Hung Out To Dry

When our twenty-year-old dryer punked out last month, I faced something of a conundrum.

On the one hand, I struggled for a bit with the idea that we even needed a dryer.  Our unfinished laundry room already had multiple clotheslines stretched under the ceiling, with enough room for nearly a week's worth of washing.  It takes a full day to get things dry that way, but it does work.

For one weekly wash, and for the next, that was how I rolled, and it was unsurprisingly effective.  Of course, some things...like towels, for pointed instance...dried into hard boards, all of the fluffy softness replaced with a faintly abrasive surface.  My jeans were similarly rigid.  Despite the Laconic appeal of such things, there's just no way my wife was going to tolerate towels so rough they'd annoy a desert mystic.

That, and I knew that once we got into summer, that area of the house gets quite humid, to the point of requiring a dehuey to keep the space from becoming unbearably musty.  Eventually, stuff wouldn't dry down there.

So a dryer it was.  The challenge, though, was finding a dryer that was just a dryer.  Meaning, it tumbles clothes and blows dry, heated air through them as they tumble, and that's it.  Dryers really don't need to do anything else.

But almost every dryer out there was farkled out the wazoo.  Meaning, they were stuffed full of utterly pointless gimcrackery.  WiFi enabled and with downloadable app connectivity, with chipsets and control screens and dozens of other utterly irrelevant and pricey features.  I could check on my dryer anywhere on the planet!  Why would I want to do so?  What's the use-case for such a thing?  Gosh, say the designers, don't worry your pretty little head about that. 

Almost all dryers were like this.  I found one that wasn't, one that was...as best I could tell...simply a rebadged version of the same decades-old unit that had finally given up the ghost.  No electronic controls, just knobs.  All mechanical.  There we go.  Just what I need.

But there was a challenge:  It wasn't in stock most places.  There were plenty of the overpriced doohickey-laden critters, all of which were selling for hundreds...and in some cases, over a thousand...more.  The most simple, most affordable, functional dryer?  Most places, it was backordered.  

Meaning, people want it.  Every one they make, people buy.  I found one, but it took time.

And here, I see something of a market failure.  Because profit maximization often requires that a manufacturer manufacture not just products, but demand.  And all one wants in an appliance is that it does its job.

Or so I'd think, but I suppose I'm peculiar.  Perhaps we'd all rather pay more for irrelevant features, pointless connectivity, and counterproductive overcomplication.  Perhaps we prefer having our actual needs ignored, and replaced with synthetic desires.

Perhaps we enjoy being hung out to dry. 

On the Partisan Mind

Late last week, I woke early and puttered into southeast DC on my scooter.  I was headed to a formerly industrial area near the DC Navy Yard, where I planned to spend a day amongst members of a different Jesus tribe.

My own tribe is rather particular.  I'm a cradle Presbyterian, the child of a storied old church in downtown Washington.  It's the church of Lincoln, of Eisenhower.  The pastor who baptized me, and who was a regular guest at my house?  He preached the sermon that helped put the words "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.  Let me note, because history warps weird: that same pastor also marched with Dr. King in Selma, and fiercely opposed our misbegotten war in Vietnam.  

I've been part of the PC(USA) since before the PC(USA) was the PC(USA), and after years of conservative flight, we're now a very uniformly progressive gathering. 

The purpose of my day last week was to attend something called The After Party.  There, I intended to listen to the voices of evangelicals lamenting the toxic direction of American political discourse, and challenging how the partisan mind has seeped into the faith.  Two of the three primary speakers...Russell Moore and David French...have been vigorously outspoken about the poisonous impact of Trumpism on the Christian witness, and their presence was a significant draw.

It was, I will say, a very different experience than attending Presbyterian gatherings.  The event was held in the worship space of an evangelical congregation, which was...as such spaces tend to be...a sleek conversion of a former industrial warehouse.  The seating, theater-style.  The tech, stunningly sophisticated, with a board exceeding the width of my congregation's sanctuary, gimballed cameras, and a primary ultra HD screen that spanned the entire front wall.  To my oldline sensibilities, such spaces parse as functional rather than sacred, but one has to appreciate the depth of the functionality.  

So it didn't look like most progressive Christian events.  Meaning, pastel fabrics wantonly festooned everywhere, like someone set off a grenade in a Michaels.

The attendees were a diverse mix of races and genders, as evangelicals tend to be.  There were also plenty of folks in their twenties and thirties, which was...different.  The oldline, progressive as it has become, remains remarkably and increasingly old.

It was a vigorous, intellectually bracing, remarkably grace-filled day of engagement.

I'm not sure, from my conversations and observations, if there was another mainline liberal in attendance.  

This got me to thinking about the partisan mind and progressivism.  

In this gathering, at least as my frank and remarkably civil conversations at table about queer folk and inclusion were concerned, I felt very liberal.  In mainline gatherings, I almost invariably feel like a conservative.  Decades of reimagining and reframing and deconstructing have created discourse that...to my soul...often wanders from the heart of the narrative.  Justice is a worthy fruit of the Gospel, but when it supplants grace as our purpose, we are no longer telling the same tale.

There is a point, without question, when the partisan mind...the mind that divides, that is motivated by hatred and resentment, that embraces the useful falsehood...infects any movement.  This is true of left and right.  If we understand that Christian faith is not and cannot be a creature of the saeculum, that disciples of Jesus are committed to the Gospel first and foremost, then there are places where we set bounds against our partisanship for that highest principle.

Unlike the bat from Aesop's fable, which claimed allegiance to whatever party held power, the Christian witness is to affirm commonality wherever it can be found, but also to retain integrity of witness to our own tribe when partisan conviction subverts the call to grace and redemption.

The Unhomely House

I’ve got a slightly idiosyncratic sense of what the ideal home looks like. I know that American homes have, over my lifetime, grown considerably in size, as Americans themselves have grown considerably in size.

Back in 1969, when I was birthed, the average American home was roughly 1500 square feet of living space. As of 2022, that number was around 2300 square feet, down from a peak of just about 2500 in 2015.

One can, of course, get larger, sometimes absurdly larger, like a home that's on the market nearby.  It's in McLean, a wealthy Northern Virginia suburb, one bounded by the Potomac.  The closer to the river you get, the more expensive things get, and this is right on the river, all five acres, eight bedrooms, fifteen bathrooms, and thirty three thousand square feet of it. Yours for only thirty two million dollars, discounted from the original thirty nine million!  Such a bargain.

It’s the sort of house that realtors sell by commissioning bespoke videos to stir our champagne dreams. Shooting hoops alone in the indoor basketball court.  Wandering alone down staircases.  Standing alone in walk in closets larger than most New York apartments.  Drifting around richly in empty, immaculate room after room, none of which look lived in.

Honestly, this behemoth gives me the heebie jeebies.  It doesn't feel like a home. It feels like an abandoned museum. It feels as sterile as a mortuary, an anxiety-dream residence one wanders lost in.  

It'd feel...lonely.  It's faintly inhuman.

My general feeling about housing space is simple: I don’t ever want more home than I can clean and keep at least semi-presentable myself.  My understanding of presentable is rather more liberal than most other adults, I'll admit, but it's still a good metric.  

Can you imagine trying to clean 33,000 square feet of home?  Of course not. It'd be insane.  It is insane.

If it's more than you can manage yourself, it's more than you need.  

Of Vocabularies and the Hallowed

I've got another book coming out early next year.  To my great surprise, it's not either of the books I'd been working on recently.  THE YEARS DRAW NEAR, my half-finished manuscript on faith and aging in America?  Nope.  IN THE SHADOW OF HER MAJESTY, my two-thirds completed Cyberutopian Regency Action/Romance?  Uh uh.  

It's a book I first wrote back in 2015 and self-published for the devotional use of my little congregation.  THE PRAYER OF UNWANTING, as it's now called, recenters the Lord's Prayer as part of a personal prayer life.  As the prayer that Jesus explicitly taught, it pushes back against our tendency to approach the Creator with requests for power and prosperity.  It gets us out of our individual and collective solipsisms, which is kinda sorta a prerequisite for being a disciple of Jesus.

As nearly ten years had passed since I wrote the first draft, I had some significant reworking to do, which is why it's helpful to have a competent and thoughtful editor.  Dated references were removed or changed.  Flagrant errors of reasoning or continuity were corrected.

One of those reworkings was a little unexpected.  Ever since I was an undergrad majoring in religious studies at  the University of Virginia o-so-many-moons ago, my go-to Bible translation has been the New Revised Standard Version.  It was my jam during my M.Div. and D.Min. studies.  It's the translation in my pulpit, and in the pew-racks of my little church.  I've commended the HarperCollins NRSV Study Bible to numerous folks.

The NRSV was reworked in Twenty Twenty Two, and became the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.

Some of those changes were trivial, and many are entirely comprehensible.  But some of the updating seemed less a matter of improvements in linguistic scholarship and new textual resources, and more a matter of taste and nodding to contemporary culture.

Of more significance to my book on the Lord's Prayer: among the changes in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition was a rewording of the teaching of that prayer in the sermon on the Mount.   I had an entire chapter dedicated to reflecting on the underlying meaning of "hallowed be thy name," with a focus on the word "hallowed."  I'd used the NRSV for all scriptural quotations throughout the book, which presented something of a problem.

In both Matthew 6 and Luke 11, it no longer used the word "hallowed," replacing it with the more awkward phrasing "Let your name be revered as holy."   Clumsy though it might be, "be revered as holy" is a conceptually accurate effort to transpose the Greek Ἁγιασθήτω into English. It means the same thing, even if multiple words are used where once there was but one, so it's not a question of mucking with the meaning.  

Rather, I shall surmise, it's because the word "hallowed" is slightly archaic, something we don't say often in day-to-day conversation.  That's a point I reflect upon at length in the chapter, and a fair observation.  

But then again, it's part of the prayer as it's PRAYED IN THE LITURGIES OF ALMOST EVERY ENGLISH SPEAKING CHURCH IN THE WORLD...sorry, all caps got stuck there for a moment.  And there's just no way anyone could figure out the meaning of an uncommon English word they're unfamiliar with, after all.   Oy gevalt.

As it was, it blew a giant hole in that entire chapter.  I had a choice, then.  I could reconceptualize and rewrite it because the translation that I'd used had been changed to no evident purpose.  

Or I could simply change the translation I used.  

With some regret, I chose the latter.  For consistency, I then systematically updated all of the scripture references in my manuscript to the New International Version, which is a perfectly valid and scholarly translation.

Not a big deal, in this cut-and-paste era.  No harm, no foul, and I still use the NRSVue on regular occasion.

But it did get me to thinking:  If in our faith we called to live out a discrete culture that does not conform to the expectations of broken and fractious humanity...must our choice of language be axiomatically governed by that which ain't the Beloved Community? 

And why would we expect contemporary discourse to have words for that which is holy?

We have those words.  And learning unfamiliar words isn't a chore.  It's good for mind and soul.

China, America, and Climate

There are things about the American response to China that make little sense to me.

On the one hand, sure, they're not a republic.  I prefer the liberties of speech, movement, and action that are for now still my birthright as an American.  As frustrating as the squabulous ruckus of democratic process might be, there's still much to be said for the protection of individual liberties.  The forcible suppression of religion and ethnic minorities is morally unworthy.  The silencing of those who hold a society to account for injustices and corruption leads only to rot and failure.

Yet most of America's beef with China seems to be economic, which is simply absurd.  Sure, the Chinese are now a global manufacturing powerhouse, supplanting the vastly weakened American industrial base.  Sure, most of that capacity once belonged to us.  But why did that happen?

Remember in 1992, when the Chinese invaded America and took all of our factories by force?

Of course not.  China didn't steal our industry.  American CEOs did.  Wall Street did.  Eager to plump up profit margins and fatten their own absurd salaries, folks like Tim Cook at Apple simply shipped America's industrial might to China.  The Chinese weren't about to say no.  I mean, why would they?  Can you blame them?  For them, it was all win, because they're playing the long game.

I mean, we know they are.  Chinese leadership isn't thinking about the outrage du jour, third quarter profits, or fretting about vacillations in poll numbers.  I mean, why would they care about poll numbers?   Ahem. 

They're looking to what they feel will benefit China not just ten years from now, or twenty five years from now, but a hundred years from now.

Which is why it's instructive to look at how they're approaching the climate crisis, and engagement with renewable energy.  

We Americans are in a reactionary cycle, pushing back against electric cars and solar and wind.  I'll admit that electric cars are a silly solution.  I mean, sure, they're quiet and fast, but dude.  Efficiency, thy name ain't "car."  Buses and trains and a functioning public transportation infrastructure are exponentially more efficient and sustainable.  Back when America was rising to its mid-twentieth century economic height, that's how we got around.  It was at least a viable option, which it is not now in America.  

The opposition to solar, wind, and other renewables?  It's borderline psychotic, and an ideological dissonance.  If you can draw power from the sun that falls on your own land, why is this a bad thing?  If the wind that rustles through your trees can light your home, why would we have beef with that?  Why would we want less efficient bulbs and toilets?  And why are we so programmed to desire large, energy-hogging homes and cars?  Since when were thrift and ingenuity problems for conservatives?

Yet here we are.

The Chinese aren't on the same course.

The Chinese are building electric cars, sure.  But they're going all in on the whole thing.   Unfettered by legal constraints or...paradoxically...environmental regulations, they're building a vast high speed rail network.  They're turning their newfound industrial might to the mass production of solar panels in unprecedented quantities, so many that industrial concerns in the West are up in arms about anti-competitive practices.  It's a battle they've already won, as 80% of the world's solar is produced in China.  They're preparing for a harsher climate.  They're also preparing for the era when fossil fuel supplies are fading.

They're not competing with us.  At this point, we're not even playing the same game.  

Do certain Americans assume this is because they're "woke?"  They're Marxist, which is why I'd rather not live in China, but the CCP is Chinese first.  China is on many levels deeply conservative, which is why...after some naive initial missteps...the communist party there has survived.

They are preparing, with the vision of a culture that spans millennia, for a future that will come.

And we are not.  

The Gate

How does one create the most gracious and effective threshold for entrance into a community?

The adult ed class in my little church is reading our way through CALLED TO COMMUNITY, a thematically sorted collection of essays that explore what it means for Christians to journey in the faith together.  It's produced by PLOUGH, the publishing wing of the Bruderhof.  

The Bruderhof, if you don't know 'em, are radical Mennonite communists, and if you're a radical Mennonite communist, doing life together well isn't a tangential concern.  When you share everything in common, and expect every member to freely and wholly embrace that ethic, doing community badly means things get real bad real fast.  

The book presents a rich array of perspectives from across the theological gamut of Christian faith, but the focus remains consistent throughout: how do we do this Jesus thing together?  It's designed for a year long study, but I've condensed it into twelve weeks, which means that our conversations are both rich and dense.  We don't touch on every essay, or every concept within every essay.

This last Sunday, the discussion cracked along energetically, but as has been the case in all of my class preparation, there were things I'd prepared to discuss that we didn't get to.

One of those things came in an essay by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, an advocate for/participant in intentional communities and the new-monastic life.  I'd read him a few years back as part of my doctoral work, and enjoyed encountering his voice again.  What struck me were his reflections on how an individual enters a monastic or intentional community.  

Such communities aren't unwelcoming, and frequently have robust ministries of hospitality.  They're open to strangers.  They're friendly and kind and active in the world.

But they are also, by design, hard to join.  There's no hard sell, no effort at bait-and-switch to suck the curious into their common life.  Entering into membership requires significant work.  In order to join, there are substantial expectations of the seeker.

“Only if these seekers are persistent should they be invited into the community..." as Wilson-Hartgrove puts it.

Which, if one is interested in "growing an organization," can seem a little counterintuitive. "All are Welcome," or so the mantra goes in my dying oldline denomination, and you'd think that'd bring 'em in.

On its own, it does not.  Low thresholds for entry produce low levels of commitment.  Low levels of commitment produce a weak shared culture, and a weak shared culture lacks collective resilience.  Monastic communities being the fiercely focused things that they are, demands on the curious are frequently placed early.  

Some Zen Buddhist orders, in particular instance, often make a very pointy point about not being welcoming, in a Fight Club sort of way.  You've got to prove you are worthy, prove you're not a dilletante, prove that you're willing to sit out in the cold and endure being yelled at to go away.

Which, as I consider it in the context of my genuinely friendly little church, isn't at all how we roll.  Nor would we want to.  Visitors are genuinely welcome.  All of them.  We like talking with new folks.  I mean, really.  I hear some pastors lament that their congregations are a circle of backs, and visitors drift alone and ignored through fellowship hours.  My little church is not that way.  At all.

People are welcome to worship, and to join us in fellowship.  They can get their hands dirty in our gardens.  They can help us feed the hungry.  They are, in that place, genuinely our friends, and beloved.  They can stay in that place as long as they like.

When it comes to joining...which isn't that hard, truth be told...I find myself increasingly not pressing the matter.  Just welcome, include, accept, and befriend.  Show interest.  Visit. 

But don't rush it.  Don't grasp, or be anxious.  Let God give the growth.

A Thicket of Spears

Three years ago, I put bare-root asparagus into a four by eight plot in my front yard.  

I've always enjoyed asparagus, and when my wife suggested one evening that she thought it'd be fun if we grew it, I needed little further encouragement.  While you can grow asparagus from seed, the best way to get it going is transplantable rootstock, and so that's what I ordered.  The little brown tangles arrived in the mail, looking...as bare root plants often do...like nothing more than yard detritus.  Into the ground they went, and the waiting began.

Lots of waiting.

Asparagus are sturdy, long-yielding perennial fernish critters, cousins of the lily, and a well-established plot can provide a few tasty weeks of early spring sweetness for decades.  But like so many good things, they require patience.  The roots need years to establish, and if you harvest the spears in the first couple of years, you'll cripple or kill the plants.

So I've been waiting, these last two years, gently weeding in spring and summer, cutting back the dead stems in fall.  In winter, I've tucked the roots under a blanket of leaf-mulch from my yard, and fed the soil with the wood-ash from my fireplace.  Those years have flew, as years are wont to do when one gets older.  This year, I sampled my first harvest.

When the first spears stabbed up through the mulch in early spring, I snapped them at their base, and munched on them right there in the garden.  They were, as all who advised me suggested, quite delicious.  

For three and a half weeks in early spring, we ate all of the produce of that modest little patch.  Every effort of those roots, devoured.  I could have pushed for a week more, but after returning from a short family trip to Texas, the spears had explosively regrown.  

After weeks of being cut back, every growth devoured, every effort stymied, the plants were stronger than I'd ever seen them.  Spears as thick as my thumb had shot up a foot in a matter of days, growth so vigorous and rapid that it felt like one could almost see it.  I'd been so concerned about weakening the plants in the years of their childhood and adolescence that I was surprised at their vitality.

Weeks of traumatizing and retraumatizing them had done nothing more than piss them off.  Their growth felt a little defiant, a little fierce, as living things so often can be when we face a challenge from a position of resilience. 

"Respect," I may have muttered to them, as I weeded around the phalanx of green.

It was time to back off, and let them grow.

A Spoonful of Singing

It was a bright spring morning, still a little crisp, but with the promise of warmth.  As the morning light spilled into my little neighborhood, I heard the sound of singing.  

It wasn't, truth be told, the most tuneful noise.  It rode in with the arrival of a garbage truck, and the vocalist wasn't particularly concerned with either tonal or lyrical accuracy.  His voice, a baritono alto, was belting out bits and bobs of some popular Latino music, and what it lacked in precision and consistency it made up for in exuberance.  

As the truck rumbled down the hill towards our house, the singer came into view.

They weren't stopping at every house, as this was evidently a garden waste pickup, and so the truck was booking along at a healthy pace.  He was young and eager and wearing headphones, hanging as far off the back of the truck as he could, one arm extended out to catch the breeze.  It slowed as it approached the house of a neighbor who'd set out the correct materials.

As they approached the bins, he leapt off, still singing along to whatever he was listening to.  Grabbing a can, he dumped it rhythmically into the maw of the crusher, clearly timing his motions with the music.

He returned the bin to the curb with a playful flick, then ran to his place on the truck.  He leapt up to grab the rear bar with all the pleasure of a child jumping aboard a merry-go-round, and as the truck pulled away, he leaned again into the wind.  He extended his arm and open hand to play through the rush of air as he disappeared down the street, still serenading the morning like a trash truck Julie Andrews.

It's amazing how an attitude can change the flavor of our day.

Front Yard Gardening

It's been a good spring, because it's been spring this spring.

The last four or five years, late March and early April have been inordinately warm.  Temperatures in the high seventies, sometimes kissing eighty.  The soil has heated early, and in response I've gotten my garden going early.

This year, though, it has felt as it once regularly felt.  The air still has a wet chill about it most mornings.  The vaunted April showers have come, and the wild admixture of fescue and chickweed, bugleweed and clover and creeping Charlie that comprise my front "lawn" are fat with green growth.

And so the work of the garden has begun.  The asparagus are rising, sweet and tender and tasty, particularly snapped and eaten right there by their plot.  The overwintered garlic looks robust, although I'm a solid month from digging for the bulbs.  The beets were planted into a four by eight section in the week before Easter, and potatoes went into their half barrels.  The blueberries are beginning to flower, as is one of the two little apple trees I put in two years ago.  I spade-turned and reseeded the sidewalk-adjacent patch of sunflowers from seed I'd saved last year.

I've added another 64 square feet of raised bed space for this season, which brings me to just under three hundred square feet of bed space.  That's right at the edge of what I can manage without spending every waking moment in my yard...not that I'd mind that, particularly.  All of that takes place in my front yard, right out there with the sidewalk and the street.

We Americans tend towards backyard gardening, bustling away in compartmentalized isolation, but I prefer gardening out front, for two reasons.

First and most practically, it's where the sun is.  Our back yard is blessed with dozens of trees, which means light falls only sparsely on the small section of moss and grass between the patio and the woods.  It'd make for a terrible garden, because there's no point in trying to grow things if you don't give them light.  It's also low and prone to getting more than a little swampy, as it's where...absent the storm drains...a stream would naturally flow.  That treed area produces a lovely harvest of fallen leaves for the compost pile, and makes for a great location for said compost, but otherwise, its function is as a place to sit and relax while the dog romps about.

You grow in the light.

Second, it's more public.  More social.  It's friendlier.  As an introvert, this might seem like a peculiar thing to take pleasure in, but I do.  When I'm out planting or weeding or harvesting, I see my neighbors.  There they are, walking by, with their dogs or with tiny people in strollers.  I say hello.  Sometimes, they stop and chat for a bit, or ask about what's coming up this year.  Often, they'll share what they're growing, or talk about how they'd like to start a garden themselves.  I get to know faces and voices.

Yesterday, as I was harvesting asparagus, a little family I've talked with several times before meandered by on their regular early evening constitutional.  We chatted, and they asked what I was doing, and then I offered them newly sprouted spears from the wet earth.

"So sweet," he said.  "Really tender," said she.  It was a lovely little moment.

Growing out where it can be seen makes a difference.  It shifts and shapes our expectations of how we connect with both neighbor and creation.  We grow in the light, after all.

All The Things My Watch Does Not Do

I've begun wearing a watch again.  I stopped, two decades ago, because I could no longer see the point to wearing a watch.  As all folks did at the time, I had gotten myself one-a-them newfangled cellphones, and my phone told time.  Right there on the front of my Nokia, there was the time.  So I had a pocket watch, and it also made calls.

And then texts.  And then, my phone started to be able to do everything.  Photos, videos, and apps upon apps upon apps.  

The idea of a straightforward timepiece...or even one of the chunky multifunction Casios that geeked along on my wrist during the eighties and nineties?  Why bother?  A watch had never seemed more superfluous.  I stopped wearing it.

Then, back in August, my father died.  On that day, sitting by his cooling body and waiting for the mortuary folks to arrive, my eyes lit upon his watch. 

"Oh," I thought. "I should hang on to that."  So before they arrived to take his remains away, I took his old Timex, and placed it upon my wrist.  It has remained there since.

What it does is tell the time, and remind me of Dad.  It has one control, a little twisty knob on the side.  Push it in, and the watchface illuminates in soft green light.  Pull it out, give a twist, and you can set the time.  It ticks, a high gentle percussion of metal on metal, as tiny cogs and gears do their work.  That's about it.

But there are lots of things it does not do.

It does not nudge me with haptics to notify me of texts, or of news, or to get me to think about anything some semi-sentient algorithm thinks I should be thinking about right now.

It does not track my heart rate, or my blood pressure, or my biorhythms, and does not report said data to a large corporation.

It does not know my location, nor can it report said location to a large corporation. 

It does not need charging, not ever, although the little battery within does need to be replaced every year or so.

It does not require me to have anything else.  It does not require WiFi, or a signal, or a connection. It is complete, in and of itself.

It does not require me to lie about having read terms of service.

It does not ever need an update, unless by "update" you mean twiddling that little knob to correct the time.

It does not distract me from the world around me.

It does not encourage me to take out my phone, or make me think about my phone, or add in the slightest to the gnawing Skinnerian itch that we all now feel. 

Again, all it does is tell the time. I find there's a pleasure in that simpleness, and a deeper pleasure still in being a little freer from the chattering, inescapable distractions that are inexorably driving us all a little insane.   

Sometimes, the greater joy lies in what is not done.

The Fiction of American Fiction

So.  I watched American Fiction last night, as it was movie night with Mom, and both Rache and I had wanted to see it.  As a writer and author with four traditionally published books and three agents (fic/nonfic/book-to-film), this spoke right into my existence...and to the peculiar place intersectional orthodoxies inhabit in the contemporary publishing world. 

There were some excellent performances, some early moments of real feeling, and it was often entertaining.   But at other points it felt...off.  It frequently pulled punches, drifted into intermittent bathos, and had a logically incoherent ending.

As a satire of the publishing industry, it just didn't feel like it cut close enough to the mark.  For readers of fiction with a surface-level grasp of what it means to publish and be published, perhaps.  But for me, the satire didn't cut deep, and the further we got past the premise, the more shallow it felt.  

Much of that came from the "authors life" that was presented in the film.  Our protagonist is purportedly a "struggling writer," meaning his books are excellent but unsuccessful.  When he presents on a panel at a conference, his panel is attended by fewer than a dozen extras who have clearly been told to look like they'd rather be anywhere else.  He's rejected, over and over again.  His whole schtick is supposed to be that he's barely making it.

Yet when he arbitrarily goes into a franchise bookstore, there are a solid dozen of his books on the shelves.  The "black" shelves, which troubles him, but shelves nonetheless.  If you can walk into a random bookstore and it stocks multiple copies of several of your books, you're not struggling, honeychild.

He meets with his agent in a big shiny downtown office, because that's how all agents are, right?  I've got three, and while my LA-based book-to-film agent might have an office, I wouldn't know.  I've never met him in person.  My fiction agent...London-based, a successful and reputable agency...works from home.  We Skype.  My Austin-based nonfic agent?  Works from home.  We talk on the phone.  We Zoom.  We've met once in the last ten years.  Again, if you're a mid-list author, it's not 1997.  You don't get flown places or spend the money to do so unless you're in the very tippy top of the list.  Publishing doesn't work that way.

A substantial subplot thread involves the author asserting control over the title of the book, to the point where they can pitch a hissy and get it changed late in the pre-production process.  If you're a name, maybe.  But if this is your debut novel, ain't no way that's happening.  Just no way.  In the same way that you're not gonna be writing the screenplay for your novel, particularly if you don't have a clue how screenplays work.  Because screenwriting is an art in and of itself, as I've learned in conversation with the gifted show runner/screenwriter who optioned my own novel.  

And if your books are scraping by, is anyone you randomly meet...like the attractive and recently single public defender who lives across the street of your beautiful Hamptons-Vineyard beach house...likely to ever have read them?  O Lord no.  With three thousand new titles burping out of tradpub, POD, and self-pub outlets every single day?  Not gonna happen.  That space is too supersaturated.

Other things bugged me.  Like, does he even have an editor?  AN EDITOR?  Apparently not.  I mean, books don't have editors, right?  Or copy editors.  You just write it, and rich white publisher ladies publish it and give you tons of money. 

Then there's the money involved.  Seven hundred thousand dollars for an unknown author is a preposterous advance, a fantasy advance.  Yeah, it's satire, but c'mon.  And four million for the immediate purchase...not option, but purchase...of film rights?  The industry usual and customaries on that number are a set percentage of total production budget.  Four mil assumes, what, a final production budget in the hundred million dollar range?  Given the current market, and the nature of the film that would be made, that's preposterous.  You'd take a bath.  Maybe if it's a write-off, but jeez louise.  And the film gets made IMMEDIATELY?  

There's more, particularly around what actually happens to a book and movie deal if an author fundamentally misrepresents their identity.  Which, er, isn't what happens in the film.

Much of the dissonance in the film may be a factor of the vintage of the book upon which the film is based.  Percival Everett published ERASURE back in 2001, which means that the narrative was conceptualized, constructed and written in the late 1990s or very early 2000s.  That was, obviously, a very different time in the life of the publishing industry. 

Perhaps that's why American Fiction felt rather more...fictional...than I'd expected.

Bad Family Businesses

Having a family business can be a good thing.

Like, say, the humble hole-in-the-wall strip mall Chinese restaurant my own family has been ordering from for nearly two decades.  The food is classic American Takeout Chinese, cheap and abundant and generically tasty.  We've been their regular customers as management has passed among and between members of an extended Chinese family over those years.  We've watched extended family arrive from China, folded into community through the business.  We've watched the children of the family grow up, first diligently doing homework in the restaurant while their parents worked, and then helping with the business while juggling school and life.

Family farms and restaurants and businesses of almost all ilks can be a cross-generational blessing.  The bonds of blood and trust that unite extended families can add to the sense of purpose that rises from a shared labor.

But there are some lines of work that lend themselves poorly to that connection, where the expectations that rule family life and expectation clash with the reality of the vocation.

Pastoring, for pointed example.

Just because your Daddy was a preacher doesn't mean that you are, kid.  Call is a fiercely particular thing, and while it can run in your blood, it operates on a different plane from the logics of lineage.  When it becomes the family business, faith often goes awry, becoming less about being a servant of the divine encounter and more about social position and renumeration.

Because that works socially...human beings get attached to a name, to the story of a brand...it too easily loses authenticity, as the self-serving necessities of nepotism take precedence over all other considerations.  In churches, it creates a willingness to raise up too many of Eli's sons, too many of Samuel's sons, those who see the power that comes from that position, and who are eager to milk unearned social authority for their own benefit.

Church becomes a place of falseness, of self-serving plunder and profit.  But there's a place where social power plays even more freely.

Politics, if one believes in republican virtues, is another place where familial expectations are poorly applied.  I've always looked a wee bit askance at the various political dynasties that have arisen over the course of the short history of our republic, because dynastic thinking is antithetical to constitutional principles.

It's difficult to avoid, because political systems are systems of relationship and social influence.  Those connections inhere within family networks, in ways that must be warily watched. 

The more deeply a single family weaves its name and its brand into the political life of a constitutional democracy, the more danger there is that we will slide back into a functional monarchism.  I mean, sure, it was romantic and young back in the day, but Camelot wasn't the capital of a republic, eh?  

When we see leaders promoting family members to positions of power, approaching both party and nation as if they were the family business?  It's a red flag for a republic, a warning light on the dashboard of democracy, an alarm ringing in the ears, no matter what the party.

Dad's Garden

When my family returned to the States from London back in 1982, my father planted a garden.  

A five-by-ten patch of grass on the southeastern side of our back yard was dug up, soil amendments added, and every year in the late spring, he'd set tomato seedlings into the earth.  Better Boys, generally speaking, because they were the perfect complement to BLTs and burgers.

Dad was a single generation removed from actual farming-stock, as my paternal grandfather grew up on several hundred acres of family farm in upstate New York.  Hops were the primary yield of the family farm just outside of the little village of Chuckery Corners, but there we Williams grew everything, as most Americans once did.  

Connecting with the soil was a thing for Dad.  Not as important as music and performance, but still something that gave a sense of heritage.  It was part of his story.

Every summer from middle school onward, the tomatoes at home were fresh picked.  Rows were set out on our screened-in porch to sun-redden to ripeness, safe from the depredations of deer and squirrels and the occasional enterprising turtle.

As the years progressed, the tomatoes kept coming.  Eventually, gardening got harder.  Dad's knees started to go.  Then his hip.  Then, bit by bit, his heart.  By the time he was in congestive heart failure, the garden was too much for him.  My brother and I pitched in to help keep it going, and as the CHF progressed, we managed to keep a few tomatoes coming.  Dad took pleasure knowing they were there, as my brother tended the plants during the summers he spent caring for my folks.

When Dad died early last fall after a hard season, the garden sat fallow. With spring coming on, Mom asked that I pull the fence I'd put in a few years back, and take up the pavers that once sat between rows of plants.

So this last week, I did.  The fence, gone.  The paving stones, dug from earth. 

What had been a garden is now returned to grass.

The pavers, I took for my own gardens. 

They took their place in my eight by eight raised beds, where they will provide stepping stones between tomatoes and garlic and greenbeans, between the garden that is present and the garden that has passed.

Falun Dafa, Swastikas, and Fascism

Falun Gong...or Falun Dafa...is such an odd thing.  In the United States, they're perhaps best known for the inescapable Shen Yun show, a relentlessly hypermarketed spectacle of music and dance that retells Chinese history from their religious perspective.

Over the past several years, I've seen the adherents of that religious movement making their presence known at large, open social events.  They march in local parades, their floats festooned with signs proclaiming peace and love.   They're consistently present in the annual parade in the little town where my church resides.  They're there in my hometown Annandale Parade, as they were this last fall.

It was at that hometown parade that I accepted a flyer pressed into my hand, neatly produced and earnest.  Peace and Love, proclaimed the cover.  I opened it up, and there they were.  The symbols of their movement:

Swastikas.  Oof.

I'm not ignorant of the history of that symbol.  As an image, the swastika had a long history before it was co-opted by Hitler's National Socialist movement.  For millennia, it had none of the connotations of brutal, genocidal nationalism that now hang around it like a cloud in the West.  When someone from Asia or Southeast Asia uses it, I think rather differently about it than I might were I to see it flying alongside a Let's Go Brandon flag in rural America.

Still and all, there's a clumsiness to putting that front and center, an awkward failure to acknowledge the context you inhabit, like walking into a mosque with your shoes on and wearing a t-shirt that asserts that everything goes better with bacon.  "Hey, it's just my culture, get over it" doesn't quite cut the mustard.

And there's another, peculiar level to this story.

Falun Gong has been systematically and often brutally oppressed in their native China, with adherents subject to imprisonment, "re-education," and exile.  Because of this, they are vehemently opposed to the Communist party in China.  Like Sun Myung Moon's "Moonie" Reunification Church back in the 1960s and 1970s, their vociferous anticommunism overcompensates into something peculiar.

In addition the the ubiquity of Shen Yun, Falun Dafa is also responsible for the media content produced by The Epoch Times, which they own.  

That outlet, if you're not aware of it, is a "fair and balanced" news organization that aggressively promoted claims of election fraud in 2020, that sees communist influence everywhere, and that routinely casts doubt on the efficacy and safety of vaccines.  They're purveyors of "hard-hitting documentaries" produced by entirely "neutral and reflective" folks like Dinesh D'Souza, and proudly highlight the endorsements of thoughtful moderates like Sebastian Gorka, Pete Navarro, and Paul Gosar.

For entirely comprehensible reasons, they're pro-Trump, because Trump is performatively anti-China.  This position mirrors that of the Moon's Reunification Church, which purchased the Washington Times back in the day to both promote themselves and align with far right wing causes.

Which brings us back, in the deepest of ironies, to their use of swastikas.

Saying "the swastika is just our cultural sign of peace and love" feels a little off when your media outlet is championing the messages of the far right, and amplifying authoritarian voices that would overturn the constitutional foundations of this republic.

A Eulogy for the Alderman Stacks

I am a terrible alumnus.  This, I will freely admit. 

While my education at the University of Virginia profoundly enriched and set direction for my life, and I still maintain connection with the friends I made there, the culture of the school never jibed with me.

It's a culture that I find expressed every single time I receive my alumni magazine.  The alumni magazine that my William and Mary alumna wife regularly reads cover to cover is filled with long, substantive articles about the research of professors and unusual, creative work by W&M graduates.  

That's not what I get.  The slight, slick magazine that arrives for me is almost invariably a paean to wealth, privilege, and material success.  It's a magazine for strivers, stuffed full of advertising for Charlottesville area estates, most of which are priced either in the high seven digits or without a pricetag.  Because if you have to ask, eh?  

Most of the rest of it revolves around fundraising, which seems absurd for an institution that rests upon a thirteen point six billion dollar endowment hoard.  My wife holds it up as evidence that W&M is an institution more serious about its educational mission, and I have to admit she has a point.

I usually just recycle it.

But the magazine I just received was different.  On the cover, an image of the new humanities library, the former Alderman Stacks.  I spent a great deal of time in the Stacks, and my memory of them is strong.  Like so many things, it has been recently remade, the old facility gutted and "reimagined."  That reimagining was celebrated in a short article, filled with pictures of the new, light-filled spaces.  It began with this opening description of the old stacks:

"There was always that distinct experience when you headed to the back of Alderman Library.  You'd cross the connecting bridge, never looking down the barren window wells on either side, and confront cold steel--an old elevator beside the metal chute they called a staircase.  The ceilings lowered to half height.  The walls closed in.  Windows disappeared.  Time stopped.  Your internal compass lost its polarity.  You had descended into the dark night of the Stacks.  Retrace those steps today and it's like a morning-sun realization that it had all been a bad dream."

A "bad dream?"  Really?

I had the experience of entering those Stacks countless times, but my encounter with that space was completely different.

That bridge was liminal, a place of crossing over, of transition between the outside world and the Stacks.  Because the Stacks were dreamlike.  They felt like a different world, whose internal logics and peculiarities were like those that fill our time in the Land of Nod.

The Stacks were a little close and crepuscular, the low ceilings and tight, functional staircases creating a labyrinthine warren whose twilight aesthetics spoke quietly of deep reflection and intimate focus.  The study carrels were more than a little monastic.  It felt old, even back in the late '80s.  

But "old" isn't a pejorative.  It felt rooted, a part of the written history whose memories filled the volume within.  

It was a place created for books, defined by books, and seemingly comprised entirely of books.  Words on paper hemmed you in, around, below, and above.  The scent of ancient paper filled the air with a rich sweet must.  It felt peculiarly organic, a sanctum of deep soft quiet and distance from the world, separate from the rush and hum of life.  

It was the sort of place that felt worth exploring. It was a little magical, the sort of place where one wouldn't be entirely surprised to encounter Galdalf the Grey seeking a particularly obscure scroll.  It was a place where you could focus, where you could be undistracted, where you could lose yourself in words.  It was not a place of this scattered, Adderall age.

That soft magic is now lost, washed away from the University of Virginia...like the humanities, like the study of literature, like the arts...by a space that dazzles.

Speaking Without Words

The strangest thing about going on a cruise is how much effort goes into making it seem like you’re not on a cruise. I mean, here you are, right smack in the middle of the ocean, the vast deep of our two-thirds Water World suddenly very much in evidence. In every direction, our little planet stretches all the way to the subtle curve of the horizon, and beneath you lies a deep that…if the shipboard sonar reporting is at all valid…extends for thousands upon thousands of feet.

The surface of the ocean is ever changing, going from near-mirror-smooth one day to great rolling swells the next, to thirty foot seas and spray that dances over the roiling foam-flecked chaos in a driving gale.

Inside the contemporary floating city, though, there’s often no evidence that this exists at all. Instead, there are off-Broadway shows and cabarets, shops and restaurants, bumpercars and lasertag and pickleball and hot tubs and arcades. In the belly of the ship, a casino straight out of Vegas, windowless and sharp with the scent of nicotine. It’s all bright lights and amusements, and unless the seas are high, you’d never know they are there.

I find the lights and the endless overstimulation a little much.

Out on my balcony late on the second night of the trip, I was looking out across the blackness. It was still cold, in the low forties, and as I looked out at the honeycombed expanse of other balconies, I could see no-one else outside. I was reflecting on this when a loud, slapping splash caught my attention. It sounded like someone had flung themselves from the sixteenth level of the ship in a bellyflop, and I peered into the waves to see what might be going on. The slap came again, a wet percussive report, and staring out into the darkness, I spotted the cause.

Racing alongside the ship at nearly twenty knots was a single large bull bottlenose, whose streamlined form was visible beneath the surface, lit ghostly by the false daylight of the ship.

It wasn’t riding the wake, but running fast and close and amidships. Every five or six seconds, it would fling itself from the water, soaring for a sleek moment in the night air. When it reentered the water, it would strike the surface with the flukes of its tail, and the sharp crack of tail on water would echo against the side of the ship.

It was clearly a display. It was clearly meant for us. Not that we were paying attention. 

As best I could tell, of the nearly seven thousand souls aboard the ship, I was the only one seeing it.

I’d read enough about dolphins to understand what that bull bottlenose was saying as I watched it race across the water. A tailslap, among dolphins, serves a number of purposes. It’s forceful enough to stun prey fish, so it can be used in hunting. In male dolphins, the tailslap is a territorial and threat display, a warning to unwanted intruders…dolphin and otherwise…that the dolphin is not pleased with their presence, and a show of force.

That big bull was not just any of God’s creatures, but an animal that is scientifically recognized to be more intelligent than most of the humans in congress. It wasn’t putting on an impromptu Seaworld performance. It was letting us know that our 175,000 ton ship did not impress it, and that we were disturbing the peace.

We weren’t listening, of course. We are so good at not listening, particularly when creation speaks without words. As I let myself back into my cabin, I found myself wondering just how loudly creation needs to speak before we start listening. How fiercely does the wind need to roar, how swift do the flames need to burn, how quick does the water need to rise, before it catches our attention?

I suppose we’ll find that out.

Ashes to Stay

Every winter for the last several years, I've had to figure out what to do with ashes.

On a night that's below fifty degrees, I'll build a fire, a crackling dance of light and warmth that fills our home with a primal comfort.  We human beings evolved with fire, and evolved to delight in fire, and the place of the hearth in our lives only changed during my parents generation.  After countless millennia, the scent of carbonizing oak or pine or sycamore has been supplanted by the cool glow and flicker of our screens, the soft time of story and quietness around the open flame replaced with the bingbamboom bustle of one thing after another, scrolling ever downward.

It's a loss, it is, because in our frenetic rushing about we are forgetting things.

Like what ash is, and what ash does.

In our disposable age, we assume that when we have used a thing up, it no longer has worth.  We toss aside teratons of plastic nothings.  We crumple wrappers, we plan for obsolescence, we create a wastestream, a Heraclitan torrent of the unvalued and forgotten.

But ash isn't waste.  Ash isn't worthless.  Nothing God makes is waste, even the greyblack remains of the flame.  It only seems so because we now think in shallow, rushing, wasteful ways, flinging ourselves from moment to moment and missing the whole.  

When I clean out my hearth, I do not discard the ashes.  Ashes are precious to a gardener, rich with calcium and carbon and micronutrients.  Ashes are pitchforked into my compost.  Ashes feed my garlic, plumping the bulbs that have been patiently enduring the winter.  Ashes enrich the soil in which my asparagus grows, and a diet of carbon can keep them yielding for decades.  I'm setting three small beds aside for a new plant this year.  I'm eager to experiment with okra, a plant that is remarkably nutritious, easy to seedsave, beautifully ornamental, and will adapt well to our rapidly warming Midatlantic.  

What does okra love?  Okra loveslovesloves wood ash.

To appreciate ash, one must be unhurried about it.  Over patient years, you learn the richness it adds to the earth, come to know the living things that thrive and grow as they take that ash into themselves.  When you smell the cut garlic on your fingers, snap the first spear of asparagus in the spring, or taste the nutty crunch of fried okra?  

You see the value in what the fire has left behind, and that life has reclaimed and made its own.

In the Shadow of Her Majesty, Chapter Sixteen

 

Chapter Sixteen: My First Argument with Diego

From behind Diego, his cat-faced comrade let out a percussive snicker.

“Excuse me?”  I said, recoiling, my face flushing red with an admixture of anger, shock, and embarrassment.

“You heard me.  What.  The Serious XXXX.  Do You Think.  You’re Doing?”

I was, of course, utterly mortified at the foulness of his speech, and at this appalling breach of basic human decency.  “I am attempting to thank you for effectuating my rescue, and would have assumed that this would be blindingly obvious to even the most…”

“No no no no,” he interrupted, his voice rising in timbre.  “Not that.  Nope.  You don’t understand.  I mean, no xxxx,, of course we saved you, you’re xxxxing welcome, but who the xxxx cares about that now?  We did what we did, you and your bot are here, alive, yay, all that xxxx.  I’m not talking about us kicking some Hammer xxx, either, ‘cause we do that on the regular.  I’m talking about this whole totally bullxxxx thing you’re doing right now.”

I was, in this moment, genuinely at a loss for words, as I felt with certainty that I had never been quite so grievously insulted in all of my life.

“I’m afraid I’m not sure I know of what you speak, sir.  I cannot imagine what I might have done to stir such a cruel reproach upon what is but our second meeting, but I must tell you that I am sorely wounded at your sudden choice to…”

“That,” he said, interrupting again, “that is exactly what I mean.”  He waved his hands in the direction of the air in front of my face.  “The way you talk.  Who xxxxing talks like that?  I honestly don’t know if anyone in all of human history ever actually talked like that.  Is it Edwardian?  Is it Victorian?  Who the xxxx even knows!”  He then glared at Mother’s dress and gesticulated at it in a wild manner.  “And the way you dress!  Is this some psychotic post-collapse Jane Austin cosplay?  Is that a bustle?  Are you wearing a corset?   Here you are floating through a war zone dressed like a xxxxing fairy princess or Mary xxxxing Poppins.  Why?  I mean, you do know it’s not God-xxxxed eighteen ninety seven, and this isn’t England, right?  And then you add in endless xxxxing robots, and bluesky tech…and…and Jesus, what the xxx.  None of us have even the faintest clue why you people even exist, but every day, there you are, floating through the sky like xxxxing aliens or some such xxxx.  I just can’t even…I mean, xxxx.  What the xxxx are you?” 

As his wild, vulgar ranting subsided slightly, I experienced a sudden epiphany.   Diego was quite confused, and that what I had taken at first for a vile and profane insult to my person was nothing more than a wholly comprehensible failure to understand the intricacies of the Peerage, our Society, and the nature of the Crown.  With my own righteous anger diminished at that knowledge, the appropriate diplomatic course of action presented itself: he had asked questions, and it was now my duty as a Lady and a representative of Her Majesty to answer them.

“Very well, Mr. Cruz Campo,” I said, in the tone one might take with a disconsolate and frightened child, “I think I grasp your difficulty, for I can appreciate why you might find our Society and my own presence somewhat unsettling, and furthermore, why the particulars of our distinctive way of life might be so alien to your understanding as to cause such heartfelt and voluble perplexity.  Despite your profane outburst, I shall honour your questions with replies, each in the order in which they were posed; if that is quite alright with you, of course.”

He took a step back, and with a sweeping gesture of sardonic welcome, invited my reply.  “Sure.  Bring it.” he said, as if casting down a gauntlet.

I took a breath, then began.

“Again, in sequence, let me begin.  Question the first: Who talks like this?  I do, and all those around me do, for three reasons:  Question One, Rationale One, it is this manner of speech that shapes our social order, one that centers decorum, robustness of social structure, and a life grounded in tradition; Question One, Rationale Two, this choice of language is both inculcated and chosen, as all who are part of our Society embrace and understand, both implicitly and explicitly, the necessity of carefully considered eloquence, which is of inestimable help in creating a well-formed and nimble mind, and; Question One, Rationale Three, it gives me pleasure to speak thusly, in the same way that one might enjoy performing complex music or a dance of sublime elaborateness.  In sum, it is our culture, it is our choice, and it is our pleasure.”

Diego’s eyes furrowed, which I took to mean he was endeavouring to turn his sharp but ill-shaped wit to the unravelling of my explanation; I graciously gave him a moment, and then proceeded.

“Question the second, is this a Jane Austen cosplay?  No, even if the works Miss Austen are simply lovely, for our choice of attire is not something reflective of an effort to distract ourselves from reality, as in late-pre-collapse decadence, but rather an intentional, sustained, and material reinforcement of a particular set of cultural norms and expectations, all of which reinforce the vigour and stability of our social order.   Question the third, no, I am not wearing a bustle, although that is within the realm of sartorial acceptability in our polite society.  Question the…”

Diego grunted in a most harsh and dismissive way.  “Alright.  OK.  Just stop.  I wasn’t asking you to literally answer every xxxxing question.  You…”

“Christ, stop bullying and let her answer, Diego.”  It was the person of indeterminate gender who interrupted him, their husky alto chiding.  “I know you’re xxxxed off, but you’re always going on about how little we know about The Beautiful Ones, so just shut up already and let her talk.  Don’t be such an xxxhole.”

“Shain’s right,” purred the one who reminded me of Puss in Boots.  “We love ya, man, but you’re being a xxxx.”

Diego raised the dun steel of his alloy hand to his brow, massaging what was evidently a growing headache, as he let out a frustrated sigh.  Then, in a surprisingly chastened tone, he yielded.  “OK.  Point well taken, Raj.  I hear you, Shain.”  He looked at me, a forced smile upon his perfect lips.  

“Rebecca.  Sorry.  Please…continue.”

Acknowledging his repentant acquiescence and the kindly intervention of his comrades with a polite nod, I set about completing my reply.

 “Question the fourth, yes, I am wearing corsetry, although it is of a design and purpose that significantly varies from the purely cosmetic intent of classical Edwardian-era support garments.  Question the fifth, of course I am aware of the current date as defined by the Gregorian calendar, and of the rough latitude and longitude of our physical location in the Mid Atlantic.  Question the sixth is implied in your last several questions, and is of a rather more subtle, qualitative, and subjective character, which I would summarise thusly: why do I and my Society exist?  Why, one might ask, do any of us exist, and were I to have a definitive answer to such a profound and unsearchable mystery, I should most certainly be obligated to share it with one and all.  In the narrower, contingent sense mediated by my own self-understanding and that of our Peerage, I might concisely express a response in this way:  We exist to serve the will of Her Majesty the Queen, and to live in a manner that brings honour to Her Reign.”

At the completion of my response, the one whose name was evidently Raj began to clap slowly, a Cheshire grin brightening his countenance.

“That was, unironically, a great xxxxing answer.  Dude.”

Diego glared at Raj, at which Raj’s smile only brightened saucily.

“Fine,” Diego said, tersely.  “I’ve got other questions for another time.  Right now, though, we need to know other things.  Like what the xxxx got you shot down, and what you think is going on.  Meaning, exactly.”  Diego paused for a moment, his eyes distant, as if coming to some significant internal determination, and then looked at me most directly.  “Look.  I’m going to tell you what we know, all of it, and then you’re going to tell me what you know.  Everything on the table.  Yes?”

“That is acceptable to me.”    

“Good.  Last month or so, as I’m sure you know, the Hammer has been on the move.  We’re getting hit harder, everywhere.  They took down the Staunton commune, meaning, total slaughter, had to be, we get one panicked broadcast, then the whole place goes dark.  We tried to get intel, but they’re suddenly able to bring down our drone recon.  An entire motorized platoon of volunteers from the Fourth Republican just xxxxing vanished when the RCC sent them to do a recon in force.  Then today…”

I raised my begloved hand, as I’d briefly witnessed such a gesture being used in the debate over the disposition of the trucks.

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid I am unaware of the meaning of the acronym R.C.C..  Might you please clarify?”

“Sure.  It’s Regional Coordinating Committee.  How we do intercommunity action.  Harvest distribution.  Joint defence and security.  That sort of thing.”

“Ah.  Thank you.  Please do continue.”

“Then today, your robot friend here shows up, tells us they’re xxxxing with you people, asks for help, which was a thing that just doesn’t happen.   Up ‘till now, that was the one can of whup ass that even Caddigan didn’t want opened up.  No one  xxxxs with the Beautiful Ones, not if they want to live to see the end of the day.  It’s a godxxxx rule out here.  I have no idea what it was they did to bring your airship down, but I’ve never seen the Hammer do that before, not ever.  It’s some bad juju, and it scares the xxxx out of us.  So. That’s what we know.  Rebecca.  What can you tell us?”  

Here, of course, I faced a decision of some consequence, for I was in possession of information that gave insight into Our purposes, insight that might in untrustworthy hands prove most disastrous to us.   As a representative of the Crown, and as a member of the Peerage, I must…as dear Stewart had at my importunate questioning…determine what could be shared, and also that which must at all costs be held in the strictest of confidence.

While under most circumstances I would have been reticent to offer up even the most spare account, I was convinced that the threat to Her Majesty here was grave, and the creation of an alliance of goodwill with these peculiar souls was most essential.  I was, as ever, duty bound to take the best possible choice towards the most desirable future.

It was at that point, dear reader, that I presented in detail all of the evidences that had come before me in conversations with both Father and Stewart; these are conversations to which you have already been privy, and which I therefore shall not again present in detail.  Encapsulated, my disclosure included the following: the increase in Caddiganite attacks on the Her Majesty’s servants; Father’s insights into the evident purpose of said attacks; the implicit attempt to purloin the advances of the Royal Society; the mysterious cargo carried within Her Majesty’s Ship the Firedrake; and my personal fears that with the felling of that noble vessel, said cargo might pose an unspeakable danger should it be discovered and turned to Caddiganite purposes.

Upon the completion of my sharing, the room was oddly silent for a moment.

Diego’s expression had changed most profoundly, and the umbrage that had to this point seemed his default state of being was no longer in evidence.  His golden eyes were now honeyed with a fathomless pathos, his brow furrowed not in consternation or annoyance, but something quite the opposite.

“Thank you,” he said, his voice huskier, heavier.  “That was…thorough.  I…” 

Here he paused, regarding me with a sympathy which I had heretofore not seen upon his visage.  

“Rebecca.  Your…father…was on that airship?”

“Yes.”

He turned and looked at his comrades, and then back to me.

“You watched…your father…die today.”  

It was not a question, but a statement of the most terrible fact, one that had unexpectedly cut him to the very quick, his voice thickened as some deep hurt of his own rose upon the wings of compassion; it stirred in me a great upwelling of well nigh unbearable grief.  I felt myself on the verge of collapse, most literally; my legs weakened beneath me, and it was as if my entire person, body and soul, was on the precipice of an implosion.  

I could not let that be, not now, not here; though my face tightened and trembled with the effort, my eyes welling such that a single tear escaped and tracked its course of sorrow down my powdered cheek, I was able to say, simply:

“Yes.”

“xxxx.  I had…no idea.”

Having spoken his profane but genuine condolence, it was clear he had no idea what to do next, nor did I; we stood together, in the deep pall of an awkward silence, for a time that felt like forever.

Chapter Seventeen: Of Plunder and Planning (forthcoming)