Utagawa Hiroshige 歌川広重: Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival
(Asakusa tanbo Torinomachi mōde), from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
(Meisho Edo hyakkei) (1857 (Ansei 4), 11th month)

With Liberty Tagging Along I began this FollowingChapters Series after spending the prior two quarters writing a series I’d titled NextWorld, in which I attempted to predict how my world might change under the upcoming and now current administration. I’d then completed a series I’d titled CHope in which I tried to maintain hope that my world might not be completely demolished by near absolute idiocy, somewhat successfully. Then I faced a next quarter. What would be my writing focus then? I chose the title FollowingChapters because, from my perspective at the time, I couldn’t foresee what might exist after I’d successfully investigated my NextWorld and projected much Hope. I’d enter my FollowingChapters.

The result has been a chronicling of the time. I survived the at times intolerable outrages. It seems even more apparent now than it did when I began this series that our sorry incumbent will probably not be able to hold on to the end of what would have been his second term. What will happen then? I’ve little idea other than a nagging conviction that we will eventually rediscover the underlying utility of our inherent decency. I acknowledge that our decency has always been more of a tendency than a reality, an aspirational possession more than an actual one. Still, I see a definite trend, bending back in the direction of justice, hopefully with liberty tagging along. Thank you for following along!
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FollowingChapters: Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 06/26/2025
JUN 27, 2025
This FollowingChapters Story contains introduction to this week's writing summary. Thank you for following along!

Stuart Davis: Study for “’Art Digest’ Cover” (1953)


Just Like This Administration
Physicists maintain a unique sort of humor within their ranks. They award an Ignoble Prize to scientists performing particularly absurd studies. They're attracted to Irreproducible Results. They amuse themselves analyzing Cartoon Physics, the sort to which Wylie Coyote runs sideways. Does Coyote Gravity exist? It turns out that, while the realization that nothing supports you doesn't actually trigger gravity into action, a discernible delay comes into play when someone inadvertently attempts to walk on air when blindly running off the end of a mesa. Objects do not flatten to the extent shown in cartoons when running full speed into an immovable object, though some flattening does occur.

Our incumbent engaged in Cartoon Physics last week when explaining what happened when some Bunker Buster® bombs hit an Iranian uranium enrichment facility buried deep underground. A single 'Buster wasn't designed to penetrate to the full depth of the underlying facility, so the Cartoon Physics solution prescribed dropping successive 'Busters until achieving the required depth, except real-world 'Busters don't work like that. Each leaves rubble, which proves successively less penetrable than the original hard surface the bombs were designed to penetrate. Rubble is inherently less penetrable because it tends to diffuse force, producing more peripheral rubble. The answer to how many Bunker Busters® would be required to penetrate to the necessary depth might be infinite. I'm sure many Defense Department eggheads were well aware of this fact. They were doubtless overruled by television personalities who better understand what constitutes a salable story. Reality Television wasn't about anything real, either, just like this administration.
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FollowingChapters: Writing Summary for the Week Ending 07032025
JUL 04, 2025
This FollowingChapters Story contains the introduction to the summary of my writing this week. Thank you for following along!


George Platt Lynes: Frederick Prokosch [writer] (c. 1950)

Worsen Our Collective Experience
I suspect that one of these days, the old Father Forgive Them For They Know Not What They Do routine will finally lose traction, especially in a country predicated upon the notion that we could and so really should be striving to improve rather than incessantly backpedaling. Our latest ignorance seems forced and unconvincing, as if we had not been living for the last three-quarters of a century. Ignorance didn't used to be a choice. It could appear without overdue blame before the Enlightenment. After, those who chose to ignore history's lessons tended to undermine themselves, so most avoided dabbling in it on anything like a societal scale, except for those who gained their power and authority by associating with the biggest losers in history. One by one, the more primitive philosophies bowed down to emerging realities, and while all was still not entirely right with this world, things were arguably better, enviably so.

But being human, we couldn't just accept obvious improvement and retire to smell sweet roses. Some dissatisfaction always persists even as dreams come true, and a few continue insisting that the good old days were better when they were demonstrably worse. Nostalgia for what had never been seems to have done us in again. We're resurrecting wrecks our fathers rid us of before most of us were born. Those who forget history's lessons seem destined to worsen our collective experience. Congratulations …
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FollowingChapters: Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 07/10/2025
JUL 11, 2025
This FollowingChapters Story contains the introduction to a summary of my writing week and reflections thereof. Thank you for following along!


George Inness: After a Summer Shower (1894)

Now Must Be The Time
I once believed that a time might come when my patience would be amply rewarded, though I never invested much time defining what that payoff might entail. Would it come in the form of no longer needing to exercise patience? After all those decades diligently practicing my patience, I might have earned a payoff that promised only the continued practice, by then masterful, of ever more patience. I might have mastered waiting. It seems now, from the perspective of this once far and distant shore, that practicing patience itself might have always been the underlying purpose, promise fulfilled in the very act of striving to practice. Of course, anyone who has practiced patience understands that this practice never seems to approach perfection. Even the avid practitioner understands that even diligently practicing patience involves experiencing considerable impatience, too, and that it's ultimately a failed pursuit if judged too absolutely.

My mother's Uncle Curtis served as an early example of both diligence and patience. He worked for decades as a correctional officer at the local state pen. He manned one of the towers on the night shift, watchful for any attempted breakout. Near the end of his career, a breakout finally occurred, though he was on the toilet when the alarm sounded. He struggled to man his machine gun, which he ultimately managed before pulling his pants back up. There he stood, finally fulfilling his purpose with his pants down around his ankles. He never outlived the resulting reputation.

He retired soon after, sold his side business, and bought a sporty car, planning to move to sunny Mexico, where the living would be cheap and easy. He was back a scant few months later, complaining that he'd never suspected Mexico was so full of Mexicans. He died of a heart attack a few months shy of the first anniversary of his retirement party. Life occurs while you're waiting for your life to emerge. Now must be the time.
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FollowingChapters: Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 07/17/2025
JUL 18, 2025
This FollowingChapters Story contains the introduction to the summary this week's writing. Thank you for following along!


Angelo Caroselli: Summer (1620s)

Downward And In
I cannot decide whether I'm aging or just imagining myself aging. I have so far failed to convince myself that I'm growing any older. I see old classmates pass by, obviously aged in my remarkably youthful eyes. I should know, I submitted to cataract surgery ages ago, but I survived. Nobody ever very well remembers the struggles they endured, just the moments within which they surprisingly managed to convince themselves again that they were probably not aging.

I continually need to resolve some fairly obvious deviations from expectations. I'm convinced that my father peers back at me from the shaving mirror each morning. I imagine my dexterity preserved regardless of the difficulties my doppleganger experiences when tromping through windfallen timber to access wild berries. I write almost as well now as I imagined myself writing when I first imagined that I might become a writer. My attention span seems better than it’s ever been, though I try hard to be in bed by nine. My experience-base from which I draw my stories approaches infinity, or so it seems.

My aches and pains still seem imaginary and, frankly, I pray that they always might. I can tolerate almost anything but bald-faced truth. At least paint a mustache on that baldfaced sucker, if only to render it baseline believable. I swear that I'm aging backward, feeling a little more innocent every morning and a tad more Clueless with each passing afternoon. We do not grow up and out, but downward and in.
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FollowingChapters: Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 07/24/2025

JUL 25, 2025

This FollowingChapters Story contains my Weekly Writing Summary. Thank you for following along!


Winslow Homer: The End of the Day, Adirondacks (1890)

Notice Themselves Disappearing
It's fundamentally unfair that shame has been so haphazardly distributed among the populace. Most quickly redden when catching themselves engaged in something embarrassing. Some seem to possess no threshold beyond which they can consider ceasing or desisting, even though accomplishing either amounts to doing both. Our incumbent, may his name never again cross my lips, knows no limits. He serves as a continual reminder of the price of self-importance, for it inflicts by far the greatest tax on everyone else. Those who witness it in action never recover whatever respect they might have previously exhibited toward the afflicted. Those incapable of shame ultimately seem inhuman.

This universe never had any masters. The notion that flesh and bone might somehow rise above their station to command civilizations seems, itself, an uncivilized notion. We, as humans, might be more properly characterized as vulnerable than powerful. Our sole superpower stems from our acceptance of our innate and inescapable vulnerability, not from asserting authority or threatening anybody. Those who feel the need to dominate seal their own fate. They will not be warmly remembered. We will recall all those who were brave enough to admit how vulnerable they were, how vulnerable they are, then act as if their weakness was their strength, because it probably was, and likely is.

This might be what we mean when we say we don't have kings here. We only ever muster the occasional pretender to our non-existent throne, who might have temporarily proven to be popular until their supporters got to witness continual bouts of their self-importance. Their ratings plummet as the sense of significance swells. The self-important are always the last to notice themselves disappearing.
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FollowingChapters: Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 07/31/2025
AUG 01, 2025
This FollowingChapters Story contains a summary of my past week's writing. Thank you for following along!


Johannes Tavenraat: Twee vrouwen en een persoon met capuchon [Two women and a person with a hood] (1840 - 1880)

So It Seems To Go
When my father was in his mid-fifties, he took early retirement from the Post Office because he could afford to. He retired not to a life of leisure but one featuring different kinds of work, for he had always been a working man and would get uncomfortable if he had too much time on his hands. He reserved time to watch his beloved Mariners, Yankees, and Dodgers, and to read his books, but he also had a large yard to care for, as well as a few rentals that always seemed to require his attention. Preparing to be out of town, he pushed himself even harder than usual so that when he showed up at my home in Portland, he was experiencing shooting pains down one arm and extreme tiredness. I ferried him over to Providence, where they decided to admit him. He was in the ICU for the following week and in that hospital for the next ten days. He was released to recover from his heart attack, not at home, but at my place, where he and my mom were welcome for as long as his recovery took. He was exceedingly weak, unable to even sit up for more than a few minutes at first. It was humbling to see this man, who had always been so physically commanding, so disabled. He never even thought of smoking another cigarette again, and claimed to have never missed them. My mom learned to drive their huge Chrysler around narrow Portland streets, and even, after an excruciating few more weeks, drove it the 245 miles home with him riding shotgun, a first in their long relationship. Everything was different after that.

I remain aware that I live in a time in my life when a single event could result in nothing in my life ever being the same again. This acknowledgement hasn't rendered me fatalistic yet. It might have made me a little sharper, more attentive, more appreciative. None of this was ever destined to be forever. It was for this time and no other. I say I write these stories to create a legacy. I imagine my progeny appreciatively reading about me, as if discovering themselves, though I suspect that notion is a fantasy. I write for now with the explicit understanding that my purpose might exceed its Pull By date by the day after I post my Weekly Writing Summary. So It Seems To Go.
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FollowingChapters: Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 08/07/2025
AUG 08, 2025
This FollowingChapters Story contains a summary of my past week's writing. Thank you for following along!


George Inness: Summer in the Catskills (1867)

Aching To Feel Aimless Again
Each day seems to bring another insult, a fresh example of waste, fraud, and/or abuse. Our incumbent has amply proven himself to be a first-class nincompoop who cannot seem to act according to his own oath of office. He exhibits no honor, class, or intelligence. He seems to believe he's above accountability. I keep adding fresh items to his eventual Bill of Particulars, the list of grievous offenses he will one day be charged with when he's finally impeached. He's such a delicate damned flower, unable to handle the truth about anything. He and his minions have created a fictional administration Hell-bent on undermining civilization in favor of a Confederacy of absolute dunces. I bring up all these obvious points that don't really need recounting to admit that I'm weary of it. It doesn't seem like drama. I cannot seem to suspend my gape-mouthed disbelief when each previously unimaginable insult to my morals and my intelligence appears on another front page. I'm suffering from some degree of depression, if only because these days seem so doggone depressive. My optimism often calls in sick. My usual enthusiasm wants a nap. My digestive system barks at me about whatever I consume. I need a change of venue. I've been daydreaming of visiting France and Italy, where sunny days nudged us to ramble aimlessly and fruitfully. I ache to feel aimless again. Over the next two weeks, the Muse and I will be toodling. I will be checking in from presently unknowable locations.
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FollowingChapters: Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 08/14/2025
AUG 15, 2025
This FollowingChapters Story contains my Weekly Writing Summary. Thank you for following along!


Benoît-Louis Prévost: Art of Writing, from Encyclopédie (1760)

For Your Interest
This week, I made a radical change to my long-established Weekly Writing Summary template. I'd long felt as though I wasn't so much offering a writing summary as an index with which my readers could access the original stories. The summaries, such as they weren’t, didn't summarize very much. This week, while traveling outside my usual comfort zone, I experimented with AI to see if I could appreciate its summarizing capabilities. I asked Grammarly to summarize one of my stories. I received, after about a second of processing, a crisp and wholly acceptable summary of the story. I was blown away.

I decided to experiment with this facility, wrestling only slightly with the ethical implications of this decision. I have been using Grammarly, a popular artificial intelligence app, which is essentially a large language-informed automated assistant, to check the grammar and spelling of my stories since March 26, 2023. According to a report I received from Grammarly this week, it has checked 8,350,274 words for me in that time. I approve a little less than half the suggestions it provides. It has no sense of rhythm and prefers trivial constructions, but it does catch many of my more egregious misspellings and understands the otherwise intractable comma use rules. My recent experience with a human copyeditor convinces me that it will never replace human sensitivity.

That said, might creating a summary qualify as a trivial-enough chore for me to automate? As usual, even the suggestions it created required copyediting, and some of the summaries needed correcting. However, overall, I again found the results acceptable. This week, I introduce the beta version of a slightly different Weekly Writing Summary, one that contains actual summaries of each of the stories. (I considered including a summary of the summaries, but feared I might fall down a deep well of regression, so I chose not to.)

I am interested in your impression. Does this form seem like an improvement or a degradation? Have I compromised my integrity in your opinion by inviting AI into this otherwise creative space? Have I just demonstrated unforgivable laziness? Progress seems to result from roaming around, trying different things. I'm trying to improve my product and would appreciate any advice you might feel inclined to offer on this subject. Thank you for your interest!
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FollowingChapters: Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 08/21/2025
AUG 22, 2025
This FollowingChapters Story contains a summary of this week's writing. Thank you for following along on this momentous toodle!


Daniel Hopfer, I: The Bacchanal with a Wine Vat (c. 1515-1530)

All The Usual Plotlines
I claim to live near the center of the universe, overlooking, if not quite inhabiting, it. Leaving never fails to reconvince me just how right this observation seems, for I have yet to encounter a more perfect place, even with all of its obvious blemishes. I reflected this writing week on how I could not have possibly become who and what I am had I been born in any other place or time. The towns we passed through on our toodle to and back from the Midwest clearly showed poorly when compared to where we started, where we knew we were headed at the end of our excursion. In this way, The Muse and I find travel to be enormously reassuring. We are not seeking another new beginning or a second or third-handed fresh start. We know where we belong and feel supremely fortunate for that place to have found us. We returned to find the self-same problems we temporarily abandoned. The sprinklers didn't quite reach as well as we'd assumed they might. Something's fishy about the pond fountain pump. All the usual plotlines reawakened when we crossed our threshold again, thank heavens.
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FollowingChapters: Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 08/28/2025
AUG 29, 2025
This FollowingChapters Story contains a summary of my last week's writing. Thank you for following along.


Claude Monet: The Petite Creuse River (1889)

Decency Insists
I have lost interest in what passes for political news because it no longer contains anything remotely political. It's become spectacle instead, meaningless noise and uproar for the sole purpose of distracting. It has become an enormous distraction. The incumbent will neither become more competent because of it nor less guilty of anything. Yes, he's very likely guilty of everything he's been accused of, just as he always was. The Bill of Particulars already holds enough indictable accusations to impeach him fifty times over. The "geniuses" he hired to administer have steadfastly betrayed their publics. He's run out of criminals to deport, so he's replaced them with innocent citizens. No, he's not dismantling our system; he's only misusing it. The system he seeks to destroy was never as he imagined it. It featured laws and justice and experts, sure, but it depended most upon the decency of the American people, and he’s offended that decency, deeply so. The Third Rail of American Politics was never merely "The Economy, Stupid," but the price of ordinary things. Joe Six-Pack is now a five-packer, heading to four. Two hundred and fifty years ago, decency was measured in tea, and threatening that single ritual resulted in a memorable party given by those who would later be counted as patriots. For want of a cold one, a tyranny might well be lost. Decency insists.
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FollowingChapters: Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 09/04/2025
SEP 05, 2025
This FollowingChapters Story contains a summary of this week's writing. Thank you for following along!


Unidentified Artist (Walter Gropius): "Aluminum City" Housing, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, 1941-1942(c. 1942)

Gifted Us With The Experience
One of this week's stories recounted how a U-Haul truck we'd rented broke down, stranding us at a remote truck stop along the Columbia River. It was a hundred degrees as we sat waiting for the rental company to respond to our plight. We overlooked a line of diesel pumps and an ever-shifting set of semi-trucks. Each driver in turn would use a long-handled brush to wash their windshield before pulling their rig forward and shuffling off to the sandwich shop inside. Most were dressed in cargo shorts, a short-sleeved tee shirt, and open-toed crocks, a surprising wardrobe for what I thought would seem like tough truck drivers. They looked like they'd been lounging beside a pool instead of hauling freight along the historic Oregon Trail. The Muse and I shared a pleasant afternoon watching those proceedings, occasionally wandering inside to use the restroom or stretch our legs. I'd passed this truck stop innumerable times over the years without feeling moved to stop and experience the operation. By late afternoon, we heard from a tow truck driver, learning that he'd arrive in another hour. We drove to a little roadside dive for supper. That place, too, I'd passed by for more than fifty years without ever feeling curious enough to stop. Supper was regrettable but edible. We sped home in fading light, arriving just ahead of the tow truck driver, who unloaded the rented box truck and headed out for his three-hour return trip to his garage. Our summer had been missing a breakdown, but we'd never suspected until the universe gifted us with the experience.
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FollowingChapters: Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 09/11/2025
SEP 12, 2025
This FollowingChapters Story contains my weekly writing summary for this week. Thank you for following along!


Salvator Rosa: Five River-gods (1651-1656)

Won't Miss the Weeding
The rains finally came ten days into September. I was awakened by crashing thunder, flashing lightning, and The Muse rushing around slamming windows. I barely acknowledged this long-anticipated event before slipping back into one of my more satisfying sleeps of this evaporating season. The following morning, I walked around the yard satisfied that the gardens might survive even this latest endless swelter. I have reached the age where my sample size seems adequate to reach a few conclusions. I experience summers differently now than I did when I was ten and riding my bicycle around town half naked and berry brown. What was liberating then has become encumbering, a physical and emotional challenge, a survival exercise instead of endless play. With only ten days remaining before autumn arrives, I, too, might survive this summer. I will miss reading beneath a whispering ceiling fan and the early evenings with sprinklers cooling the yard. I will definitely miss The Muse's overflowing vegetable garden, though I won't miss the weeding.
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FollowingChapters: Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 09/18/2025
SEP 19, 2025
This FollowingChapters Story contains a summary of my writings from this week. Thank you for following along through this series and this week!


Reinier Vinkeles: Cornelis Ploos van Amstel (18th century)

And Win Every Morning
This is how my thirty-third series ends, as they've all ended, with more of a whimper than a bang. I consider stories that build to a satisfying climax to have been engineered to yield that effect. Since this and every previous entry in my series focused more on my actual experiences, I couldn't engineer such plotlines. I could draw conclusions, however preliminary, but I could never actually know how any of my stories would ultimately turn out because the meta-story I was inhabiting had to remain ongoing; otherwise, their author couldn't be present to create the current installment. Or the next. Life works like that.

With each ending comes the question of whether I'm really up for another beginning. The process of producing a fresh story each morning began with me bumbling, but by the eighth year, it has become fairly smooth-running. I am finally familiar with the mechanical steps involved in crafting a coherent narrative, including the sequence of keystrokes needed to produce the layout and post in four separate environments. Those have almost become preconscious acts that leave ample room for me to consider my content. Only the layout has become a habit.

I intended my writing to be something other than habitual, though. I hoped it might encourage presence of mind. I've experienced varying degrees of success. More than the writing, though, the process by which I discover a fresh topic each morning has never threatened to become anything like automatic or habitual. I peer into the void again every time. I have not developed a pattern or a method by which I propose a story to myself, let alone how I create the resulting content. That's fresh every time and done without a safety net. I consider it a miracle each time I find a fresh story idea, even more so when I post the sucker. Imagine starting every day with that sort of authority before most people have even begun to get out of bed in the morning.

I always wonder when a series ends, whether I want to continue with another new beginning, and I've always concluded that I do. Who wouldn't want to wrestle with the great mystery and win every morning?

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #FollowingChapters, #PureSchmaltz