Longtime readers, or as longtime as a reader can be given the relatively short lifespan so far of the weekly posts, may have observed that a lot of my posts have been either warning of or apologizing for this or that hiatus. I have not been secretive about being overwhelmed by the state of these United States of America, the world, and the natural environment. This sometimes leads to an inability to create content on the world wide web, feeling bad about this, and struggling to figure out how one should interact at all with platforms owned by corporations that seem hell-bent on destroying a pleasant and safe life for regular people in exchange for a few more billions going into the accounts of maybe a dozen oligarchs.

From a brief glance around at any given moment, this is perhaps a common feeling. Haters may be celebrating from the mistaken idea that I am a “lib” being “owned,” that I am–as foretold–sick of winning. This is not despair that my political team is losing, because I don’t have a political team to root for. Unless you count my side as being the one that wants kids to have food and safety and wildlife to have habitat; that one seems to be losing bad right now. If that cheers you up, I’m glad that someone is having a good time.

The 2020s are on track to be the hottest decade in Utah history. 9 of the 10 hottest summers in state history have occurred since 2010. In some ways this summer has already been unrelentingly bleak. July started with skies so dark with smoke and ash that, on one day in Orem, you could look directly at the sun without discomfort. Currently portions of Fillmore are being evacuated, including members of the Paiute Tribal members living the Kanosh Band Reservation.

Mid to late July has seen the hottest recorded day in Salt Lake City, 109 degrees, and strings of 100-degree-plus days and 80 degree-plus nights in a row. Roads are buckling, and the post-fire landscape in areas not currently burning has led to unstable slopes unable to hold on to soils during monsoon rains, resulting in catastrophic landslides. Because it’s hotter and drier than ever, some of these forests may never be forests again.

When I was a college student 20+ years ago, these were all things that we were warned would happen if there wasn’t a change to American policy. There wasn’t one, really. Imagining the progress we could have made as a country and world in 20 years with a pivot to alternative energy, smarter city and suburban growth, and more efficient power and fuel sources when compared to what we actually did is enough to send me spiraling just while writing this. Two decades of inaction due to stubborn ignorance, profiteering, and misinformation in the face of clear evidence is an almost unimaginable loss. In spite of all of this, we could still be doing something about this today, and the versions of ourselves and our children would applaud us decades from now for finally taking meaningful steps.

Will it happen? Maybe. I don’t know. Years ago I realized that it’s just as easy to be optimistic as it is pessimistic, which is to say that in the absence of an all-seeing future predictor Magic 8-ball, I may as well hope for the best while doing what I can in the present to make it happen. The best I can do beyond that is hope that other people also do their little part and huge collective changes happen underneath our feet that we’ll only recognize decades later. “Remember when so many people stood up to tech bros finally for the first time and rejected AI? That was the beginning,” we may say one while harvesting fresh vegetables on our solarpunk future-farms. For a long time it felt like that was happening, lately it hasn’t, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t happen again.

At the risk of falling into the trap of bread and circus appeasement, I begrudgingly have to admit that this spring and summer–in spite of the horrors–has been one of the best of my life. I have had a lot of fun. In spring I visited family in Poland, and my wife and I have marveled since at what a charmed experience that was. There are so many ways travel can go wrong, and at every juncture we instead had a perfect experience. The only notes I have for Poland is that in a place so lousy with beavers, why didn’t I see one, huh?

Castor fiber no shows aside, this then kicked off months of camping, hiking, concerts, pottery, yard-sale scores, family visits, hot dates, good movies, farmer’s markets, fresh peaches, a successful garden, barbecues, community activities, fitness and health gainz, volunteering, and so many more little and big things that cumulatively add up to the conclusion that in my little sphere of the world there’s no other way to put it than “thriving”.

There’s survival guilt there. How dare I enjoy these blistering hot days when others are suffering profoundly? How is it fair that I get to listen to the long awaited vinyl re-release of Decemberunderground in a comfortable air-conditioned house when others are suffering and dying in heatwaves in detention centers for the crime of trying to give their children a better life? Yeah, I’ve tried to help people who are going through tougher times than me, but I have more time in the day. How do I live with myself knowing there are still things I could be doing, dollars I’ve spent on concert tickets, Taco Bell (at great personal risk to my bowels), and food truck pad thai that could have gone to friends and strangers in need?

These are the reasons I can’t write a newsletter these days. I don’t know what to do with myself, these thoughts, and the knowledge that people are suffering while I’m having the time of my life. I keep thinking that I’ll just write a breezy update on fun things I’ve done, while putting that classic Howie spin of forcing them into a metaphor, but the introspection required to try to sort through the detritus in my brain I’ve tried to silence with loud music and podcasts about dungeons and dragons and put words to page is paralyzing.

It sounds like I’m too sad to post, but weirdly I think it’s because I’m too happy. It makes me self-conscious about posting. I have a hard time sitting down in front of this stupid google word processor and saying that I’m having fun this summer. At the same time, the knowledge that summers may continue to get even worse makes it almost an imperative to wring as much as we can from the ones we have left. Imagine how much worse it would be to say one day, “we used to have more bearable summers than this and I spent them scrolling and panicking.”

“Joy as resistance,” is a phrase used correctly by the marginalized when they refuse to let the bastards get them down by being funny and partying in the face of fascism. It’s incorrectly co-opted by the privileged to make excuses for having a good time at the Jimmy Eat World concert when others are starving, but how does one not have a good time at the Jimmy Eat World concert? You can’t fill from an empty cup, as the saying goes, but that doesn’t mean we have to empty our cup every time before we allow ourselves to fill it again.

I think I have a disease sometimes that no matter what: hot field work days, miserable weeks as a struggling Mormon missionary, failing at past careers, barely passing college classes, a worldwide pandemic, the decline of democracy, the worldwide cratering of bird populations; I am determined to have a good time. And I’m going to try to make sure that the people around me are having as much fun as they can be. This relentless jocularity makes me seem flippant when we should be serious, sacrilegious when we should be solemn, and obtusely blase when we should be furious. It is, perhaps, why I have been told multiple times over my near five decades of life that I am “an acquired taste.”

I admit that it’s easier to be your resident goofy golden retriever when you’re a tall, able-bodied white guy. The closest I’ve ever been to truly marginalized, and I’m going to have to defer to you all if this even counts, was when I was considered among the highest risk individuals to die if I contracted Covid, pre-vaccine. Because I have stage-3 kidney disease, I have a lot of factors associated with what they called co-morbidities at the time. I, along with my family, spent a lot of time worried that if the virus made it into our household, it could lead to devastating tragedy. These were heavy conversations with teens who wanted badly to live their lives as normal, but also took the threat seriously.

I spent a lot of time online seeing people who I believed loved me complaining that the steps being proposed to protect people like me were too much for people like them, or rolling their eyes at my caution. Things that made the world safer for sick homies to participate in it were infuriating, conspiracy-fueling overreach. “Why should I have to bend over backwards for a small percentage of the population? Shouldn’t they just stay inside if the world is too scary?”

Even in spite of this constant, low-level terror/insomnia/disappointment/sadness/isolation I still had a constant voice in my head saying “if you survive this you will remember this time fondly, so enjoy it now.” And wouldn’t you know it, I mostly had a great time. I spent a lot of time with immediate family, got pretty good at yo-yo, learned how to make macarons, prepared elaborate meals, tried knitting, read a ton of books, and started making videos for social media. I loved reading about pollution going down, road noise decreasing to the point that white-crowned sparrows could sing more complex songs to one another, and the natural world’s incredibly ability to bounce back with only a little break. It felt like maybe there was another way to live our lives that didn’t revolve around traveling hours into and out of cities, wasting so much time making small talk in offices, and eating out of vending machines instead of good fresh meals at home. All while being unavailable to our families for 8-10 hours a day.

Again, not everyone had that privilege. I got to work on my juggling while calling into yet another zoom meeting while nurses worked triple shifts zipping up body bags after watching people say goodbye to loved ones through iPads. I kept my job when countless others lost theirs, and was in a position where my employers cared about my health as much as I did. I luckily didn’t work for a billionaire immediately asking people to come back to work after, rather than admit they didn’t have actual friends but acolytes whose fawning didn’t hit quite the same way over video calls as in real life. Or a middle-manager with a corner office who, when confronted with the fact that if they didn’t have the chance to walk around cubicles and ask how the weekend went realized didn’t have a real job, and started agitating for “return to office” initiatives too early.

Two or three jobs ago when I only got paid when I was doing field work, the same reset I look fondly on today could have set us back decades financially and career-wise. I know because a few years before, the housing crisis did exactly that. It was horribly stressful, work dried up, we almost lost our house and upon moving had such ruined credit that we missed out on perhaps the last time when home ownership was feasible for regular people. But my kids were so little and so much fun, we spent a lot of time at the library and splash pads, enjoyed free lunches at the park, and got through it.

Not everyone gets through it when things get bad like this, but if you’re reading this you did. Maybe you barely did, but barely still counts. I don’t want to look back at the summer of 2026 without acknowledging that for me, personally, it rocked. But I also want to grieve with you if yours did not.

Here is, perhaps, the way I can summarize this. In recent years I’ve seen young women on social media make fun of bald men simply for being bald. When it’s pointed out that the ways to combat baldness are expensive and have side-effects, they point out that women have been expected to risk their own health and financial well-being to conform to societal standards, why not men? Personally I reject the idea that if one group is miserable, we should make the other one miserable, too. Rather than make everyone conform to unrealistic standards, let’s lower the bar for everyone to match the height society has set for me. It’s fun being able to put in 70% effort and get awards for it. Everyone should get that.

I don’t want to feel bad for having fun. But I should, kind of, until something changes. Until everyone has a great summer (HAGS)--except for Stephen Miller–there’s still work to do. And if you work alongside me, we’re going to have a good time doing it.

For reasons I can’t yet identify, something about this move has completely thrown off my groove to the point that I can barely throw. I’ve put in easily triple or quadruple the hours that I would put in at the high school, and have produced perhaps a tenth of the pots that I would have in that same period. I’ve put in entire 3-4 hour sessions where I had one mug to show for it, or–more often–nothing at all.

Admittedly, sometimes they work

The toll this takes is hard to fully explain. As soon as I’m home I get an idea of what maybe went wrong: I was using the wrong kind of bat, of course. These ones are warped. Or I need to try a different clay body; maybe the reclaim process we’re using is not working and this will be fixed with a new box. I’ll be lying in bed and some new idea will come to me that hopefully will unlock this whole thing again and I get so excited. So the first chance I get I go back to the studio and proceed to fail over and over again for hours. I also get constant tips and feedback from folks at the studio trying to help me figure out what’s wrong.

This has been going on for literally a month, which I know because my studio membership fee just renewed. I almost cancelled it because my confidence is so shaken. There is a past version of me that was not failing like this, when I was confident and learning exponentially. I know that guy is still in there, and I’m just going to keep trying until I find him again. It’s so easy to imagine this period as something I reflect on when it’s over and remark on how dramatic I was being about it. I’ll just get into that mindset now.

There’s a weird stubborn streak that goes through me that I’ve found is usually worth listening to. I don’t like quitting something I think will ultimately be valuable for me. When I first started my current job, I was telling a coworker that I would be riding the train and then my bike every day. Someone I hadn’t met yet in a different cubicle overheard and scoffed at this and said, “wait until winter.” Since that day, almost ten years later, the amount of times I’ve driven into the office could be counted on less than two hands. I’ve ridden in blizzards and torrential rain, through flooded roads, and in single digit cold and 100+ degree heat. Every time I start to flag, I remember that guy and pedal harder. Am I saying this because I think it’s badass? Yeah. I am. It kind of is.

Remember snow?

This applies to the many people who told me I’d never make a career out of ecology, that I wouldn’t progress without an advanced degree, or that I was too goofy-looking with a weird voice and shouldn’t make videos on social media (the last person who told me that was myself). At one point I was almost fired when my career was just taking off as I became overwhelmed with the rigors of work travel, long field days, and managing many projects at once. I worried that after leaving a creative writing program and moving my family to a new town, new university, and an unknown job market, I had once again picked the wrong career path.

I wondered if there was a right career path. If I wasn’t cut out for this, I wondered, what am I cut out for? The answer is that probably none of us, aside from like Wemby, Michael Phelps or Simone Byles, are cut out for anything in particular. I’m not uniquely carved out to withstand a tumultuous time in history any more than anybody is or ever has been. I don’t believe that the way that people found joy and humor in the most dire circumstances in history is innate, rather a conscious decision to not let circumstances around us beat us. I simply cannot believe that these are the worst of time after talking for hours with my grandpa about living through both the Great Depression and World War II. He had a lot more living to do afterwards, and so he did.

When I look back at some of the toughest times in my life; like when I was underemployed during the housing crisis and we almost lost our house. When we had to have a yard sale to make rent and only barely made only because I sold the last of my childhood video game collection on ebay. The loss of precious family members. The terrifying confusion and uncertainty that came with my kidney disease diagnosis. In spite of it, I still remember some of those times as also the happiest of my life. My kids were so little and we had so much fun going to parks, throwing rocks into rivers, camping, and reading them bedtime stories. Work was sporadic and unpredictable but also provided me once-in-a-lifetime outdoor experiences. We were so lucky to get a baby sitter sometimes and go to an art market and a restaurant on our little dates and that felt really special. The Nintendo Gamecube was awesome.

Because of this I know that I’m going to be nostalgic about even today. When I was visiting my 90+ year old grandma I told her that I was about to turn 46. She sighed a long sigh and then said, “oh, to be 46 again.” And yeah, of course. It’s amazing to be 46. I can do everything right now. People who have lost mobility, or are missing precious loved ones, are now fighting horrible disease or failing bodies would trade everything they have for one more day when they could ride their bikes, share a long, quiet Sunday with someone who has been taken from them, or have a night without physical pain or discomfort. For whatever million lucky reasons and privileges I get to experience a life filled with possibility among people I love and who love me. Even my chronic disease is mostly symptom-free. Someday I may be on dialysis and will yearn for days just like I had today, even a regular Tuesday when if I turn on the news it will be pretty bad out there.

The last thing I will allow myself is to look back from some future time when it’s harder to do so many things I take for granted now and have it tainted by melancholy over things about which I had little to no control. I don’t know which of the bad news stories will matter 30 years from now, but I do know that how I treat the people around me will. When things were tough, I hope I’ll say, I did what I can to make people in my community feel safer and cared for. I’d rather they say that I made them laugh than cry. Or at least, that I made them a mug.

It’s jarring when the needle bounces, but DJs do that on purpose sometimes. It’s fun! But it takes a bit of recovery. I don’t think I’m talking about records anymore. We’re back, baby. Track four or whatever.

This is good, actually! Me screwing up. All of it is. You should know that I have a tendency towards disaster. I’m messy and annoying. If you’re reading this you probably do know, but social media only shows successful posts, and so it looks like people are always killing it when they actually kind of suck. I’m pretty dumb a lot of the time. I make commitments here that I will do something fun, like a newsletter and a physical zine, then I don’t. I get you to sign in to a new platform so that you can follow me wherever the new tech nonsense is—Shoobie or Gumbow or whatever—then I discard it.

I sometimes react poorly to criticism, even though people who are critical of me are so important. I have a lot of patriarchal hangups still, and even when I’m reading the books and trying to learn, I still benefit from being a tall white guy. Even being bald is somehow associated with business success. I wouldn’t be surprised if like 6 out of 10 CEOs also have kidney disease.

Oh this is an unintended trajectory this post is taking. Here’s what I’m thinking about. On social media there’s been another one of those rashes of very outwardly and loudly feminist men really blowing it when what everyone needs is definitively not that. I’m not a drama guy, so I don’t want to link anything, but this happens so often that I could post this on virtually any Log Cabin Sunday Wednesday (yes, it’s clunky), and it would apply to some guy.

I also hate vagueposting, so I’ll give you some broad strokes: there are guys who have made a tidy living just reading women’s tweets on tik tok as if they are their own thoughts while being very handsome. There is a seemingly infinite amount of men using their good guy painted nails feminist personas to be creeps in DMs. Some big time “allies” have been accused of domestic violence by their real life partners, while filming emotional videos about how bad domestic violence is. One had DMs leaked in which he repeatedly bragged about how much money he earns per post calling out abusive husbands. He also explicitly described his sex life with his wife to his female online fans. Recently a very well known tik tok personality was at a paid democrat-aligned event for influencers and was accused of drunkenly groping another influencer. That’s a sentence that would have made zero sense 20 years ago that we now one have to grapple with.

Even guys who haven’t been called out make me uncomfy sometimes. Some of them are married dads with young children and full-time jobs who also post several times a day. I know how long it takes to make social media videos, and you can’t do it with small kids without off-loading even more childcare and house-running labor onto your wife. That’s just math.

Most of these guys, even some of the nastiest ones, still have very successful accounts filled with fawning comments every time they post. That sounds like jealousy and maybe it kind of is (messy!) I make these kinds of posts too sometimes. It does feel pretty good when people say you’re nice and cool. It feels good be be “one of the good ones.” It’s addictive. It’s the kind of thing that does well and the tendency we all have is to keep posting content that succeeds. I’ve never made money from those kinds of posts, but if I had I probably would have spent it just like any of the other guys do.

Every time one of these men gets called out, the comment section fills with people saying “I always knew there was something off about him.” And, by definition, they were right. I’ve learned to trust this radar implicitly. My wife has saved me a lot of heartache by privately telling me that someone gave her an off feeling. I also know that people say this about me sometimes. That’s weird! I can’t think about it too much but I should think about it some. That’s a voice I need to keep in my mind when I’m making something for the internet. If you’re one of them and for some reason reading this, I’m grateful for you.

Some of the examples I gave represent criminal behavior, and online cancelling is the least of their problems. But some of them are well-meaning with massive blind spots or more to learn. Sometimes they let the adoration they get from women go to their head and start leaning into thirsty stuff, which makes the space between advocacy and fandom very blurry. Or they try to leverage their fame to date their followers (though there’s plenty of evidence of the overtures being explicit and non-consensual).

The reason so many of these men online get absolutely fire-hosed with justifiable righteous fury is because they got too comfortable. They think they’ve accumulated an account of good boy points that they can withdraw from with bad behavior and still have some left over. They forgot that every post they make will be the first one for someone. Or that this post will be the one that proves the doubters right. They were guests and started acting like it was their own house. They helped themselves to yogurts that weren’t for them. Those were for work tomorrow. They used the good towels and the fancy soaps, even though the intended soap and towels were laid out just so.

I know because I’ve used the fancy soap. And people who I trust (often my wife), privately reached out and said this or that could be misinterpreted. Or I made a bad choice of words. Or I straight up was wrong. I like to think that something what distinguishes me from the online-talk-only guys is that I back up what I say with real work in my community. But that doesn’t absolve me from critique nor does it mean I’m not still a guest. It means I am especially a guest, because my volunteer work regularly puts me in women-dominated spaces. When people correct me, I can only think that it is very kind of them, because it will make me a better real-life advocate. I hope that anyone reading this feels empowered to reach out when I miss the mark. I also appreciate when you tell me I did a good job, who doesn’t? Especially if you tell me I’m funny. It just can’t all be that. That’s an echo chamber and that’s too scary.

Anyway this isn’t what I meant to write about so that’s that. We don’t have to talk about it anymore, OK? Moving on.

Here’s the Sundays I’ve had that you missed: the first one I was in Poland and visited Bialowieza and Biebrza National Parks. It was Easter Sunday which is a big deal in Poland. It was cool seeing what they do there. On Saturday we saw everyone walking to church with their Easter baskets to be blessed. Sunday everything was closed except for gas stations so we loaded up on treats and gas station food for meals. The parks were amazing and there weren’t a lot of people there so it felt like we had them to ourselves. By the afternoon they filled with picnicking families (sp?) which was very cute. Monday was supposed to be the water fight day, but it was too cold so we just saw a handful of teens with unfired water guns just sort of roaming around.

The next Sunday was back home recovery from walking 68 miles in 6 days and dozens of hours of plane rides. I think I mostly played video games.

Then this last one I slept in really late, then took a nap. Even after that I could not stay awake. When I was awake I felt crappy. It took until like 3 pm before I realized “oh damn I’m depressed today.” I don’t think I have the clinical version but I do get caught up in brutal periods of melancholy that I can only ascribe to chemicals being off. That night we had a concert that I have been excited about for months, but I didn’t want to go at all. The thought of standing in line for an hour, then standing in a venue for two hours, then watching an opener, then standing for another half hour, then watching two more hours of music made me feel like the oldest man in the whole world. I had the hope that once I saw Ethel Cain on stage all that would melt away, as is usually the case when I dread going to concerts.

Plot twist: it was absolutely miserable. This has nothing to do with Cain (who rocked) and everything to do with the venue. The concert was really well done, but they put too many people in that frickin place. I don’t want to be hyperbolic but it was a crushing, oppressive, relentlessly packed death trap. I know that sounds like old man howie but it was happening to everyone. People passing out, fights breaking out from too many people in each other’s space for too long. Just hell.

That being said, fifteen minutes into the drive home I did say out loud “that was a pretty good show, all told.” So if there’s nothing else to learn, it’s that humans will adapt to almost anything.

That’s kind of beautiful but it’s also concerning. The frog in the frying pan thing is a myth, but we don’t need frogs to illustrate it. Frogs are incredibly adapted to sense minor changes in water temperature. Humans are dumber than frogs. We have allowed our natural world to be ruined by a thousand million little cuts in exchange for one quarter’s worth of paychecks and a couple extra points of stock increases. We let our rights get eroded gradually in exchange for feeling safe. I point a camera at my face and read a script and then get sad when my metrics aren’t what I hoped they’d be or not enough people are saying I’m a good boy. Why? How did we get used to this social media thing?

There’s too many people here. It is a crushing, oppressive, relentlessly packed death trap.

Just hell.

I am trying to say yes to stuff more. This isn’t groundbreaking news but it’s a reminder I keep needing. Just frickin do the thing sometimes. I’m in general a guy who doesn’t want to do the thing, a full-on homebody. I do OK if something is on the calendar a week or two in advance, though even then inevitably an hour before I’m supposed to be there I start thinking of excuses to opt out. I’ve had a couple of near-friendships with that spur of the moment type of person and it doesn’t work out.

Like for example, I had a neighbor years ago who was into a lot of the stuff I was into. I used to rock climb, and one day we started making plans to go to the climbing gym. To me what that looks like is we have a standing day and time where we hit it up. I want it on the calendar and I want to see days pass on that calendar where I focus my chi into sending mode. To him it meant that on a random evening at like 9 pm when I’m all settled in with Veronica Mars (I was into Veronica Mars then), he would knock on my door with no warning and be like “want to go to the climbing gym?” Readers, I did not.

Once I’m in pjs I don’t get out of pjs that calendar day, even to do one of my favorite things in the world which at the time was rock climbing. I feel like it would still be one of my favorite things if I started doing it again. I should do that. How, though? The climbing gyms are tooooo faaaar and to get back into outdoor climbing I need a squad and nooo squaaaad. That squad, btw, needs a shared google calendar.

When I think of concerts all I think about are logistics. Traffic, parking, will the commuter train still be going when it’s over, etc. Same with travel or even trying a new restaurant. It took me two months to sign up for the library Dungeons and Dragons session. I didn’t have dice! What’s a perception check? Most people have extra dice and I still don’t know what a perception check is vs. an investigation check. What’s the difference between a survival check and a nature check if I’m examining a mushroom? Who cares? Mushrooms aren’t real.

When I’m there, whatever the thing is, I’m cool as the proverbial cucumber. I don’t even recognize the person who thought it would be more hassle than enjoyment. I can just take it easy. Why was I such a Hundred Acre Wood Rabbit about it? How do I channel these impeccable Pooh vibes I’m experiencing while rocking out while Wish is playing, but in the planning stage?

The answer, I think, is that a Pooh can only exist when there is a Rabbit. Ideally, each of us have a Pooh and a Rabbit within us (though I have to admit I can be a real Piglet sometimes). The reason travel is always less stressful than I think it will be is because my wife has considered every possible angle. She runs through scenarios of what could go wrong before being able to sleep.

This has been a trend on social media this last week or so. Men can be laid-back because they have a partner smoothing out every speed bump. My friend came to visit and I did a lot of work to make the house look nice, but Kristin did the significantly more taxing emotional labor of anticipating needs and pitfalls. By which I mean communicating to me what needs to be done and when, which is way harder and more exhausting. For a friend visit and concert these are much less of a big deal, but she does it every time. When we move, when I start a new job, and while we plan our first trip to Europe next month.

I’ve read a half a dozen books about this: Gemma Hartley’s Fed Up, Rose Hackman’s Emotional Labor, Laura Danger’s No More Mediocre, and more. And still I have to face the fact that reading all the right books isn’t enough. This isn’t even what I want to write about but as often happens, writing about something made me think about it in a way I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t started. What started as a chatty update about a fun weekend makes me have to do a hard check in. I’ve got work to do.

This would have never happened if I had AI write this thing. Makes you think (or maybe it doesn’t, if you’re already dependent on LLMs). Thanks for reading.

Here’s the Sunday report:

Albums:

Metric, Formentera

The Faint, Danse Macabre

Games played:

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

Dinner: Creamy Tortellini Soup with Chicken Meatballs and Kale

This one won’t be about Jane Austen or informed by Jane Austen. I will only update you here where I’m at and then move on to more important things: cartoon orange cats not named Garfield. We’ll get to it.

On Sunday I finished Sense and Sensibility, which concludes my reading of the published catalog with one week to spare. It’s not all of her writings. There’s the Juvenilia, which are short stories, poems, and outlines from her early years (11-18), and her unfinished novel Sanditon that I haven’t gotten into. I’m not saying I never will get there but it wasn’t part of the assignment. I also watched the 2007 BBC Northanger Abbey adaptation starring Felicity Jones of Rogue One fame (loved it) and Austenland (liked it). And while this is the conclusion of my report on the subject for the sake of this post I am forever willing to discuss any and all of these books and shows at length.

This is going to be understandably jarring as I transition from 1800s fiction to a character named Heathcliff. I am not referring to the character from Wuthering Heights, which I am told by commercials is also the number one movie in the world right now. I am talking about Heathcliff, the cartoon cat. You will be forgiven for either not knowing this rascal of a tabby exists at all, or for being surprised that the intellectual property is still a going concern. The funny pages are not at the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist to say the very least. For those of us whose humor was shaped by The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes, this is sad. There are glimpses of greatness still. Real groundbreaking work. Check out New Nancy, for example. Or if you’re weird, try Heathcliff.

Why am I talking about this? Because this interview with its current artist and writer is one of the most inspiring things I’ve read in some time.

You may be demanding context, and you’d be right to do so. Unless you are very online, you may not know that Heathcliff is currently one of the strangest pieces of mainstream media going. I don’t know what the laws are for reposting comic strips, so I will direct you to this article where you can see what we’re talking about here. My metrics say that very few of you click links, but I have to be so real right now: this is one you should click on, otherwise little else I talk about today will make any sense. If you are a hyper-fixater like I am, I direct you to the entirety of “Heathcliff Week,” by the literary magazine Solrad. That a literary magazine dedicated to comic strips exists makes me sometimes glad, in spite of all of it, to live in the 2020s.

Some of you will still not read it, so I will try to explain a couple of the Heathcliff comics therein. One is Heathcliff the cat driving a military style tank through a small town. On the side of the tank is the word “meat.” Heathcliff is wearing a helmet that says “meat.” There is a flag flying from the tank that says “meat.” Two butchers stand outside of a building with a sign on the top that says “meat.” In the foreground, adoring children cheer. The caption says, “Children love the meat tank.” This description does not capture the deadpan expression Heathcliff always wears, the equivalent of a real cat staring right at your face while knocking a glass of juice onto a borrowed book.

Kids Love the Meat Tank went super viral on social media and the bizarre, surrealist work that undoubtedly perplexed many a grandfather started reaching the audience it deserved. Iconoclasts and meat tank fans rejoiced.

Another comic: an old man is grumpily talking to a Heathcliff who is wearing blue jeans. Two mice are also strolling by in the foreground, they are wearing blue jeans. The caption says “Enough with the jeans.” I can’t explain why the joke is made in the composition of the panel, but it is.

It gets even more confusing when you read several, because some days do feature a traditional funny page joke, and then the next will be a lovecraftian glimpse into a world where there are no rules, one we have no way of contextualizing. The Heathcliff universe may appear, at a glance, just like ours. It’s definitively not. And it is in this near-simulacrum that the uncanny valley between our reality and Heathcliff’s confounds us. Nothing is explained. But over time, it makes a kind of sense. It’s self-referential to past jokes and characters in a way that I wouldn’t dare do in a social media video. The cartoonist knows this is the first time someone may read it, knows they will be flummoxed, and publishes it anyway. There is a trust and beauty in that; it staggers me.

I won’t keep doing this, but there was “dirt week,” in which every cartoon of the week was about a pile of dirt. There are “bro fish,” who are fish who only say “bro.” Heathcliff also has some cat friends who are also “bros” and ride around in a blimp that says “bro” on it. They seem to be a bad influence? Heathcliff’s dad is a career criminal who is always depicted wearing prison stripes. There’s a mythical creature who brings delicious garbage to town called Garbage Ape, who is celebrated as a folk hero on the level of Santa Claus. Heathcliff is the promoter for a frog named Jimmy. In spite of all evidence, Heathcliff seems sure that Jimmy is going to hit it big. We don’t know for sure, because we never know what Heathcliff is thinking and while other animals talk, he never does. Though he acts and is acted upon, his own inner process is deliciously opaque. The closest we get to knowing what is going on in the feline brain is his endorsement of something, like ham, via a helmet that says “ham.”

“There’s this beautiful old library in Philadelphia, and they had all the cartoonists that wanted to set up booths, and we just drew comics for free for anybody who came in. I was there with all these great, great cartoonists next to me. At one point, this young woman who’s probably like college-age – late teens, early 20s – came up and she was talking to me. Occasionally I’ll do like a theme week, where it’s the same theme for the whole week. She goes, “I just want to tell you, when you did dirt week, my boyfriend called me. He’s like, ‘I can’t believe it! I think it’s on, I think it’s gonna be dirt week!’ He was so excited about it.”

Every Heathcliff cartoon feels like a secret code to someone who is not you. Over time you start to think you see the code, and then something will show up that shows you have only begun. You learn by context. At first, it’s perplexing. How does someone get paid for this? It becomes infuriating. For some, it stays that way for ever. For others, maybe 20 comics in, it becomes something that makes us laugh so hard that we start to cry and cough and nose run and barely breathe. I laugh in a way that embarrasses my wife. I can think of few things on this earth that delight me more than whatever the hell Peter Gallagher is doing.

This was way too much explanation. You don’t have to like the comic to get value out of the interview. Indeed, the single-panel comic may make you angry, like it does many readers. I think this resonates for all kinds of art. It ain’t for everyone. It may not even be for most people. It doesn’t have to be.

Gallagher took over his uncles’ comic strip in 1998. It was started in 1973 and predated Garfield. It was pretty much what you’d expect it to be: an alley cat who gets up to mischief. He collected intact fish skeletons and used garbage can lids as a plate. He wailed on fences in the middle of the night. His girlfriend was a chubby Persian. He had a rival dog neighbor, and a little girl lived nearby who liked to dress him in baby clothes. I grew up on the cartoon, which was half Heathcliff, and half (the much cooler in my opinion) Rifraff and the Catillac Cats. It was OK.

In other hands, Heathcliff would have gone the way of the rest of the legacy strips on the funny pages. Your Wizards of Id, your Hagars the Horrible. Your Blondies. Weak puns, outdated boomer humor observations about how hard it is to get a regular cup of coffee or middle-aged men hating their wives, repetition of jokes that have been around pretty much untouched since at least vaudeville. Instead it went <ahem> ham.

“All the time online, I see comments from people who are like, “Oh, he ruined Heathcliff, I used to think Heathcliff was so funny.” But, you know, at the same time, if I were doing the same ideas and the same humor that they were in the 1980s, I would be the worst comic writer. You know, humor does change, I think. It evolves a little bit.”

Reading this interview while on a hiatus from content creation was so helpful. This whole month I’ve been evaluating whether I want to keep doing it or just quit. I’ve seen people walk away from audiences ten times as large as mine and they seem to be doing fine. This month I’ve been doing fine. I look forward to coming back to social media next week to see what you all are posting, but kind of dread feeling like I need to make posts. I found some wisdom here. It’s been repeated to the point of being trite, but Jimmy Eat World is right. Don’t write yourself off yet. Do everything you can. Be yourself. It doesn’t matter if it’s good enough for someone else.

“I remember when I was just giving my uncles ideas. I would usually try to bring in twelve ideas. And this one time I just said to him, “I’m sorry. You know, like, I tried my best but…” and my uncle George Gately looked at me, and he’s like, “That’s the way it is. You try your best. You can’t hit a home run every time that you’re at bat.” You just try your best and you make do with what you have. I’ve had people – friends of mine – who are like, “Oh, isn’t that a lot of pressure doing it every week?” And you know, because it is every week, I feel like it’s less pressure. I just can’t worry about fixing it forever. I have to get it out and get it done. You’re doing it every single day. You try your best, of course, but every one’s not going to be the best comic you’ve ever done.”

When I started making videos on Tik Tok there were so many throwaway attempts to see what stuck. When something finally stuck, I also got stuck. Because I spent all my time trying to recreate that magic. It’s dumb, though, because the posts that I’ve had the most success from are ones I thought were too silly to even post. My biggest one, the one celebrities shared and got me probably three quarters of my following by itself, sat in my drafts for days because I was too embarrassed to put it out there. But now I put so much work into each post that when they underperform to my standards it’s devastating. Putting in that kind of work is valuable for me. I learn about my expertise and stay sharp about current scholarship. And though they don’t go viral, they seem to resonate with people.

I’m learning this with pottery, too. When I first started I recycled everything I threw. My attitude was that I didn’t want to waste trimming time and glaze on something I didn’t think was great and it was going to take a lot of practice throwing before I made anything worthwhile. But then the first bisque fire I didn’t have anything to glaze. I helped Kristin glaze her pots and had so much fun that I started keeping everything I threw as something I can practice the next skills on. I was pleasantly surprised to find that things that I thought were bad looked pretty good the next week because some magic happened while trimming, and then looked great (to me) after glazing. Pottery I made that I didn’t think was worth giving away were the first things people picked out of the box when offered. Conversely some pots I remembered being better the week before were kind of disappointing when I saw them again, and ultimately didn’t work out. When you’re just learning how to do something, you can’t get hung up on nailing it every time. I don’t think even experts can expect that. There’s wisdom in knowing you have to finish this one thing because you need to make another thing after.

“And I was like, “You know what, I’d rather go down with my own humor than trying to be like, this middle of the road, kind of safe comic,” so it was good. It was a good impetus. I was starting to do that anyway, but then I was like, “You know what, I’m just gonna do what I think is funny.” Honestly, I’ll tell you, when I first started giving ideas and gags to my uncles, I would bring them a group of gags, like usually it would be like twelve or something. They would go through them and tell me “all right, not this one” and I was like, “Oh, I thought you would think this one’s really funny.” And they’re like, “Don’t do what you think we think is funny. You should do what you think is funny.” And I thought that was great.”

I think anyone who creates anything, who tries to sell it at a farmer’s market or a gallery or on Etsy or whatever, starts getting a voice in their head based on critics you were never creating for in the first place. Someone looking at your wares and saying to their friend, “who would buy this?” resonates in your mind for ten times as long as the one who picked something up and handed you cash for it without saying anything. But the latter is your audience and the former never will be. It’s stifling to listen to that voice, because you start to self-censor for no reason to please someone who you have no business trying to convince. What if someone misinterprets this? They will. That’s got to be OK, at least if you want to do something new. They may find something of value there that you never intended. That rules.

“I’m not comparing cartooning to fine art, but you don’t go to an art museum and the artist is standing there next to the painting and he argues with you if you say something. No, you let the art stand for itself, and they can hate it or love it, but it’s just, you know, you put it out there.”

The Middle wasn’t the lead single on Bleed American, which in itself was an album released after two failed records with a major studio. Adkins wrote it in response to a fan letter from a junior high girl whose friends said she wasn’t punk enough (this was a major concern in the 90s). He thought it was so simple, the band wouldn’t even agree to play it. It turns out it’s not just junior high kids who need a pep talk.

“I remember doing a rough demo of the song in my bedroom when I was living in Tempe, Ariz. I had one of Zach’s first drum sets that I had bought off him. I did this rough outline of what became “The Middle.” The music and lyrics came at least within an hour of each other. There were some tweaks when we came to the band editing process. I’m not sure if anyone thought that it was great or not, but we felt it was solid enough that it could be a contender to record for the album.” - ‘No wasted motion’: An oral history of Jimmy Eat World’s ‘The Middle’

At the time of its release, the members of the band were selling art supplies, auto parts, doing construction, or working at a car dealership. By touring, they were able to buy back their catalog from management–a hugely important move given how big they eventually broke out–and fund a new record. But money was so tight that the album’s producer worked for free.

I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but I think about those guys a lot. This summer I’ll see them tour Bleed American in its entirety for its 25th anniversary. I know people will say “there’s no way that album is that old,” but I did the math and it checks out. When it came out I was 21 and I’m 46 now. It’s a particularly memorable time in my life. I didn’t know what I was doing (less, even, than now). I was studying creative writing in college, getting married, working one full time job and one part time job, and trying to survive without any idea of how. Looking back at my whole career, it felt like I was throwing darts at a wall and seeing what would stick. Pretty much nothing did for a good 15 years. Now I have a 401k!

Both when I was studying writing and then when I moved to ecology, I was told that they weren’t practical careers but look at me now, writing for free to 400 people. Take that, college advisors. For one college semester, I abandoned my dream path to pursue a degree in website design. That’s kind of funny to remember. I wonder how that would have turned out.

Ultimately the conclusion I can reach is that people who want to create, can’t stop creating. It’s not in their DNA. Most of it does not resonate with anyone. We’re lucky if even one thing we make pleases even one other person. We’re really lucky if it manages to please millions, and to do that once is almost astonishingly rare. Finding people who keep finding what you’re doing is that much more unique. I need to work on a mindset that once it’s out there, it belongs to anyone who is interested.

In summary: thank you for being here. I hope I can share some good pottery soon.

There is currently a dual-author hyperfixation occurring in the Howard household. While I’m in the grip of Austenmania, my wife is deep-diving in Tolkien lore. Yesterday she showed me her binder of printed out of lineage charts of the elven families. On our walk we took turns info-dumping on each other; her explaining Morgoth Bauglir’s fall and rise and fall again, me talking about the sources of Mr. Bingley’s wealth. Last night I dreamt of Emma writing a letter inviting the gentleman Mr. Underhill, the sole inheritor of Bag End and all its titles, to a ball. The handsome, if diminutive, gentleman of the finest breeding and manners from a most laudable family. At the age of three and thirty (though what a youthful example of such!), he would be a most suitable acquaintance for her dear Harriet.

Since last writing, I have finished Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, and will have finished Emma by the time of this publishing. We’ve also watched the 1999 film of the latter, and on a whim, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Both films represented large departures from their source material, though only one had a knife fight between potential lovers where their clothes got progressively cut off.

It shouldn’t be surprising how much I can accomplish when not looking at social media or listening to podcasts, though it is. I’m quite ashamed to admit to how much time I was wasting on Instagram that I could have spent learning the nefarious deeds of many a coxcomb in the Regency countryside. I also had a productive pottery class, played Dungeons and Dragons at the library, and cooked an enormous amount of Super Bowl food.

Also these bean hotpots from the Official Stardew Valley Cookbook.

I’m more or less halfway through the Austen catalog (Lady Susan is a short novella), and I can’t imagine loving one of her books more than I’m loving Emma. It’s so funny, first of all, but also dang it if it isn’t capital T true. I’ve already been so amazed that someone writing two centuries ago has a comedic and literary voice that resonates so well today. I’ve always been skeptical of the so-called generational divides, and have never been more so upon reading the writings of centuries ago and finding so much to relate to. So much of what we say about boomers, millennials, gen z, and my forgotten generation could easily be summarized by Jane Austen: young people are silly, middle aged people are scared, older people have stopped caring what people think about them.

My understanding is that Emma is the most flawed of Austen’s heroines, and maybe that’s why I, a mess, relate to her so much. I also strongly suspect that she has ADHD, like me. She collects hobbies to the point of proficiency but not excellence, hyper-fixates on one thing at a time to the point of obsession, and is relentless in novelty-seeking. And while loyal to her friends and charitable to the needy, suffers from jealousy, pettiness, and a distinct mean streak, which I’m afraid I have to admit to, though it’s something I’ve tried my whole adult life to actively counteract.

When Frank Churchill comes to town, Emma finds a kindred spirit in mocking her neighbors, and commits the comedy sin of punching down at someone at a lower station than herself. I couldn’t help remembering a friend of mine who I am still very fond of but who I have to admit brings out those latent tendencies in me. Once, when spending time with this friend and some others, my wife pointed out that we were “mean girls,” making fun of strangers for the mildest of fashion or behavioral faux pas. It was a side of me she had probably seen only glimpses of before, was clearly not impressive, and something I should have done away with long before.

That Emma will experience a harsh comeuppance for this behavior seems inevitable (I’ve seen the movie so I have a good idea of where this is going). She can work to remedy her ways, but wounds will still fester. I have to deal with the fact that in spite of all the work I’ve done to be a kinder person, I will always have a reputation among some of being thoughtlessly cruel. As they are no longer in my life, I can’t do much about it now. My only hope is that by continuing to surround myself with people who assume the best in their community members, that will continue to rub off on me and I won’t keep making the same mistakes.

—

This was my first full week of Log Cabin February, and there have been a handful of events that make me feel good about my decisions to distance myself from social media. I’m glad I didn’t have to participate in Super Bowl Halftime Discourse, for example. Like Emma will soon be forced to learn, I am reminded that my opinion isn’t necessary in all moments about every little thing. They may, even, be woefully misguided. And if mine adds to the clamor of people disaffected because this thing or that is no longer the Way it Used to Be, it’s also not welcome.

It’s weird after being so fully immersed that to distance myself even for a week from the opinion machines and just grappling with the world through my own eyes only is difficult and jarring. I don’t have to take to the internet to find out if other people like the Fallout tv show as much as I do; instead I can just like it. It makes me wish I wasn’t looking at social media when Stranger Things finished. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I wasn’t subconsciously defending it from critics who keep watching something they hate for the sole point of being able to make Points about it Online. I forgot what it’s like to just take in information without micro-blogged takes or phone-screen deconstructions.

It feels good.

It would be dope, I think, if we collectively could acknowledge that some things just aren’t for us, even and especially when it seems like they’re unavoidably popular. An estimated 150 million people watched, which is almost half of the United States’ population. I suppose there is no other cultural event left that draws that many of us to the same event anymore. I don’t know why the whole country watches the Super Bowl. It’s the equivalent of there being a social expectation to watch the season finale of The Bachelor every year, even if you’d never seen another episode. Is this a good one of these? Who knows! I don’t know what the hell I’m looking at. Instead, because I don’t care about or for it, I spend the time lamenting my fate on the internet.

As someone who (unfortunately) loves football, it bums me out that my fun makes you miserable. Don’t be miserable! If you’re there alongside family or a spouse, eat your food and go for a walk, engage young family members, put on some Mario Kart rounds in the basement, play the pianoforte in the parlor or practice your drawing. I assure you the commercials have never actually been good.

This has become one of my deepest values: if it ain’t worth it, hit the bricks. Bail on books, quit on tv shows midseason, walk out of movies, stop eating that thing that makes you sick, take a break from the football season when your team is bad and revisit it when the playoffs start (if at all). If your club or church or friend group or fandom brings more anxiety than edification, I give you permission to step away. It may feel like an integral part of your personality, but you’ll be surprised at how much of yourself still exists even though you’re no longer the Star Wars guy. If you feel better away, you can stay away. If you find you miss it terribly, work on a way to engage with it in a healthier way when you return. In much of my thirties and forties, my life has improved through subtraction and simplification. There are more examples of this than I can list. You’ll not only make life better for yourself, but your absence will make for a better place for folks who still want to be there without you bellyaching within it.

I don’t know if this sounds preachy or not, I apologize if it does. What I do know is that these are all corporations. The company that makes your favorite super hero movie, the owners of the sport team whose colors you decorate your office with (unless you’re a Green Bay Packers fan), the streaming services that make propaganda to appease a government so that they can be allowed to consolidate even further. They are dragons sitting on hoards while people starve. That doesn’t mean art that resonates with you isn’t made by real artists–at least for now–or that your emotions aren’t real. But the decisions their funders make are financial ones. And they are harming us. At the very least either enjoy yourself or deny them even one more penny if you aren’t.

If you want to enjoy some fine entertainment without enriching a billionaire, the Jane Austen books are all public domain now.

–

Okey dokey artichokes, big news:

This weekend I listened on vinyl to Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine; Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher; and Metric, Art of Doubt.

Metric is on tour soon, so is Jimmy Eat World! So is Brandi Carlile and Nine Inch Nails. Hit me up if you’re there.

As you may have seen, in February I am embarking on the first ever Log Cabin Month. It began, technically, on January 30th as 2026’s inaugural Log Cabin Weekend, in which I also observed Saturday from the majority of internet activities. By Sunday afternoon I knew I would continue it. This is going to get needlessly complicated (which is a teaser for this week’s recipe), and will probably only matter to readers who love rules like I love rules. If that’s not you, go ahead and skip to the next paragraph after this subsequent one.

On Saturday’s the Log Cabin is a little less off-the-grid. It’s like my grandparents’ actual log cabin that they had when I was growing up, which is to say an a-frame not made out of logs at all and situated in the tiny town of Manila, UT. This cabin is not as disconnected from the outside world as the famed fictional Sunday cabin located deep in the woods. While the latter is stuck in the 90s, the former has some connection to the 2000s. It has a Playstation 5 in it, for example. And it has some streaming capabilities (though barely, just enough to watch the season finale of Fallout on Wednesday before we go full no-streaming). Saturday Log Cabins still don’t have podcasts in them, or Instagram, Threads, Tik Tok, Bluesky, etc. But I can send off a weekly missive to the masses (or 400 or so of them out of the combined 200k who follow me on those platforms) through classic newsletter technology. And while the focus is still on physical medium, I can stream all the Carly Rae Jepsen I want.

If you skipped that last paragraph, the long and/or short of it is that the only posting I will do will be on this newsletter, however you are reading it. The newsletter will get a little chunkier, I imagine, because it will have a week’s worth of what I would have normally posted elsewhere. Also mildly unrelated, I’m going to read all of Jane Austen’s finished novels because why not. By the time of this publishing I believe I will have finished Pride and Prejudice.

–

This Sunday we walked along the Provo River Delta and saw a lot of gulls and ducks, some bald eagles, a great blue heron, lots of evidence of beavers, and some American kestrels. I reflected on how far Utah Lake has come in the ten years since I moved to Utah County, and how much more again it has come along since I first saw it at the Missionary Training Center in the year 1998. My state colleagues may disagree with me on this point, but much of this miraculous (with full knowledge that it is just a start still) recovery can be directly tied to the existence of a federally listed species, the june sucker.

This push and pull of state management vs. federal jurisdiction that is triggered by listing under the Endangered Species Act will necessarily need to be simplified, otherwise this newsletter would spiral into book length. I often hear in my day to day work life among local biologists and managers that states are better at managing imperiled species. Among non-profits and advocates, there is a general attitude that some species’ management simply should never be turned over to untrustworthy red states. These are oversimplifications of a spectrum of attitudes where I find myself sympathetic to at least some of the critiques.

As an example of where some nuance can be found, let’s look at Utah Lake.

At the time that Mormon settlers arrived in Utah, there were 13 native species in Utah Lake, today there are 2. Utah Lake was once so abundant in fish that the Indigenous Timpanogos people considered it sacred, and would host an annual fish festival attended by other Ute and Shoshone Tribes. During the festival there was dancing, trading, horse-racing, and an opportunity for young men and women to find romance with members of other bands. The intervening post-European years were not kind to this sacred water body, to say the least. Overfishing, polluting industry, and over-allocation of water for agriculture has led to a much degraded lake. One that has become something of a joke to Utah residents.

I have become a bit prickly and defensive of what I now consider an underloved gem with almost limitless potential, but I know full well how much of its reputation as something Utah County residents were ashamed of was well-earned. The ignominy seems misplaced. Folks here seem ashamed that it exists in its state as if it were an unfortunate inevitability, not that we caused this.

Enter the much-maligned ESA. The Endangered Species Act often feels like more stick than carrot, if you’re a developer, but the carrot part is there and shouldn’t be ignored. The existence of an endangered species feels like (and is) a big headache if you are an (alleged) grifter who wants to build islands in the middle of a lake, for example. It also complicates things like building roads, wind and solar farms, public transportation, housing, oil wells, and other trappings that many of us both hate and depend on. These are usually surmountable–it’s very rare that the ESA stops development altogether–but the additional costs and schedule complications can be onerous.

From a conservation standpoint, it’s also deeply flawed, as any 50 year old law would be. It’s inconsistently applied and can seem arbitrary, both in which species get listed and its enforcement. There are no shortage of sticky situations that arise from an imperfect law that can be wielded erratically, like when one species that is listed as threatened or endangered competes with another at-risk one that is not. When the control of predators is deemed necessary for the survival of a struggling species. Or when an endangered predator/grazer depends for food on an equally dwindling source of prey/forage.

That all makes a lot of people’s jobs a lot harder (and gives some of us jobs to begin with), but at least from my standpoint, there is no way Utah could have accomplished what it has at Utah Lake without federal funding allocated because of the Endangered Species Act. The motivation for delisting and the flexibility that comes with it is a very strong incentive that creates unlikely and effective partnerships. Those resources and combined with the deep expertise of state biologists doing on-the-ground surveys and recovery efforts have led to some of the greatest conservation successes I’m aware of whose benefits far exceed those to a single species. These are not limited to cleaner water and air, nice recreation facilities, great birding, and a slow-building but meaningful swell of support for a neglected resource.

Just the threat of a species being listed can trigger meaningful action that kicks in to convince the federal government that states can work together to prevent listing, like we have seen with the greater sage-grouse. And even when a species is delisted–the whole point of the ESA–state guidelines and management plans are required to keep the species from being relisted. June sucker is currently under petition for delisting, and projects like the Provo River Delta is a big reason why. The surrounding area is under extreme development pressure, including an industrial development virtually next door to the project. While this can be demoralizing, it makes it even clearer how important the timing of a handful of diligent people was to make the land and water right purchases when they did.

Shifting gears to a much larger and cataclysmically more imperiled body of water, these musings on our stroll were particularly striking given the policy backdrop. Recently the Wilson’s phalarope was advanced for a status review to be listed, which has huge implications for the Great Salt Lake and the state as a whole.

From the article:

“’We find that the petition presents substantial scientific or commercial information indicating that listing the Wilson’s phalarope as a threatened or endangered species may be warranted,’ the agency wrote in its decision, pointing to “freshwater diversion” leading to declines in habitat resources in Utah, California and Oregon.”

If Utah Lake was in dire conditions when I first saw it as a 19-year-old, the Great Salt Lake’s plight is almost immeasurably worse. Everyday Utahns can be forgiven for thinking that the Great Salt Lake is a deadzone of biodiversity, but it’s a rare and vital ecosystem with worldwide consequences. Ten million birds depend on it, including somewhere between 50-90% of the world’s eared grebes. It also supports 80% of Utah’s wetlands.

As of this writing it’s only 35% full, 54% of its shoreline is exposed, and its salinity is approaching levels that are ecologically catastrophic. The exposed lakebed is spreading toxic dust clouds that threaten respiratory health in humans (and wildlife), including arsenic levels that are 100 times levels considered safe. This is all as we are most of the way through the worst snow year in Utah’s recorded history. 95% of our summer water comes from the locked-in reservoirs of water in our mountain snow, and we have about half the snow in the mountains than is considered “normal.”

You wouldn’t know it from reading Facebook comments, but there have been some impressive strides to address this beyond prayer. That being said, a problem that is hundreds of years in the making can’t be fixed in a year or two. At the same time we don’t have the luxury of taking it slow. Unaddressed, it’s about as bleak a situation as I can imagine.

Allow me a digression.

While cleaning the kitchen and making dinner, I put on Hellboy II: The Golden Army and wow does that movie frickin’ rip. It’s not only one of the coolest looking movies I can think of, but it’s also remarkable in that it has one of the most sympathetic villains I can think of in a comic book movie. Every adversary’s death is sad. The elven Prince Nuada has seen his people driven by relentless human expansion to hiding in subway tunnels and sewers, every treaty and agreement made with humans broken. Nuada has realized that the only way to save the elves is to restart and decisively win the ancient war between the species. His father, the king, disagrees:

King Balor: [In Gaelic] You have broken an ancient truce between our people and mankind.

Nuada: A truce based on shame! The humans... the humans have forgotten the gods, destroyed the Earth, and for what? Parking lots, shopping malls! Greed has burned a hole in their hearts that will never be filled; they will NEVER have enough!

King Balor: [In Gaelic] What humans do is in their nature; to honour the truce is in ours.

Nuada’s tactics are extreme and cruel. In one case he attacks Hellboy with a massive forest elemental, the last of its kind. To save New Yorkers, Hellboy kills it, but not before Nuada says this:

“What are you waiting for? This is what you want, isn’t it? Look at it. The last of its kind. Like you and I. If you destroy it, the world will never see its kind again– You have more in common with us than with them.”

The dying of the arcane creature is deeply sad. While we know this is not a real being, it represents something we’ve all seen disappear from the earth: green, living, vibrant life full of mystery and surprises. It is a poorer world without such things.

The world of Hellboy is one in which there are elves and goblins and all manner of magical creatures being pushed further and further into grimy corners by unceasing human expansion. The movie grieves this loss while the protagonists fight to save the lives of humans who don’t particularly care for the supernatural misfit team of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. It reminds me of how much disdain I sometimes hear in my community and online for my colleagues whose only crime is trying to maintain or restore a vital Earth where humans can live a healthy life.

If you’ve ever seen a Wilson’s phalarope, they’re astonishing little birds. They’re one of the few bird species where the females are more visually strident than the males, as males do the majority of the raising of young while females immediately search for new mates. Therefore the males are competed over by female phalaropes (called polyandry, in case any adventurous women reading find a kindred spirit here and want to give themselves a title). They swim in tiny, relentless circles to churn up the water and create a column in which aquatic insects are forced upwards. There’s something hilarious about these frantic little spinners, and the world would be less magical without them. The Great Salt Lake is the most important stopping point for the species. And while I have severe misgivings about the administration in charge while this listing decision is taking place, I still have hopes that they can be unwitting little heroes in a fight to save the world.

–

We also watched Sense and Sensibility, which I had not seen before and found to be wonderful. I have had to face the twin facts that based on the excellence of the film adaptations I’ve seen, Jane Austen must be one of our finest writers. And I have never read one of her novels. As I mentioned at the top of this post, I plan to use my social-media/podcast/streaming tv show free time to remedy that sevenfold this month. The 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie is Kristin’s favorite, so I’ve probably seen it a dozen times. While I consider the film more or less perfect, I’m enjoying the additional nuance of the book so far. Though I’m halfway through and feel like most of the things that happen in the movie have happened already so I have no idea what comes next. Maybe a big sea battle? I’ll keep you posted.

Albums I listened to include:

The Firewatcher’s Daughter, Brandi Carlile

Stay Gold, First Aid Kit

Deltron 3030, S/T

The Bouncing Souls, Hopeless Romantic

Weyes Blood, Titanic Rising

For dinner I made my (locally) famous fried chicken sandwiches, the recipe to which I am including below. I call these Double Marinated, Double Battered Chicken Sandwiches or Fried Chicken Sandwich Squared. They are adapted from two recipes, one from the unfortunately titled “Cook Like a Man” cookbook published by Esquire, the other from the Blue Apron cookbook. Each recipe calls for a marinade, and once when shifting gears halfway through, I ended up using both. They turned out so good I’ve been afraid to experiment further and somewhere in the process ruin the magic. The night before, I brine the chicken in a peppery Coca Cola based brine, then in the morning drop the brined breasts into a buttermilk and cayenne marinade until it’s frying time. To ensure that the batter doesn’t slide off, be careful to let the oil return to 350 degrees each time between batches.

You can find the recipe and others at my newsletter here.

Note: the best place to get this post is to sign up for my weekly newsletter here. There you get extras like recipes, contributions from guests, and other fun treats

Almost by definition this blog/newsletter/self-imposed prison has been about grappling with an internet environment that is no longer working for me. It started last year around this time with a post I made on threads, which is here for posterity:

You never know how something like this will do when put out there. On the one hand it seems so easy. Just one day a week without Phone? Without Podcast? 24 hours without Notifications? It was going to be hard for me personally, but I was ready to be laughed at for proposing something so minor. It went pretty viral both on Threads and Instagram and resonated with a lot of people, which was an indication that this is a bigger problem than most of us probably were admitting to ourselves.

Given the way 2025 shook out, one may humbly call this prophetic. The signals were there, but I don’t know if at the time we knew that social media platforms would absolutely betray every shred of goodwill they built, starting by doing things like donating millions to the current president’s inauguration fund and ending with the wholesale embrace of the technology that will almost inevitably make them useless. In retrospect it should have been obvious. If there’s one thing the tech industry does best, it’s build something nice and then systematically destroy it. Give yourself a pat on the back, Howie.

Today I see a lot of people talking about how to make 2026 more analog and I believe my experience gives me a smidge of head start in the fight against the bowl cut billionaires and their sad little clankers. I would never call myself a nascent guru but if someone else called me that I’d have no choice but say “well I guess I’m a guru now.” It’s a heady responsibility so I will promise you two things right now: yes I may invest in a heavy robe, no there will not be any weird sex stuff.

That’s plenty of intro so let’s talk about some of the things I’ve learned in one year of Log Cabin Sundays (™ ™ ™):

It’s liberating not to be tracked by billionaires.

My first Sunday of the year I went on a ranging walkabout for 2 hours. Nobody knew where I was, because all I had on my person was an automatic watch. I kind of wished I’d had a wallet to stop and get a Gatorade but that was a lesson learned. In that time, no app knew how many steps I took or if I’d filled out my exercise rings for that day. In spite of this I still got stronger. No satellite knew where I was, and I wasn’t training any map making models. I like having secrets from Zuck. We should try to have more of those.

I wasn’t as bored as I thought I would be.

Embarking on this journey I had a lot of big ideas. I would get back into knitting and get really good at it. I would beat all the Castlevania games I wasn’t good enough as a kid to finish. I would do so many puzzles. In fact, all I needed was books. Many Sundays this year I would wake up, put on a record, and plan the week’s dinners. Then I’d clean the kitchen to another record and sit down to read. We’d go for a walk usually, or I would go on a long hike. I’d make a more complicated than usual dinner, clean the kitchen again, and then read or watch an old movie. I’m reminded that I spent all of my childhood with roughly these same options available to me and was plenty entertained. How did I get to a point where it wasn’t enough?

I destroyed my reading goal.

I had set the ambitious for me goal to read 40 books, but thanks to many a Log Cabin Sunday resulting in me devouring one cover to cover and maybe even starting a second, I’ve read 56 (hopefully 57 by the time of this reading). I have been a big reader my whole life but hadn’t realized how often I stop reading to look at my phone until it wasn’t an option. I was reading more deliberately and retaining more.

I’ve fallen back in love with music

If you’ve been following me on social media you’ve probably watched as we got a record player as a Christmas gift a few years ago for our kids and then I subsequently got completely absorbed in it. I talked about this in a recent post so I won’t belabor it, but as skeptical as I was about the medium, it has been ultimately great for me. Listening to albums start to finish was something that I hadn’t been doing since I was in high school, and more recently most of my listening time has been podcasts. This is no offense to the people I know who make thoughtful, informative podcasts, but most of the ones I was listening to were a complete waste of time. Because I listened primarily while doing other tasks like my job and housework, I couldn’t have something important that I would miss, so I listened to a lot of the chatter type shows. I think this is an ADHD thing, body-doubling. I could focus better if I felt like I had some friends hanging around with my talking about football or Dungeons and Dragons or whatever while we worked.

I know it sounds goofy if you haven’t done it for a while, but the physical act of removing a record (or CD or tape or whatever) from a sleeve and looking at the lyrics while it played genuinely makes a difference. I like that music has become something I sit and focus on and think about in a way I never did before. Even when listening to streaming music on the train or while exercising I listen to albums start to finish in the order the artist intended. I’ll still put on a playlist of feel-good bangers sometimes when I’m sad, but even then it’s as a jumping off point to get back to album listening.

It’s helping with discipline in general

I don’t know if I’ve talked about this on the newsletter/blog/personal prison but the birthday before my last one I had a couple of wake-up calls regarding my physical fitness. I had gained about 35 pounds in the years after leaving field work, and it was taking a toll on my ability to do the things I want to. I was also being prescribed increasingly strong medications to manage my kidney disease and was getting really tired on hikes. Maybe the most distressing thing was going to the rec center with my nieces and nephew and not being able to make it to the top of the climbing wall. This in particular distressed me so much because I was once an OK climber. This won’t mean a lot to most of you, but I was leading 5.10s. You don’t need to know what that means other than it’s a far cry from failing on the pool climbing wall easily ascended by any 9 year old.

I’m not a behavioral scientist, but I do think that discipline is a muscle, and the more you work it the stronger it gets. Even a weekly experiment of leaving the thing I’m perhaps more addicted to than anything else on earth on my night stand for 24 hour works that muscle, and I’m seeing results in my regular life. I’ve lost all 35 of those pounds and am starting to add more weight in muscle. I dropped one whole blood pressure medication, and am taking half of the other. I will even tell myself sometimes if I can put down Phone and take a break from Podcast, then I can do the gym today even if I’m tired or sad or (often) both. And wouldn’t you know it, I feel better having done it.

An anecdote to wrap it up:

This last Log Cabin Sunday was so lovely. We went for a walk to our town’s beaver dam and birded. We watched Flight of the Navigator. I listened to Radiohead’s The Bends. On Monday morning I looked at my phone like it was a time bomb. It took me an hour just to open it and start getting caught up on social media, and instantly I was getting my feelings hurt. I’d made a couple of mildly controversial posts on Saturday and woke to people being angry and mean. I know that other people experience many, many times the vitriol I do online (especially if they’re women, marginalized people, and the many intersections within) but I was kind of appalled. Why am I doing this to myself? Even when I go out of my way to try to consider every angle of nuance I can, I’m still misunderstood. And sometimes mocked. Why am I looking at this device?

As the day progressed, I was able to check social media as usual and just roll my eyes at the crappy stuff people say seemingly without thinking about how a real human will read those words. I noticed this more or less as it happened and had a realization that the Monday morning person was the right one. I shouldn’t be desensitized because people shouldn’t treat each other like this. We usually don’t talk to each other like that in person, even when we disagree. If someone does, I would simply leave or disengage. But with Phone, I not only invite it but openly court it.

Where does this leave us all as we stare down the barrel of a 2026 that will almost certainly bring more of the things that have made our lives–perhaps for the first time in my lifetime at least–actively and progressively more hostile? Boy that’s a tough one and I sure do hope you have some ideas in addition to mine, but here are a few I’ve come up with, many of which I’ve talked about this year:

Reconnect with something you loved pre-internet if you’re old like me, or something you once loved doing that didn’t require it. A few years ago I got back into yo-yo, which has been a lot of fun. And I started taking a pottery class, which I liked in high school but only took one semester of because of a bully. There’s a million of these. It could be skateboarding or roller skating or even something that doesn’t involve the word “skate” at all. Pick up your clarinet again. Reacquaint yourself with watercolor. Let yourself be bad at it. This part is key because if you’re like me, you were probably told in high school that if you weren’t the best in your class at the thing, you should probably quit. That voice was wrong; don’t listen to it anymore. Even I, someone demonstrably just a baby beginner at pottery, was able to make a few ceramic pieces that I was proud to give away.

Get comfortable with quiet. I had a realization a few Sundays ago that even records were a distraction sometimes when I needed to be alone with my thoughts. I cooked an elaborate meal with no background music and just focused on making my movements as efficient as I could. I took pleasure in how easily many cooking tasks flowed that I had once struggled with. Sometimes the thoughts aren’t very good ones, which is probably why we drowned them out with podcasts and tunes. Those thoughts, I’m afraid to say, are the ones we need the most to work out.

Participate in real life. This year I joined our library board. We don’t do very much. We meet every couple of months and approve minutes and someone reports on how the library is doing and we review the policies. But it feels good to see the tangible results having such a great library has on my community. I also met with a city council member about ways we could improve ecosystems for pollinators, birds, and other wildlife in my city. Volunteer, form a local working group to daylight your stream, plant some pollinator plants. Be with other people. AI isn’t going to fool you if you aren’t looking at a screen.

Assess all the things that are taking up your time and if they’re still worth it. This year I over-committed to you all. I kept adding new ways I was going to fight the system. A newsletter, a physical zine, stickers, mailing pottery (it’s very expensive to do this whoa). I wrote a book proposal. I wanted to do more with Patreon and Substack. I keep making more videos on Instagram, which by my accounting has resulted somehow in me having fewer followers at the end of 2026 than I did at the beginning. Perhaps I would be in better shape on social media if I had never posted a thing.

I’m going to be more judicious about what I spend my time and energy on this year and I need to be more honest with myself about what being a social media creator is doing to my mental health. Sometimes it feels like I can’t walk away from this platform I’ve built, something that many people dream about having. And there was a period in there where it was just so much fun. I imagine that’s what it feels like sometimes to break up with a long-term relationship; there were good times, but the good times seem fewer and farther apart. One way you can stick around way too long is with the lingering: What if they get good again? The better question sometimes is: What if they don’t? How much longer can you keep this up?

I like you all too much to simply disappear, and I will stick with this weekly (mostly) report and trying to figure out a way to get as many of you as I can into a space where we don’t depend on the increasingly weird, increasingly wealthy, increasingly depraved robber baron class to maintain our friendship. If you’ve got ideas, I’d love to hear them.

Last year I made a startling discovery. I started seeing posts on social media about women in committed relationships waking up on Christmas morning to an empty stocking. “The most useless decoration,” one called it. I’m not talking about moms who don’t put one out because in their family they decided that stockings were just for kids. Nor the ones who, when they first got together with their partner there was a talk about stockings and a decision not to hang them. Nope. In these situations a stocking was hung with care with hopes that St. Nicholas (or his surrogate) soon would be there. Nobody was.

After seeing these posts I made my own that year on Tik Tok wherein I said that it was discouraging to hear this and gave some basic stocking stuffing tips. It became a modest success with twenty thousand views. There were 200 comments, many lamenting that the men in these women’s lives—some of whom were married for decades—never once filled their stockings. So this year I made a follow-up with more advice and it blew up. At the time of this writing it has been viewed 850,000 times. There are almost 5,000 comments and it’s been shared 6,000 times. I hit a nerve and for a lot of people, it hurt.

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The absolute majority of these comments, representing thousands of women, confirms my suspicion: men in general aren’t filling stockings on Christmas Eve. And worse, many of them aren’t even giving gifts under the tree. Some women said that in decades of marriage they could count the gifts they received for any holiday or birthday on one hand. If ever.

Dudes. There is a lot going on in the world right now. It doesn’t matter if you read this today, or if you discover this on an ancient smartphone thousands of years from now and somehow decide to read it (hello cool alien archaeologists, I’m sorry we messed things up so bad but I hope you found some of our recipes and like them), there’s probably a lot going on right now for you too. And in spite of that, or maybe even because of that, we need to do better. Because this isn’t just about stockings.

Many pages of literature have been devoted to the unsung heroes that women in straight relationships are while making Christmas work. Especially when there are kids. I won’t list them all but there’s a great article about it here. In spite of leaps forward for gender equality, kin-keeping is still vastly considered women’s work. Throughout the year these includes things like tracking birthdays, sending cards, remembering when all the parties are, and reaching out to members of not just their own family but that of their husbands and boyfriends. This makes the winter holidays especially taxing. “For women who are already stretched thin during the holidays, as so many of these activities converge at once,” Dawn O. Braithwaite of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is quoted, “kinkeepers would likely be stretched even more.”

That’s not fair and if we’re going to make the lives of the women we ostensibly love easier, a big step would be reducing their holiday workload. So many of the women in my comments have grown to hate Christmas—a holiday they once loved—because of the work it entails, the expectations from their families that every year be magical, and maybe worst of all a complete lack of reciprocity vis-a-vis said holiday magic.

So when I brought up stocking stuffers, it unleashed a lot of pent-up frustration. The responses from the stocking-deprived could be sorted into a few categories:

The bitter, angry, or resigned

They’ve put out a stocking every year for nought. Some just ended up not putting theirs out at all. When kids arrived and learned about Christmas traditions, they wondered why Mom was the only one without, and these moms started filling their own just so the kids stopped asking awkward questions. Presumably there’s a father blithely sipping his coffee during this discussion, but perhaps he is too absorbed in yet another book about World War II to process it.

The jubilant exes

These are women who proudly referred to their thoughtless paramours in the past-tense. Some had replaced them with a considerate gift-giver upgrade, some happily filled their own. Some swapped stockings with a close friend, a sister, or filled their own with treats and little gifts. A handful of single mothers had taught their young sons to fill their stocking for them. Cycle-breaking heroes the lot of them.

The copers

These women made excuses for their men. Frankly I don’t have a lot of patience for this. “He mows the lawn, though.” OK? That’s once a week, not even all year if you live somewhere temperate. You probably do a million laundry loads in that time and still manage to remember birthdays. Next. “How is he supposed to know unless I tell him?” Can you imagine if that attitude carried over to the workplace? Nobody gets hired if they need to be given a list every single day of the tasks they need to do. Show some initiative. And worst of all, “gift-giving isn’t his love language.” Ma’am. I respectfully ask this questions: who cares?

I’ll admit to getting prickly at the concept of “love languages.” It’s bothered me for a long time and only recently did I discover that there’s no research supporting the concept. Just some guy made them up. Not a researcher or an expert, but a Baptist pastor who counseled couples. Let me be on the record that I don’t like the idea of religious leaders without any formal training giving therapist-adjacent advice. It’s setting everyone up for failure.

Not that the Love Language book is a failure, at least not financially. I don’t mind the idea at its core, I just disagree with any one person being easily sorted into one basket. Or that there’s just five said baskets. I especially don’t like the idea of a “primary love language.” But clearly it resonates. People have found usefulness in it and I don’t want to take that away from anyone.

What I would like to point out is that there’s too much emphasis on what someone’s giving love language is and not enough on the receiving end. It feels like the whole concept has been weaponized as an excuse.

A short play:

“When I grew up, my parents gave me a stocking every year. It was filled with treats, inexpensive gifts, a card, and there was always an orange in the toe. I’d love it if we could do that.”

“Oooh that sounds so nice but my love language is acts of service, unforch. So I’m going to mow the lawn which also just happens to bring me a lot of satisfaction but it’s for you I promise. Though later we can do my other one, physical touch, for a while.”

“Um OK right, and I appreciate that, but what I’m saying is that stockings were an important part of my holiday season and oh the mower is going you can’t hear me”

CURTAINS. Jeers from the audience. One woman faints. A man is escorted from the theater, apoplectic. “NOT ALL MEN,” he screams. He is unceremoniously deposited on the curb by burly security guards. “Not all men, no. But certainly you.”

Way more compelling to me than love languages is the Gottman Institute concept of relationship “bids.” Instead of sometimes broad big declarations of love that we see in movies, good relationships are built on thousands of small bids to one another and how they are reciprocated. According to researcher John Gottman, these can be responded to in three ways:

1. Turning towards (acknowledging the bid)

2. Turning away (ignoring or missing the bid)

3. Turning against (rejecting the bid in an argumentative or belligerent way)

Successful relationships can be predicted based on how many “turn towards” reactions there are compared to how many times the response is a “turn away” or especially “turn against.”

A common example of a bid is if one of you sees a new bird at the feeder and calls out to the other to come see. It seems like a minor thing, but the number of times when you’re busy or stressed and not particularly interested in the bird and either ignore or (heaven forbid) scoff at the bid, the more likely you are to erode the affection your partner has for you.

In either framing that’s what a stocking hung over the literal or digital fireplace represents. A bid for affection, or a receptacle for a love language deposit. And oh my gosh why can’t I talk about any of this without every third thing sounding like some kind of euphemism? Definitely there’s a better way to put that second one. Help me out.

Anyway sure this all sounds nice. But why the stocking, though? Why does it matter? There are lots of Christmas traditions, what makes this one special? I’m dying to tell you. It’s why I wrote this whole thing.

Gift-giving is an art, and like all arts, it’s hard at first. It takes practice. It gets even more complicated in committed relationships with things like shared finances. If money is tight, even a dedicated gift-giver can mess up and spend family resources on a gift that falls flat. The stakes are a little higher if the opportunity cost of a miss is that there’s less money for food. Some of this pressure can be relieved by having separate accounts for fun money that can be spent without having to check in with one another, both on yourself and on each other. It makes it more meaningful if there’s a bit of personal sacrifice.

But either way I understand why someone would rather just buy themselves the thing they want, hand it to their sitcom-clueless husband, and say “wrap this.” In partnerships where there is a big under-the-tree present, it’s probably pretty normal to have a pretty good idea about what’s under there. Or at least that’s been narrowed down to be one of a handful of things on a curated online shopping wish list. Pulling off a successful surprise on a once-a-year gift is not for amateurs.

That’s where the stocking shines. The stakes are low and the payoffs can be great. Good gift-giving means seeing and knowing the person you care about. Filling a sock with little reminders say that you know who you married, enjoy her, and celebrate what she celebrates. Pins, stickers, and earrings of her favorite TV show or music artist say that you’ve been listening when she talks. Favorite treats say you know what she likes. And some refills of her favorite lipsticks and perfumes say you like how she looks and smells when you go somewhere nice. An orange in the toe just like her parents did for her says you recognize that tradition matters. And as opposed to the one time at-bat you get for a big gift under the tree if you miss on one thing, there’s a lot more chances to knock it out of the park.

Someone told me that stockings are silly. That they’re for kids. But so is all of Christmas. We bring trees into our houses. We eat too many sweets. We force small children to sit on an elderly stranger’s lap and laugh at them when they cry. We pretend to like peppermint. We listen to the same seven songs for a month and a half. We hang poisonous plants from the ceiling and try to make people kiss under it. In that context putting some Reese’s peanut butter cups in the shape of little conifers in a sock and saying “here, I love you” is pretty reasonable.

All I’m saying is give it a try. Even if you’ve never done it before. If your partner has given up on even putting one up it’s not too late. Dig it out and surprise them. Or get her a whole new one. It’s going to go well. She, he, they? They’ll cry. I’m so confident about this.

I’ve not been here in this memo for very long and already I’m falling a bit short of what I promised. Hopefully this provides some explanation.

I do have some submissions to review and some fun things on the way still but this is going to be another lean issue. Thank you for being here.

I don’t talk about my dreams much because I try to talk about things I myself would be interested in hearing about and I never, ever care about whatever random information dump the hose of your brain leaked into the basement den of your subconscious. But last night my dreams were just too on the nose to ignore. In my slumber I found myself in college again and taking my juggling final. I was struggling to juggle outside of my normal comfort zone, which is three balls or pins for a little bit. In the final I was expected to keep many objects of different sizes and shapes aloft and was failing. I was failing in front of an audience.

This week was not bad, exactly, but it was not easy. It started last Monday with a bike crash. I slipped on some wet leaves, a victim of autumnal physics. It seemed minor at first with only a moderate lingering shoulder pain, and by the time I was riding home I had forgotten all about it until my back bike tire went flat about halfway to the train station. It was unfixable in the field so I walked my bike the remaining three miles and got home an hour later than usual. I refused to let this be an auspicious beginning to the week or any kind of omen but it feels like it decided to be that anyway.

On Wednesday I gave a presentation at Utah State University’s Quinney College of Natural Resources, which is where I graduated from. This may not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed me on social media for more than–like–two days, but I overthought it. In retrospect it seems almost absurdly obvious that they wanted me to talk about wildlife crossings. That’s what the latter half of my career has been focused on, and it’s something that has been increasingly visible in the natural resources world. Every video my agency posts about wildlife crossings goes mega-viral on social media, and it has brought us worldwide attention. I imagine if you googled me it would be the first three results at least.

This is a presentation that I have given so many times that I could have done it with little preparation and with slides I already have prepared. The hour of time that I was so intimidated to fill would have flown by. It’s one of the few subjects on earth that I can talk about without notes for, roughly, the rest of time until the heat death of the universe.

Instead I prepared a retrospective of my career and a metaphor about how we all have very different pathways to work. Useful, I hope, but why me? Why did I instead spend about ten hours preparing a talk that nobody asked me to? Why did I think that I was being invited as, like, a notable alumnus and not just another seminar guest presenting research and expertise? I honestly don’t know. I don’t know why my brain works this way.

The day of the presentation was quite fun and pleasant. I got to visit Utah State’s beaver bunkhouse, which I’ve wanted to see since I found out about it maybe 5 years ago. And luck would have it there were actually beavers there, which is unlikely given how late in the season we are. After hanging out with three beaver kits I had the free time to drive up Logan Canyon and look at some famous beaver dams up there. It was a really stunning morning.

Then I had lunch with some students and answered questions and gave advice about careers, and was feeling pretty all-around good about everything. I thought I’d have some free time in between lunch and my presentation, but instead my schedule was filled with talking with some professors. This is when I realized I had made a tactical error. All anyone wanted to talk with me about was wildlife crossings. Which, again, of course they did. That’s the thing I’m known for and the most novel thing I could possibly talk about. I am at least one of the experts on this in the state. At this point if I did have some free time, I would have scrapped and pivoted the whole thing. But I didn’t, so I couldn’t.

I know that I’m overthinking this, too. My presentation went fine. And I think there were valuable things I talked about. I wanted to reflect on some things I wish I knew when I was a student. People laughed at my jokes. I hope it was worthwhile for the people who attended. I did adapt somewhat and spent the last 10 minutes or so speed-running the most frequently asked questions about wildlife crossings. When I asked for questions, of course all anyone wanted to talk about was that. Because that’s why they invited me.

It’s fine. Nobody was hurt and everyone was nice. This kind of thing makes me spiral, though. I’ve done this my whole life: misunderstood a request or instruction and then spent way too much time going down a path that nobody wanted me to go down. Speaking of careers, this has been damaging to my own more times than I care to think about. I can think of so many times that I’ve done almost this exact thing and I still haven’t found a strategy to mitigate it.

So anyway, it was hard to dwell on too much because the next morning I had a root canal. Here at Howie’s Everything Club on top of everything else it’s been 2:30 for two weeks now (tooth-hurty). I foolishly thought I would be able to work afterwards and instead I just laid in bed counting the minutes until I could take tylenol again. And the next day after that I put on a resume workshop at a different local university. Even though it was the evening, this also occurred at 2:30 (tooth-hurty). Still it was was fun and satisfying and reminds me that one of the many issues I have with the way American society has evolved is that we have so few opportunities to interact with people from different generations.

Given the current news cycle regarding horrifying predators in every level of power and government, I understand why we need to be cautious when introducing young people to the worlds of middle-aged men and vice-versa. I understand why, when I’m volunteering at the domestic violence shelter and watching children, I am watched closely. I wouldn’t have it any other way. That all being said, I think it’s the result of a consistent and systematic failure to hold anyone accountable for blatant abuse. In the absence of institutional justice, we find ourselves in a place of distrust and public opinion court. That all makes sense. But because people (mostly men) who are in power tend to abuse that power, we are robbing our young people of access to wisdom and experience and robbing us middle-aged folks from finding out about good new music.

In my two structured but casual conversations with groups of young students this week, it was deeply fulfilling to be able to just hang out with people full of hope and enthusiasm. We still had a lot in common; they liked my Avatar the Last Airbender hat and I am playing some of the same video games they are. I also enjoyed my time speaking with professors from a generation older than me and picking their brains a little about things we can work together on in the future. A few weeks ago I gave a presentation about wildlife crossings to a group of middle-schoolers, and let me tell you their questions were good. They held my feet to the fire and their follow-ups were insightful.

Aside from very real issues with power dynamics that rightly require extra safety measures, I think generational differences are completely exaggerated. I can make my 95 year old grandma laugh and I can have very serious conversations about Marvel lore with a 15-year-old while volunteering as a sexual assault victim advocate. I can spend a perfectly pleasant hour drawing sonic the hedgehog alongside a 6-year-old while they chatter about Five Nights at Freddy’s. This may be the conspiracy theorist in me, but I think the generational difference obsession is rooted in the same place as all the rest of the ways we’re prevented from relating to each other: the more we are separated, the less we can see how similar we are and cooperate. That’s how a tiny handful of people can maintain power and hoard resources to the detriment of all the rest of us.

You have more in common with your neighbor than you do someone you interact with online. Even if you disagree about some things. And you’re more powerful when united with someone in your community than you are agreeing with strangers in a comment section. My challenge this week for you is to find safe ways to interact in real life with people older and younger than you. Join a knitting group, volunteer at an assisted living. Find non-profits with healthy professional boundaries (and background checks) in place and see if you can help out. If nothing else, it will help you forget for a minute how many pins you have in the air.

I’m reminded that I didn’t do a media round-up last week (or any of the log cabin sundays reporting) because of the absolute self-imposed crushing stress of overpreparing for a presentation I didn’t need to overprepare for. Luckily I wrote things down so here’s two weeks worth of info.

We hit a stash of great condition classical records at the thrift store that all have handwritten notes on them, including what we guess are all the dates they were listened to and the listener’s favorite tracks. We’re fascinated with this person. Were they a music teacher? Just an enthusiast? We couldn’t buy all of them because there are dozens, but we did end up with maybe 12 between two trips. It was clearly treasured by someone and I’m glad at least a bit of it will stay together. Anyway, we’ve been listening to a lot of it while reading T. Kingfisher books by the artificial fire.

Last week we listened to

Ashkenazy in Concert, Chopin

The Faint, Danse Macabre

Orville Peck, Bronco

Marty Robbins, Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs

Soccer Mommy, Sometimes, Forever

We watched: Tombstone. It still rips

I read most of The Angel of Indian Lake, by Stephen Graham Jones

This week it was a bunch of classical albums and I don’t remember which

Finished The Angel of Indian Lake

And started and finished What Stalks the Deep, by T. Kingfisher

I did watch a little football again and got bored

I had a great real life week and especially weekend, which is good because my posting morale has been kind of in the pits this week. Confidence for the persona Howie who performs on the internet as a character who believes his presence is valued is at perhaps an all-time low. I’m in one of those phases where not only do I not feel like creating content, but I don’t actually recognize the version of me that did. He really had all the audacity, didn’t he?

Matt, though, had a lot of fun. Out of the sheer stubbornness you sometimes see online as I try and fail at endeavor after endeavor, we have decided that we are going to single-handedly (double-handedly because there are two of us?) prevent the end of trick or treating on our street as our neighborhood ages. This entails setting up in the driveway with a firepit and a relatively elaborate welcome space for kids. This is the second year and it’s working OK. People will sometimes stop while driving by just for their kids to stop at our house before piling back into the minivan. Because we don’t want leftovers, it works out well for the teens especially. Because they tend to come towards the end of the night, we tell them to take so much. I love seeing them still dressing up and still going outside and walking around in their neighborhood and they’re unfailingly polite and pleasant.

The following day my parents came to visit, we ate a lot of good food, and then later that night I met up with old friends and saw my favorite band live. While the show was sold out, I don’t encounter a lot of AFI fans in my day to day life. Chances are that you, the reader, are at best vaguely aware of who they are. Come along with me on a journey anyway, while imagining this is your favorite artist.

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of concerts, and lately I’ve noticed that people in the crowd will have the Setlist website up so they can see the whole show’s songs ahead of time. Most of the time, these are pretty spot-on as predictors of what you’re going to get. Usually there may be one or two songs that get rotated in and out to make it unique but the show is built around a pretty tight schedule of pyrotechnics and video or whatever. When I realized this it was kind of a disappointment. There are unfortunately a lot of things like this, where as an adult you see a peek behind the curtain and realize that the world is not as bespoke as you thought. When I was a teen watching live concerts the audience never knew what was coming next and every song was a surprise. The next one they played could be literally anything and the show felt just for you and collectively losing your mind when the first notes ring out and you all realize what song it is can’t be replicated.

That’s what happens at an AFI show. This tour they have played 81 songs so far, with an average of 17 songs per show. I know this because there’s a person on Reddit who has been managing a spreadsheet. This is a sickness I profoundly relate to. At the SLC show we got a cut so deep the last time it had been played live was 26 years ago. I like to cram for concerts so that I know as many of the songs they play as possible, so for comparison’s sake usually these cram playlists are an hour and a half long. The AFI one is 5, and still can’t cover the whole thing because every ding-dang show they play something that nobody thought they would. It’s not just AFI. I’m going to see Nine Inch Nails in the spring and it’s a different show every night too. And of course it’s a common jam band thing. I believe Phish once played an entire tour where they didn’t repeat a song once. But the difference here is that this is good music.

Maybe it’s a generation thing, like me hanging on with a death-grip to the whimsy of Halloween in spite of sensationalist headlines, trunk-or-treating, or teens worrying that their peers (or neighbors) will make fun of them for being too old to put on a costume and greet strangers in exchange for an eventual pillowcase full of candy. I remember being a little too old for trick-or-treating and doing it anyway. I’m grateful for my kind neighbors who saw us for who we were: kids who weren’t ready to grow up just yet. I don’t know or pal around with any members of AFI (yet), so I don’t know their motivations. But I like to think that they also remember being kids in a confusing world and what it was like to see a favorite band and not know what they’ll play next.

I’m not much of a dancer and I’m even less of a singer, but Saturday night I sang, and I danced. I screamed when they started the first few bars of a song I’d hoped to hear, but wasn’t sure I would. There’s a lot of sucky stuff going on, so an hour and a half of having that drowned out by banger after banger was as welcome a thing as I could have hoped for. I did make a playlist of the show I saw and I will listen to it when I’m sad, which is a lot these days. And because I’m 46, it took an entire Sunday afterwards to recover.

That’s your segue into the Log Cabin Sunday report, which I’m pleased to report was very relaxing. Because we flurry-cleaned on Saturday for visitors, it only took a bit of maintenance to be ready for the week. I napped, went for a walk, read a whole book, listened to a lot of records, and made the recipe you’ll find in this newsletter. Because of the time change, the day extended like my cats making an absolute meal out of a stretch in a sunbeam. This was the feeling I’ve been seeking. A day that feels long, with plenty of time to do anything and big gaps in between for quiet thinking. I unfortunately have to continue to admit that quitting football watching is the best thing I’ve done this year. Much of the latter half of my life has been addition by subtraction, or improving my life by removing the things from it that don’t work anymore. I guess this may be one more of those.

For the Log Cabin Sunday media wrap up:

Listened to Dua Lipa, Future Nostalgia

Mozart something (I can’t remember what it was called but it was a woodwind 8-piece and was quite lovely)

The Faint, Fasciination

Boston, Don’t Look Back

Fleetwood Mac, S/T

Elton John, Greatest Hits

Read: Stephen Graham Jones, Don’t Fear the Reaper

Social Media Roundup:
I didn’t do any social media because of the sads