I am choosing to run this article anyhow, with this added preface, because its core meaning remains: Democrats in states that allow ballot measures1 need to be far more responsive when extremist ballot measures circulate in their state, because they get hung around far more necks than just their own.

Back in the oughties, I served for three years on the Executive and Central Committees of the Democratic Party of Oregon (DPO), as Chair of its Platform and Resolutions Committee. During those years, I learned first-hand how elected officials, and party officials, will say what they please, even if the party has taken a different stance, whether by resolution or by a platform plank. These same officials will also remain silent, if they please, blaming the party for not having yet “spoken” on a topic, again whether by resolution or platform plank.

Said differently, party officials say what they please, regardless of what their party activists may resolve. Party platforms and resolutions exist to provide foils or fig leaves, as any party official may need, while keeping the activists who draft them busy, believing they are doing something relevant.

Shortly before I woke up to this, and resigned, I watched the Chair of the DPO chuck her hand-delivered copy of the 2010 DPO Platform—the final work product of that election year’s platform convention, representing thousands of hours of collective effort, by delegates from across the state—into the remote bowels of her desk, to deliver the clear message that she could not care less what it said.

I got into a bit of a dustup on Facebook last week.

IP28—which 131,220 Oregonians have signed, so far, will be on Oregon’s November ballot. If passed, it will criminalize fishing, hunting, rodent trapping, and livestock herding. It would extinguish Oregon’s support for ancient Tribal fishing rights. It would exterminate significant parts of Oregon’s outdoor recreation industry, and wipe out dairy farms (bye-bye Tillamook Cheese?) It could shut down the Oregon Zoo. IP28 exists to criminalize treating any animal differently than a well-kept household cat2.

Several friends in Portland seemed incensed that I expect elected Democrats in Oregon, including the leaders of Democratic Party of Oregon (DPO) itself, to speak out against IP28. Loudly, and promptly.

One friend repeatedly insisted that elected Democrats cannot be expected to say anything about IP28, because they are not allowed to, until the DPO Central Committee has issued a resolution on the topic at a quarterly meeting.

I rolled my eyes.

Said sarcastically, IP28 is an attempt to write “The Vegan Agenda” into law.

Historically, Montana is a purple state. For decades, the legislature and statewide offices were swapped between the parties. Then, in the 2022 and 2024 elections, the Montana Republican Party began posting billboards reading “Don’t Want Montana to Become Portland? Vote Republican.” The state turned bright red.

Just this month, Montana’s right-wing Christian Nationalist Governor, Greg Gianforte, has begun running ads mocking “Democrats” for Oregon’s IP28 (“They are literally trying to outlaw hunting”)—even though he’s not even up for re-relection. And, even though IP28 is happening over in Oregon, not Montana.

It is a very effective message, outside of Portlandia.

To a far greater degree than my many friends in Oregon realize, “Portland, Oregon” has become a national code-word for radical left-wing extremism.

Which is problematic, because Oregon’s nearby rural Western states—Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas—have 10 total Senators, compared to just 6 for the whole Left Coast—California, Oregon, and Washington.

Yet, those 10 rural Senators, now all Republican, are elected by just 5.5 million people, compared to the 55 million mostly-urbanites, who elect the Left Coast Six. Greater Los Angeles alone has over twice the population of these five rural states combined. Wyoming has less registered voters than Portland.

Jon Tester was the last Democratic U.S. Senator elected from among these five rural states. He lost, in 2024, by being framed as a “Democrat extremist,” controlled by the Left Coast. Tester is now backing an Independent, Seth Bodnar, in a credible and well-funded effort to replace Montana’s outgoing Republican Senator Steve Daines, by appealing to our state’s historic political centrism. After 18 years in the Senate, Tester sees the now urban-dominated Democratic brand as too extreme to win any longer, in Montana.

For their part, the Montana Democratic Party—which holds no statewide offices since Tester lost, and is nearly a super-minority in the legislature—has chosen to back a political unknown named Alani Bankhead, who moved to Montana three years ago because she “decided she likes us.” She has no chance of winning. But, her vanity campaign will guarantee the Republicans keep Daines’ seat.

The USA is in a Cold Civil War. This should be obvious, even in Portland.

Republicans have about seven million less registered voters, nationwide, than Democrats4. Yet, they control all three branches of the Federal Government, and a majority of State legislatures, because they play way above their weight through a) unified political messaging, b) gerrymandering, and c) billionaires.

Democrats care about regular people too much to have many c) billionaires on their side. And, Democrats tend to consider themselves “above” the sleazy politics of b) gerrymandering (until this year).

So, one might think Democrats would at least keep their shit together, when it comes to a) messaging.

But, one would be wrong.

I know full well, from 36 years of living in Portlandia, that 133,220 Oregonians would gladly sign onto The Vegan Agenda of IP28.

I also know these same folks—who would be happy to force their vegan values onto others—are mostly incapable of seeing how forcing their moral views about animals onto other people makes them no different from those who force their moral views against same-sex marriage onto my own life as a gay man.

Legislating other people’s morality, beyond the basics of public safety (no killing, no stealing, no lying in court, no driving through red lights, etc.) is un-American. It is the opposite of what it means to be liberal.

Yet, even though IP28’s war on ranchers is being weaponized against Democrats throughout the West, we are have been, until just a few days ago5, hearing crickets from Oregon Democrats about it.

My progressive friends pushed back at me, claiming that IP28 is not their problem. That it wasn’t backed by “real” Democrats. That it would never pass.

It is irrelevant how many “real” Oregon Democrats are behind IP28. It does not matter if it is likely to pass. It it meaningless whether it is some nefarious right-wing subversion to drive the conservative vote.

Even if all that is true, it just means Oregon Democrats let themselves get played.

As I was taught by the same DPO Chair who chucked the 2010 DPO Platform into the bowels of her desk, “the perception of political power is political power.” If voters see something to be true, then it is true, for all political purposes.

So, it is irrelevant how IP28 got wrapped around the Oregon Democrats’ neck. It is there, and completely credible, because it is consistent with Portlandia’s brand. A brand that loses elections outside of Oregon’s Willamette Valley, even if it remains exciting in safe, bright-blue districts Democrats already control.

Oregon Democrats need to start responding to national politics with something more effective than yet more screaming about Trump. They also need to work more closely with rural activists, who understand the voters who control most of America’s state, federal, and county governments, outside of safely packed and cracked urban districts.

Because there is a war going on. And, the rest of us need the Left Coast’s help.

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To me, Greater Idaho and The PEACE Act are a pair of awful twins, pinching each other and crying in complaint.

In 2020, a group emerged whose name said it all; Move Oregon’s Border for a Greater Idaho. They have been advocating that Eastern Oregon is more culturally aligned with Idaho. They point out that it fells like Oregon’s powers that be ignore and undermine Eastern Oregon. Therefore, the land of Eastern Oregon should become Western Idaho.

This is an unrealistic idea that won’t happen, but I despise it and work to disable it.

Still, resolutions in favor have passed in most of the counties that their proposal covers. In urban places, Greater Idaho is a laughing stock. It made it to an episode of The Daily Show.1

Is it funny because it is something that the people who want it are nearly powerless to do within legal means? I never thought it was funny. Kinda like when a TV personality ran for the Republican nomination for President on a platform built to appeal to disaffected rural people. I didn’t think that was funny either.

Two years after Greater Idaho came into being, the first PEACE Act came out of urban Oregon and started collecting signatures. The People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions Act, would categorize farming, fishing, hunting, pest control2 as animal cruelty, thus making them illegal. The PEACE Act comes from an odd organization out of Portland with some really wacky funding.3 Here in 2026, they have sought signatures again to get the PEACE Act on the ballot. Having spent at least a quarter of a million dollars, it looks like the PEACE Act will be on my Oregon ballot. This is an unrealistic idea that won’t happen, but I despise it and work to stop it. Along with Democrats across Eastern Oregon, My county committee has passed a resolution in opposition. We are holding meetings and speaking out on social media.

Like Greater Idaho, The PEACE Act would destroy towns. The fact that someone would propose something so destructive and pain-inducing boggles my mind. I struggle to empathize with them.

It is not in the least bit funny to me. It is not something I can ignore.

And I place the PEACE Act next to Greater Idaho as signs of the poor interchanges here in my state.

In conflict, we often try to discern “who is the aggressor.” It is a treacherous pursuit, because each escalation is a response to the other. Each aggressor has a reason in the actions of others to explain their act.

Greater Idaho says that urban Oregon is the aggressor. The PEACE Act is evidence to that claim.

As a culture we try to draw lines as to what aggression is acceptable and what is inappropriate.

Oregon is in dysfunctional conflict.

I love every corner of Oregon. If you read Old Truck Good Coffee with regularity, you have heard me sing praises and lay out critiques of the left (The Good Coffee) and the right (The Good Trucks).4

I think our conflict makes us vulnerable. Both Greater Idaho and The PEACE Act receive funding from outside organizations who seem to be more interested in starting fires in our house than making Oregon better for people. Now, we have to spend time talking and working on these issues instead of on our schools (which, by the way, could really use the help).

Something I love about Oregon is that historically, we have gotten through this. Oregon was famous for collaborative politics in the 80s and 90s. We can do it again.

And we are. This May, Wallowa County voted to kick Greater Idaho out of their county.

To date, 12 County Democratic parties have passed resolutions in opposition to The PEACE Act. More are in the works (Disclosure: I am organizing for this project. My County Democratic Party passed that resolution in May5). The Democratic Governor and her Republican challenger are both in opposition to The PEACE Act.

I don’t regularly meld my political efforts and Old Truck Good Coffee. Leo and I want Old Truck Good Coffee to be read across our interchanges and inspire community thinking outside of partisanship. These days, party membership is legitimately distracting and distrusted, so not that useful.

But this moment seems exceptional. Everyone (except that substitute teacher, his distant funders, and his paid signature gatherers) is behaving really well. People are recognizing how damaging this proposal is and they are taking it seriously. Not because it might pass but because we don’t want to be associated with it. Because we understand the culture, livelihood, and meaning in hunting, fishing, and farming. Because we share priorities.

I am sad with where we are, but I see the work being done to fix us. To allow all of Oregon to see each other, despite these outside-funded efforts to ram us into each other.

It is a good question. Astrophysicists now estimate there are 2,000,000,000,000 (two trillion) galaxies in the known universe. Which means there are more galaxies than a human brain has neurons. There are more galaxies than Musk has dollars.

Our own galaxy has 100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion) stars, of which our planet Earth orbits exactly one. One.

Said differently, humans are physically incapable of allocating even one neuron per galaxy to how big our (presumably God-given) curiosity, and resulting technologies, now know physical reality to be. We live inside Plato’s cave.

Yet, the largest two religions on the planet, Christianity and Islam, plus many smaller ones, teach that we can only be “saved” by believing in a set of stories that are only available on Earth.

It would make for quite a bottleneck on the road to salvation, if you had to find some planet named Earth, and read a particular book, to stand any chance of an afterlife. You could be eternally damned, just for belonging to a species that evolved in the wrong galaxy, or on the wrong planet, or in the incorrect era of our 13,200,000,000 year old universe.

Myself, I doubt “God” sucks so bad at engineering.

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Any religion which cannot be as true in one galaxy as it could be in the next one cannot claim to be a universal (aka, “catholic2”) faith, just a regional culture, no matter how big the region.

Which is fine, at least in a free country, and good for those who feel into it. Civic cultures can be valuable, particularly in the face of AI. It takes work to maintain our humanity, and it helps to show up for face to face meetings.

But, a civic culture is less than what major religions present themselves to be: as the one way, truth, and life, for all; albeit differently stated, often in conflict, and sometimes enforced with a sword.

This could all be unpacked much further, of course. Religion is a big topic. But, for the purpose of commentary relevant to Spielberg’s latest flick, it seems to me that neither time nor geography could be preconditions to any credible, universal faith. No one, true, monotheistic God worthy of that moniker would demand a faith based in historical events arising from a brief era on a single planet as a mandatory requirement for “his” love.

Any such God would be a bigot.

And, while many have tried, no one has ever convinced me of that.

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For me, I wanted this year to be a year to consider what is good friction and what is bad friction.

The plan this weekend included a walk through Bend (Oregon) First Friday. My sweetie lives here and loves it. I see that Bend is …objectively worthy of appreciation. It is a smaller city but with great restaurants. It is in a beautiful part of the world. I like to recreate in a lot of the ways it does. I hike and run its trails, fish, and camp. I should be pro-Bend. And I want to be.

However, I tend to get wound around my old cultural objections to Bend; it attracts people who move here for the lifestyle. They are not of here, and it is hard for me to see a place populated by folks not connected to the earlier chapters of the Ongoing Story of Here.

I also find the people to be so suspiciously beautiful and well appointed. I get a sense of emerging women’s fashion walking around Bend First Friday.1

We went to the grand opening of a new space for art creation. People can rent small studios there and enjoy common space. There was an area for teenagers with a coffee bar, open space to sit, and a shared guitar. I love a shared guitar.

I overheard one painter standing outside her studio space say exactly my fear, “well I work remotely and my goal is to get here to my studio by noon every day.”

I had to wrestle with the sense that she is living La Vida but has no culture. That she is adrift, seeking pleasure and ego rewards, anchored to nothing.

Maybe that remote-working painter is unmoored from culture. I can’t say. If so, I think it is very sad for her and I hope she finds some connection. But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps she has a rich faith community that gathers in worship throughout the week. Perhaps she has a close family. Perhaps she is driven to community service. All this AND she works from home AND she maintains an artistic practice? Amazing.

We continued our journey. We went to the book release celebration of a local non-fiction author. We bought stickers at a fundraiser for a high school speech and debate team. My new sticker says “Be Kind and speak your mind.”

In the late afternoon, downtown Bend was an ambient temperature such that you did not even notice the weather. People were milling about. Many were in the peak fashion I can’t help but notice. There was a well-dressed but bored looking group at a very fancy real estate office. A DJ was playing unoffensive rap over different beats.

On another corner was a funk band playing their version of Dolly Parton’s “Nine to Five.” I realized that we passed several original bands including a hardcore drum and guitar duo, a largely female band playing originals that reminded me of Siouxsie and Galaxy 500,2 and an alt country outfit. The main stage by the river was also a band playing originals, where I had expected someone playing pleasing straight ahead covers.

Perhaps Bend has developed an original local music scene that even my snobbish tastes can enjoy.

I looked around and saw not just high fashion worn well. I saw people dressed like me. I saw high school age people trying on identity. I saw older people out engaging with the people around them.

My sweetie invites me along to a lot of events. Last year she brought me to a presentation by the Oregon State economist, Damon Rundberg, speaking about Bend’s economic situation. Before the talk, I had presumed that Bend was akin to Vale or Steamboat Springs. That recreation and out of town money dominated it. You can see the experience of that in the housing market here, it is definitely true that out of town money has increased housing prices.

But Rundberg (who is, by the way, one of the most engaging, affable public speakers you may ever get to see) said that the economy here is more diverse than you would think. And on reflection, I know folks who run a machine shop here. There is industry. It has problems, but Bend is not completely lost to an addiction to out of town money.

My sweetie loves it here, and she loves events like this. If she had not invited me, I would not have chosen to come to Bend First Friday. However, I am glad now for the good friction of passing into a place and seeing it in more dimension.

I was also happy to leave, to go back downstream the next day to my part of the river where it waters a thin strip of the desert to crowded green, where I am not able to discern the latest in women’s fashion.

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For the third annual High Desert Low Speed Mixer and Brunch, I had a blessed number of people at my house in the high desert of North Central Oregon. To my knowledge, no political fracas occurred. Perhaps this is the sort of mixer to pull America back from the brink.

The mixer part of the weekend is a morning run where participants1 get paired off with another person for a short leg in our beautiful desert meadow. I provide poor directions and distractions so that people get a little lost sometimes and have to work together to get back home where the chilaquiles are cooking up.

Other than the little run, we cleared some brush for my neighbor, played with dogs, cooked, ate, and talked.

After three years the logistics are less challenging, but my primary concern is the primary reason that I set this up; my invites go to friends of mixed political stripes.

I did send out one email prior to the event reminding people to use their best judgement to not be a part of the two stage rocket of political dispute:

1. Avoid saying things that might trigger someone else.

2. If someone does say something that triggers you, wait a beat and think what response (if any) is going to be productive.

Three of us were hauling my neighbor’s brush to the dump. We drove past an overlook of the river with the mountains behind it. We had just found yet another agreement across our divides; that Coors tastes best at 30 miles per hour.

James then confused me. He said, “you know, Joel, you live the life of a conservative.”

I was befuddled. I made babbling noises for a minute. James lives in a fancy part of Idaho part of the time and San Antonio part of the time. He works in banking. He is a thoughtful guy about a lot of things but we don’t align either politically or in the way we spend our days. Mostly, pickleball and grandkids. I want neither of these things.

I live in a pretty rural area — though to be clear not an agricultural community. My home is in a place developed in the 1980s on a historic ranch. It is largely retired people. Registered Democrats are a small percentage of voters, true. So are natives; most of my neighbors moved from cities.

Do I live the life of a conservative? I never thought of it that way. I live the life of my family, which is a mixed, politically moderate group. I live where I like to fish and where I can be with family that anchors me. I live on the land that I was formed upon. That is not intentionally a political act.

I asked James what he meant but did not get anything that clarified. “You live free out here,” was something to do with it.

While the Republican Party has embraced the idea that rural is inherently Republican (and the voter registration demographics of the last three decades bear that out) it was not historically true.

The shift of the working class and rural people towards the Republican party is within my memory. That is a small slice of our shared 250 years. There is nothing about living in a rural area or having a particular lifestyle that makes you of one political stripe or another.

Rural areas in America gave birth to the Grange. Folks working the extraction economies of rural Montana, West Virginia, and California were the strong spine and legs that moved America’s labor movement forward. They would not be considered conservative in their own time or in ours.

From what I understand about the people of those movements, I imagine that those families also cleared brush for their neighbors and would enjoy nice beverage while in motion on occasion.

I have come to reject the “spectrum” metaphor of our politics. We are all more complex, more beautiful than a dot placed on a line that blends from blue to red, from left to right.

Metaphors like that are more powerful than people imagine. Putting people on this spectrum allows you one calculation: how far away are we from each other?

James works for a bank. He is highly mobile. His family structure is not a simple nuclear sort. He loves close family members who are gay.

Are these supposed to describe a liberal lifestyle, even though he votes Republican? We have had wonderful conversations, driving down the road blasting Whitney Houston, about what matters in our lives. He has offered me valuable advice. Except pickleball and progeny, his world makes as much sense to me as my own. The distance between us is close to zero.

There is no spectrum.

Luke was the third person riding with us. He also votes Republican. There is no simple way to describe Luke (like everyone else) but for brevity I will say that he carries forward the redneck he was raised in.

A while later, having a beer that we consumed while sitting in one place, he called back to our conversation on the way to the dump.

“You know,” Luke said, “I don’t think we should think of the Republican Party as a lifestyle brand,”

“That’s smart,” I said, “Democrats neither.”

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Please forgive! Now, on to some weekly truck … - Leo

We managed to get outside for a while on Saturday. It is Memorial Day Weekend, after all. The holiday when the 94 million acres currently known as the State of Montana is body-tackled by tourists slathered in technicolor outdoor-fabric, gunning to snag some fish from a river and slap it on a grill. With beer.

I trailed my husband, walking along an unofficially abandoned railroad line instead1. We are not fishermen. He collected rusty bits and worn wood pegs, all likely to end up in his ceramic creations. I shot patterns and textures.

For the line of thought I am nurturing here, the key part is that we were outside, walking along the leftovers of a transport technology which once bound together two of Montana’s more significant towns: Helena and Great Falls. People were fishing and camping all around us, along this Recreation Road we would likely never camp on ourselves. It is much too close to the highway. We know how to get far more lost, if we want. This afternoon stroll is a mere thirty minutes from our front door.

We finished up our mild adventure with a cuisine-grade burger at a nearby taphouse. One well worth your while, should you ever be nearby. Wifi was available, along with local brew, as well as Montana’s very good regional cider brand. There was even a weed shop down the street, in the tiny riverside town where we ate. Which I mention not because I partake any longer—cannabis rattles my nerves, and leaves me feeling blue for days—but because there is no need to stay in a city if one wants “accoutrements” to go with your bit of nature. Even in rural Montana, intoxicatingly tasty elements of the anthropocene era2 have spread along rocky canyon riverbanks once dominated by mountain goats.

It has become harder to find the wild. Still, I would rather be sitting in one of these curated outdoor dining experiences than staring at a screen. Or, so I say here now, while staring at a screen, writing about a previously lived experience.

Could I survive with neither nature nor screens? I do not know. I have not had to try, at least not since growing up before personal computers were invented. People somehow managed without, and my family took only occasional trips to the mountains.

My life has been privileged enough to consume nature for its beauty, on demand, taking photos on the wildly powerful computers I now carry in my pocket. I keep thousands of those photos stored on my phone, and in a data center, somewhere, the location of which no doubt changes regularly. I have no idea where.

I have never had to survive outside of my physical comfort zone, even if I have pushed myself to try a bit, in certain ways.

Social comfort zone, though? That’s a very different story.

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A brother of my Masonic Lodge in Portland frequently complains of the way he sees this old civic organization we share as “infected with white trash Trump voters.” He is a single, seventy-year old, upper middle class, retired white lawyer, born in the middle of the baby boom. He lives in a home he bought and paid off long ago, in Portland’s Hawthorne-Belmont neighborhood3, one of the deepest blue political zones in America.

He does not get out much. He lives most of his life via keyboard.

His open bias against rural American culture is ironic, given he is a Freemason proudly living in the heart of Portland. Portlandians are well-known for their claims to embrace diversity. And, reaching across divisions, in search of shared light, is a core tenet of Freemasonry4. I like to remind him of these points. He seems not to care.

I do. I have to.

Out here in Helena, Montana, I know several men in my local Masonic Lodge who are part of that demographic my lodge brother in Portland appears to despise. They hunt, wear caps, love football, drink beer, and often do not bother to put on a suit or tie for lodge meetings, though they have one, for funerals and degrees. I am sure some voted for Trump. I also know they show up, do the work, and would be among the first to offer me help, if I had need. No questions asked.

Early on, when I first met these guys, a few looked twice at the “George Michael” hoop earrings I wear specifically to make me look more gay. A couple of them paused, briefly, the first time I mentioned “my husband, Michael.” A fair number of them have since told me of their LGBTQ children, siblings, cousins, aunts, etc.

So, I know for a fact, from my very own “lived experience,” that just showing up, month after month, and being completely myself—earrings, husband, and all—has built bridges, and shored up trestles, among some “white trash Trump voters,” where these bridges may have never existed before5.

In other words, I see these guys work harder to bridge actual social gaps than some highly vocal Portlandians I know, parked behind keyboards and shooting off their mouths. I expect many of my local guys would never vote for Trump again, if they did before.

But, I will not ask them.

Shaming people does not win votes or friendship, much less a chance to change somebody’s mind.

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Those rusty old railroad tracks Michael and I walked did not lead anywhere in particular. We had no destination or agenda. Still, the trestles crossing the river were strong. The rust added color. The air was clear and fresh.

We could have stayed home, staring at a screen. But, we drove off and walked along some abandoned old technology anyhow. We went someplace similar, but unfamiliar. Unexpected. We found some beauty there.

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It is not clear whether this is coercion by Substack (which only makes money from Paid subscribers), or yet another glitch in their user interface. Regardless, apologies for double-sending this to you today. I hope it is worth it. - Leo

We managed to get outside for a while on Saturday. It is Memorial Day Weekend, after all. The holiday when the 94 million acres currently known as the State of Montana is body-tackled by tourists slathered in technicolor outdoor-fabric, gunning to snag some fish from a river and slap it on a grill. With beer.

I trailed my husband, walking along an unofficially abandoned railroad line instead1. We are not fishermen. He collected rusty bits and worn wood pegs, all likely to end up in his ceramic creations. I shot patterns and textures.

For the line of thought I am nurturing here, the key part is that we were outside, walking along the leftovers of a transport technology which once bound together two of Montana’s more significant towns: Helena and Great Falls. People were fishing and camping all around us, along this Recreation Road we would likely never camp on ourselves. It is much too close to the highway. We know how to get far more lost, if we want. This afternoon stroll is a mere thirty minutes from our front door.

We finished up our mild adventure with a cuisine-grade burger at a nearby taphouse. One well worth your while, should you ever be nearby. Wifi was available, along with local brew, as well as Montana’s very good regional cider brand. There was even a weed shop down the street, in the tiny riverside town where we ate. Which I mention not because I partake any longer—cannabis rattles my nerves, and leaves me feeling blue for days—but because there is no need to stay in a city if one wants “accoutrements” to go with your bit of nature. Even in rural Montana, intoxicatingly tasty elements of the anthropocene era2 have spread along rocky canyon riverbanks once dominated by mountain goats.

It has become harder to find the wild. Still, I would rather be sitting in one of these curated outdoor dining experiences than staring at a screen. Or, so I say here now, while staring at a screen, writing about a previously lived experience.

Could I survive with neither nature nor screens? I do not know. I have not had to try, at least not since growing up before personal computers were invented. People somehow managed without, and my family took only occasional trips to the mountains.

My life has been privileged enough to consume nature for its beauty, on demand, taking photos on the wildly powerful computers I now carry in my pocket. I keep thousands of those photos stored on my phone, and in a data center, somewhere, the location of which no doubt changes regularly. I have no idea where.

I have never had to survive outside of my physical comfort zone, even if I have pushed myself to try a bit, in certain ways.

Social comfort zone, though? That’s a very different story.

Leave a comment

A brother of my Masonic Lodge in Portland frequently complains of the way he sees this old civic organization we share as “infected with white trash Trump voters.” He is a single, seventy-year old, upper middle class, retired white lawyer, born in the middle of the baby boom. He lives in a home he bought and paid off long ago, in Portland’s Hawthorne-Belmont neighborhood3, one of the deepest blue political zones in America.

He does not get out much. He lives most of his life via keyboard.

His open bias against rural American culture is ironic, given he is a Freemason proudly living in the heart of Portland. Portlandians are well-known for their claims to embrace diversity. And, reaching across divisions, in search of shared light, is a core tenet of Freemasonry4. I like to remind him of these points. He seems not to care.

I do. I have to.

Out here in Helena, Montana, I know several men in my local Masonic Lodge who are part of that demographic my lodge brother in Portland appears to despise. They hunt, wear caps, love football, drink beer, and often do not bother to put on a suit or tie for lodge meetings, though they have one, for funerals and degrees. I am sure some voted for Trump. I also know they show up, do the work, and would be among the first to offer me help, if I had need. No questions asked.

Early on, when I first met these guys, a few looked twice at the “George Michael” hoop earrings I wear specifically to make me look more gay. A couple of them paused, briefly, the first time I mentioned “my husband, Michael.” A fair number of them have since told me of their LGBTQ children, siblings, cousins, aunts, etc.

So, I know for a fact, from my very own “lived experience,” that just showing up, month after month, and being completely myself—earrings, husband, and all—has built bridges, and shored up trestles, among some “white trash Trump voters,” where such bridges may have never existed before5.

In other words, I see these guys work harder to bridge actual social gaps than some highly vocal Portlandians I know, parked behind keyboards and shooting off their mouths. I expect many of my local guys would never vote for Trump again, if they did before.

But, I will not ask them.

Shaming people does not win votes or friendship, much less a chance to change somebody’s mind.

Leave a comment

Those rusty old railroad tracks Michael and I walked did not lead anywhere in particular. We had no destination or agenda. Still, the trestles crossing the river were strong. The rust added color. The air was clear and fresh.

We could have stayed home, staring at a screen. But, we drove off and walked along some abandoned old technology anyhow. We went someplace similar, but unfamiliar. Unexpected. We found some beauty there.

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Is anyone in the United States happy with the way things are? No matter who I talk to, conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican, or a someone who (gasp!) defies a label, no one seems happy.

It feels like we hate them and they hate us, whoever they or us may be. But if we’re all unhappy with the current state of affairs, shouldn’t we be able to find some common ground? As both sides launch rotten tomatoes at each other, you’d think the people in the middle suffer the most.

Actually a recent Gallup Poll shows unaffiliated voters represent the biggest part of the electorate. Forty-five percent of voters are registered independent, unaffiliated with any party, as opposed to 27% who are registered as Democrats or 27% who are registered as Republicans. Look at all that untapped power!

It might be wrong to assume all 45% of unaffiliated voters sit in the middle ideologically. Some may think more extreme than either party. Polls show most independents lean left. At least independents step away from irrational party loyalty.

Like New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill recently said, “People almost treat political parties like sports teams so anybody against them in any way is doing something bad or wrong.”

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Friends Christina and Erin and I pondered these possibilities over coffee/matcha/tea. Christina decries the two-party system. “It sets up the energetic field for failure in collaboration, because you’re defining two sides based on opposing views and you’re asking them to come together and come to a resolution. Energetically you set a stage for opposition.”

Christina says get rid of the categories and labels.

“But that requires people who want to look forward,” says Erin. “Right now I think there’s a pandemic in our society of people who want to look backward because in their mind there’s this glorified beautiful past where life was simple and America was good.”

You know, those Archie Bunker, All in the Family values: “Girls were girls and men were men.” (Note: girls, not women.) “Didn’t need no welfare state. Everybody pulled his weight.”

Erin is right, of course. We need to look forward to a new future. But as Erin points out, that takes courage. “Hope looks scary because it’s unknown and it’s new.”

Hope looks scary? Why does hope always play like a wide-eyed child while cynics come off as worldly wise? I have two words for those who find safety in pessimism: Chicken Little. Who was naive in that scenario?

People who criticize have nothing at stake. They appear to stand above looking down, but they offer nothing constructive.

Hope requires bravery, curiosity, imagination and the real work to build our future. Real solutions come from people who don’t care about following the party line. How do we elect genuine problem solvers?

By definition, independents don’t have the political machinery to run a campaign. Extreme opinions lend themselves to motivating slogans, but imagine a slogan for the middle: “Calm Down!” “Moderation.” “We Want Solutions!” “Come Let Us Reason.” The middle defies marketing. (Or does it? Maybe you have some ideas.)

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We, the middle, need to find our voice. People who seek power need to know what we want.

Christina wants candidates who have experience, collaborative energy, diplomacy and inclusivity.

Give me, Pat, a candidate with solutions. Don’t complain to me about ICE atrocities. I already know that. Tell me how you’re going to use resources to create sanity at the border for citizens and for immigrants.

I refuse to vote for anyone who berates their opponent. Tell me why I should vote for you. Give me something constructive.

Don’t try to make me afraid of the other guy. Tell me how you’ll make things safer.

Do you believe in dignity? Prove it. Say something good about the other candidate.

I believe in hope. I believe hope for our country lies between the extremes. If you agree, help increase the voice of the middle. Consider sharing or restacking this post. Let’s grow the middle voice.

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For the latter half of the oughties, my activist tendencies led me into a handful of political party roles, culminating in a three-year stint as Chair of the Platform and Resolutions Committee of the Democratic Party of Oregon (DPO). Last year, I felt gratified to learn—from my OTGC writing partner Joel—that a small handful of process improvements I helped navigate into place, back in the day, still guide aspects of that state party’s bi-annual platform convention.

Along the way to those, though, I learned how visibility is the only political currency in a democracy, and that small-stake contests are as bloody as any other. Many party animals will stab backs as needed, to rise into the lights.

Ask me how I know.

Which is why I know that people occupying a political spotlight for more than a hot minute tend to be deeply compromised, and to avoid making changes that would matter to average voters. Average voters do not own spotlights, much less have enough money to pay the power bills needed to keep those spotlights lit.

I do not feel particularly bad about any of this. Human beings preen. Preening is baked into our biology. We preen to get laid, and scream to dominate. Parties are full of ambitious people, acting out on their ambitions.

It would be naive and utopian of me to expect any different.

But, this also means I often have better places to spend my time and money than helping party activists play their party games, inside a broken process.

Thirteen years ago, the Christian aspects of my spirituality settled into the Anglican tradition, for it being a welcoming and gently held approach to my childhood catholicism. Some ritual, some mysticism, and easy on the dogma. It works, for me.

The American expression of Anglican tradition is The Episcopal Church. This church operates as a democracy, not an empire. A democracy that has, at points, told both Popes and Kings to go take a walk; a fact that nurtures my middling anti-authoritarianism. Leadership, yes, but also decentralization, please.

Anglicans walk a willfully middle way between the ancient, imperial Christian tradition, with its pope and patriarchs, and the younger traditions, which have been protesting against Christendom for the past 500 years, to the point of giving any dude with a Bible the right to thump it at others for money.

The middle way takes some of each and leaves the cultishness behind. The only promises one makes as a member of this middle way are listed in a Baptismal Covenant, the most often cited line of which is:

Episcopalians are offered an opportunity to speak and re-commit to this line, publicly, as a group, on Easter every year, if one chooses to do so. No one will likely notice if you keep quiet, much less ask you to leave. It’s a personal thing.

Regardless, every human being is a very big group. We need to work together.

I dropped out of party politics after the 2010 election.

In doing so, I joined the apparently incomprehensible (to party leadership) 45% of voters, averaged by age, who do not identify as Republican or Democrat2 and so are without an organized political home, due to the laws of American politics.

So, does this mean that (a) I support baby-murder, per much of the party with 28% average voter loyalty3? Or, does it mean (b) that I want Trans people to die, per much of the other, which likewise commands about 28% voter loyalty4?

Yes, #notalldemocrats and #notallrepublicans adhere to these hyper-partisan litmus tests. But, they are very real, and many do. These and similar trigger points (e.g., guns, racism) ignite enough passion to get ambitious party animals elected, by the dwindling ranks of party loyalists who show up for screaming.

(N.B.: the root problem is in the laws governing state by state election processes, which give unfair structural primacy to the two historic parties; but, the toxic impact of closed primaries, invested interests, and resulting stranglehold on genuine political diversity and discourse, is beyond scope this week.)

But, to simplify, if screaming led to positive change, wouldn’t we know by now?

A Vice Chair of the Democratic Party of Oregon once advised me, “process rarely works, Leo. You only win with popularity.” He was right. Our process has delivered President Trump, twice. He is very popular. His people love him.

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Myself, I choose none of the above.

Instead, I consider every candidate. I look for one, single, over-arching theme in the noises any candidate makes: do they see every person, who would be subject to the laws they want to make, judge, or enforce, as deserving equal justice, peace, and dignity? Or, do they think some folks are, for any reason whatsoever, “more equal than” others?

I read candidate’s websites. It does not take long. They tend to be short these days, composed of little more than partisan catch-phrases. But, I try to read between whatever lines they provide, and assess their pool of concerns.

For example:

• Everyone needs roads, otherwise we smash our axles and drive through yards. So, will they take care of the roads?

• Everybody needs water and a place to poop, otherwise we all get cholera. So, does this candidate care about water, sewers, and public infrastructure?

• Everybody needs food and a safe place to sleep, else we get criminals crawling through our windows. Does this candidate seem ready to manage the fact that starving and/or addicted people will kill to get what they need?

• Everybody needs access to digital communication, to participate in the economy. Will this candidate work to ensure everyone does, and securely?

• Everybody needs a planet to live on. Will this candidate waste our planet, or protect it? It is the one and only livable planet we have.

• Every person needs the feel the dignity of their labor is respected. So, will this candidate help ensure there is dignified work available for everyone?

• Every adult needs to live among voters who can read, write, do basic math, and understand civics well enough to vote. So, will this candidate ensure good public schools and teaching are available for everyone?

• Does this candidate seem mature enough to grasp simple principles, like an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?

• Is this candidate mature enough to grasp things most of us know from shopping at Costco, like buying in bulk saves money?

I could go on. So could you.

The point is: none of these ideas are hard. None are extreme. All of them leave room for diversity. All of them are boring, and agreeably middle of the road.

Too boring to get the screamers, who want to dominate others, enough attention to get elected. And that is the problem: good public administration is boring, but Americans love excitement. Americans love screaming, and horror movies.

Can systemic political polarization be fixed by an unorganized 45% of the electorate, sitting in the middle of the road, looking for some quiet? I do not know. Still, that is where my deepest beliefs put me: in a middle ground where every person has the right to expect equal justice, equal peace, and common dignity, and otherwise be left to follow their personal weird.

This goes especially for any weirdoes I do not like.

Any candidate who can place this “baptismal” truth at the center of their politics will get serious consideration for my vote.

I could not care less what color they wear while doing it.

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Today is getting above 60 degrees Fahrenheit, so I shouldered a backpack sprayer and headed out to the strip the cheatgrass is growing. Sixty degrees is the temperature that the weed killer does its business.

I have been passing that row every few days, looking for what I think a baby cheatgrass would look like. I know that this blanket of spring green that I see, the short-lived photosynthesis of desert grasses, includes the invader.

I know that what I should have done is put a pre-emergent spray on the weeds in the fall to kill the seeds as they embed in the soil. Two autumns ago I didn’t do it because spraying is bad. After a year watching the cheatgrass spread, I didn’t do it last fall because I just didn’t have the money.

This spring I am spraying with a vinegar solution, to kill the young plants. With vinegar, don’t have to worry about the dogs getting in to it nor feel guilty about contributing to the collapse of plant pollinators.

But there is Roundup in my garage and I will be using it this year.

This is my fourth summer here. Every year the cheatgrass has gotten worse. For certain, the routes my dogs have dug in the soil crust has encouraged it. Also, my attempts of a couple years of a rookie chemical-free management has allowed the vile weed to expand its range.

In my post two years ago, I talked of using the heat of the sun to kill the cheatgrass seeds. An expert resident of my neighborhood, 80 years old and running a tractor at the limb dump, patiently explained that this internet theory is nonsense.

“I tried that. At the bottom of my pile was a nice scattering of fertile cheatgrass seeds. Its fire or nothing for these bastards.” I will be bagging and taking all my cheatgrass to the limb dump, where they all get burnt up in midwinter.

I will still be pulling up cheatgrass this year, but I hope to kill off some before it gets to that. It is a lot of hours of somewhat useless work; you pull up the plant, the seeds fall into the loosened soil where the roots once were, and next year you are back in the same place cursing at the same damn plant.

I am learning. I have learned to think about the cheatgrass earlier. I learned the phone number of a local guy who will spray this thing called a pre-emergent on your land in autumn. I am learning from my neighbors that the previous owner of this land, although she hated to use cling wrap because of the environmental impact, put a lot of chemicals down to keep the place free of the noxious and invasive. She is a thoughtful person and I expect it was with some consideration.

So this year, I am a little better. I know how much time the cheat grass is going to take from me. I seek to shrink its population for 2027. I am spraying to do so, because in our lives we are always balancing opposing goods.

My neighbors may judge me for the cheatgrass this year, but I appreciate their patience. We all need patience as we wrestle with hard decisions.

On Sunday’s Old Truck Good Coffee, our guest writer Pat Kruis shared her thoughts on how to consider the regret of some Trump voters.

Perhaps you are as a neighbor considering the weeds in my garden, expecting that I will come around and get better for caring for my land and our community.

It is May, and I am already thinking about cheatgrass. I hope that in September, I have the wherewithal to spray the pre-emergent like my more experienced neighbors do. I will feel sad about the chemicals, but realize that it is a better option than losing all of my land to cheatgrass and pulling their seeds from my dogs’ ears.

When I learned how to drive, my instructor warned us about ‘target fixation’, the tendency to steer toward what you’re looking at. Rubberneckers get into accidents because they look at the obstacle, so they steer toward the hazard and *BAM* things only get worse.

My driving instructor, thank you Mr. Snapper, told us to focus on our intended path, 15-20 seconds ahead, not on the spectacle.

Right now I see people, including myself, expending a lot of venom criticizing the current administration. Instead of tallying all the wrongs, can we get a clear vision of what we do want in leadership? Let’s focus on an intended path.

What if we don’t fixate on Trump, or waste our energy hating people who voted for him? If we want more balance in Congress, some of those Trump voters will have to change their minds. The “you’re so stupid” rhetoric repels the very people we need to help turn the country in a positive direction.

(If you’re a Trump voter, thank you for reading this far. I really want to hear your opinion.)

Listen to what Allyson Reynolds says about creating a soft landing for people stepping away from MAGA. She has an Instagram series called “Things I didn’t know when I was a Republican.” She says shaming and blaming will not change minds.

Reynold’s video is about three minutes long, but many of you may not have time to listen to it, so here is a key paragraph:

“As more people come out of the MAGA fever dream I think it’s important to keep encouraging people who are opposed to Trump and MAGA to create a soft landing for people who are leaving.

“And I hope to do that by explaining just how easy it is for many Americans, especially privileged White Americans and poor uneducated White Americans to not know the things that you think everybody already knows or ‘should know.’”

Newsweek reports on a Navigator poll that shows one in five Trump voters regret their decision. The poll indicates these dissatisfied voters are younger, most younger than 45, and describe themselves as moderate. Most of them, two-thirds, don’t like Democrats either.

Research shows the top two reasons people voted for Trump: the economy and immigration. Guess the two top reasons for Trump voter dissatisfaction: the economy and the violent tactics in immigration arrests and detention. Add to that the Iran war started by a president who promised no more wars.

Intelligent people voted for Trump. That may be hard to admit when you’re stuck in Trump disgust mode. We need to face the fact Trump won the presidency because Trump opponents didn’t offer a better alternative.

I’d rather concentrate on hope than hate, but don’t mistake this for some milquetoast plea to “just get along,” or civil discord. This requires something far more strategic. It’s not enough to vote against something, we need something to vote for. What is that? What’s that platform? Who is that?

I have not heard this articulated. Maybe you have. Show me where to look. What do YOU want in leadership? What causes can our nation successfully rally around?

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Here’s some information I found valuable:

—A recent (April 17-20, 2026) Echelon Insights poll of 1,012 voters, showed 42% of Democrats think their party should move more toward the center to win the next elections, compared to 22% who think the party should move left, and 18 percent who think the party should stay the same.

—Check out the Third Way and its Moderate Power Project. This is the MPP mission statement:

We amplify center-left views and voices to challenge the far left, push back against the MAGA right movement, and govern effectively from the middle.

MPP takes polls, does research and supports moderate candidates. It’s latest Data Dispatch highlighted Blue Rose Research that showed successful messaging about the economy. Interesting. Helpful.

I don’t pretend my little Substack has superhuman power, but I believe in engaging constructively, joining the positive voices.

More than ever, I hope you comment on this post. I want to hear what you’re thinking. I want to hear about candidates you think can bring hope to our country. Together let’s break our fixation on what’s wrong and focus on the path forward.

Along the way, at my request, we stopped at the gravesite of an old friend of mine. His headstone is set in the cemetery of the tiny Kansas town where his parents adopted him from a mother he never found, despite great efforts. Efforts that ended with a government letter telling him to stop looking; or, so his brother reminded me at graveside.

Looking over the headstones resting quietly under a fluffy Kansas sky, I recalled this story myself, from a long-locked trunk in my head. This trunk also let me recall how William S. Burroughs had become a friend of my friend in college, over coffee Darren would serve him, in the college-town café where he worked while earning his degree. Burroughs was a flirt.

My friend and lover’s adoptive brother—now the local fire chief—and I had first met many years ago, briefly, once. It had become my role to pour Darren’s ashes into the ocean at Oswald West State Park, a beachfront for connoiseurs of the Oregon Coast. It was my duty, as a friend and former lover, to do so over family objections, if any. This was Darren’s will, and a good one, under circumstances particular to his family, and to the age of untreatable HIV/AIDS. At his brother’s request, though, I had allowed a small portion of the ashes to travel back to Kansas. No, his family could not have it all. It was much too late for that.

Those spoonfuls of ash were now mingled in the soil below a headstone I was viewing for my first and only time. Which was sitting next to the headstone of “a loving father and friend” of whom I had heard unspeakable tales.

Despite those tales, and my own, Darren’s brother had still listed me in the local obituary, nearly thirty years ago, as an honorary pall-bearer to his brother. To return his respect, I now offered him some photos that no longer bring me tears.

We will never see each other again.

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This hour of memento mori, in a remote graveyard, was not off-point for what came next. Less than two hours further south we arrived at one of the largest Masonic buildings ever built; a temple for remembering death and resurrection.

The next three early mornings were spent in an elaborate, copal-scented room, engaging in contemplative practices before moving into the big, old, leather-seated auditorium, to witness the day’s degrees. No one was permitted in the third and highest balcony. The 1,500 or so available seats have likely not seen a full house for many decades, though there are photos of the glory days, dating to before the First World War.

Still, on each of our three days, hundreds of men were scattered around inside this century-plus old edifice, setting stages, running lights, rehearsing lines, adjusting wireless mics, making food, smoking cigars, talking with brothers, and reading quietly in the rippled glass and carved wood library, or one of several exotically-themed lounges.

At one point we were told 493 men had volunteered to make this weekend happen. The entire event—including months of labor leading up to it, and a week of tear-down following—was an outpouring of old school volunteerism, undertaken in service to moral, chivalric, and philosophical enlightenment. An educational experience dating from an era before highly specialized (and expensive) college degrees became so common as today.

This all happened in a town of 12,000 people, in northern Oklahoma, not far from where tornados hit this past Friday. It felt … inspiring … to learn how a college of mystical interreligious studies, expressing itself through dramatically staged, highly literate rituals, has been dotted across the United States, and woven into the now-fraying American cultural fabric, since 1801.

It takes very little research to learn that philosophical lessons, framed around death and resurrection, have never been limited to the Christian church. The Way is not exactly hidden.

Three days later, my fraternal brother and I drove 1,400 miles back home, including 17 hours in one very long day, crossing stretches of Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana. We largely kept to state highways and local byways. We drove past lots of small town cemeteries and museums.

There was a time when we humans had to meet face to face, if we wanted to dramatically communicate vast philosophies, in ways that touch the heart and punch the gut. Now we have YouTube and a cereal bowl.

The first called upon armies of volunteers equipped with scripts, props, and mythologies. The second requires data centers, sucking up aquifers once used for growing food.

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When I look at this history, and then I look at the culture war, I see cause and effect. I see a war being fought over the spoils and the ruins of Progress by people who live in those ruins and are mourning the loss of something they don’t even quite understand. That sense of mourning is common on both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’. Whether they are mourning the end of the arc of history or the end of a country they miss without maybe having known it, the sense of loss is profound, even if unspoken. For many people, everything is broken.

The first half of Against the Machine is bleak. Thus far Kingsnorth has been laying out all that is wrong in our world, the hyper-real commercial experience we live in that obscures and destroys our more natural origins.2 This chapter of the book is starting to gain what I hope is momentum to some kind of path forward for us in response to the mire he has so vividly described.

The idea that we are two camps,3 in opposition and mourning, hits. I take his reference to the “end of the arc of history” to be the progressive left’s general idea, expressed by Martin Luther King, jr days before he died, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”4 I take the “end of a country they miss without maybe having known it” as the suggestion in “Make America Great Again” that we once were great but are not now.

I am reading Against the Machine with a book club. When we discussed this chapter, one person was able to describe his own mourning in a very detailed way. It inspired further discussion of the things he feels a loss of and a desire for. However, he could not express a belief or understanding of the mourning of those he saw in opposition to what he was mourning.

And it is hard for us to expect otherwise. Everyone mourns in their own way — some violently, some quietly — but little can be done about the direction of ones mourning from the outside. All manner of relations tried to redirect Hamlet’s mourning to something more convenient. They could not change his mood or trajectory.

Forgive me for not doing extensive research on clinical approaches to mourning, but in a quick search I came across The Center for Loss & Life Transition, started by Alan D. Wolfelt. In his article The Six Needs of Mourning he lists

1. Acknowledge the reality of death.

2. Embrace the pain of loss

3. Remember the person who died

4. Develop a new self-identity

5. Search for meaning

6. Receive ongoing support from others.

I wonder about whether we are fostering our own process of mourning or simply striking out to avoid the pain of loss and the reality we are facing.

Right now, there are both numbers and words showing that people are abandoning Donald Trump. In numbers, polls of his approval are dropping. In words, prominent supporters have publicly distanced themselves from the administration.

If you are in opposition to Donald Trump, you have to consider what to do next. To one extent or another, these people have some responsibility for what you view as great ills. You will tell me that “great ills” is doing a whole lot of work there, holding death, cruelty, destruction.

These are things to mourn.

I ask a hard thing, in the midst of the rubble;

Without addressing anything external to these individuals, can you consider the feeling of abandoning something you believed in? Of abandoning hope that would resurrect what you have lost?.

In my social media these days the machines that are designed to feed me rage dressed up like news regularly show me people who I don’t know saying that they will not forgive any Trump voter, that they will not welcome them back. Some are Russian bots, but some are actual Americans, also in mourning.

In the past, I have said that this is stupid strategy unless your goal is authoritarianism of a left-leaning brand built on demonizing large swaths of the popultion.

It still is stupid, but now I consider the mourning, the grieving, the churning processes we are all experiencing. The tragedy that we can not give each other anything useful to our mourning as we have not the strength just now to reach that far.

That we have worsened our communities because our own mourning kept us from comforting our neighbor’s mourning.

Two varieties of deviled eggs were on display, next to a similar count of relish trays, with radish rosettes and pickles pulled from cool basement jars. We also enjoyed homemade pickled beets, a clove-scented delicacy I learned to love from my dad. Cousin Candy brought a big selection of chocolates, nougats, and multi-colored sugar-wafers from Helena’s 104 year old Parrot Confectionary, because, as amazing as her cooking was, back in the day, and it was, Candy gets a pass, now, thanks to her double-tank oxygen supply.

By the time my single-tank mother-in-law, Jeanette, brought out Elvis Presley’s Favorite Poundcake for dessert—complete with your choice of homemade Huckleberry and/or Strawberry compote ladled off-side or over the top—my appetite was nearly in rebellion. Once Elvis was finished with me, I could not eat one … more … bite.

So, I went for a walk. It had been months since I had chatted with Ross, a dear friend, who long helped anchor Portland’s fringe theater scene, as well as stock its weirdest vintage shops, using his eye for worn-classic beauty.

Ross has always nurtured my creative pursuits. This time, he invited me to write about limits. He waxed a bit about “having enough,” in a culture of excess. I avoided thinking about his age, which not quite recently drove past 80. He pondered what it means to pay attention to your belt, or any belt, for that matter, well enough to notice the moment when it goes uncomfortably tight. The irony of which was not lost on me, given I had just pressed pause on the Easter brunch above.

I expect anyone reading this has their own take on what too much can mean. Just having a screen on which to read a Substack article means having access to endless scrolling feeds of whatever we have told the algorithms we like most.

Which is a well-known trope.

What feels less known, to me, is how to navigate based on a sensation of sufficiency. How to say no, without gimmicks or convincing. Not the no of a GLP-1 drug, nor the no of software locking me out of my phone for a while each day. But, the no found on a paint-palette, where an artist has said yes to a chosen set of hues, and what may be done with them.

This notion of limited palettes has floated through conversations with another dear friend, Derek. He works in the software gaming industry. He tells me that when new games are designed, there is a known tension as to how many options to provide. Too many choices, offered too quickly, and many players will be too overwhelmed to bother. They will switch away or keep scrolling. Too few choices, though, and they get bored, and move on. Repetitive flows of simple choices seem to be the baseline drug of choice, as in Candy Crush (or Instagram). Different players also have different appetites, tastes, and capacities, making digital game design a complex process.

And, centuries later, chess remains pretty much the world’s most popular game, with its six types of game piece, arrayed on an 8 by 8 checkerboard.

Early in my software career, I came across “CatB,” which is shorthand for one of the most famous essays in the history of tech: The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond.1 This essay-turned-book teaches many things. I have long held onto one specific takeaway: there are tools, and there are solutions.

A tool is a device to perform a well-defined task. A tool does what it does, and no more. A human can learn a set of tools, and apply them in repetition or sequence, as needed, to solve an endless array of problems.

On the other hand, a set of tools can be pre-selected, sequenced, packaged, and automated to define one approach to an overall process, which is then sold as a (“the”) comprehensive solution to a set of interrelated problems. A set which the makers have defined for you in advance, generally without asking.

Tools keep humans in the middle of a process, requiring us to struggle a bit, at first, as we build our skills, and find our own efficiencies. Solutions, on the other hand, set humans and our struggles off to the side, by selecting a set of problems and defining a problem-solving process. A process which does what its makers designed it to do with their “problem space,” and no more, yet with speed and efficiency. The human is just there to feed it problems.

AI is now poised to become the final solution, for processing humans, by choosing which inefficiencies it finds to be a problem.

I wasn’t sure which compote I wanted on my pound cake. Huckleberry is the Montana classic. Strawberry, though, takes me back to Sunday after-church breakfasts when I was a kid, which were often the best meal of the week.

Michael solved this problem by artfully dropping a spoonful of each on either side of a yellow slice standing in the center of his plate. Myself, I tipped my slice flat and chose my childhood, ladeling on two silky spoonfuls of strawberry, and watching them slide down my own golden wedge.

Two problems, two tools, two solutions, both uniquely delicious.

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It is so hard to practice that I can not believe that a whole culture could assume it.

Grace is an individual’s practice, built on the understanding that you will not receive grace for giving it. Grace is not a currency that returns interest on investment. Give grace to another, you may have pain and loss in return.

Grace goes against how we teach each other to be. Our legal system does not have systems for grace, for we are certain that they would be exploited. Bad people would get away because of the grace loophole.

Grace is fine with that. She is defiant and won’t be built in to a system. She does not scale. To offer grace is to join her in defiance and risk.

Grace is defiant to your supporters, who want you to win. She sneers defiance to those who want a story to follow, a model of a path to a happy life. Walking with grace is dangerous to absolutely everything you desire, including justice and safety.

In the town nearest to my house, on the day of the nationwide ant-Trump protest No Kings Three, a small group of people attended wearing shirts from reading People’s Rights. People’s Rights is a right wing organization that has been present in Central Oregon for several years. Their focus seems to be on personal liberty. They are not normally on the side of Democrats and Indivisible.

I do not know their motivation for showing up and being counted with the anti-Trump rally. Perhaps a foreign war crossed their belief in America First. Perhaps masked, unidentified police performing arrests in defiance of our constitution signaled forces they must stand against. Perhaps they joined us after seeing that powerful people were protecting other powerful people who systematically injured and traumatized young women.

I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I do know that they were offered snacks and hugs. I understand that they declined both.

At about the same moment, in the larger town just a bit farther down the road, a man stood up in the midst of the thousands of people at that particular No Kings protest. He produced a flag and started to make a speech about his intent to burn it.

I need to be careful about how I talk about this incident. I was not there, either. The details are very important to how people want it explained, and I don’t have certainty of the details today. I do not expect anyone to be merciful or understanding if I get them wrong, so I am going to try to only say the most general truths about it.

Other protesters did not want him to burn the flag. De-escalators became involved. There was physical violence.

Eventually, the flag was burned. People continue to be angry that it was burned. Other people are angry that the flag burner was physically assaulted.

I have anger about it. There are systems for me to express that anger, including this internet that you are using to read this message. It is good at transmitting anger.

But should I transmit grace — grace for anyone involved — this big machine would almost certainly transmit back to me lessons on justice, lectures on history, and judgement upon me.

I am exhausted, realizing that for the world to be the world I dream of, I need to practice grace more than I believe that I can. I do it in silence from a distance today, because that is what I can manage.

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I have already been graceless, yelling and gesticulating my useless judgements and insults. I hope that poison dissipates quickly, damaging few.

These people, trying to make their world better through action; I know not what they do.

I am told that while dying, Jesus said of those who ground him down:

Happy Easter.

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Then a foot of snow dropped last week in a single day. The roads were bad enough to delay my planned four-hour drive to Billings, to visit an old friend whose mother was dying in our hometown. The next day, a Chinook hit.

Within a couple of days, warm winds had left the roads bone dry. I drove to see my friend. His mother had died. We re-told childhood stories of our parents at the Pictograph caves1. He related his mom’s death to me, in minimal detail, and in keeping with his family’s traditional stoicism. I told him things of my own Mom which he had never heard before.

Now, one week later, spring is back. The buds are growing fat. We will have enough water this summer, at least here in Helena, but many people in many places will be left wanting.

Nature does not spread her resources equally. “God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Mt. 5:45).

In-class disruptions were rare enough in my 1979 Catholic grade school that I vividly remember when P.J. showed up a few weeks into seventh grade. I had been going to school with pretty much my same twenty-five student cohort since first grade. New kids always got attention. In our little school there was nowhere to hide.

P.J. would not be ignored. He could not stay put or be quiet. In 2026, I imagine he would have be diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed with Adderall. In 1979, he was labeled “hyperactive,” and decamped from public to parochial school as a last resort. He would walk laps around the classroom, grab books, throw things.

I remember the day our seventh grade teacher, Mr. Stevens—who was a ringer for the movie and television character Grizzly Adams—finally snapped. He had apparently done some rodeo. He grabbed, wrestled, hog-tied, and then roped P.J. into his student desk. Private school teachers can get away with such stunts. Or, they could in 1979.

Less than half an hour later, P.J. noisily toppled his desk and wriggled free of his ropes. Mr. Stevens chased, caught, and body-hauled him away.

He never came back. After a month of waiting every school day for P.J. to begin singing, talking to the ceiling, walking laps, or otherwise domineering the classroom, it returned to being basically quiet and orderly (bullying—of which there was plenty—mostly happened in the alley, a location which Grizzly Adams and The Nuns largely ignored.)

I have no idea whatever happened to P.J.. Frankly, I have not wondered about him in the decades since, until writing this.

During my 16 years in Catholic schools, I was never exposed to the widespead American cultural assumption that free, public education should be universally available. In my family, my sisters and I knew we were different.

Yes, we could be in a public school. The nearest one was less than a block away. My oldest sister had gone there for first grade. Now, we were fortunate to be with the (theoretical) “good kids,” across the street in Catholic school, instead.

Our parents made a choice, and they paid for it. The local Catholic school system was considered the best in town, at the time. Nearly half of its students were not Catholic, just college-bound.

Every tax season, our stay-at-home mom would complain about having to pay “extra” for her kids to go to Catholic school, when “we already pay school taxes.” Mom wanted her dollars spent on her kids, only.

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I follow a writer here on Substack, named . He recently wrote a piece title “When People Say They Want to Send Their Kid to a Good School, They Usually Mean Schools Without ‘Bad Kids’.”2 I had never thought about how selective admissions and expulsions drive school reputation.

Public schools are required by law to teach every student. Americans have a constitutional right to public education. To expel a kid from public school essentially requires a court order.

On the other hand, private schools, including taxpayer-funded charter schools, can craft and shape their student bodies. They can select for “engaged” parents, typically meaning those wealthy enough to have time to spend on their kids. And, charter schools can expel “disengaged” students, the ones whose parent(s) struggle to make rent, despite multiple jobs plus side-hustles. Parents who often end up passing some of these struggles on to their kids.

In the new world of charter schools, the strugglers in general are the public school kids. The ones who are left to what the ongoing privatization of public funds and functions is leaving behind. We have a K-12 education system that expects its faculty to serve as I.T. technicians, mental health counselors, nutritionists, disciplinarians, role models, coaches, medication managers, standardized test proctors, huggers, tear-wipers, drug and alcohol treatment specialists, entertainers, record-keepers, and, oh, that’s right … Teachers.

These same public employees also need to be skilled professional educators, who can effectively teach English, History, Biology, Chemistry, Art, Math, and all the related topics. The topics which turn a child into a literate adult. One capable of casting an informed vote.

Worse, teachers are expected to do all of this as cheaply as humanly possible. Since the Reagan era, taxes on businesses and the wealthy have been slashed by nearly two-thirds. Leaving public school teachers doing all the things kids need, but struggling parents no longer have the time to do. Because Reaganomics requires parents to work the most hours possible, at the lowest pay their employers can get away with, while risking termination if they whisper the word “union.”

In other words, school segregation still exists. It just happens based on poverty instead of race. At least on the surface.

Minority parents are often the strongest charter school supporters.

Our dad never complained about paying private school tuition on top of public school taxes. He had no expectation that his neighbor’s dollars should be spent to send his kids to First Friday Mass, nor to take classes in Catholic doctrine. Even if these were delivered alongside English, History, Math, and the rest.

Dad knew universal literacy is essential to a healthy society.

He had grown up on a dustbowl-era, dryland farm. He was as proud of working hard enough to afford his own kids private school tuition, as he was of paying for our stay-at-home mom to put store-bought beef on the dinner table.

That said, Dad could still afford to hold these opinions, back in the 1970s, even as a small business owner. The pre-Reagan economy allowed for single-income, small business owner families. The post-Reagan economy does not. At least not if you want to sit down to dinner with your family every evening at 5:30pm, like he did.

His small business was of a type later largely eliminated by the internet. He grew that business in a local, small business economy, that would later be devastated by Amazon, Wal-Mart and the rest of the national chain-stores. He “ran the shop” well enough to take his family out for the occasional sit-down dinner, in local restaurants that would later be shuttered by more national chains. Mom would send us to see “PTA movies” in theaters later be driven out of business by cable TV and online streaming. And, we would go to church every Sunday, in a Catholic parish that later collapsed and consolidated with three others, because folks began staring at screens, instead of gathering as human beings.

Everyone wants what is best for their kids. Right?

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“When People Say They Want to Send Their Kid to a Good School, They Usually Mean Schools Without ‘Bad Kids’,” Freddie deBoer.

Freddie deBoer

When People Say They Want to Send Their Kid to a Good School, They Usually Mean Schools Without "Bad Kids"

It’s always useful to be reminded that conversations in the policy world are often very different from those in other contexts, and this is particularly acute when it comes to education. Lots of people who have zero exposure to the world of 10,000-feet educational policy analysis have opinions …

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3 months ago · 63 likes · 28 comments · Freddie deBoer

They are writing about how good they are at predicting things, and then they are predicting things.

They are mapping now onto the past for the sake of worry.

They are writing about how the things they are being told about a technology affects their sense of self.

They are writing about God collapsing and rising in them.

They are trying to tell you not to worry, you don’t have to worry if you will not worry you can help make the world not so worrisome.

It is pre-dawn. I have a candle lit because that candle is the signal I use to myself to keep writing for a while.

This is what I do with my time, I write.

It is the spring of 2026. We are filling up Substack. If volume is a metric of someone’s success (perhaps the success of Hamish Mackenzie) then this is going amazing. But what is it for each of us? None of us writing are skyrocketing to metrics of amazement to ourselves. Of profitable metrics. Of metrics that even justify the effort.

Many are pretending. It is the same as Tik Tok and Instagram and all the other platforms profiting on hope without offering more than token stories of making it. They pretend to not pick winners, that the metrics reveal how winners would get picked, but there are no winners. There are two ways people get a large readership here: by being pre-famous or by pandering with metric-driven topics.

You are not a metric, my dear. Nor am I.

Measures and the Internet

We wrote and read before there were metrics for it. The internet gave us refined, instant measurement. We draw ourselves up and ask what we can do to have a number that proves we have readers, that our writing is read.

I want my writing to be read. I have considered what topics would be more read. But in the pre-dawn times, with the candle lit, I can’t bring myself to write on those topics. I write what others tell me to enough for work.1 I don’t want to pander to the metrics here.

When a measure becomes a goal

I am a lover of quasi-natural laws.2 The most famous of a prior era is Murphy’s Law. The most important quasi-natural law of our time is Goodhart’s law.3

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

We need to hear Goodhart today; we are short circuiting staring at metrics imprecise, roughly connected to us, and dominating our goals far out of sane or healthy proportions.

A person in power can spontaneously create a metric and it can take hold, regardless if it reflects what we want to measure. What I create does not correlate to like buttons. I don’t get a lot of metric reinforcement. I am not sure why. I don’t believe it is that I am stupid or a bad writer. Instead of likes and shares I get phone calls and texts from people saying I got them thinking.

My theory, trying to construct an explanation for this, is that people view their social media button as a vote YES I AGREE and I write things that are not so easy as yes. Perhaps if there was an “interesting. maybe” button I might get metric love. Perhaps if a share was not an expectation of mutual confirmation bias, my articles would be shared.

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Its me, not you. People show me what they are reading on social media like Substack. It is not the same reason I am, so I get confused trying to reach you.

Many do not like to leave a trace that they are on these platforms. That is beautiful when I consider it. They do not want to be measured by the metric (though regardless they probably are). But as the producer of that content, I wish they would acknowledge me. The metrics are how I am supposed to find that acknowledgement.

These social media metrics are born from business problems. They are inspired by what we as humans know matter, but that is not the story they end up telling. They don’t hold up to testing and, once they fall under Goodhart’s law, they measure nothing useful except someone else’s profits.

When the metric goes up, we can say that the business goal is being achieved.

It moves money, so it is easy to forget that it is not true. It is now a goal not a measure.

Immeasurable experiences.

The light is getting to my part of the globe. I see some blue in the sky. I feel good putting this down on the page. I would like to write all day with no concern for audience.

But I am concerned for you.

Yesterday I talked with a guy who is reading my novel. We dug deep into the characters. He sees things in them that I did not. I was able to tell him what others said about Cardio and Reginald and Cherry. It was the high point of my week, and I am having a week of tremendous experiences.

We talked about my book over a video chat, which can be done through a highly leveraged corporate server or a secure, privacy-focused non-profit.4

I have a website5 running on open source software. You can read what I write there. The Internet does not just bring harmful noises; It can be a platform to reach each others, regardless of these oligarch mechanisms. I will keep writing for you. I will keep reading you.

Old Truck Good Coffee observes and improves our interchanges. We connect who you are with who someone else is. We doubt that the bargain Substack offers will be worthwhile much longer, but we appreciate the fact we have found people like us here.

I am going to blow out the candle now and turn to the next chore. I have an RSVP list to check. I want a count of how many people are coming I hope it is large. I will check my book sales. And my bank account. I will be awash in metrics for a while.

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But then I will drive into town, the spring desert and ranch land passing by. I will have lunch with my niece. We will talk about books and family. There will be no measure for it.

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He also refused to conform to the simplified desire for data and metrics of his day.

As a refugee from Nazi Germany, he was invited to New York to join a Rockefeller-funded study of radio in 1939. The key researcher, Frank Stanton, was director of research (and later president) of CBS. While Adorno was curious about context and aesthetics, Stanton wanted to sell soap during soap operas.

Stanton and his associate Paul Lazarsfeld invented possibly the first like button. They ushered subjects into a room, gave them a like button and told them to click it when they liked what they heard. They also got a dislike button, something that is controversial to this day in social media platform design.

Then the researchers played the radio. On an old fashioned tape, they recorded the likes and dislikes.

This was not an environment that Adorno could work in. He felt that this process was a totally a misleading gauge of an audience.

Adorno tends to, in even my secondary reading of him, use pretty sophisticated ways of saying things. Or perhaps he was being polite to his hosts. I take it to mean

Adorno left the project shortly after. Lazarfeld co-wrote a paper a few years later contradicting the project, saying that analysis of content and in-depth interviews were needed to understand audiences. Simplistic metrics don’t cut it.

But Stanton got what he needed out of the study. Strategies for soap selling have been refined with these numbers ever since.

I learned about this story first from a revealing article from Carina Albrecht, Discerning Audiences Through Like Buttons.2 It also reminded me that many of the creators of our addictive apps (including the Facebook Like Button) have regrets and don’t use them.3

Triangulating their concerns with Adorno’s observation of radio, it seems that we are not treating these powerful forces with the obvious understanding of what they do to our ability to reason. Adorno said (in his still roundabout way)

I translate this as

Or

The new hyper-tuned platforms (depending on your generation Facebook or Tik Tok but also this here Substack is using the same principles for disseminating fascim) use features built and refined from massive amounts of data just to keep you hooked. Then, their owners pretend that their motivation is community building.

We consumers try to maintain our sense of power and agency by saying that we are not affected by them.

• Pull down to refresh, a slot machine handle.

• Infinite scroll, a never ending quest.

• Notifications, hope tapping you on the shoulder.

Pick metrics or narrative; neither the numbers or the stories support our theory that our agency is more powerful than these features. You would not be able to discern if you are subject to this, so I don’t trust you if you claim you are the exception.

More than a few people feel that our digital media consumption is one reason for our political climate and social divides. I agree.

After the inauguration where the operators of all of our platforms sat behind Donald Trump then doled out massive checks to spoil him, I polled a group of activists that I communicate with on a Facebook group. Would they be willing to migrate to another platform?

One person spoke for them. I paraphrase:

Let’s use their platform. I am not influenced by their ads.

I don’t believe that person. But, we still use Facebook. I am constantly compromised into using these ad-revenue-creating monstrosities.

And now here I am creating for one, Substack. And wishing that you were addicted to me. It does not feel great.

My understanding of the tech world is better than most. So is my understanding of the business models. I am confident that the technology to have a social media experience or a writing-publishing experience could be separated from addictive platforms.We could all spontaneously move to Mastodon4 and our attention would not be funding people trying to make money from our attention.

We could log in to a platform in which our friends are more than 7% of the content we see.

But, we are captured by the value of our friends and we can not collectively sell all of our friends and family on the change. And some of us feel that more than entertainment is here. That our future of communicating outward to you is here. I want to believe it is worth it because I have not come up with a better alternative.

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After aging out of the cry room—which happened quickly for me, thanks to her—we returned to Mom’s preferred seats, nearly in front, on the left-hand side. The seats were stage right from the altar, in front of Mary, the Mother of God, whose statue stood on a plinth mounted on pale, pine-wood wall paneling, over some flowers. We never sat on the right side, stage left, where Jesus’ step-dad, Saint Joseph—orYusuf, in Aramaic (IYKYK)—stood on a plinth of his own.

Around age 4, I recall furtively licking the wood railing on back of the pew in front of me, while kneeling and leaning against it, shoving my sister and pretending to pray. I was bored. It tasted sour.

The better sensory hit, from a thousand or so masses2 I sat through in this church before leaving for college, was from the candles. Their warm odor flowed off the altar and flooded the nave, particularly after they were snuffed at the end of each service. Lighting and snuffing the candles was one of the best parts of being an altar boy, which I was, for a while. That, and learning to whisper every word of the Eucharistic prayer along with the priest; a rebellious act (only priests are supposed to speak that prayer), which felt important to me, at the time.

My parents were devout, old school Catholics, raised on the Latin Mass. Our family might well have missed a meal before missing Sunday mass. Neither ever happened. We just kept showing up, saying the prayers, sitting, standing, kneeling, and walking up the aisle to the altar for communion, or Good Friday “veneration of the cross.” Which meant kneeling to kiss Jesus’ feet, on one of two crucifixes laid in front of the altar by Father Heretick for this purpose. Even on family vacations, Dad would try to find a local church for us to attend.

The importance placed on regular participation, and ritual observance, built a momentum over time. It built a predictability that led, over time, to a sense of assurance about the nature of things greater than me. Assurance that was a pretty convincing sell, for a lonely kid trying to dodge bullies on his way to adolescence. There were times when I felt like I belonged to a global society, collectively protecting me, and guiding me back to the source of all reality. Yeah, I felt that. Sometimes. For a while.

It can be hard to wonder who we are, where we fit, and why. Everyone stares at the ceiling, sometimes. Which can lead to questions that religions are happy to answer, with authoritative claims. Some of which make more sense than others.

I came out as gay in 1984. And, I stopped going to church. Having finished 12 of my 16 eventual years of Catholic school, I knew very well by then that the way God made me to express love and affection was, to put it gently, fundamentally incompatible with the doctrines of Rome and my Catholic school cohorts.3

I came out anyhow. A nun once told me “God does not make junk,” and I believed her. She probably saved my life.

I missed the smells and bells, though.

American pop culture has an obsession with lone wolves. Radical individualism, whether wrapped in cowboy or soldier drag—but always toting some weapon or tool—is a trope we fear in our crime statistics, but glorify on video.

What we hear of less is how we are all social creatures, with a deep drive to work together, with more than just one buddy, and for more than just running a ball down some grassy field.

Lone wolves are sexy. You can also take them out with a single shot.

Quitting church was not difficult, on the surface. Lazy Sundays are seductive, and productive for more creative pursuits. The much more involved story, for me, is why I have ever gone back. Because I have.

Not to the Roman Catholics, of course. My self-respect could not take the humiliation that returning to the church of Rome would demand of me. To subject myself to such an authority, one which continues, to this day, to deem people like me “intrinsically disordered” by God, would require me to believe in a sadistic Creator. Which I refuse to do.

To return to the Roman faith, I would have to believe in a God who creates “His” homosexual children specifically to live without love and affection. I would also have to believe that the only legitimate function of human love and affection is to make more babies on an overpopulated planet.

Both of these notions are simplistic, to the point of silliness. Dangerously silly, in fact, for the grave way some piously intone these points, while raising their whips to deliver another beating upon the flock.

Love stories taught me to respect myself, instead, and to laugh when it helps.

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I still want to feel like I belong, though, to some flock or herd or tribe. I have always wanted to feel part of something bigger than myself. No doubt because I felt cast out of exactly that feeling, at a young age, by the Roman Catholic church, the biggest organization in history, religious or otherwise.

I have always wanted some greater frame of reference, some deeper teaching, some … club membership … to which I could refer, when I lose track of who I am. I have wanted … something. Something that can feel like it is missing, when you are born, and expected to serve, as one of humanity’s most ancient scapegoats.

I never wanted to feel small, “queer,” and alone, having to figure it all out for myself, by myself. I wanted to belong, too. Which is a childlike desire, and one I learned at a very young age, by being shown who does not belong.4

So, I wandered, seeking answers. I have spent quality time chanting and dancing with Sufis. I have repaired my Christian damage by walking with Episcopalians. I am a Past Master of two Masonic lodges. And, I still spend hours each week on a cushion, practicing buddhadharma, a tradition first introduced to me by a bookseller in Billings, Montana, when I was still an altar boy.5

None of these define me. I am not sure I “belong” to any of them. I am not certain I belong to anything, at this point, other than to anyone willing to hold my hand, for so long as I am willing and able to lift it.

Even while holding hands, my identity is not fixed. I no longer believe any of us are so fixed as we might believe. Because as soon as I say who I think I am, my heart beats, and there I sit, one moment older again, still wondering at it all.

They tell me this may keep happening.

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