vagueness of this days-later scene, but I’d rather not identify anyone or the place involved, nor offer any clues to that effect. I will say up front that it was not a self-help group of any kind.

About 30 people were present, evenly divided between men and women, most but not all of us taking turns addressing the group. Many, including me, were whimsical and comic, while others were poignant and personal, including a few describing the loss of children.

Maybe I should add that I may have been the youngest person present, no mean feat for a Truman baby. It was the first time I joined the monthly group, and only because New Year’s fell on a Wednesday did I have the day free. I regret that I may never be there again, and please keep that in mind when you hear this:

Prior to the start of presentations, our MC made a few introductory remarks, including the standard reminder to silence mobile devices. I chuckled at the reminder of how ringtones–and people actually taking calls in the theater while a film was on–drove me up a mandate when it spread like a pandemic among Screening Room audiences some ten years ago, but it hardly happens anymore. Everyone else, or so it seemed, reached for their phones and hit a button or two. Not me. I still do not own one.

Each of us spoke for five or ten minutes, and I believe it was while we were hearing the fifth speaker, that a ringtone came from a front corner of the room. The speaker continued while the tone sounded twice before a woman could get it out of a pocket, look at it, whisper a few words, and then put it away. The speaker never stopped, nor was anything said about the imposition before another speaker stepped to the mic.

May have been while the tenth or eleventh speaker was just starting that the same phone rang again. I clenched my teeth, but said nothing only because I was brand new to this group. Otherwise… Well, my parole officer may be reading this, so I better leave it unsaid. However, the fellow sitting next to me felt no such constraint:

Waving his hand at the speaker: “Excuse me! Excuse me!” And then pointing to the woman who, to my amazement, was answering the call: “Can you shut that thing off?” The whole room froze. He continued: “Or take the call outside.” She got up and left.

He then looked at the speaker: “I’m sorry. Can you start over again?”

The speaker did, and nothing else was said of the incident. It was if it never happened, except that in the transition to the next speaker, I put my hand on the fellow’s shoulder, and addressed him by name: “B—–, thank you for doing that! No one ever wants to do it, and no one will thank you even though most every one wants it done.”

With the next speaker ready to go, he simply nodded, and we both turned our attention to what we were there to hear. All was well until the speaker after that was mid-way into a moving account of personal loss, and the woman re-entered the room. Instead of going to her seat, she came right to our table and started explaining to my new friend (and ally in the futile war against technological imposition) why she “had to” take the call.

May have been ten years ago that I figured out that cellphoners have turned “emergency” into the biggest one-word joke in the history of language. So, of course it was “an emergency” involving a “doctor” and “couldn’t wait.” J—– simply said, “Well, then you shouldn’t have come here!” And she walked to her chair.

This time I was the one waving to the speaker: “I’m sorry, but can you go back to where you were looking out the window?” It wasn’t that far back, and I didn’t want to miss anything. He gladly complied, no doubt because he knew where the room’s attention had been redirected, and it wasn’t to, through, or at his window in a previous life.

There were no more interruptions, and the event soon ended as if there had never been any interruptions at all.

Next day I’m standing at a busy intersection in Melrose waiting for the walk sign.

Green comes on for the cars aside me, but none move. My mind is on something else–The Marathon? The spanakopita I’m about to have at the Iron Town Diner? The farce of the word “Emergency”? So I don’t look to see why the car doesn’t move. Five seconds pass before the second car sounds the horn. Just a bump, barely a beep, nothing that we would call “laying on,” and far short of blaring.

It works. First car finally starts, and a few get through the light before it turns red. During that time, a woman, perhaps my age, walks up to the corner and declares to me: “Some people have no patience!”

Nor did I have any patience: “What are you talking about? That driver sat here on green long enough to do his taxes. What’s the driver in the second car supposed to do? Offer to lick the envelope?”

Clearly, she was expecting immediate agreement, as she began with a stutter: “Wuh-wuh-wuh-well, there’s never any need for impatience. That’s my life’s motto!”

Irony was right on cue. We now had our walk sign, and she was crossing west while I was crossing north–not to mention that I had skipped breakfast and was ravenous for Iron Town. If not, I’d have asked if it ever occurred to her that the first driver was pre-occupied–most likely on a cellphone, perhaps texting–and that the second driver was actually doing the first a favor by letting him or her know that the light was now green. The second was certainly doing the third, fourth, fifth, etc. drivers a favor.

Instead, as we went our separate ways: “What your motto really says is ‘Let everything slide!'”

Next day, at the very beginning of NPR’s coverage of Jimmy Carter’s memorial in the Washington National Cathedral, a ringtone sounds.

“A reminder of modernity,” sighs the commentator.

Modernity. In the Washington National Cathedral and with all flags flying half-staff.

Can’t tell you just when or why or how it all went awry, but a Truman baby can tell you that it wasn’t always like this. Most of us may have been shy, but we’d support those willing to speak up for rules–written or understood–that call for the consideration of others.

Today, those who break rules, disturb the peace, and impose on others are to be tolerated. Those who complain or call attention to them are the ones to be criticized. “Let it slide” might as well replace E Pluribus Unum as our national motto.

We’d absolve the worst of thieves so long as they don’t thieve from us.

Or would you rather believe that a convicted felon becomes president of the United States thanks entirely to the high-financed schemes of a powerful few, and not at all to the day-to-day, carefree passivity of the let-it-slide many?

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Thanks to a friend from Rome for the screenshot. That’s 1:00 AM. And that’s Rome, *New York*.

Coincidence or Algorithmism?

On Sunday, I attended an event and heard the main speaker call dedicated activist groups “small but mighty.”

I recognized the reference thanks to a diminutive villager and singer at King Richard’s Faire who often wore the shirt at cast-call before she climbed into Renaissance garb.

Made without mention of Shakespeare, “small but mighty” came near the end of the event, and so while rising to leave, I turned to two nearby friends, a married couple, and let them know. But I couldn’t name the play and guessed, Much Ado About Nothing or As You Like it. “Has to be one of the comedies.”

On Monday, my newsfeed included an ad for literary t-shirts. First and foremost was:

https://tshirthodoca.com/product/and-though-she-be-but-little-she-is-fierce-shakespeare/

Has my brain been tapped? Unnerving though it was, I laughed at the ask-and-you-shall-receive immediacy–and the exact re-wording–of what I hope is pure coincidence and passed it on to the couple. I’ve heard of opening Pandora’s Box, but I opened a Litmus Test: She worried that “someone is listening in.” His reply could not have been more cheerful: “The web heard you wondering which play it was from, and kindly gave you the answer!”

Yes, the line is from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a comedy that may qualify as the Bard’s weirdest play, spoken by Helena in act 3, scene 2, referring to her friend Hermia. When I added that, the reply was this: “Our daughter named her cat Hermia, and she was little but fierce.”

Before and after that exchange, I was drafting a column for Martin Luther King Day for the local paper. Yes, six weeks early, but I had an idea prompted by a question posed to the speaker on Sunday. Already drafting it in my head on the drive home, but up against a deadline for another project that night, I had to draft it next day.

In it, I describe and quote a sermon King delivered in Lima, Ohio. When I had a complete draft, I went clicking for emails and messages which included a friend request from a friend of a friend as often happens on social media. As always, I checked a profile before approving, and there it was: “From Lima, Ohio.”

Is it possible that the name of a place in my unpublished and unseen-by-anyone-but-me Word file was caught by an algorithm and connected via social media to a woman from that place, prompting her to send a friend request?

Nor could my remark while leaving a church be anywhere near the internet. And yet…

And yet it feels so much like other “coincidences” that should be suspected. I’m an avid, lifelong cribbage player, so it was only a matter of time before I mentioned the game in an email not long ago with my most frequent opponent. Next day I was looking at this:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1341/crib-wars

No fan of gimmicks, she was appalled, as was I. She even sounded a bit miffed that I dared send it. But I inflict it on you to make a point: As soon as I mention it, it’s known to cyber-advertisers. Unlike this week’s surprises, I had put it in an email, so I hardly noticed or cared. First noticed this 15 years ago when I reviewed a Jethro Tull concert opened by Procol Harum. I was already a member of a Tull fan group and seeing ads for their merch, but the next day I began seeing ads for Procol Harum.

I can only wonder if it was due to my enthusiasm for them, the only opening act to gain a call for an encore in the 30-plus Tull concerts I’ve attended since 1971. Interesting to note that, in the column, I made made bare mention of The Rolling Stones and The Who but received no ads for them.

And now I’m bombarded with ads for nativity scenes. When drafting my Christmas column last week about displays of refugees seeking shelter on the lawns and in the homes that fly the flag of a candidate promising mass deportations of refugees seeking shelter, I wanted to know where the figurines are manufactured.

Do the Marys and Josephs have green cards? If not, may they be rounded up and deported to Guatemala or Pakistan or wherever they may have been mass produced?

For that, I get ads offering them at bargain rates. Call it comic relief. The algorithms have no sense of satire. They’d try selling guns to a nun if the nun wrote “gun” more than once in an email.

What’s new–and what’s worrying–is that I’m now receiving ads and possibly friend requests that appear too specific to be coincidental. We’ll see what this account you are now reading might draw. If I start seeing ads for services providing encrypted text or web secrecy, I’ll ask the algorithms to let you know.

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