At least a couple people in my friend-sphere are today becoming or have recently become U.S. citizens.

If you’re American and this is true for you too, I encourage you to put aside irony and bitterness and instead hold the thought: Look, see, the project is still alive. May their addition to it be a candle through the darkness.

Update: New citizens are shown a speech by the current president at their naturalization ceremony. One friend describes it as “awful beyond description; like, Lynchian”. After a friend of had to watch it earlier this year, Daniel D. Beck shared his own alternative welcome message to new citizens.

I try not to make a habit of peeking at the trending-posts tab of my Mastodon server, but when I do it anyway, I often find myself thinking of the preceding 2005 installment of “Anthropomorphic Republican Talking Duck”, a “Mallard Fillmore” parody by Adam Jameson.

There are over 300 million Americans so I’m sure that some must self-identify as “liberal”, but I’m not certain I’ve ever met any. It’s a little funny to me how this right-wing bogeyman has been wholly co-opted by the left wing as well, or at least that part of it which is angriest and loudest in my nearest shards of current American culture.

Janet Kessler lives in San Fransisco and maintains Coyote Yipps, a blog that documents her observations about the local coyotes living their lives. Her most recent post features a coyote dad musically summoning its family before beginning the evening together. My favorite post is a photo collection of a young, solitary coyote who digs up a clearly beloved toy on a golf course, plays energetically with it, then re-buries it. It has a sad angle; Kessler tracks and observes these animals well enough to know their individual stories, including how this one had recently lost its brother and playmate.

Closer to (my) home, I enjoyed this profile about Romeo and Juliet, a coyote couple who lives in Central Park, by Bonnie Eissner for the West Side Rag. Their territory includes Delacorte Theater, best known for its annual free Shakespeare performances—and hence the name of these two animals. The article has several great photos of the pair, including a shot of them nuzzling affectionately while on-stage together.

I have a certain fondness for coyotes, some of whom I glimpse from time to time in my late-night Central Park walks. (I left a comment about one such encounter on the Rag article.) Very American animals, urban and resilient. I like thinking of them as neighbors.

Sometimes I feel the urge to say something snide, cutting, or otherwise intentionally hurtful to someone I love. It may come in response to some perceived slight or annoyance, or in shock and retaliation for something hurtful they just said. The words rise up my throat in a peristalsis of emotion, and it takes an act of will to delay their expulsion.

After I buy myself some time like this, I reframe my situation this way: What if I saw the words now trying to pry open my jaw as instead glowing in front of me, one of several choices I could make in a video game’s conversational interface?

I immediately know that, in a game, I’d gleefully choose the cued-up acerbic utterance if I wanted to start a fight, or if I decided that my character didn’t like or respect the other character. Or maybe I was just screwing around, exploring how much I could break the game through awful choices, with the intent to reload a save file afterwards.

Invariably, none of these motivations apply to my real-life situation, and the “characters” involved. So, clearly, I shouldn’t choose this option. So what are the other choices? There’s always at least two or three to pick from, right? Still in this frame, I find it easier to read—that is, mentally compose—at least a couple of cooler-headed alternative replies, there in my imaginary conversational UI. (Including, often, the ever-popular [Say nothing].) And I choose one of those instead, and life goes on—with no yearning, moments later, for a Quick Load button.

In A Haunting Relic From America’s Past, Wright Thompson describes his encounter with the Army-issued pistol that was used to beat and murder 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. Thompson located the gun while writing a book about the context and legacy of that murder. Subsequently, the person who had inherited it—a local crop duster—donated it to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, where it just went on permanent display.

Thompson describes the menacing energy the gun emanates, viewed in person. He quotes multiple museum employees expressing similar sentiment.

Goodwin met the pilot for the handoff. The gun came wrapped in a rag inside a plastic Kroger shopping bag. Goodwin held it. He wished he hadn’t. That night he struggled to sleep.

As a lifelong enjoyer of fantasy books and games, it humbled me to encounter this description of a specific gun that radiates an actively hateful aura: an actual, real-life cursed weapon. One powered not by evil wizardry, but human-scale horror, and hate.

I first read this article on my phone while on jury duty, last week. The text moved me, while its illustration on my tiny screen seemed unremarkable. Returning to write this entry now, I have the story opened on my desktop display, and I find that the full-sized photograph of the gun and its holster absolutely radiates some of that malice. I feel it in my spine, and I reflect on why that’s so.

I found myself remembering the first nightlight that I had in my childhood bedroom, depicting Pinocchio and a goldfish. Perhaps there is only one image of it on the internet, but DuckDuckGo nonetheless led me quickly to the website of Jack’s Mart, a store in Japan that specializes in 20th century Americana. Whoever writes up their item-description pages puts some real care into it, enough for search engines to send me to the Jack’s Mart page about the nightlight.

I was especially delighted by the attached image, which demonstrates how dimly the light shone when it was plugged in; that vague orange glow was all you got. I had a few night lights like this as a kid, all fashioned from a weak bulb behind a chunk of white plastic with stuff printed on it. This resulted in a small, dim, irregular blob floating in the darkness of my room, not recognizable as anything, and illuminating nothing beyond itself. And still, its presence was a comfort.

An inscribed paving stone found in the East End neighborhood of Portland, Maine:

IN MEMORIAM
This pavement is a gift to the
St. Lawrence Congretational
Parish by the children of
Charles L. Thompson
in memory of the father who
watched with interest the
erection of this house of
worship and who died
on the day of its completion

Posting this amidst a two-week vacation in Freeport, on the Maine coast. I can report that the 1901 Maine flag, with two simple shapes on a plain background, is ubiquitous on souvenir merchandise here. In shop after shop I see it embroidered on caps, screened onto T-shirts, and carved into coasters. People here are proud of the design, and visitors clearly love it too, buying every sort of representation to take back home. I shall be among them.

I do not see the official post-1909 state flag anywhere, with its “DIRIGO” motto and its much busier design, aside from its obligatory installation outside of the Freeport city hall. But that’s the only flag I knew during my part-time childhood and full-time young adulthood as a Mainer in the 1980s and 1990s. The movement to re-establish the 1901 flag only started gaining steam after I moved away in 2000. In 2024 it made it all the way to a general referendum, where it lost a popular vote.

I first saw the 1901 flag last year in my old home city of Bangor, just before that vote. It flew from poles, glowed from windows, and flickered on animated LED signs all over town. I do prefer the updated 2024 design from the referendum, with a more realistically rendered tree—but judging by the shop shelves, Mainers seem to prefer the original, simpler style. I am more struck by how they resoundingly choose this design as the symbol that they show visitors, rather than the flag that’s flown over the state house for longer than any Mainer’s been alive. I was sad to learn of the referendum’s defeat, last year, but cheered to see today that the Mainers who had chosen their true flag have not abandoned their choice.

I am slightly obsessed with this video clip of unknown provenance featuring three minimalist electromechanical puppets bopping and lip-synching to Madonna’s “Into the Groove”.

I found it on HELL Yeah! Bot, a Mastodon account that reposts a lot of milennial-coded memes and other nano-media, so I assume this is of circa-2010 vintage. I’d love to know more about its source!

Andi McClure posts several times per week to a personal Mastodon thread of interesting audio.

Most posts focus on clips of someone sharing sounds or patterns that they’ve discovered through a synthesizer, but the thread dips now and again into recorded music that has piqued McClure’s interest that day. She always includes an explanatory paragraph, such as today’s:

The musician says this emerged from setting up a new synthesizer, so what I imagine happened: They were trying to make that “chonkchonkchonk” noise from reggae, stumbled into an amazing-sounding semi-repeating pattern, went “I have to stop everything and find a way to make this a song” and built a life support system around it. Result: Lovely little ambient meditation over a 128bpm heartbeat. If ur bored stop at ~5:00.

(h/t Monica)